“I want you to take over my Meals-on-Wheels route.”
4
Because he knew Coule’s type. Recognized retrospectively the solid, bulldog centers of gravity of his kind, his big-bodied, full-bellied, hard-handed, heavy-hammed, iron-armed, thick-throated, barrel-chested lineman likenesses and congeners. Not overgrown, like giants, say, such men did not, or so it seemed to Mills, even possess glands, lacking not a pituitary so much as the space for one, mass not a function of secretions, of body-buried wells of the cellular juices splashed and splattered indiscriminately throughout the skeletal sluices of their frames, nothing endocrinic, hormonal, for there could have been no more room for these, or for organs either, than there was for glands, their insides pure prime meat, human steak all the way through, gristled perhaps and marbled possibly and certainly scaffolded with bone, but nothing liquid to account for size, and even their blood only for coloring, flesh tones, flush; their pee and excrement, too, merely variants of their blood’s limited palette, affected by the air perhaps, the light, like exposed film. So nothing leviathan in their genes — he’d seen their parents, their brothers and sisters like the law of averages — their physical displacement a kind of decision, the ukase of their boom town wills, their realtor reality. And many were realtors, or at least landlords. It would have been difficult not to be in the Florida of the thirties, even though this wasn’t Miami or even Tampa or Jacksonville, even though it wasn’t anywhere oceaned, beached, or even, particularly, mild.
It was Cassadaga, and except for the fact that George knew they had come south, that he and his mother and father had changed their lives and been translated to a state called Florida — he had no memory of how they’d gotten there, probably some of the way by bus, some by hitchhiking — where his father meant to pick oranges, become a migrant worker, it could have been not Milwaukee, since Milwaukee was a city of some size and Cassadaga was barely a town, but some residential neighborhood in Milwaukee. Stucco might never have been invented or Florida so new it had not yet become indigenous there, its properties undiscovered, it no more occurring to the other Easterners and Midwesterners to mix cement and sand and hydrated lime to make their homes than to build them out of thatch. So the houses were wooden as the trees, the ordinary oaks and elms and maples of any Iowa or Wisconsin yard or street. And perhaps that’s why he had no memory of how they’d gotten there (he’d seen no sea, no gulls or beach), because the landscape was the same he’d lived in all his nontropical, Tropic of Cancer life, along the bland, unrainy seasoned peel of earth with its gray and temperate gifts of the to-scale regular.
He did not even know where the oranges would be, could be. There were no groves near Cassadaga, nothing citrus in the odor of the wind. He’d seen more fruit in Milwaukee. And no palm trees except for the one by the bench in the town’s small square, its tall stem and leaves like an immense shredded umbrella.
“That’s a tree?” he’d asked.
“Hell,” his father said, “I don’t know if it’s even wood.”
He pointed to its sky-high shells, shaggy, brown as bowel, clustered as cannonball or the cabbages in produce bins. “Are the oranges inside those things?”
“If they are you don’t pick oranges, you climb them.”
Because this is where they’d been dropped, the young men who’d given them the ride — it was their journey he couldn’t recall, not their arrival — driving on toward Daytona Beach. “Looks nice and homey,” one of them said. “You should be able to get a room here. Tomorrow you can walk the few yards to where the groves begin.”
They had no luggage to speak of, only the single suitcase between them which contained not all their clothes but all the clothes which they still had, which they had not sold along with their furniture and dishes and odds and ends in order to get a nest egg together, a stake, to make the trip. Anyway, they had all the clothes which they believed they would need in the hot new climate to which they believed they had come — socks, the three changes of boys’ and men’s and women’s underwear, the two sets of overalls and denim workshirts, the two cotton dresses. They had not even brought handkerchiefs because they thought they had come to a place where no one caught cold. They had not brought anything dressy for Sundays. They were not religious and so wouldn’t need anything for church. For Sundays and holidays there were the three brand new bathing suits in the brand new valise. The only other things in the grip were a change of sheets and pillowslips and a large box of laundry powder. They were ready to make their new life, traveling light as any three people could who had excised not only fall and winter from their lives but the very idea of temperature.
And so if Cassadaga looked homey — and it did — they looked, save for the single clue of the single suitcase, already at home.
“Look here,” his father said. He was standing by an immense glass-enclosed hoarding at the entrance to the square. “It’s the church directory. Just look at them all. Did you ever see so many? Maybe it ain’t even Florida. Maybe we hitchhiked all the way to Rome.”
“I don’t see any churches,” his mother told his father. “Seems in a town as tiny and churchy as this one you’d be able to spot at least one spire. Wouldn’t you think so, George?”
“Maybe there’s an ordinance against them. Maybe they only run the crosses up on Sundays, like flags on the Fourth of July.”
“Oh, George,” his mother said.
“Well,” his father said, “we didn’t come all this way to sightsee. And tomorrow we got to look for work. I think our best bet is to find somewhere we can get a place to sleep. You tired, George?”
“Yes, sir,” George said.
They walked through the little town. Mills remembered it yet. It was a paradigm of neighborhood, not a town but a constituency, not a place but a vicinity, homogeneous as graveyard or forest or a field of wheat. There were no stores or gas stations, no public buildings, neither school nor library nor jailhouse — whatever of municipality or commonwealth, canton, arrondissement, deme or nome, whatever of government itself centripetalized in the bench in the small square. There were no churches.
“I think it must be one of those suburbs,” his father said.
“What of?” said his mother.
“I don’t know,” his father said. “Maybe the highway.”
They passed several blocks of neat frame houses, not identical but all lawned, porched and porch-swing’d. Many had gardens, some narrow driveways that led to tiny garages that looked like scaled-down versions of the houses themselves.
They walked up a side street, turned south at the corner, went down that street and entered another side street. They turned at another corner. It was the same everywhere they walked. (He was carrying the suitcase now. It was that light.)
They came out of the town and were in open country.
“I think those houses must be the main crop around here.”
“Oh, George,” his mother said.
“Look there,” his father said. He pointed to the open country. “They must already have harvested that part.”
“Oh, George,” his mother said. “You tired, honey?” she asked Mills.
“A little I guess,” he said.
“Here. Give me that.” She took the suitcase from him. “We better turn back, George. The kid’s falling off his feet.”
“Suits me,” his father said, “but I didn’t see signs for lodging, no folks either, if it comes to that.”
“We’ll just knock and ask if they have a room. Some of these houses must be where the ministers live.”