Seattle Washington 1919. Trans-Pacific voyage 1919.
Resident of Japan 1919–1927. Second volume of verse Child
Bride in a Zen Garden unpaged published in English
by Nosaka Publishing Company, Tokyo, 1926. No reviews.
Deported Japan undesirable alien 1927. Poet in residence
private mountain retreat Loon Lake NY 1929–1937.
Disappeared presumed lost at sea on around-
the-world airplane voyage 1937. No survivors.
Third volume of verse Loon Lake unpaged published
posthumously by the Grebe Press, Loon Lake NY 1939.
No reviews.
5
You are what? said Jack Penfield, leaning over the table to hear better. His brow lowered and his mouth opened, the face was poised in skeptical anticipation of the intelligence he was about to receive. Or had he received it? In his middle age he no longer wanted to be the recipient of good news of any kind. And if some was forthcoming he quickly rendered it ineffective, almost as if it were more important that the world be grimly consistent at this point than that it would offer a surprise. You are what?
The boy of the year, his son said.
What does that mean?
Oh Warren, his mother said, isn’t that fine. She sat down beside her son, pulling the wooden chair next to his, and she faced her husband across the table. He would have to work on both of them now.
I don’t know, Warren said. You get a certificate and five dollars at the spring ceremony.
Jack Penfield leaned back in his chair. I see. He got up and went to the mantel and took his pipe and tobacco tin and came back to the table and fixed up for a while while they watched. The large flat fingers tamped the tobacco in the bowl. The hand of the lifelong miner with its unerasable lines of charcoal in the knuckles and under the nails. He lit his pipe. You know, he said, when I come up this evening there was a man with a rifle on Watertank Hill.
Please Jack his wife said.
What you going to do with the money lad?
I don’t know.
That’s moren a day’s wages. Are you proud?
I don’t know.
You won’t make four dollars when you come below. Did you know that?
Yes.
If there still is a mine. Are there any other english-speaking there aren’t are there?
I don’t think so.
Well then you had to be boy of the year didn’t you.
Please Jack.
Didn’t you.
I suppose.
The only one they can call up to the platform and trust to say thank you properly. No polack wop or damned greek knows to say thank you for makin me boy of the year does he?
I don’t know.
And your ma’s going to find a clean shirt for you that day won’t she. And she’ll comb her hair back and put the comb in it and go with the tears of thanks in her eyes for the company school and the company supply and the company house and the company boy of the year.
You poison everything Neda Penfield said. You make everything bad, you make a child feel bad for being alive. There’s nothing worse than that. There’s no evil worse than that.
But he minded less than his mother thought he did. He wanted his father to talk this way. It was very helpful to him. The consistency of their positions was all he asked, that his pa be unyielding and full of anger, that his ma be enraged or worse frightened by her husband’s spiritual tactlessness. Warren knew they were poor and lived lives the color of slag. He knew there was nothing beautiful in Ludlow but he was eager to get up each morning and test the day. He knew the real evil was his own, the eye and ear that took in everything and suffered nothing. He accumulated meaningless useless data that nevertheless bewitched him. The thick bulbed vein in his father’s hand, for instance, in contrast to the thin greenish vein in his mother’s. The characteristic smell of the house and the privy were noted and recorded. There were certain objects he liked very much. His mother’s tortoise-shell comb, the teeth broken off in several places. The coal stove, whose shape was like a naked woman, her long neck disappearing through the roof. He liked to see underwear drying on the line the wind animating it to a maniac dance. Sometimes he thought of the flapping long Johns as a desperate signaling of imprisoned or tortured people. He was absorbed by the sun rising and the sun setting or the rain when it fell from rock to rock. He was excited by any kind of violence, a parent hitting a child a man hitting a woman. When he happened to see such things he would be suffused with a weird heat. His heart would beat furiously and then he’d feel sickened and would feel like throwing up. Until he broke into a cold sweat. Then he would feel all right again. He listened now with eyes downcast but in some contentment to their argument, enjoying the words of it, the claims and counterclaims, agreeing with each in turn they were so well matched and spoke so well the images that flew through his mind on their words.
6
I got out of bed and rolled my clothes and shoes into a bundle. I grabbed the money from the bureau. I unlatched the door quietly and closed it behind me. There were no other guests at the Pine Grove Motor Court. A thin frost lay on the window of her car. The wind blew.
I threw the bills into the wind.
I found a privy up the hill behind the cabins and next to it an outdoor shower, the kind you pumped the water for yourself. I stood in the shower of cold spring water and looked up at the swaying tops of the pine trees and I watched the sky turning gray and heard through the water and the toneless wind the sounds of the first bird waking.
I dried myself as best I could and put on my clothes. Shivering, stipple-skinned, I struck off through the woods. I had no idea where I was going. It didn’t matter. I ran to get warm. I ran into the woods as to another world.
All morning I went up and down the hills of timber. Sometimes I’d hear the sound of a truck or a car and it would shock me. I’d veer off to get as deep in the woods as possible. It was difficult to keep my sense of direction, difficult to put life behind me. I’d come along into a clearing and find the remains of a fire or an empty wine bottle. Traces of human life everywhere: stone fences, old trails, dirt roads grown over. I found a busted inner tube, yellowed sheets of newspaper with dates on them from the early summer.
But I saw no one: any stiff in his right mind would get out of the Adirondacks before autumn.
By the late morning I was so hungry I changed course and went downhill till I found a paved road. I walked along the tree line for several miles and came to a country store with a gas pump and some chickens in a coop. Stood in the trees and waited to see a black Model A or perhaps a carney truck or even a state police car. The odds were against it, but I was not thinking odds. The carney was a territory in my mind. It loomed out further than I had gone or maybe could go.
There were no cars. I slid down the embankment of loose earth behind the store and went around front and stepped in the door like any customer. I had my savings of the summer, twenty-six dollars, in my shoes; in my wallet I carried three dollars more. I bought a loaf of wax-papered bread, some slices of baloney, a bottle of Grade A milk and a package of Luckies. The store lady, short and wide and with thick dirty eyeglasses, treated me as if it were the most normal thing in the world for someone to come along from nowhere, as maybe it was.
I went down the road till it curved out of sight of the store, and then I ran back up into the woods and found a tree in a spot of sun and sat there and made my lunch. Then I went to sleep for a while, while the woods were still warm, but it was a mistake because I suffered terrible dreams of indistinct shapes and shadows and awful sounds of violence. Someone was crying, sobbing, and it turned out to be me. I jumped up and got going again.