A lot of people, it seemed, were out for a little Sunday day-tripping. Traffic was heavy and slow-moving, and it gave me a lot of time to think; what I thought about mostly was the man I was going to see.
I'd lost a lot of heroes over the years, but two remained. The first was my brother. Garth had, both literally and figuratively, carried his dwarf brother on his broad shoulders throughout said dwarf brother's tormented childhood and adolescence, had, along with our mother and father, tenderly nurtured the fairly bright mind of a child and young man who could not understand, deep down in that part of him where rational thought ceases and explanations are useless, why his body would not grow as other people's bodies grew. As a child I learned a thing or two about human cruelty, and it was only because of the love and understanding of my parents and Garth that I reached adulthood and took control of my own life with mind and heart, if not exactly unscathed, at least not hopelessly crippled.
Harry Peal was a hero of another sort. In my opinion, he was a quintessential American, and he had carried the conscience and best ideals of an entire nation on his frail shoulders for more than five decades. A communist at a time when a good many decent people thought that communism offered the best hope for a nation being crushed in the coils of a merciless economic depression, Harry Peal had traveled the Dust Bowl with Woody Guthrie, gone down into the Pennsylvania coal mines with men who were dying of black-lung disease, stood on picket lines in teeming rain and freezing cold-all the while singing, and capturing in his songs not only pride in a magnificent land and its people, but also crying the need for social and economic change.
No pacifist, Harry Peal; he had fought in the Lincoln Brigade in Spain and was a combat veteran of World War II, having volunteered for the Marine Corps. When Stalin crawled into bed with Hitler, and news of the massive purges and the Gulag began to leak out of the East, Harry promptly and forthrightly severed his ties with the American Communist party. If his dream of a better America and a better world through communism had been shattered and brutally betrayed by Mother Russia, he would not betray his own ideals or his friends or his onetime political comrades; he cheerfully but firmly refused to cooperate with the HUAC and later refused to cooperate with the McCarthy committee, both times explaining that if he had a taste for trials, witch-hunts-even for real witches-and purges, he would have remained a communist. He'd said that he was not afraid of them, because they couldn't make him stop writing and singing songs, and that he didn't have much to lose because he never made that much money doing what he did anyway. And so this combat veteran, winner of two Silver Stars, had been sent to prison twice.
Harry Peal was one of the first to protest against the war in Vietnam, had laid his body as well as his songs on the line in the struggle for civil rights, and had been in the forefront of the fight for better working conditions for migrant workers. He was still tossed into jail on occasion in connection with some demonstration or another, but for the past fifteen years he had been devoting all his time, royalties, performance fees, and growing prestige to the problem of cleaning up America's polluted lakes, rivers, and landscapes.
At least a dozen of his songs had become classics; he had become a classic. The right wing, of course, still hated him almost as much as they hated Roosevelt, but this was perfectly understandable and only served to put Harry Peal in good company; along with Pete Seeger, who had made cleaning up the Hudson River his own personal crusade, Harry Peal had proved to be a durable thorn in the sides of the kinds of "conservative" businessmen and factory owners who considered it their God-given right, if not their patriotic duty, to pour acid over the face of America in the pursuit of greater profits. Garth and I had been at the White House dinner where President Kevin Shannon presented Harry Peal with the Medal of Freedom for his work in leading the fight to clean up the environment. Harry Peal's was a ferocious integrity. If, to my mind, his politics and loyalties had always tended just a bit toward the mushy-minded, he was still, to my mind, a great American patriot who loved the land of his birth far more than most of his detractors, with their star-spangled invective.
Following Mary Tree's precise directions, I turned off Route 9W about ten miles north of Cairn and drove down a winding dirt road that led toward the river. Virtually at the end of the road, there was a mailbox with the name PEAL scrawled on it in red paint. I turned in the driveway, came to a stop beside a modest, freshly painted clapboard house with an enormous screened-in porch that rested on a ledge overlooking the Hudson, three hundred feet below.
As soon as I got out of the car, Harry Peal emerged from the house and hurried across a small expanse of lawn toward me. Age had bowed his back slightly, but had not reached his legs; although he was close to eighty years old, his gait was springy, lithe. He had a full head of white hair that nicely complemented his pale blue eyes; as he rushed to greet me, his face was wreathed in the simple smile that always made him look to me like Santa Claus on a diet. He was dressed in a variation of what I thought of as his "uniform"-clothes he wore everywhere, whether singing for a group of migrant workers in a dusty field or on the stage of Carnegie Hall, eating a potluck supper with striking union workers or being honored with a state dinner at the White House. He wore baggy jeans, fine boots of supple Spanish leather, and a worn, faded flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up just past his elbows. A hand-carved wooden flute stuck out of his shirt pocket. As he reached me, I extended my hand; he shook it, then gripped both my shoulders.
"Mongo Frederickson," Harry Peal said, his smile growing even broader. "It's a pleasure to meet you."
"And it's an honor to meet you, Mr. Peal."
The old man with the heart and spirit of a child laughed loudly and shook me by the shoulders; pain shot down through my left arm, but I tried my best not to show it. "Mr. Peal? Do I look like a banker? My name's Harry."
"Okay, Harry," I said, suppressing a sigh of relief when he finally released his grip on my shoulders. "I appreciate your willingness to see me. I know you just got back from Europe, and you must be suffering from jet lag."
He dismissed the suggestion with a wave of one liver-spotted hand. "I've got no time for jet lag; I leave for Africa in the morning. Come on, we'll have something to eat on the porch."
I followed him across the narrow expanse of lawn between the house and driveway, entered the porch through a screen door that he held open for me. A wooden table set flush against the screening had been covered with a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth. On the table were a basket of fruit, a wooden board displaying a variety of cheeses, a loaf of bread that smelled as if it had just come from the oven, a large earthenware jug, and two place settings. Harry Peal motioned for me to sit in the chair on his left, and I did. He poured me a glassful of an amber, sparkling liquid from the jug. It turned out to be hard-very hard-cider, tangy and aromatic, with a pleasant little kick.
"Good," I said, raising the glass in salute. "I assume you make it yourself?"
"Yep," he said proudly, sitting down beside me and pouring himself a glass. "I store it in an underground herb cellar at the side of the house. It sits there through the winter and spring and starts tasting pretty good about this time of year." He pushed the loaf of bread and cheeseboard in front of me. "Mary give you good directions?"
"Perfect," I replied, helping myself to a piece of Gruyere. I tore off a chunk of bread, put the cheese and bread down on my plate, turned to face the other man. "Harry, did she tell you why I wanted to see you?"