Lucy Meets a Count

***

1

Her house was like a big, messy mind. And whenever she cleaned up downstairs, which was extremely seldom now, she always ended up brushing things under the rug or behind the sofa, stacking unread magazines in some other corner scarcely disturbing their dust, and throwing most of that stuff she was going to sort out one day into an unused old trunk she kept just under the stairs.

She thought sometimes that there must be things living under there, some enormous, uncharted animal, or rats and roaches and things, a teeming bed of life all covered up and not often talked about. "It was as if the house were built on the sea and if you opened the little door leading under the stairs you'd see the living waters shimmering with never-ending movement and undreamed excitement." That, she thought one time, was eternity...living just under her stairs like a sleeping hypothalamus.

And she never really went under there or even downstairs anymore, no more often than she had to. It was dirty: that was it.

She stood up to survey her work. Gleaming and clean, the tiny room lay before her.

All was prepared.

Mentally she surveyed the lab one floor below - the electrodes, the meters and computer, the as yet lifeless woman-model itself. Yes, all there too was waiting, ready, as she had left it. All was quietly awaiting tomorrow.

She stepped again across the tiled floor, stooped to peer into the crevice between the slick wall and the bottom of the stool, genuflected briefly as her aerofoam sponge swiped across the cool and curving stone. The drying film of moisture sparkled in the light.

She straightened again, and turned. Yes, here too in the tiny third floor room, all was neat and ordered. The sink, the tub, the stool itself, the cabinet before it where alone on the shining shelf sat her black box of bank statements and stock reports. All shone and winked at her, and she felt calm and relaxed.

"It does a woman good once in a while," she used to say, "to get down on her hands and knees." (Did her old mother used to say that?)

It had been during one of the times when she was reading over those bank and stock figures (her grandchildren, she called them), then when her neat little bathroom was still on the ground floor, one day already so long ago, when she had suddenly thought of all the dirty little things crawling around in her under-the-stairs basement. Perhaps she had been thinking of insecticides and rat poisons, and she had very distinctly heard a noise. Not a very frightening sound in itself, but definitely she heard, or was she only imagining it? a peculiar little rumble, or a snarl.
She had become somewhat alarmed, and had left that first tile-smooth chamber, somewhat dingy and old in those times, to prowl the great downstairs floor. She hadn't gone far, however, when there was something, was it a sound? a vibration? something which guided her attention to the doorway under the stairs.

It was then, and immediately too, that she had decided to move upstairs. For from behind the shadowed doorway there had been, or she felt there had been - she told herself now, of course, she must have been imagining it, "her reckless imagination" - what was it? how did she perceive it? a deep, sighing, groaning moan.

It had been - her eyes glazed now remembering it, and her stomach felt empty - "it was as if the house were built on a windstorm and now the winds were whirling through the aging beams of a pirate's trusty schooner, listing and creaking as the masts trembled and the ship groaned before splashing down, down into the turbulent waters of the sea below."

She had gathered all her things, her then small collection of equipment too, and had moved entirely and unhesitatingly to the house's middle floor. And ever after, despite the filth which had met her there (she surmised that the under-stairs pipes had been somehow blocked), despite the days of toil she had been forced to spend cleaning the foul rooms of the excrement she'd found there, she had made her decision final, and almost never again descended to her house's lower floor...no more often than she had to.

And soon, of course, she had been forced to leave that entire middle floor for her burgeoning laboratory, forced again to move up a floor, to lose days of valuable time cleaning the filth-choked rooms upstairs. But she had carried on, knowing then, of course, that there would soon be her own porcelain suite, spotless, bright and clean.

2

By now she had left the bathroom for the bedroom, and had begun to prepare for sleep.

She sat there in her clean little chamber with the fluorescent lights on before bed. She sat there, holding a shoe thoughtfully in her nimble hand. "Tomorrow," she said to the shoe.

Tomorrow she would descend to the lab (and there was warmth in the thought of it), and she would finish it, the woman she was building, her mirror image. Then she could begin, "and all her works would praise her name."

That, she thought to her shoe, is eternity.

She occasionally thought as well, though she said nothing of it since she didn't want it to seem she was complaining, that it was rather unpleasant to have to work where it was so dirty. Her laboratory was on the middle floor of her house, though sometimes she worked out of hours in her nice little room upstairs. And she couldn't help noticing now and again that there was a door which led from one dark corner of the lab into that eerie little storage room under the stairs by means of a short narrow staircase leading almost straight down. She would, on occasion, throw furtive glances in the direction of that little door, though it had long since been bolted and barred, and sometimes wondered if, when the lights were out in the lab, though they almost never were, she couldn't see just a little bit of a glowing, showing from underneath the door. "As if the house were built on the sunset and the door was the last cloud the old sol would wink behind before bubbling its hot orange magic underneath the very mountains she was standing on." (Where did these words come from?)

It had been only after the second move - she was getting into her pajamas - when she had left the middle floor for her lab, that her work had taken its new and decisive direction. She was building another woman, a model of herself, a woman which would walk and move and have her being just as she herself did. A perfect replica of the human form, just what humanity needed, a woman-model to observe. The model would show her what they required, for progress. And there would be no involvement, no uncontrolled subjectivity. She would be like a test tube or a centrifuge, the algae, or a mouth-watering dog.

It was such a great idea!

She swung her legs onto the bed, and, sighing, lay back. The fluorescents above sparkled through the water in her eyes.

She was never quite sure whether or not she liked her work. Not that that was important, but it sometimes amused her to try to decide, "lying there waiting for sleep to invade, like Ethiopia over Mussolini."

There was, of course, the money. Reluctant governments were nevertheless paying dearly those days for research and construction perhaps destined to solve oh so many problems facing humankind at the moment, perhaps at any moment.

"I'm not doing if for that," she said to herself. "Oh I'm not working for the money." For indeed, she had no real need for money, her house, her equipment, her food and simple pleasures all so freely provided by the government or from privately donated funds. Yet there was the little black metal box placed carefully on the empty white shelf in the bathroom cabinet, before her when she sat; and she would often pass an hour or two there, reading eagerly the records she kept in the box, the increasing figures, the history of her prolific little grandsons and grand-daughters running around from bank to bank, from pile to pile, from hand to hand, making people happy while they bred a little more the months ahead.

"That too," she liked to think, "was eternity: coins breeding in a fertile pile of gold."

She knew she must like all that sort of thing - and the calculations too - but somewhere, somewhere beneath the while rubberized laboratory trousers she always wore or next to the superthin calculator she often carried in her breast pocket, somewhere where her eyes could not see, nor her microscope, nor her fluoroscope, there a voice "like a warm breeze wandering through the hot fingers of a dry summer night's grass fire" was telling her there was something else in the work, in the lab itself, "something dark and fierce like the uncharted waters in some Louisiana pool." There was something fierce and dark in the lab which drove her on "as a midnight blaze drives a mad, blind stallion charging into the darkness where he cannot see, but charging on and on."

She rolled onto her back; she was panting.

But her work was important, perhaps vital, she told herself, to all humanity; and she would go on with it day by day, carrying on cheerfully, even eagerly. And tomorrow, she would . . .

She yawned, and the fluorescents swam above her. Her eyes fluttered closed, and she dreamed of a racetrack and of herself clocking a speeding unicorn.

3

She had risen early that day, nervous with anticipation. She had stubbed her toe on the cold white stool while her eyes were still filled with sleep. She had dressed carefully, favoring her throbbing toe and concentrating on remaining calm.

She had descended from her little room...as usual, she had thought to herself; it's just a normal day. Yet the key had somehow crawled through her fingers and bounced to the floor when she began to unlock the lab door, and somewhere she knew.

She had entered the lab; there was nothing changed. Her equipment lay still before her, meticulously arranged and prepared. Yet she had not begun her work. She had been drawn instead to turn about the room, which was quiet and somehow unbalanced by the slanting rays of morning sunlight which were playing through the only little window near the back. She had paused there before the little door leading down to the under-stairs; she had carefully reached out her hand to check the bolts and bars, and could not now forget that they had distinctly felt warm to her cold, unsteady fingers.

It had been months since she had checked her small white cabinet just beside the outer door across the room. But now she did; today she felt it was important. She ran a short test on a drop she took from the small black vial she kept there.

It was still potent.

It was foolish, she thought cynically to himself, to keep it there. Yet she did not trust the glowing, snarling, softly waving under-stairs, and the poison she'd distilled from monkey urine would kill any beast or monster she might have to face. Perhaps it was - yes, she smiled at her hesitancy, it was foolish; but she had humored herself that morning and had found there a sort of confidence.

She had moved on and on about the room, and had finally begun.

And just as the woman was born, just as the model began slowly to stir, to blink her glazed eyes and to scowl, then - she could not now forget it - then, she had felt the floor shift "like the deck of a faltering vessel." The room was suddenly warm, and from the little door - she must have been imaging it - there was a glowing like the sunrise and a moaning like a strange imprisoned animal.

The model-woman now sat before her, and knew why she'd been made. The model was wise, and her creator quick to note all her motions and thoughts, though the noting mind often clouded with a dark thought of the cabineted vial.

"I am empty,” said the model-woman.

And she knew that it was true.

Just then, as the model-woman had begun to speak, the floor started to shake and the walls rattle. The fluorescents flashed and died, but the room was light.

There was a rumbling, a snarling, a roaring like the wind in a fire, and the bars on the little door glowed with heat, then fell away.

There was fire everywhere, the floor, the lights. The model- woman's eyes flashed in wonder and in terror as her creator vomited and writhed in her burning rubber pants.

The door smashed open. The model-woman fled, and, running out and up the stairs to the clear white room, she gulped greedily from the foul vial.

But she herself, she did not flee, and knew she did not want to go. She was standing then, awaiting it, and it washed over her in a boiling bath. She stood fast, her hands raised high above her head, knowing that she did not want to run, exulting savagely and painfully in the violent burning of her flesh as the uncharted animal, the swimming seas of boiling unction, the blind, wind-blown, charging stallion, and the flames crashed upon her like black waves on a sunny rock.

And as she died, as she perished in the awful sea from the under-stairs, her house fell to ruin about her, an innocent victim of the dark savage fight between the flowing sunsets from below the floor and the piles of excrement on the roof.

Her house had fallen into smoldering rubble, floating like smelly scum on a sunlit sea.

And today the wet, charred ruins of her house cry out to the never-ending skies: "One day, oh humanity, let there be built a house where seas and stools can live united, as in the well-ordered mind of a rose!"

***

Too Much Government? Not Enough? Taxes?

***

1

Once I was one of four or five individuals from various locations invited to spend four days at General Motors headquarters in Detroit. The company’s interest was said to be, and seemed to be, to start recruiting new professional employees who were not engineers or accountants, GM’s traditional applicant pool. We were a historian, a writer, an artist, a speech teacher, and a psychologist.

Two things happened within the first two hours of our program that were memorable. First, our host was giving us an overview of our schedule. After our first day there at headquarters, we were to go visit several different manufacturing, design, and testing plants. We were shown a map, and directions were drawn indicating how to drive from our hotel to each site. Our host was astonished, indeed flabbergasted, to learn that none of us had a car with us. I had come by bus, two or three came by train, one local by taxicab, and one local had been dropped off by his wife on her way to work. That was the first memorable event. (After a few phone calls, we were provided with two cars and drivers for the next several days.)

Next on our agenda that first day was an elaborate presentation involving a large model displayed in stages around a large room, several films, and a presenter. The subject was the history of transportation in America, which started with the reasonable assertion that the development of our culture and the progress of our economy were significantly influenced by innovations in transportation technology. As I recall, there was passing reference to the shoddy roads (horsepaths) and inefficient and expensive private tollways of colonial America, before development of shipping along the larger rivers. Perhaps reference was made to the invention of the steamboat.

The first emphasized innovation, as I now remember it, was development of the great canal system, converting the unpredictable and inconsistent riverways into more dependable means of transportation for passengers and especially products. Next came the development of the railroads and finally trucking along modern and ever improving highway systems. This presentation was designed to show how dependent today our economy and our culture had become upon motorized vehicles, the prize products of American private industry.

Major private corporations, one of which of course was General Motors, were continuing to serve us fundamentally and well. We owed everything (or at least a whole lot) to the free enterprise system! At dinner that evening, among ourselves, we discovered that we had all noted the same thing: just about every major step forward in our transportation history – as the presentation that afternoon had clearly shown – was an intervention by government, due less to private enterprise than to public funding. The roads, the canals, the interstate highways, and – through tax subsidies and especially land grants – the rail system were all dependent upon government action and the use of tax dollars.

2

One hears a lot today about the right size of government and the right amount of taxation. Not only politicians but also private, ordinary citizens are often heard to say, “Reduce the size of government” and “Lower taxes.” This is for many a political dogma, a litany in the public worship.

And, I’m sorry, it is just wrong.

What matters and should matter to all of us is not how big or how small our government is; what matters is how good our government is, how well our government serves our long-term, mutual interest.

And what matters is not that we pay too much in taxes, but to what degree each of us and each group of us are doing our fair share to fund the quality of government we need and deserve. We should all demand good government – intelligent, efficient, effective, and long-term government – as well as the tax system most likely to provide it.

3

Let us recall: the cardinal American values are peace and prosperity, equality of opportunity, liberty, and justice for all. These values should be pursued, supported, and honored above all others. Actions that threaten or diminish them should be avoided or prohibited, vilified, or at least highly taxed. Public leaders praising these essential values should be supported; those whose decisions undermine them should be hounded out of their positions of influence.

These values must be kept foremost in our minds as we consider any proposed change in government. The size and forms of government as well as methods used to determine the size of each income-earner’s fair share of its funding should be decided not on some abstract or dogmatic principle about either the size of government or about the amount of taxes imposed on everyone; but about making government better and the tax system more just.


***

Reminiscence: Dad Meets His Sister

***
1

My father lost his mother when he was 13 years old. It was the “Spanish Influenza” epidemic of 1917 that killed her. His grandmother, who had helped take care of him and his older brother most of their lives, had died only about a year before his mother.

Dad had been born in a small historic city on the Atlantic coast, when his father was away exploring new opportunities in Texas. His mother and grandmother had taken Dad as a babe in arms, along with his toddler brother, half way across the continent on the train to rejoin his father.

Shortly after they had arrived in Texas, and his mother had taken a job, Dad’s father left the family. A divorce came shortly afterward, and before long the father had remarried and left the area. He did not support the family from this point on.

2

Knowing that his father had acted irresponsibly toward his mother was a source of pain and shame to my Dad, whose most deeply held values were commitment to helping others, loyalty to family and friends, moral rectitude, and taking responsibility.

When I was in my early teens, Dad told me that he had met his father only once, when he was about six years old. His father had taken the two young brothers to an elegant barber shop in a neighboring city, where he had treated them to a manicure, the only one Dad ever had. That was it. He led me to believe that he suspected that his father had been unfaithful to his mother even before the divorce. That would have hurt him more for what it said about his father's moral character than for the harm to himself and his brother.

Dad and his brother, with advice from a concerned neighbor, raised themselves by selling newspapers both before and after school. They took other jobs when they could find them, going to school every day; they lived on the second level of a garage on their mother’s home lot, the neighbor exercising a Power of Attorney. The mother’s modest life insurance money paid for renovation of the garage. The lower level was rented out to a reporter at the local newspaper, and the house was rented to a family. Never did the boys hear from their father, who was simply not part of their lives.

Ten years or so later, when the two brothers were making their way in different cities, Dad saw an advertisement for a vaudeville song and dance act at a nearby theatre. The two performers, who turned out to be brother and sister, were also named “Derrick,” so Dad contacted them. Their mother told him she was the second wife who had left with Dad’s father all those years before. “Bob,” “Sally,” their mother, and Dad spent a few hours together during the day before the second performance. Dad learned that his father had divorced his second wife as well, though she and her children were still receiving support from him.

They went on their way on the vaudeville circuit, and Dad did not hear from them again.

3

Dad never knew anything about his forbears and had no knowledge of his family’s history. Growing up, I was not aware of any curiosity on his part to learn more. But many years later, after Dad had retired, Mother wrote that he was taking her to his birthplace on the coast to see if they could find out anything about his family’s life before the move to Texas.

My wife and I joined them after a few days. They had found some information in a local historical society, including Dad’s parents’ marriage license and the name of Dad’s grandfather on his mother’s side, and together we found a burial record at a local cemetery and several references to his grandparents – and parents – in turn-of-the-century city directories. I was surprised that all this seemed quite meaningful to my Dad, and was also surprised that he and mother were going on to another city farther down the coast to pursue hints that his father had come up from there.

By chance they came across a woman named “Derrick,” who turned out to have been the widow of Dad’s half-brother “Bob.” After Mother and Dad returned to their home, a little package came from this woman with several mementos of his father, which his half-brother had had. The next time my wife and I visited my parents at their home, Dad showed us the little treasures, which proved that his father had indeed lived in the more southern city before moving up the coast to where he had met and married Dad’s mother.

4

With my wife, I lived in a large northeastern city, a long way from Texas, but after seeing how fortunate Dad himself had been in his researches, I decided to make a cold call to the one person named “Derrick” in our own telephone book, one “S. Derrick,” who turned out to be “Sarah.” She had been a widow for a number of years. She was reluctant to tell me, but did eventually acknowledge that she had been known as “Sally” when she and her brother had had a song and dance vaudeville act. I don’t know whether she told me in that first conversation, but she also remembered the day when she had briefly met my father.

Although retired, Dad still traveled for his profession now and then. The next time his business brought him to our city, he brought Mother with him, and he told us he was going to call his half-sister and see if he could arrange a reunion. He seemed uneasy about this, which was unusual for my Dad, but was convinced it was the right thing to do.

After a brief telephone conversation, the meeting was arranged at “Sarah’s” apartment across town. We all went: Mother and Dad, my wife and I. The encounter was quite uncomfortable and did not last long.

We began by introducing ourselves, Dad giving a brief summary of his career and Mother chipping in to let “Sarah” know that he was being overly modest. My wife and I talked about our jobs and where we lived. All this was an effort to establish a friendly ambiance and to build a base for developing a relationship. “Sarah” seemed to understand this intent, but seemed rather distant and stressed herself.

Getting to family matters after a short while, a few sentences were exchanged between Dad and “Sarah.” He ultimately told her when he had been born, the day of the month as well as the year. Looking down at her hands in her lap, “Sarah” told us she had been born a month or so before him.

Dad seemed his usual outgoing, empathetic self, and we left soon after. As we drove off, he said quietly to us, “I was afraid of that." We knew how bad he felt.

***

Poem: An Old Man Proceeds

***

The young woman
in the red car
in the space
next to me,

Without thought
effortlessly
moves up and on
ahead,

While I,
focusing my will,
concentrating,
lift the one knee

Pushing off
the other toes,
step up the curb
and go on
my way.

***

Saying Goodbye (essay)

***

1

The medieval German mystic called to our attention the fact that - surprisingly enough - opposites, when they are precise or exact opposites, have much in common, by writing:

“In my beginning is my end

In my end is my beginning.”

Later writers have pondered the complexity of this paradoxical statement, since one’s “end” can be a goal; the “end” that you pursue is something you wish to achieve, the object of a quest or a striving. Only after having identified a goal for oneself – the end that one chooses to pursue – only after identifying this “end,” can one make a beginning in the most meaningful sense.

As the poet wrote:
“In my end is my beginning.”

On the other hand, as you begin any new endeavor, simply by beginning, you define an end – a rationale, a value giving your life and work meaning and purpose – since any effort is aimed in a particular direction, where the effort will lead, where it will end.

As the poet wrote:
“In my beginning is my end.”

So both paradoxical statements are true:
“In my beginning is my end
In my end is my beginning.”

2

In his masterwork, Four Quartets, the great American poet, T. S. Eliot, quotes that medieval monk, and later describes a moving scene from a Hindu legend: a large group of dedicated pilgrims is gathered together on a darkened shoreline, setting out on a long and unpredictable journey across dark and unsettled seas.

To these pilgrims, the poet imagined that we should say, not “Fare well” as in a goodbye, not “Fare well” (as at the end of something) but “Fare forward” (as at the beginning).

We should say, that is:
“Fare forward, pilgrims, on your exciting and challenging and
significant journey.”

3

Often as our children grow up, as our friends mature, or marry, take a new job or move somewhere else, we could think of their growth as a journey – a journey of discovery, requiring courage and self-discipline, and providing a sense of danger and of freedom.

By concluding a stage in life, the individual – whether a retiree or a young child - would be experiencing the beginning of a new stage, whether as a grandmother coming to a new town to provide extra child care or a youngster joining a Little League team for the first time.

And by making this new beginning – whether it be the first day of kindergarten or the first day of college orientation, the first job or the twentieth, the last time one chooses a new home or the first – by making the start, our child or our friend would be setting a new goal, defining a new objective; and in her or his beginning there would be a new end.

And to them too, we might say (at least in our imagination):
“Fare forward, voyagers.”

This might mean, Fare forward on your journey toward independence and identity, not (one hopes) through selfishness or a desire merely to please others, but through initiative and service; your journey (one hopes) toward satisfaction through new friendships and commitments.

“Congratulations,” we might say on such occasions: “Fare forward, and Good Luck!”

And on such occasions when it is we who are making such a transition, we might want to say the same to ourselves.

***

Story: An Extraordinary Sight

***

1

Fifty years ago the island of Inishmore was not overrun by tourists, as it is today, even in mid-summer during periods of perfect weather. You could see some visitors, it is true, wandering along the dusty, bumpy, crooked road that went from one end of the island to the other. You could see them buying Aran sweaters (actually made in Galway) in one of the two general stores at the harbor or clopping along in a jaunting cart hired from a big, dark, surly and silent islander for the quick trip up and down the road. But that was only during the day, while the boat from the mainland went to the other two islands to unload and load supplies, before returning to Inishmore to load up for the return trip to the mainland. Almost no one in those days stayed over from one boat trip to the next, three or four days later. Even fewer stayed for the four weekdays than remained over the three-day interval at the weekend. And the few who did all lodged in the smart and neat cottages offering “Bed and Breakfast” in the harbor area where the boat docked.

That made the two aging schoolteachers quite unusual.

Muriel R. Perkins was from Cedar Falls, where she had taught third grade in a small private school for twenty years. She often traveled in the summer and had visited Europe four times before. Although she did not yet know it, this was to be her last trip,. She’d had no particular reason for going to Ireland but she wanted to, and when another teacher at her school (whom she did not like) scoffed at the idea, that had cinched it.

Her companion was named Pétille. Miss Perkins was pleasantly surprised to find herself and Mme. Pétille on a first-name basis from early in their acquaintance. She had always been taught that the French were very formal and distant. Her own experience on a previous trip in Lille, Dijon, and Paris had in fact re-enforced this notion. But Magali was exceptional. At least, Muriel felt, she was not required to attempt the familiar verb and pronoun forms when they spoke in French. She kept herself alert for this eventuality — which, she knew, would be very significant — but most of the time Magali seemed to prefer English. She had been widowed during the first German advance in the winter of 1940 but, being a vigorous and healthy woman, after her three children had grown up and married she had engaged herself as a volunteer assistant at a school for young girls run by Dominican nuns down the street from her flat in Paris.

She too often traveled during the summer, usually with one of her daughters. She had visited Dublin several times in this way, but that year marked her first extended tour of the rest of the country. Unlike Muriel, after the visit to Inishmore, her life remained outwardly unchanged.

These two older ladies were unusual in all respects, in the islanders’ eyes. They had not hired a jaunting cart, preferring to carry themselves, their small cases and overnight bags slowly along the sunny road. Muriel in fact would have been willing to reverse this frugal decision after the first five minutes, but she didn’t like at all the way the drivers who pestered them at every stopping place seemed to think it their natural right to pick up all tourists, for pay. Yes, Magali was justified in feeling offended at this.

Second, they did not stay in the thickest part of the islands’ tiny population near the dock but made their way farther and farther toward the western end of the island, stopping at last at Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s somewhat isolated farmhouse. Muriel was reluctant to knock at the door there, but once again Magali had proven to know what to do. Even though there was no sign at Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s saying “Bed and Breakfast” — no sign of any kind, in fact — it did seem to be such a place after all.

And then, of course, they had come to stay for a week.

2

That first afternoon had seemed interminable. They had not understood why Mrs. Fitzpatrick had treated them so coldly when they apologized for interrupting what looked like it might have been the family meal; and then when they returned down the stairs to go out again, speaking in French and laughing at some triviality, they again failed to understand the good woman’s cutting anger. She thought they were talking about her in that barbarous, foreign tongue and were laughing at her. Magali appeared not to understand, even after Mrs. Fitzpatrick had directly accused her of this. Muriel, genuinely disturbed by her fantastic, proud fearfulness, tried to mollify the poor woman. She assured her they were most comfortable in their snug room on the highest floor, with the slanted roof-ceiling; she praised the Irish people for their neatness and sense of propriety. But all to no avail. Mrs. Fitzpatrick told them at what time dinner would be served. Mme. Pétille revived from stony silence to say, as Miss Perkins was about to, that they would eat elsewhere. Mrs. Fitzpatrick was not pleased.

They walked farther down the road then, toward the western tip of the island. The road ended in a small cluster of buildings, at least one or two of which had apparently been constructed within the past ten years, unlike the others. One of these was a cinderblock schoolhouse. But there were no restaurants among the buildings, no stores, no commercial buildings of any sort. Of course, there was a church. But most were just houses. In front of one, three boys were kicking about a half-deflated soccer ball. Mme. Pétille did not remark the absence of place to eat or buy food. Muriel was beginning to think Mrs. Fitzpatrick had been so agitated not merely from hurt pride and disappointed avarice so much as from knowledge denied the two outsiders. If one did not take his meals “at home” on the island, perhaps he wasn’t to eat at all! They had not had lunch, neither being very hungry after the bumpy, rolling boat ride …

Muriel pulled herself up inside. She mustn’t give in to this sort of worrying. The beautiful sunshine and the deep blue of the water they would frequently see ahead and to both sides of them as they strolled, the paler azure of the cloud-free sky — these circumstances around her helped relieve the nervousness she was prey to inside. She gave in to their languorous appeal. The warmth of the sun, the freedom of the solitude: it was enough.

Just before the end of the road, a pathway turned off to the left, heading upwards along the only truly steep promontory on the island. Similar paths had crisscrossed their way so far, but this one was marked (which in the general barrenness all around was quite enough to call attention to it). It was merely an arrow pointing up the path.

Other tourists were about, it should be remembered, the boat not being due to return for at least two hours more. The only people visible, it seemed, besides the jaunting car drivers and those three boys down the way, were silly, chattering, camera-carrying women hurrying toward the two older ladies down the pathway.

“I beg pardon,” Magali said most graciously to the two fat ladies in bright cotton dresses who had been speaking English, and asked to where the path led.

Brandishing what certainly looked like a guidebook, one of them replied in a surprised tone —“Why, Dun Aengus!”

This was, in fact, as the English lady’s tone implied, the one true tourist site on the Aran Islands. The day-tourists were evidently beginning to wander away from it now, moving gradually back toward the harbor, but Muriel and Magali climbed on, against the current, toward the top. The others were naturally concerned even then not miss their boat, not to be isolated there in the mouth of Galway Bay. You couldn’t see the shore on any side, even on such a clear day. But for Muriel and Magali, time had already begun to lose its meaning as they strolled up the winding path toward the ancient fortress.

Up to this point, the two ladies had always been surrounded by crowds. In Dublin they had found themselves each morning having breakfast at the same long table, at about the same hour, in the otherwise deserted dining hall of the university dormitory where each had managed to find inexpensive accommodation. Mme. Pétille was in fact enrolled in a summer English course at the university, which she had heard about from one of the nuns at her school. Miss Perkins never spoke to anyone at the breakfast table, and no one addressed her either. At the end of her week she went by bus up through what they called the Yeats country around Sligo and back down through the Connemara to Galway, spending two days and two nights on her tour.

When they saw each other on the ferry deck that Monday morning, amid the cluster of English and Swedish tourists, although they had not spoken to each other before, the two women hailed each other like the best of friends and as if the meeting had been carefully pre-arranged. Mme. Pétille especially, Muriel observed, had seemed to regard the fortuitous recontre as quite natural and commonplace.

“May I ask, please, how was your trip from Dublin?” were her first words.

Miss Perkins had replied, rather astonished at how ordinary the event should seem to herself as well, by pronouncing her name and apologizing for not knowing her companion’s. By shortly after their arrival at Inishmore three hours later, the chance acquaintances had discovered still another coincidence, their mutual plan to spend a full week on the fascinating islands. Before reaching Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s, the French woman had rather solemnly asked Muriel’s “pre-name” and had declared, equally gravely, her own.

But these were all preliminaries. As, two by two, the other curiosity-seekers wandered away back down the grassy, bumpy path toward the road, the harbor, the boat — leaving the bizarre brown-rock walls, the smooth stone floor, and the dizzy precipice with no protecting rail where one half of the prehistoric fortress had obviously fallen into the black sea and foaming, crashing waves four-or five-hundred feet below — as the others straggled away, leaving the American and the French woman there in the quiet breeze and the slowly reddening rays of the late afternoon sun, Muriel and Magali, although again they did not speak, felt themselves quite alone there in that peaceful and beautiful, and yet altogether alien world.

This impression, they were to discover, was mistaken.

3

They saw the girl twice. At least, Miss Perkins did. For the rest of her life she would wonder if her French companion had truly failed to witness the curious, tragic scene that was to haunt her until she died.

After the first evening, when they had managed after all to find a cottage near the dock prepared to serve them supper, the two ladies slipped effortlessly into what, for visitors like themselves, seemed the natural rhythm of life on Inishmore. After a splendid breakfast they would wander each day in one direction or another down the road until they crossed a path they hadn’t explored that struck their fancy. They usually carried a box of crackers or cookies and perhaps a little cheese for a light lunch. They had found a little, yellow-stucco store not far from Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s on the way into town. They would usually carry with them too a book to read and paper and pen with which to write letters.

Muriel did not usually read or write, however, being quite content just to sit on a rock somewhere, feeling the warmth of the sunshine and the pleasantness of the sea breeze, and to gaze silently and steadily at the life around her. Magali too was quiet much of the time.

The remarkable thing about the island, as they discovered, was its utter infertility. The natural land itself seems to be entirely rock, the same grey granite one sees here and there on the mainland but here underlying everything, every footstep, every cottage, every shadow, every wall. Where grass and wild-flowers did grow, the soil was curiously granular and dark. Magali had read in a pamphlet she’d brought from the mainland Tourist Board that for centuries the islanders had heaped seaweed onto the sterile rocks, until the decayed mass of it would support the grass needed to feed sheep.

Even after those centuries, the old women remarked, many tiny, walled-off fields remained quite barren. In one, on the northern side of the island not far from Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s farmhouse, a poor scrawny cow was tethered each day. Stark and lonely, it presented a dark, unmoving shape cut out of the broken stones shining in the sun. In their entire stay on the island, they saw about six sheep.

Wherever they turned off the road, it seemed, Magali and Muriel found an arresting image to contemplate, like the old cow. Perhaps that is why Muriel was content most often to simply gaze about her those sunny, extraordinary days.

The southern side of Inishmore, at least toward the western end, is quite unredeemed from the wild ocean and the ungiving rock. The slowly rolling hills and knolls of the island’s other flank suddenly fall off there, as at Dun Aengus the land has fallen spectacularly into the sea. Lower along the island’s shore, a huge shelf of rough, flat rock extends out over the water. Magali was fond of exploring this curious formation, with its shell-like, pocked surface, but Muriel found it somewhat unsettling. The water, she thought, must run all the way back under this wide table of stone to the habitable land higher up. The tiny pools they came across here and there in the rough surface had brightly colored, living things in them, which suggested that at some times during the year (or perhaps in the night, Muriel thought) the rocky shelf was reclaimed by the waves they saw below its outer edge.

One evening, the two old companions were sitting on a grassy hill above this rough, jutting table of rock. Magali had been reading, her back to the sea so that the light would fall properly over her left shoulder. Muriel had been patiently watching a giant black spider suspended in a large glistening web thrown over the rocks in one of the low walls that crisscrossed the whole island. It was amazing to her that she could observe this small beast for hours without disturbing him, frightening him, or making him “self-conscious.”

Muriel had not been afraid of him either, despite feeling strongly his other-worldly nature. She had begun to be less afraid also that she would be forced to witness some horrible capture and a silent killing in that delicate, shimmery web.

“Ah---“ Magali had said then. In the quiet they’d grown accustomed to, her little gasp seemed to express more than mild surprise. She had turned around and was now shading her eyes.

On a rocky shelf below them was a young woman.

4

The hill they were seated on overlooked one of the most remarkable sections of the strange, flat rock. The structure there extended out from the grassy hill’s edge perhaps two hundred yards. In the precise center of this area, it seemed, the heavy and hard stone had somehow fallen through, back into the water underneath, severing itself from the main mass of rock along straight lines in a perfectly geometrical pattern, a square. Deep inside, as many as fifty feet below the crusty surface, the dark and murky waters rise and fall gently with the motion of the outer waves. Delicate, amorphous, white spots spread over tiny, scattered parts of the pool, just under the waters’ surface, like intricate stains: they were jellyfish.
On the far edge of this strange pool, a tall young woman or a girl stood, her back to the land, staring out toward the sun and the wide ocean. From the distance, she seemed almost teetering on the edge of the low, slowly undulating pool. They were too far away to cry out to her.

Muriel did jump to her feet, shading now her eyes too from the slanting rays from the West. Magali said nothing more.

The girl was dressed in dark clothes, seeming black against the grey-brown of the shell-like rock. Her hair was long and blew gently over her shoulder in the ocean wind. She seemed to have a knit shawl about her, holding it with folded arms, standing quite still. Her skirt was unusually long as well.

Her two observers later admitted to one another that each had felt instinctively at that first moment that she was not a regular inhabitant of the island. They had asked discreetly at the little yellow store the following day and felt their notion confirmed by the evasive answer received. She was an outsider, a visitor, they had both felt at once, like themselves.

Muriel stood quietly on their hillside, waiting for the young woman to turn and notice them. She did not. She might as well have been alone.

Her clothes and perhaps something of her attitude, Muriel said to herself, seemed old fashioned. Something a girl in Muriel’s day might have worn.

“She is—“ Magali said quietly then, from her rock: “She is — handsome.”

And the other old gazer could only agree. The girl below had turned her head toward the rising cliff to her right, raising her arm to shade her eyes. A corner of her shawl lifted gently off her shoulder and blew back to one side. This too had a charm for the two spectators on the hill, rising as it did so gracefully in the breeze.

Hair brushed back over the forehead, wind caressing the soft cheek. The sound, distant and calm: rustling in the ears, whispering, the waters rocking below. The waves rolling slowly, black with depth, etched by bright light and sparkling white foam into somehow moving, glistening, sculptured black crystal. The damp cool breeze on the face, the warm sunshine slowly penetrating deeply into the body. The caressing, loving, cherishing silence rustling at her skirts …

The young woman began to move to the right, around the corner of the treacherous pool, making her way back toward the living portion of the island to one side of the old ladies. By the time they had reached the pathway she must have taken from the edge of the rocky shelf onto the green slope, by then the lovely poised creature had disappeared.

“She is admirable,” Muriel said to her friend on their way back to Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s. “We must try to find her again.” But the French women by this time appeared to have her own thoughts on the subject and did not reply.

Muriel’s excessive response to even this first view of the dark young woman should perhaps have been recognized as a preliminary warning of the slight disorder that was to strike her later, forcing her to decide to leave the island after only four days. Magali said she was bored by then too.

Their next day was cloudy and cool. It was not stormy, and the two older ladies were not absolutely prevented from going out. Perhaps it was the exertions of the previous days, then, that most encouraged them to stay close to the road, never wandering far from Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s.

Muriel took it upon herself to ask in the little store just down the road if the old proprietor knew a tall young woman who might live on the island. He may have heard her question imperfectly, or even slightly misunderstood her English, being accustomed to Gaelic most of the day. He replied that there were still some children on Inishmore, but “no young people.”

“They go off now, d’ya see?” he said; meaning, Muriel thought, that they went to the mainland, leaving only young children and old people. Muriel’s own observation tended to confirm this remark.

Muriel did not mention the young woman again to Magali, but she found her thoughts often returning to the image they had both had of her the afternoon before. Muriel recognized in herself a certain quiet envy of the other’s proud bearing, her independence, self-sufficiency, and strength. It did not occur to her that the same traits could be observed in Mme. Pétille, her friend. She did recognize, of course, that these were qualities of the particular scene she had witnessed, more perhaps than of the girl herself.

Seeing her and, especially, having these unjustified impressions of her character were among the many out-of-the-way experiences of Muriel’s island visit. The rude denial of these fantasies that she was later to register left her deeply troubled.

When she and her companion on that cloudy day went for tea to the cottage they now knew in the harbor area, Miss Perkins asked the lady in charge if she knew of a lovely young girl among the few tourists at present staying on. “No, no,” she was told; “No one like that, dear… And how are ya’ finding Missus Fitzpatrick’s now?”

5

The next day the sturdy Mme. Pétille and her little American friend seemed thoroughly restored. The weather had changed again for the better, as their hostess had predicted at supper the evening before, remaining cool but becoming once again sunny and peaceful.

Magali began to tell Muriel about her family as they explored for the first time the eastern end of the island. Muriel was interested, feeling her old self again, and even chimed in a few remarks about her sisters and their families in Illinois and Michigan. They spent most of the day chatting here and there among the small, flat fields, in the tiny pathways between the piled rock walls. They met an old man on one of the roads, the first islander they had seen not on the main road or in a house. He didn’t say anything, staring rather stupidly, they felt, at them; but when they wished him good morning he nodded happily and pulled his lips back into a broad smile away from the one stubby brown tooth sticking down from his front gum.

The little old touring ladies had to smile at each other surreptitiously after they had passed this pitiful creature. But mostly, they had just talked that day.

After tea once more in the harbor cottage, they struck upon the idea of returning to Dun Aengus. Looking back on it in later years, Miss Perkins was to feel this decision quite natural or even inevitable. She had been feeling slightly tired, physically, but not at all ready to go in for the day. She was also feeling quite pleased by the new closeness a whole day of friendly conversation had established between herself and Magali. Looking back, later, she did wonder that this intimacy could so quickly disappear. Perhaps it was the return of ordinary time upon them when they left Inishmore the next afternoon. They had planned to write each other, perhaps with a view to future visits and vacations. But that was not to be. Muriel realized that this was her fault, not due to any coolness from the redoubtable Mme. Pétille.

6

They thought the sunset viewed from the height of the bizarre and ancient structure must be magnificent. It would be just beginning before they would have to start back to their guesthouse for supper. They did not defy Mrs. Fitzpatrick anymore on such matters of custom.

So they positively hurried off up the road to the West. If a jaunting car had hailed them then, Muriel thought gaily, they might even have taken it.

They rested twice along the road, once before a tiny grey beach where a strange, curved, open black boat had been lying on its side since they arrived, and once at the tiny sign pointing off the road to the upward footpath. Both women were winded. Muriel was also feeling rather hot by this time, and found her vision slightly dazzled when she looked at anything directly in the sun. But both old women seemed eager for the sight that awaited them. After only a moment seated awkwardly on a rock there, Magali and her old friend started off again.

That pathway is not like the others that go between the tiny fields. They are dusty, flat, and rather smooth; whereas the path to Dun Aengus is grassy, rather steep, and studded with small points of rock jutting up from beneath the soil. Magali was the stronger of the two old ladies and had less difficulty than Muriel. At first she paused now and then to look back towards the northern side of the island they had come from, once remarking how the afternoon sun made everything on that side seem to glow warmly. Muriel became self-conscious about how she was slowing her companion down. She did not turn to look back.

Mme. Pétille finally went on ahead, at her own rate. Muriel did not mind this desertion and was in fact enjoying her climb at the slower pace. When she reached the top, she found Magali plunged again into one of her silent reveries, standing with her back to the old fort, several yards from the footpath, looking out over the clustered buildings, that small beach and Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s farmhouse, across the grey waters of the bay, toward the mainland.

That curious nervous disorder by this time had begun to take possession of Miss Perkin’s little body, although she did not realize it then. She was out of breath and quite dizzy from the brisk walk and the steep climb. She felt hot.

The stones at that side of Dun Aengus are small and pointed, not for sitting. Muriel made her way, calming her breathing and trying to re-focus her disturbed vision, into the wide semi-circle of rocks. She could at least sit there a moment on the smooth stone floor.

In fact, she gladly plumped herself down on the first stone she found. It was at the entranceway itself to the dark old fort, or was it an ancient temple? She closed her eyes. Gradually, her heart-beat slowed to its normal pace. Slowly, her rapid breathing and feeling of heat subsided. The unusual calm that she had felt before on the island stole back over her in the utter silence of that extraordinary place. Magali had retreated from her consciousness. She felt alone, and she felt free.

She was not in truth entirely alone, however, and when she realized this upon opening her eyes, she almost gasped in surprise. She became conscious then of the silence there, feeling that, even if she were to try, she could make no sound.

Looking back later, it was always the silence and the sensation, oddly, of being alone that returned to her.

The dark young woman they had seen on the shelf-like rock was, of course, with her then. She was dressed just the same, with the same dark shawl lifting gently from her shoulder in the ocean breeze. Muriel could not speak to her or call out, even to Mme. Pétille, for fear of startling her. There, where the dark rock walls and the smooth stone floor had plummeted centuries before down hundreds of feet into the deep, black waters, the young woman was seated. Her feet in fact must have been dangling over the edge!

Muriel hardly dared to breathe, so disorienting was this prospect to her. With no guard-rail whatsoever, the precipice had fascinated her that first day but had terrified her as well. One of those images she’d carried away with her was the quick view she had allowed herself over the edge, of the utterly black water perhaps five hundred feet below, glistening in the sunlight like carved ebony and the dazzling, sparkling foam of the waves crashing into what might have been the old fort’s rubble, the broken rocks. They were so far below that even the roar of the waves could not be heard at the top. There, all was still.

The quiet calm, the warm emptiness.

The sun’s warmth and the gentle wind …

It did not seem unthinkable to Muriel that the younger woman would be perched thus on the brink of the high cliff. She herself after all had inched her way to the edge, and Magali had done so as well. Once again, however, she was moved by the apparent calm and self-possession of this other, lovely creature. She was seated at the edge of a dizzying height, looking — it seemed — impassively into the sky and the darkening sea.

As Muriel watched her from behind, just after the older lady had opened her eyes again still rather disoriented by the slanting light and by her fatigue, the young woman still gracefully and calmly leaned slowly forward into the void and, without the slightest sound, vanished from sight.

7

Muriel Perkins was horrified, of course. She was shaken to her soul. Jumping to her feet she turned to find Magali, but Mme. Pétille was now shading her eyes looking the other way, over the bay. Hearing movement behind her, the French woman said then, “Look!” gesturing down toward the shore.

The black, open boat they had seen on its side for days was then bumping out into the waters. From the distance the men at the oars seemed mere extensions of its own dark, hulking shape, indistinguishable from it.
Muriel stepped back into Don Aengus, looking toward the side opening out to the West, into the sunset. There was nothing but light and emptiness.

8

The next day they heard no talk of a missing person. The young woman’s body seemed to have disappeared forever, sucked away in the boiling currents. She seemed to have left no trace, except in Muriel’s mind.
Muriel said nothing.

When they told Mrs. Fitzpatrick that morning that they had suddenly decided to return on the boat of that day, abruptly cutting short their often announced plan to stay a full week, that good woman was not even surprised.

By that time, the two foreign visitors she had entertained in her home had become for her utterly inscrutable.

***

“No Problem” and Courtesy (essay)

***

Consider the following exchanges:

1:
John: Hello, Margaret.
Margaret: Hi, John. How are you?
John: Fine, thanks; you?
Elizabeth: Fine.
John: What’s new?
Elizabeth: Nothing much.

2:
Lois: May I help you?
Stephen: Do you have any ______?
Lois: Yes, right over here.
Stephen: Thank you.
Lois: You’re welcome.

Conventional, polite, pleasant enough, right?

Now consider this revision to the first conversation:

1 A:
John: Hello, Margaret.
Margaret: Fine.
John: How are you?
Margaret: Nothing much.
John: Fine thanks. What’s new?
Margaret. Hi, John.

The replies here are responses to the wrong questions, right?

And how about this revision to that second conversation?

2 A:
Lois: Did you find what you needed?
Stephen: Yes. I’d like to buy this ______, please.
Lois: Oh, good.
Stephen: And thank you for your help.
Lois: No problem.

This conversation ends with a response to the wrong question just as surely as all the replies in conversation 1 A. Thank you is a statement indicating the speaker’s appreciation for something the other person has done. There are, of course, more than one appropriate response to Thank you. Consider these possibilities:

You’re welcome – This conventional reply indicates it was appropriate for Stephen (in conversation 2) to expect Lois to do what she has done. It turns the conversation back to Stephen’s wants and needs, which is as polite as Stephen’s Thank you, since the response is also about Stephen.

I’m glad you found what you wanted – Although this reply does not comment on the appropriateness of Stephen’s request for help, it is still a pertinent and polite response to his Thank you. It is still more polite as it indicates Lois’s own pleasure in Stephen’s being satisfied.

My pleasure to serve you – This reply goes beyond both You’re welcome and I’m glad you found what you wanted, since it indicates that not only did Lois find it appropriate for Stephen to ask for help; she actually appreciated the opportunity to be of service. The same would be true for Happy to oblige and I’m glad I could help.

Now, to what question or comment is the statement No problem an appropriate response? No problem indicates that, in the second speaker's mind, the person saying Thank you has just expressed concern for the second person. For instance, in the scene in conversation 2, Stephen might have said, “I’m sorry I didn’t know where to look for ______.” No problem would mean in that context, unless an insult were intended, that Lois understands how an intelligent customer might not have known where the ________ was in the store.

In a different context, Stephen might have said, I’m sorry to have troubled you. Maybe Lois had been engrossed in another project when he came in, which he had interrupted. By saying No problem, she would have been telling him, not rudely, that the interruption had not caused her a problem, as he evidently thought.

Appropriate uses of No problem as an uninsulting reply to Thank you only occur when the first speaker – in this case, Stephen - is talking about the other, Lois, and that she acknowledges that her experience is indeed the subject of the exchange. Comparable responses would include, Oh, that’s okay and You didn’t cause me enough trouble to be concerned about.

In other words, saying No problem in reply to Thank you is equivalent to saying, It was not much of a bother to help you. That’s not part of a polite conversation – and should absolutely never be said to a customer as in a store or a restaurant.

You see, in that kind of a situation, and in many other kinds of situation, saying No problem to a person who has just thanked you indicates that the person replying thinks the most important element in the transaction eliciting the Thank you was how much or how difficult was the work he or she has been required to do.

So, if we thank our waitress, and she or he says, No problem, should we reply, Oh, I’m sorry I made work for you?

***

Reminiscence: The Children 1

***

1

With A----- pregnant for the first time, naturally we began to think about children’s names. We agreed on several points:

• our children’s names would reflect our families’ Irish and English heritage

• we would always call them by their real names and not with well-intentioned but generic names (like Sugar, Dear, Cutie, Sweetie)

• and their names would not be easy to make into nicknames (like Robert, William, Elizabeth, Katherine).

Several years later, the second child - son W----- - was not feeling well. I was trying to comfort him while heating something up in the kitchen. I picked him up and held him, hugged him. He was a toddler, so after a few minutes he began to feel heavy. I put him on the kitchen counter, still holding him tightly.

After a minute, I looked him lovingly in the eye. “You’ll feel better soon,
W-----,” I said.

He suddenly threw up, right in my face.

I did not hit him. I tried my best to not even flinch, but to continue looking at him lovingly. I asked sweetly, “Feel a little better now, honey?”

In his most innocent, piteous little voice, he said, “I don’t like to be called ‘Honey.’”

2

While W----- was still an infant, he slept in a crib in his own room, next to ours. Our daughter L------ - who was 20 months older - had her room a few steps away down the hall. We had worked hard to make her feel good about a new baby’s arrival, and she did.

Every morning, for instance, when she would first wake up (and often before her parents were stirring), L------ would go into W-----’s room and climb up into his crib to murmur quietly to him in a few minutes they had to themselves.

One morning, when A----- went in, she found L----- clambering back down from the crib; she had a pained look on her face. Before A----- could even ask her the trouble, she said: “I don’t like that poop in my smell.”

***

Poem: first day of spring

***

cycling
from work
home

a man wrestling
a bright stroller with
a girl

not
my daughter

beside him
peering
at the rushing
cars

what i'd do
i'd lift her

thinking that
cycling by

i felt her weight
on my arm
and her legs
on my chest

and my heart
leapt

**

American Success: Dualities Within the Culture

*
**
***

1

The force that historically has driven America – and the United States in particular – is generated by a dynamic tension between dualities.

These dualities consist of worthy, even noble motives or ideals that happen to be paired against one another, pulling in opposite directions. Yet the opposition is not between good and bad (not between good and evil, and not even between moral and immoral). Both members of each pair are unquestionably good.

Consider, for example, the classic duality between Reason and Passion.

By nature, passion - or as we might say more often today, emotion – is volatile, always changing, “in the moment,” unpredictable.

Reason by contrast is orderly, considers both the past and the future, is predictable (though not unchanging).

The ancients said that one should seek a balance in one’s life, inspired or motivated by emotion (or “passion”) and also guided by reason. An excess of either emotion or reason would lead to negative results; finding the right balance in one’s life between these opposing internal forces was the ideal.

An individual or a nation driven by excessive emotion would be always unstable, untrustworthy, subject to intimidation by others more powerful, and vulnerable to manipulation. An individual excessively driven by reason would be alone, cold, selfish, calculating; a nation driven excessively by reason would not be grounded in values, and would be seeking, not ideals, but only the nation’s material and political interest. Emotion is perhaps more critical to the individual and reason to a nation, but the opposed driving force - in some degree - is necessary to each.

2

Since early in its development, American culture has been impelled forward by the tension between such opposing and interrelated forces – dualities – as these:

Reason - - - - - - - - - Emotion
Order - - - - -- - - - - Harmony
Society - - - -- - - - - Nature
Social - - - -- - - - - - Individual
Public - - - -- - - - - - Private
Duty - - - - -- - - - - - Commitment
Loyalty - - - -- - - - - Independence
Social Order - - - - - Social Justice
Law - - - - - - - - - - -Freedom
Authority - - - - - - - Conscience
Virtue -- - - - - -- - - Love
Observation - - - - - Imagination
Tradition - - - - - - - Creativity
Principle - - - --- - - Inspiration
Classicism - - - -- - Romanticism
Male - - - - - - -- - - Female
Real - - - - - - - - - - Ideal
Privileges - - - - - - Rights
Observation - - -- - Revelation
Physical Senses - - Intuition
Fact(s) - - - - - - - - Truth
Science - - - - - -- - Faith
Skeptical - - - - -- -Trusting
Knowledge - - - -- -Feeling
Intelligence - - - - - -Common Sense
Education - - - - - - -Experience
Ability - - - - -- - - - Motivation
Society - - - - - - - - Nature
Others - - - - -- - - - Self
Service - - - - - - - - Pleasure
Interest - - - - -- - - -Esteem
Respect - - - - -- - - Happiness

If an item in any pair seems negative, then we must simply remove that pair from this consideration. The point is, this list is intended to call attention to the opposing, complementary motives or ideals that have driven American culture through its history. Each item in every pairing should seem capable both of motivating behavior and of being intrinsically good.

Pursuit of happiness, for instance, is one of the self-evident rights referred to in our Declaration of Independence. Happiness is obviously good. On the other hand, who could say that seeking to earn respect – the opposing force to the drive for happiness - is not good?

Making decisions based on knowledge obviously seems desirable, yet one says, “Sometimes, you’ve got to go with your gut.” Sometimes, that is, it is good to make a decision based simply on what feels right.

Some are motivated by the pursuit of virtue, which is clearly a good thing, but who could say that it is not also a good thing to do something out of love?

And so on. (I hope the reader will be motivated, whether by curiosity or by faith that doing so would be beneficial, to think through several others of these dualities, seeing for yourselves how both ideals in each duality are good in themselves, even if they each have opposites that are also intrinsically good in themselves.)

3

Conventionally, Americans are said to be different from those in older cultures.  Americans are said to be more individualistic and independent, more imaginative and resourceful, committed more to their own freedom than to tradition or social hierarchy. That kind of claim is asserted so often and is so well illustrated by reference to events that it is clearly true at least to some degree.

At the same time, however, often in our history Americans have exhibited extraordinary love of their country and self-sacrifice of many kinds – for others, for loved ones, for those in need, for future generations… This tendency to put others before oneself is also often said to be a defining trait of American culture.

Another conventional and no doubt true observation is that America was born out of the Enlightenment, the intellectual culture distilling what was special about the Renaissance into behavioral imperatives and moral values. Jefferson, Washington, Adams, Madison, and the many others who led the way to the establishment of our nation embodied the perceptions and ideals developed by Montesquieu, Descartes, Locke, Hume, and many other contributors in the eighteenth century to the cultural phenomenon now called the Enlightenment. The American founders had learned from these writers and statesmen and came to embody in laws, institutions, and in themselves the grand principles for these intellectuals such as independent inquiry, reason, distrust for convention and authority, equality of opportunity, and so on.

That is all true, but we must not forget that more than their intellectual forbears', our founding leaders’ principles, ideals, and passions grew up in the pragmatic struggle to survive and then to prosper. At every time in their lives, they lived with the sense of the wilderness stretching out in front of them, offering both opportunity and danger or risk.

Thus, American culture grows most fundamentally out of the duel between our great intellectual, legal, and social heritage and our practical desire to overcome real, material dangers and risks.

***
**
*

Reminiscence: Mother, a Year Before

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1

A short time before my mother was diagnosed with cancer (which soon killed her), although she – and we – had been spared the awful ravages of Alzheimer’s, nonetheless, she had moved to a significant level of dementia.

A psychologist specializing in geriatric cases, whom we had hired a few years before as Mother’s care manager, had correctly predicted that over time Mother’s already-noticeable short-term memory problems would become more prominent. But she was always quick to explain that Mother’s ability to reason would remain sound and that her basic nature and emotional responsiveness would be unaffected. Unless she later developed Alzheimer’s – which seemed unlikely – she would not become “another person,” as many say about their aging parents.

This also proved to be true.

This care manager had a lot of experience with old people; she was intuitive, empathetic, and articulate. She listened as well as she talked. Mother had liked her right away, though after a short time from one visit to the next, Mother could not remember who that nice woman was.

So the care manager was good, but on at least one occasion, she just didn’t “get” it.

2

A year or so before she died, my wife and I took Mother to dinner at her favorite cafeteria, where she and my dad had gone once or twice a week and where she had continued to go after his death when taking a friend or relative to a meal. When visiting her, it had been our custom for a long time to take her to the cafeteria at least once.

She knew what to order, and how to do it. Although the staff always had someone carry her tray for her, she could have managed that tricky business too, I feel sure.

We were chatting away, as the three of us always did, when Mother set down her silverware and looked rather intently into my eyes.

“’Byron,’” she said sweetly and simply, “I don’t know who you are. Are you my brother? My husband? My son? I don’t know.” Not knowing who I was, was apparently a curious phenomenon for her. But it did not seem a disaster or a cause of embarrassment, or even concern.

Trying to answer in the same simple, rather casual way, I told her I was her son, and she sat back as though satisfied, and picked up her fork. The conversation on things in general picked up again, barely missing a beat.

Although she never asked me again, Mother, of course, would not have remembered this conversation. But I did.

3

Next time I spoke with the care manager, I naturally told her about this brief conversation. We had weekly talks, sometimes lasting more than a half-hour as she would report her observations to me and answer my (many) questions.

But I didn’t have any questions about that incident, although it did seem worthy of being reported to her.

After I told her, she began speaking right away. She was immediately more animated than usual. Apparently, I learned, mine was not a particularly unusual experience. It was reasonably common for a person with dementia to forget her or his relationship with friends and loved ones.

As Mother’s care manager continued to speak, it slowly dawned on me that she was working to console me, to reassure me that I was nonetheless an important person, and also to warn me that such would probably not be a unique phenomenon.

In other words, her assumption was that I must have been traumatized by my mother’s little question, feeling suddenly that I had lost my dear mother, wondering how I could go on without her. In short, she thought I found it a very negative occurrence.

This was so wrong, so off the mark, I didn’t think it necessary to say anything other than showing gratitude for the helpful information.

4

It seemed so obvious to me: Mother’s little question had told me, shown me, that my mother loved me and trusted me. She thought I might have been her dear brother G------------, or even her beloved husband of over 50 years.

That was as positive an experience, it seemed to me, as one could have.

***

Wise Sayings from Ron Lucius

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First things first.
Enough is enough,
_______but good enough is not good enough.

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Rely on observation, respect for others, and reason -
Not on superstition, bias, and fear.

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Protect the poor
Support the modestly successful
Praise the rich and powerful
___but require them to help protect and support the others.

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DO lead others through example and reasoned argument.
DO NOT drive others through authority and intimidation.

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............…………………………………………………………Ron Lucius

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Story: An Oriental Tale

***
1

As many as one thousand years ago, a small village of shepherds, salt traders, and barley farmers lay sheltered in a high and narrow Himalayan valley. The heavy wooden huts of the village, the fields to the East and West, the sheep and goat herds in the foothills, and the twisting paths to the salt lakes in the North were all controlled by the several ruling families of the valley people. The family elders remained inside their smoky, log-and-hide lodges more and more as they grew older, as the wealth and power of succeeding generations increased, until the oldest men seldom saw one another, after braving the harsh winds of the long winter and the weak sunlight, even though their low and dark lodges were but several hundred yards apart. Their true interest lay in their land, their herds, and their serfs who tilled and tended them; in the horses strung together that wound through the mountain passes to the South, laden with hides and wool and great chunks of gritty salt.

The traders who led the pack trains did not belong to the ruling families, nor to the serfs who lived in the fields in sod houses or in caves in the foothills just north of the village. Their families too lived in log huts within the village itself, not far from the Pootsonng River which flowed through the valley. The ruling families knew of the traders' exotic stories of other lands and peoples. They knew also of the traders' noxious and blasphemous desires to dig the glittering, heavy stones from under the mountains' hide. But the pack trains moved on to the South and returned in due time, with cotton and tea, and the trader families were quiet and the young men of the ruling families dealt with them fairly.

The ruling elders ignored the traders' petty blasphemies and ignored too the exotic lands and peoples from which their tea and cotton and fine brassware came.

By coincidence there were born at one time to both a ruling family and to a trader, sons of especial ability and intelligence. When these two sons were of age, they began to work together overseeing the fitting-out of the pack horses, sewing the hides into salt bags, weaving the goat hair cords or leather thongs. The trader's son was called Ha-Mul, and the ruler's son was called Amuthswahti. They knew each other by name.

Ha-Mul found that by asking his father and older brothers a day ahead, he could learn what share of the work the rulers would allot to the young master Amuthswahti and could join him. Only when Amuthswahti was sent into the barley fields or the vegetable gardens or into wide storage barns would Ha-Mul be left behind.

By the time Amuthswahti was old enough to move out of the elders' lodge, where his father lived now with the ancient family patriarch, and to take a wife from one of the other families, the other members of the ruling class already looked to him as a extraordinary individual. It was noted among the traders and the domestic serfs that the lodge constructed for Amuthswahti and his bride was not the usual square hut with a flap of hide at the door and mud from the Pootsonng smeared between the logs. It resembled instead the long, dark elders' lodge, oblong, with the fire-hole at one end, goat hides tacked on all walls, and split and polished logs tied into the entrance way as a door.

By the time Amuthswahti had two sons, a third having died at birth, and a new daughter, the other villagers already revered him as other peoples would revere a king or high-priest. Ha-Mul also had prospered, having by this time taken no fewer than six pack-trains of hides across the highland trail toward Sikkim and Bengal and having returned far sooner than the other traders, braving the harsh winds and the deep snows and bringing with him the finest ivory and brassware, the most delicate silk and cotton, the richest, dark teas. Even the ruling elders knew of his explorations far across the giant salt lakes in the North, toward Cathay, the huge shapeless Chinese empire far away there. But they made no stirring or protest so long as the village life remained undisturbed, all the more secure now for having Amuthswahti to oversee their interests and to insure the stability of their world.

Ha-Mul had not married until a year before Amuthswahti began constructing a new lodge, which was destined to become the center of village life, by village standards almost a palace for himself and his family elders and, for all the villagers, including traders, a market and meeting place. Ha-Mul had two wives and two young serving women living with him in a plain but spacious trader's hut near the new central lodge by the time it was completed. But he was denied a son. Even the several daughters his women bore him were not well and died before reaching womanhood. At first, Ha-Mul spent many months away from his people, living in the caves far to the North or leading trains across the mountain trails, but as Amuthswahti matured and prospered and began, like the elders, to remain quietly in the central lodge supervising the others' work, Ha-Mul also came to still his own wanderlust. He invited his brothers to live with him, and he spent many hours within sight and hearing of Amuthswahti, speaking when Amuthswahti asked him about his business or about his trading successes in the cities in the South. As the years passed, the two men became again as accustomed to each other's ways and to each other's company as they had been as boys, weaving goat hair ropes or sewing together the salt bags of hide.

2

Amuthswahti had become a thoughtful man.

He had always been a decision-maker, a leader. He had from his youth an extraordinary ability to organize working projects and domestic life as well, but as he reached maturity, he developed a greater sense of humanity, a deeper interest in the individual people with whom he lived, their peculiarities and their good sense. He found more and more that his greatest pleasures came from observing the simplest actions of the simplest folk around him, the serfs from the fields who brought in the produce for barter in the long open wing of his central lodge, the ancient peasant woman who had served his family as a domestic since long before he was born, his old parents and his youngest children. He liked men of his own age and class somewhat less, feeling that perhaps he should communicate with them more of his thoughts about such things, not confining himself to matters of wealth and tradition and trade. Ha-Mul, Amuthswahti sensed, was different from the others but different still from himself. These impressions made him uneasy, and sent his attention back once more to the activity in the marketplace or the kitchen and the nursery.

Once an incident threatened to disturb the deep calm of the village life. An old trader, whose wives had not prospered and had died or had been taken back to their families, was discovered abusing his youngest son. The two of them lived separately from the servants and the several other children and the elder family members. The boy appeared with the others at play first, and in later moths at his chores, with bruises on his arms and sometimes around his eyes. He was a quiet child who stayed somewhat detached from the rest of his brothers and from the other traders' sons. But, for years, this was not noticed by the villagers. The older man was like the others, packing the trains and tending the horses who made them up, taking his turn on the journeys to the South. Amuthswahti and the other men of the ruling families scarcely knew of his existence.

By accident one night, a trader's wife, slipping quietly to the river for water she'd forgotten to fetch before, heard from the old trader's hut a stifled yelp, and then a slap and a second tiny cry.

Next day her husband observed the youngster holding his shoulders unnaturally stiff and on raising his tunic found the welts and swollen, red stripes of a harsh beating on his back and what might have been scars. The other lads laughed sheepishly and the traders joked among themselves at the youngster's having been so disciplined, recalling their own youth. But this man, who had discovered the welts, continued to watch for several weeks, noting how frequently the boy was bruised or cut, and how often he walked stiffly or unnaturally, favoring one foot or not swinging one arm freely. This man and his brothers and another old trader quietly watched the hut for three nights, finally rushing in as the old man stuck the lad's buttocks with a worn leather-covered board and pinched the inside flesh of his thighs beneath his wood-soled boots.

The matter was brought to the attention of all the men who gathered each day at the central lodge. Ha-Mul and the other traders did not hesitate to order that the youth be placed with the other children of the family and the old man was cautioned that his behavior could not be continued. Amuthswahti did not speak at first, but after several weeks, when Ha-Mul happened to mention to him that the old man's work had been failing and that the others expected him soon to fall ill or die, Amuthswahti finally bared his mind to his companion.

"I am not surprised, Ha-Mul," he said. And when Ha-Mul questioned his meaning, he went on. "The boy too will be suffering."

The conversation ended here, as almost all exchanges did after two or three remarks, but the trader thought of his friend's comment and felt after several weeks that indeed one could observe in the young lad's bearing a despondency, a lifelessness that had not been present before.

"But how can this be?" he wondered, "now that his beatings have been stopped?"

One evening when he and Amuthswahti sat together alone before the fire, Ha-Mul asked him what measure he would have proposed himself. "Surely," he thought, "Amuthswahti would not allow the punishments to continue."

His companion replied slowly, after a silence, "It is a hard question," and then did not continue.

Ha-Mul stirred uncomfortably after moments of silent meditation had passed.

Amuthswahti then said, "Both the old man and the boy together must be considered. Both to be restrained, and both pitied."

Again the conversation ended here, but the next evening Ha-Mul suggested that perhaps the old man should be invited to live once again with all his family, so that the two would not be entirely separated but so that their nefarious deeds could not be repeated.

"That," Amuthswahti said, "would have been my proposal."

This was done.

The following winter, Ha-Mul learned from the old man's next eldest brother that he and the young son had disappeared, taking one horse with them and some food.

Amuthswahti knew that he and Ha-Mul had acted wisely, yet their solution had failed. From then on, he found the incident returning often to his mind. He felt that a certain tragedy had transpired, and he wished deeply he had known the old man and his son.

3

One afternoon after many years, Ha-Mul did not join the other traders in the wide meeting room at the central lodge. By this time, when few masters remained older than Amuthswahti himself and when Ha-Mul was among the oldest in the class of traders, the leading men of both groups came together on most days to speak of their crops and their commerce. Family and personal affairs were still discussed only among members of the one group or the other, but most other matters came to be discussed by all. A kind of informal government had evolved there in the meeting room, over which Ha-Mul customarily presided, although he and the others deferred to Amuthswahti's judgment when it was offered.

Ha-Mul's absence was felt, surely, before the day had far progressed. It was not mentioned, however, and as no matters of moment were introduced into the several languid conversations here and there about the hall, many of the others drifted one by one back to their own homes, before the servants had rightly begun to bring in the tea to them. Amuthswahti himself was at first not concerned at missing his old friend, but as the hours glided slowly toward evening (it was now almost summer, and the evenings were long, light, and warm), he began to grow uneasy. And finally he became quite unsettled.

He spoke to one of his sons returning from the building site of a new storage barn, asking if perchance the old trader had taken advantage of the lovely warm weather to go share his own experience with the younger men working there. But the son had not seen or heard of Ha-Mul since the evening before in the lodge at twilight. Amuthswahti had been thoughtful that night and had not taken special notice to his old companion's behavior, but now as he reflected upon the quiet tranquillity of that earlier scene, he thought he could sense a slight restlessness in the old man's deportment, an abstracted air about his remarks, perhaps an unusual inattention to Amuthswahti's elder son, a favorite with both.

Amuthswahti called for a traveling robe and walking boots. His servants left the tea and their meal preparations in surprise, scurrying to find which of the sons' boots would be suitable for their master and to present for his selection one of the family's fine, heavy robes. He chose instead a simple, hooded skin one of the traders had left behind, exchanged his slippers for the first pair of hide boots they brought to him and strode, alone, out into the empty market space and directly across the village. A few children did not hide their astonishment to see the tall old man walking by himself among the lodges and wooden huts, but the others who recognized him went on with their chores or their meals without appearing to see him or appreciate who he was.

At the lodge of Ha-Mul's family, Amuthswahti was received graciously and invited ceremoniously to join the circle seated comfortably outside along the high, wooded bank of the Pootsonng at one entrance to the hall. But the old leader was scarcely courteous as he greeted Ha-Mul's brothers and their sons. When he spoke at last with Ha-Mul's elder wife, he learned that his old companion had left the village at dawn, by himself, leading a single supply horse behind him, heading--his nephews added later--heading north toward the caves above the wide salt flats he had once explored as a younger man. Amuthswahti found himself growing irritated at the family's complacent composure. As if Ha-Mul went off alone into the hills to the north every day! As if this was not an unusual and a portentous sign of hidden motives or unsuspected plans!

Ha-Mul was away hardly a month, but the changes in the village elders in such a short time seemed remarkable to him on his return. Amuthswahti had followed his surprising behavior on the evening after the other's departure by spending all the next morning out of doors, first in the market nodding to the traders' wives when he could recognize them and later observing the progress of the storage barn. In a few days he ordered the household domestics to serve the evening meal at the benches and tables in the market space, left vacant by that hour. When Ha-Mul returned to the gathering at the central lodge late one afternoon, he found his old companion Amuthswahti and the others seated on the rugs and cushions in the open air between the wings of the lodge, shaded from the sun by a loose canopy of goat hides stitched together with thongs and tied to poles. Amuthswahti said that he had himself helped to select the hides.

Later in the evening, after the others had returned home from their main meal and Amuthswahti had invited Ha-Mul inside once more and had shared with him his best barley-wine, Amuthswahti suddenly chuckled out loud.

"You see, Ha-Mul," he said, "I too grow restless in this season." And then he added, "And perhaps before now as well; I am not certain."

Ha-Mul discovered at that moment, for the first time, that he had made his long journey and had pursued his little adventure for one reason only. So that he would be able to tell Amuthswahti of what he had seen and what he had learned of the world in the North.

The brief summer on the high plateau soon ended, and the village life returned to its accustomed ways for all. Never had Ha-Mul and Amuthswahti felt so close. The old trader arrived at the central lodge now before the market place had emptied of peasants and serfs. He stayed late into the dark, cold night. He told his friend slyly that he now expected to discover that the young serf who stayed with him to help him across the village in the darkness, slipping on the hard, dry ice, would ask permission to take one of Amuthswahti's cooks for his woman. The two old men often joked of this possibility in their slow conversations after the evening meal.

When he had left the village that summer, Ha-Mul had not tarried long in the caves in the rocky hills. As he remarked to Amuthswahti, they had not changed since their boyhood. The younger traders, like Amuthswahti's own sons, did not explore there now, preferring to steal away to the South to hunt stray ponies or wild goats in the less barren passes toward Bengal. Ha-Mul himself had moved on farther North, picking his way as he found it, not remembering how he had journeyed as a young man into Cathay. Perhaps the land was the same; the people he found were not.

First, on the other side of the rocky hills bordering the valley on the North, he had crossed a wide trail moving east along another plateau. Ha-Mul had considered following it himself, as a possible trade route which itself might finally bend down toward Sikkim and the cities in the South, perhaps providing an easier journey for the valley peoples' traders to enter the Pootsonng Valley themselves, bringing their own goods. But this dream failed to inspire Ha-Mul's desire, the simpler man he had used to be or ought to be. He told this to Amuthswahti last, after telling many other things. The other man had merely smiled sympathetically, shaking his head.

So Ha-Mul, the old man now that he had become, had chosen instead to follow the trail away to the North and the West, to find what peoples had settled now in that land and to find how they lived there. He had met almost immediately a small group of trappers, heading east with furs and fine silver jewelry. They were smaller men than some of the valley people, stocky and wide-faced more like the country serfs and a few traders than the taller, leaner, dark-skinned ruling families and Ha-Mul himself; but their language was not so foreign that the old man from the Pootsonng could fail to understand and to make himself understood. He tried to remember seeing such men trading thick, dark furs in the southern cities he had visited, and thought perhaps he did remember seeing them but briefly and only infrequently. These travelers told him of a small settlement at the western end of the trail where the lord of a strong kingdom still far away beyond the mountains had ordered some of his dependents and their peasants to build a city not many years before. The ruling families had already returned to their own lands, but the serfs had remained in the new city to continue the trade the foreign rulers had originally intended.

Ha-Mul almost left the trail then, to go on directly into the mountains, hoping to cross them and to find on the other side a true kingdom or a new city, disappointed to find his trail led only to a small, uncivilized outpost of peasants and traders not so different from himself. One of the party he met, however, an older man like Ha-Mul whose role among the others remained obscure to the Valley traveler, had spoken to him as the camp was broken up that morning to suggest he might stay with his family in a certain lodge. Many travelers, he said, visited there and they might be a curiosity of some note to a man of Ha-Mul's standing and years.

The old trader did not know what to think of this, suspecting a blurring of his language or an unusual unctuousness in the form of the older man's invitation, but though he remained disappointed in his desire for exotic, fine places, he decided to follow the trail westward toward the older man's settlement.

"It was a small adventure." Ha-Mul might have said, during the long winter months, to his old companion Amuthswahti; "it was a rather curious household I was permitted to visit in their village." The older trader had not knowingly planned to describe his travels and he was not accustomed to speaking his mind at length, so his account was filled with indirection and interruption. He seemed to Amuthswahti almost exasperatingly preoccupied with the material circumstances of his visit, the disorderly cluster of huts and lodges, the food he was served, and so on, while the old ruler was himself eager to hear of the people Ha-Mul had met and especially of the one other traveler from the distant frozen lands and beyond his imagination's reach.

"He was light-skinned and fair-haired," Ha-Mul might have said of this man, had his story over the weeks been pieced together; "he wore furs on his head and feet as well as on his back. He laughed often for no visible cause and quickly became quite drunken on the rice wine we were offered. He was too unsettled for a man of mature years, and his flashing, sparkling eyes in the fires at night were disturbing to me."

Ha-Mul did not recognize at first the significance of one of the fair stranger's anecdotes. He did not at this time discern that in it lay the seeds of his own approaching doom.

Amuthswahti, after several weeks, found his mind often returning to the savages far to the North mentioned by Ha-Mul's fellow traveler in the outpost beyond the salt flats. "Did he say," Amuthswahti asked again, "that they ate human flesh? Was this true, Ha-Mul?" The old trader in fact had to recollect for a moment that evening--his companion had intruded suddenly on his description of the journey across the mountains home again to ask his question--before he remembered telling of this inhuman practice earlier. "They were,” Ha-Mul replied, "a small tribe of uncivilized beasts. But very docile to all appearance, the teller also said."

Amuthswahti often questioned his old friend on this one portion of his narrative, so that eventually Ha-Mul too found the cannibalism of this obscure northern tribe deeply disturbing, feeling inside as he contemplated such an action a peculiar kind of revulsion. At the same time he observed in Amuthswahti what he sensed was a strange sort of excitement. As the long winter drew on, the two old men discussed every possibility that could lead even a primitive people to such horror: the promptings perhaps of a savage religion or even the tribal memory of severe shortages of other meat or an ancient custom of war or perhaps punishment. As he reflected, Ha-Mul decided--though he had not carefully attended at the time--that the stranger had distinctly ruled out the latter two possibilities. Visiting travelers were not threatened by the grotesque ritual, and the wandering tribe had no real enemies, living as they did in the frozen waste lands.

Amuthswahti grew more and more fascinated by the notion of eating human flesh. How could they, he asked himself, how could such a people know someone, a person with speech and with a mind, and yet do that? The village on the Pootsonng was unaccustomed to violence of any sort committed by one man upon another. Perhaps this fact explains why the old ruler soon found that the murder which would precede the ultimate, barbarous action did not disturb or even interest him. The social ritual, he would say to himself, the obscure tribal traditions might make such a thing possible. His own people, on the other hand, had almost no public life.

4

Ha-Mul was known in the village as a skilled surgeon of sorts. From his earliest maturity he had been able to lash broken bones in such a way that they might grow usably back together, or to remove with a sharp blade a festering sliver or cut out a sickening growth. He had all his life followed the lead of Amuthswahti, his old friend, not questioning his superior wisdom and his subtler understanding. By the time the winter days were gradually growing longer that year, it had been decided between the two old friends that Ha-Mul would use his skill in this line to realize an uncharacteristic, insane plan of Amuthswahti's. Killing or harming another was unthinkable to the old ruler. Ha-Mul was engaged, on a day before summer under conditions of the strictest secrecy, to administer the usual sleeping drug to Amuthswahti in the depths of the night and, while he slept, to remove from his left hand his last two fingers and the fleshy outside portion of the palm. After he had been allowed to recover from the operation and from the sleeping draft, Amuthswahti himself, using only his right hand as the other arm would be bound tightly to his chest so that his bizarre orgy would not be alloyed with pain of any sort, roasted over the fire and ate in the darkness of his sleeping chambers the portion of his hand that Ha-Mul had removed.

Later, of course, Amuthswahti could not explain to himself why he had felt so driven to such a perverse and terrible deed. But he knew until he died that he has been so driven, that had he tried he could not have resisted the overwhelming attraction of the idea once it had come to him, and that, far within--even though the very thought now revolted him to the point of actual nausea--he was glad he had gone ahead.

But alas for poor Ha-Mul!

5

When the old trader disappeared after the days had become long and warm, no one was disturbed. Amuthswahti was at first pleased, in fact, to have some time alone with his thoughts, examining his feelings as he gazed at his slowly healing, misshapen hand. But soon the other men of the village observed Amuthswahti's growing uneasiness. Questioned again about Ha-Mul's departure, the trader's elder wife and his nephews reported that again he had traveled to the North, as though this was now already an accepted matter of routine. Scarcely a month passed before Amuthswahti, in what seemed to the others an almost feverish anxiety, sent a party of ten men after his old friend, led by his eldest son. On the third day out, the party found Ha-Mul's body outside one of the caves north of the salt flats.

The earth beneath him was stained dark and under his right arm was a bundle of sticks for the fire. Under his left arm, which was missing below the elbow, was a broken staff he had used for a crutch. His left leg was severed from the knee and had bled copiously. At the entrance to the cave was what was left of his fire, and in the cold ashes lay the remains of two charred bones.

***