Round and rectangular and octagonal advertisements spoke from the edges of. the farmland. One weathered barn’s whole side said pony cut plug. The fields where in summer Amish families in bonnets and black hats harvested tomatoes and where fat men on narrow-nosed scarlet tractors swayed through acres of barley seemed, shorn of crops, painfully exposed; they begged the sky to blanket them with snow. At a curve a two-pump gasoline shack wrapped in tattered soft-drink posters limped into our path and fell away wheeling, reappearing in the rear-view mirror ludicrously shrunk, its splotched flying horse sign illegible and dwindling. A dip in the highway made the door of the glove compartment tingle. We passed through Firetown. The village proper was four sandstone houses; here the old squirearchy of Fire Town ship had lived. One of these houses for fifty years had been the Ten Mile Inn, and there was still a hitching rail by the porch. The windows were boarded. Beyond this kernel, the village thinned into more recent developments: a cinder-block store where they sold beer by the case; two new houses with high foundations and no front steps, though families lived in both; a rambling hunting hut well back from the road, where on weekends parties of many men and sometimes a few women came and made the lights burn; some pre-war com position-shingled houses, built tall as if in a city and filled, my grandfather maintained, with illegitimate children dying of malnutrition. We passed an orange school bus waddling in the opposite direction, toward the township school. I lived now in this school’s district, but my father’s teaching at Olinger High saved me from going there. I was frightened of the children in the land around us. My mother had made me join the 4-H Club. My fellow members had slanting oval eyes and smooth dun skins. The dull innocence of some and the viciously detailed knowingness of others struck me as equally savage and remote from my highly civilized aspirations. We met in the church basement, and after an hour of slides illuminating cattle diseases and corn pests, I would sweat with claustrophobia, and swim into the cold air and plunge at home into my book of Vermeer reproductions like a close-to-drowned man clinging to the beach.
The cemetery appeared on our right; tablet-shaped tomb stones rode at various tilts the settling tummocks. Then the stout sandstone steeple of the Firetown Lutheran Church leaped higher than the trees and dipped its new cross an instant into the sun. My grandfather had helped build that steeple; he had pushed the great stones in a wheelbarrow up a narrow path of bending planks. He had often described to us, with exquisite indications of his fingers, how those planks had bent beneath his weight.
My father and I began going down Fire Hill, the longer, and less steep, of the two hills on the road to Olinger and Alton. About halfway down, the embankment foliage fell away, and a wonderful view opened up. I saw across a little valley like the background of a Durer. Lording it over a few acres of knolls and undulations draped with gray fences and dotted with rocks like brown sheep, there was a small house that seemed to have grown from the land. This little house presented to the view from the highway a broad bottle-shaped chimney built up one wall from field stones and newly whitewashed. And out of this broad chimney, very white, its rough bulk linking the flat wall to the curving land, the thinnest trace of smoke declared that someone lived here. I supposed that all this country looked this way when my grandfather helped raise the steeple.
My father pushed the choke all the way in. The needle of the temperature gauge seemed stuck in its bed on the left side of the dial; the heater refused to declare itself. His hands as they controlled the car moved with a pained quickness across the metal and hard rubber. “Where are your gloves?” I asked him.
“In the back, aren’t they?”
I turned and looked; on the back seat the leather gloves I had bought him for Christmas lay curled palms up between a rumpled road map and a snarl of baling rope. I had paid nearly nine dollars for them. The money came from a little “art school” account I had started that summer with money earned from my 4-H project, a patch of strawberries. I had spent so much for these gloves I only bought my mother a book and my grandfather a handkerchief; I so wanted my father to care about his clothes and his comfort, like the fathers of my friends. And the gloves had fit. He wore them the first day, and then they rested in the front seat, and then when one day three people crowded into the front seat, they were tossed into the back. “Why don’t you ever wear them?” I asked him. My voice with him was almost always accusing.
“They’re too good,” he said. “They’re wonderful gloves, Peter. I know good leather. You must have paid a fortune for ‘em.”
“Not that much, but aren’t your hands cold?”
“Yeah. Boy, this is a bitter day. We’re in Old Man Winter’s belly.”
“Well don’t you want to put the gloves on?”
Roadside scruff in a scratchy stream poured past my father’s profile. He emerged from thought to tell me, “When I was a kid, if anybody had given me gloves like that, I would have cried real tears.”
These words hurt my stomach, weighted as they were by what I had overheard while awaking. I had gathered only that there was something in him, and this thing, which I thought might be the same thing that made him resist wearing my gloves, I hoped I could elicit; though I did suspect that he was too old and too big for me to purge or change completely, even for my mother’s sake. I leaned closer and studied the edges of white flesh where his fists gripped the steering-wheel. The wrinkles in his skin seemed fissures; the hairs, bits of captured black grass. The backs of his hands were dappled with dull brown warts. “Doesn’t the steering wheel feel like ice?” I asked. My voice sounded like my mother’s, when she had said, “You can’t feel such things.”
“To tell the truth, Peter, my tooth hurts so much I don’t notice it.”
I was surprised and relieved: a toothache was new; per haps this mere thing was what was in him. I asked, “Where?”
“In the back.” He sucked; his cheek, cut in shaving this morning, wrinkled. The blood of his cut seemed very dark.
“You ought to have it looked at. That’s simple.”
“I don’t know which one it is. All of ‘em probably. I ought to have.every tooth in my head yanked. Slap a plate in there. Go to one of these butchers in Alton that pulls ‘em out and puts ‘em in the same day. They push ‘em right into your bloody gums.”
“Is that really what they do?”
“Sure. They’re sadists, Peter. Mongoloid sadists.”
“I can’t believe it,” I said.
The heater, thawed by our run down the hill, came on; brown air baked by rusty pipes breathed onto my ankles. Each morning, this event had the tone of a rescue. Now that a margin of comfort had been promised, I turned on the radio. The little dial, thermometer-shaped, glowed wan orange. When the tubes warmed, cracked and jagged nighttime voices sang in the bright blue morning. My scalp tingled and tightened; the voices, negroid and hillbilly, seemed to pick their way along the tune over obstacles that made their voices skip, lift, and stagger; and this jagged terrain seemed my country. It was the U.S.A. the songs conveyed: mountains of pine, oceans of cotton, tan western immensities haunted by disembodied voices cracked by love invaded the Buick’s stale space. A commercial delivered with an unctuous irony spoke soothingly of the cities, where I hoped my life would take me, and then a song came like a choo-choo, clicking, irresistible, carrying the singer like a hobo on top of its momentum, and my father and I seemed ourselves irresistible, rolling up and down through the irregularities of our suffering land, warm in the midst of much cold. In those days the radio carried me into my future, where I was strong: my closets were full of beautiful clothes and my skin as smooth as milk as I painted, to the tune of great wealth and fame, pictures heavenly and cool, like those of Vermeer. That Vermeer himself had been obscure and poor I knew. But I reasoned that he had lived in backward times. That my own times were not backward I knew from reading magazines. True, in all of Alton County only my mother and I seemed to know about Vermeer; but in the great cities there must be thousands who knew, all of them rich. Vases and burnished furniture stood upright around me. On a stiff tablecloth a loaf of sugary bread lay sequined with pointillist dabs of light. Beyond the parapet of my balcony a high city of constant sun named New York glimmered in its million windows. My white walls accepted a soft breeze scented with chalk and whole cloves. In the doorway a woman stood, shadow-mirrored by the polished tiles, and watched me; her lower lip was slightly heavy and slack, like the lower lip of the girl in the blue turban in The Hague. Among these images which the radio songs rapidly brushed in for me the one blank space was the canvas I was so beautifully, debonairly, and preciously covering. I could not visualize my work; but its featureless radiance made the center of everything as I carried my father in the tail of a comet through the expectant space of our singing nation.