“The barker thought of the few coins in his pocket. He coughed. ‘It’ll cost you money,’ he said. ‘Of course you can get some of it back, though, here and there. People will pay.’
“Ansel did not press to insist that this was immoral. ‘How much?’
“‘Three hundred.’
“‘Too much.’
“‘For a human being!’ said the barker indignantly. ‘Too much for a human being! How can a man be not worth three hundred dollars? That’s not much money for a human life.
“This line of reasoning presented your grandfather with some problems. He left, and when he returned, groups of two and three people were slowly coming into a much larger group in the dust outside the sideshow. This gathering at first was timid, brought together by accidental interest. But some of the men who’d gone into the show began talking, and then the group decided that something would be done. Though unsure of what that would mean, they were generally becoming hostile. One woman suggested that a fire be set to the canvas, for fun, and as the momentum of the idea was being drawn into actuality your grandfather stepped out into the dust, the creature stepping so carefully beside him, the chain gone. The barker, watching them from inside, counted three hundred dollars out in ones and fives and silver—collection-plate money. The crowd moved back and was quiet. They made a passageway and your grandfather walked between them with Ernie glowering up at their faces from his some four feet, thick, dark marks on his neck. Some of the people followed them nearly home, watching at a distance. Before the two stepped up onto the front doorstep of the house on Everett Street, where they lived before moving here, he’d been named, and Ansel introduced him to C and Sam and your grandmother as Ernie. And he lived with them.
“Actually, he didn’t live with all of them, because your grandmother left shortly after that, never to return. Can you imagine a man with principles like that?”
Glove sat and listened, becoming very interested.
“So then there was this man (this was a little later) Johnie Fotsom, who I think lived—It doesn’t matter. He started writing these novels about your grandfather, true stories, and sold some copies, and it came out in a cheaper edition and sold some more. The Holy Man, Man of Faith, The Broken Lantern. Critics hated them. All men of learning—any learning—deplored them. Young people hated them. Atheists found them ‘cheap sensationalism’ and ‘hocus-pocus sentimentality.’ But still they sold. There was one scene in Man of Faith where Ansel was pictured walking toward town during the Depression with seventeen cents in his pocket and a starving family at home when a freshly, cleanly killed rabbit falls out of the sky at his feet. He looked up, expecting a large hawk or eagle, and saw nothing. There are several then about how close to God he was and how God would purify the impure people around him—one account of how Dr. McQueen lost a hand to an exposed window fan that he had forgot about being behind him as he reached for a piece of billiard chalk on the ledge. One where a man’s wife hangs herself. And so almost overnight Ansel received a fairly immense sum of money from Johnie Fotsom for the use of his name and his life. Ansel took the money and everyone in his church thought he shouldn’t have, because a lot of money . . . for nothing! No honest work. Of course everyone knows writers are a seedy lot, but to accept money from one, especially a not very good one, and be glorified in the public eye . . . Whatever, there was a surge of resentment against your grandfather (spearheaded by Rabbit Wood’s father) and some talk of ousting him from the ministry of the First Friends Church. Many in the congregation were afraid of him, because they couldn’t understand saintliness, and most felt that Ernie was an affront to the community.
“But before a real confrontation could arise, a half-dozen carpenters imported from Cedar Rapids—strong, hard-eyed men that never talked while they were together—began working on this house; and even before the foundation was set, it was obvious to everyone that it was going to be a building of giant size, much bigger than many of the rural people had ever seen, and bigger than any Christian man could ever use. The town people, at noon, stood back and watched as our front porch went up, as the studs for the walls climbed up three stories.”
“Wait a minute,” said Glove, showing signs that his mother recognized, signs of becoming very upset, his hands twitching nervously. “So someone begins to build a house, on his own land—his own place! What business is it of anyone else? What can it possibly matter to them? Why can’t people just mind their own lives?”
“I don’t know,” said Cell, sitting up straighter in the chair. “C could tell you. He’s been to college, and that’s what’s the main thing of education—showing you what’s your business and what’s somebody else’s.”
“Still,” said Glove. “It was none of their business.” The green light shaded his hand.
“Maybe I didn’t explain well enough. There were whole families destroyed, little children had terrible, uncommon accidents, disease would break out among healthy people. And all this they thought might be Ansel’s doing. They were afraid. And so, with things like that, everyone was going to be absolutely sure that something was not their business before they ignored it for even a little while. Maybe I didn’t explain that there was more, that Ansel worked his sons into the ground, making them cut wood with him. There were stories of how much corn he could pick by hand, ungodly amounts.”
Glove then remembered the only other thing he knew, at that time, about Ansel Easter . . . he remembered someone saying that his grandfather had taken all the broken, cracked, and rusted parts from his automobile as they’d worn out, the mufflers, clamps, old tires, hoses, brake shoes, carburetor gaskets, etc., and put them in the trunk, like a chain the car must wear for its sins. They said he didn’t beat his children for their transgressions but inflicted nightmarish lectures upon them that would live like weights in their memories.
AND THE STORY OF C
And so it may be imagined that C Easter, on the supposedly unmysterious death of his father, after the expenses of the burial and the more than adequate fee charged by attorneys for extricating the actual man Ansel Easter from his partnership with Johnie Fotsom while retaining his name for possible printed material in the future, had little more than enough money to rent a small basement apartment in Iowa City, enroll in the University with the intention of going on to law school, eat moderately, live as though each moment was a new one and might fool him into remembering those things he wanted to forget, and be secure that this way of life might last five and three quarters years until the money ran out. And C intended to do that—run his money out. He was just under twenty, shy, reticent, and fearful of things he couldn’t see or identify. He believed the world was hostile—that if in any way it could direct misfortune and calamity toward him, it would. His own mental image of himself was one of victim. Nightmares filled his sleeping. He did the things he had to do by living in a sense of routine: this thing now, that thing at five thirty. If he could go through a whole day without emotion, it was a success. Everything he did had a plan. Going to the University amounted to giving himself time, five and three quarters years, in which to discover a friendly attitude toward living. If at the end of that time there was no change—still the same gnawing hope that it might improve—then he would let the trickling out of his money be the end to everything, and have no more moments that might ever again fool him.
With an enforced serenity and one thin carpetbag, C said goodbye to Sam and went away to school, not so that he might learn, but to nullify all the rest. Apartment hunting nearly finished him, and though he finally succeeded in finding one, it was a meager success. The rhetorical lectures at the University were a comfort to him. He studied late into the night in his basement, a gaudily furnished, L-shaped, concrete room with pole lamps, a space heater, pictures of musical instruments, and everything that a non-student might imagine a student wanting in his place. The only change he made in this arrangement (after obtaining with difficulty an approval from his upstairs landlady) was to streak black and white brush-width stripes along the walls and across the ceiling, converging on