Table of Contents
More Fiction from David Rhodes
ALSO BY DAVID RHODES
Driftless Rock Island Line The Easter House
For Nellie
Chapter I
I
WAS BORN IN IOWA — ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY MILES WEST of the Mississippi River, and by looking at a map the middle of the country. My brother John Charles, whom I never knew, was hanged that night somewhere in Missouri and my sister, Nellie, not blind then, named me Reuben; and I was the seventh child born to Luke Sledge. I am Reuben. My mother, Andrea, died three days later from what I have come to believe was an internal hemorrhage. This is my book, written as a chronicle of myself hidden within the grayness of a story of the people and the City itself.
This book will allow you to see me through my own eyes. To reach where I am now you must read it. I must write it in order to go on. That is to say I must write it in order to survive. I will assemble those things that have happened to me, to us, leaving nothing out — nothing important. I will set it down, set it free and have done with it.
This country, Iowa. I can tell you about it. It is so much of me that sometimes I am confused: sometimes I believe it is more important — that it is the land and the city, Des Moines, that speak through me, using me the way I imagine I am using them. The earth itself is wet black and you can shove a spade down into it up to the handle without hitting a rock. A tin can will grow here. The fields and lots are filled with cattle, hogs, chickens, turkeys, sheep, ducks, and horses. Pheasants, raccoons, grasshoppers, mink, and crickets run teeming through the cornfields. They cannot eat it all. Trees continue coming back after they have been cut down — starting as weeds, thousands of them, so many that the animals and the farmers cannot wipe them away — some clutch hold of the ground with their iron fingers and explode upwards. The farmers come out then with axes and chainsaws, chop them up, burn them or build more houses with them, and wait and watch for it to begin again. Then the trees, pushed to the side, rise up along the fence rows, inching back out into the fields with their huge root-tendons. The farmer, jamming with his plow into these, curses and drives on.
The farmer, I know about him. I have no memory so long that he is not in it. I have always known him — his demonic love of Iowa. I have watched the sky cloud with rainbows of dust from his incessant machines. He is so filled with the earth that he is not capable of inactivity. Plowing, disking, cultivating, harvesting, picking, planting, harrowing, building fences, cutting trees, moving boulders, digging ponds, damming creeks, selling, buying, digging up weeds, spraying, trapping raccoons, resenting that he must sleep, ashamed that he does, procreating in order that his sons can help work the fields and daughters can seal the fruit in jars with melted paraffin and tend the gardens — miniature farms. Like a madman he weathers through the terrible winters, pacing through his house that he never pictures himself living in, looking out at the snow. Sometimes he will walk through the cold and out into one of his many sheds, where he stands looking at his frozen tractors. Like a war.
But now the end is in sight. Just over there the war will end and the farmer will win; all that will be left will be the doing, not the action, the motion, not the movement. The ground will give up. The farmer’s children will be sick, will look at the old barn and the grain bins, at the scythes and rusting buggy wheels, the electric dishwasher and the cider press. They will look and look till their eyes turn inward. They will be sick and the City will send out and lead them in. But that is not now.
Luke Sledge was not a farmer. He had never been one. He was old before he even came into Iowa — old in the kind of way that made farming impossible. Carrying his age around him like a yoke, he had driven into Iowa in a wagon with a horse possibly as old as himself, a Black and Tan, one hundred fifteen dollars in silver, and my mother. He had come from Wisconsin, near the Mississippi. He told me this.
Of his family I know practically nothing, only small, unrelated incidents that he has told me and I have remembered . . . dates that I have tried to fit together. All of my attempts to locate the members of his family have been futile. They have either died or the steamboats carried them away to the East. The name, Sledge, is unknown to the people where they supposedly were to have lived at least until the time of Father’s departure, and the only mention I have found of this name is in an autobiographical novel written between 1921 and 1924 by Henry Jimson, called And God Was There, the story of his youth, marriage, and declining years in Wisconsin. In chapter nine, entitled “Hard Luck,” and covering that period of his life between the years eighteen and twenty-two (which I have placed somewhere between 1891 and 1895), he writes: “. . . seeking the solemnity and peace of the forest, and wanting a chance to think out these troubling questions, I went for a walk into the woods. During this walk I met a Mr. Sledge, who had burst upon me from the heavy foliage, followed by a large work animal, a Percheron, I believe. This man told me that he and his family lived fifteen miles away in a cabin he had fashioned with his own hands. I could see from his ruddy complexion and attire that he was indeed a man of the forest, his ancestry probably going back to the very founders of the country. But there was also something . . .” (page 217). This last word or words had been ripped out, as had the rest of the page, by some fumbling file boy in the Library of Congress and I was unable even through the author’s relatives to locate another copy of the book. That was Grandfather.
For two years (Father never told me this, but from my study of his 1916 diary written several years later — the way his words tended to form small, definite patterns of despair, a kind of thinking solipsism, the way his paragraphs are sprung always from the omnipresent “I,” and by carefully ordering the dates and memories he has told me — I know) he was held prisoner by his brothers in a cabin hidden in the woods. He remained there until he agreed to leave Wisconsin. As compensation (or settlement) he was given one hundred fifteen dollars in silver, a wagon, a Clydesdale named Amos, and a Black and Tan.
That cabin was of dried mud and split logs, perhaps rails, with a cement floor. Every