Two days later, I had occasion to go to the county seat on newspaper business. I had it in mind to go to the bookstore there and look for Jace Gantry’s book. I went down to the light rail station early in the morning and stood waiting for the train. I noticed Chloe Tuttle standing on the other side of the tracks with her little picnic basket on her arm. The train came and she got on at the other end of the car. I watched her, as she seemed to be unhappy with her seating arrangements. She sat down near a woman and looked at her expectantly for a little while, but made no conversation. Then after a bit, she got up and sat near someone else. I noticed that under her winter coat, which she had unbuttoned because it was warm in the car, she was wearing a pink sweater. She kept putting her hand in the pocket of that sweater like she was checking for something. Pretty soon, she moved again and sat down across from a derelict looking man and looked straight at him. She always was an odd little thing, but today she was really behaving strangely. I could never have imagined our timid Chloe trying to make eye contact with strangers on the train. Who knew what was going on in her mind? Certainly not me.
When the train arrived, she scurried off in the opposite direction that I was going. She was no spring chicken, but that woman was making tracks, looking for all the world, like she was supposed to meet someone, and was late. Now who in the city could possibly be meeting Chloe Tuttle? I shook my head and went about my business.
A few hours later, I finally made it to the bookstore and asked the clerk for some help with my book search. He took me to the autobiographies, and there on the shelf, were three copies of “The Catalpa Tree Spoke” by Jace Gantry.
It had the same cover as the photocopy at the cemetery. I opened the book and in the first pages I read: “To my father. For pointing the way, even though I didn’t take it.”
“My God.” Was all I could say.
I bought the book and tucked it in my briefcase and headed for the train station. I didn’t want to start reading it on the train, so I got out a magazine and read that instead.
The sun was going down by the time I arrived in Bogwillow.
The west had turned a delicate shade of peach with a pale blue background and high cold wisps of clouds smeared across the horizon. The winter trees stood in stark contrast in stoic silence trying to remember the evening summer breezes.
My wife was gone for the week, visiting her sister in Alderpoint Bay. I made my way home, hoping there was still some roast beef left in the refrigerator to make a sandwich with.
I got home and built a fire in the fireplace, made a pot of coffee and a sandwich from the hoped for beef and settled in my favorite chair to read the book.
It was a collection of vignettes, taken from Jace’s travels across the country. Poignant encounters with old men, street people, and others who had picked him up hitchhiking. It was very well written. Poetic and insightful. But I knew that Porter would not have appreciated his son’s style, nor would he have understood the multi-layered meanings. I began to feel that it was just as well that his father had never had a chance to read this book, as it might have driven a wedge that would have divided them even more, if that was possible.
Then I came to my favorite story. It was a dream sequence. And it went like this:
“ I found myself walking in a twilight world, at once strange and oddly familiar. It was late afternoon in winter. What little warmth the sun had brought during the day was rapidly dissipating in the lengthening shadows. One began to think of hot soup and a warm bath waiting at home. But where was home? I walked tentatively down the street not exactly sure which way I should go, searching for some familiar landmark to reassure me. I finally came upon such a sign.
Near the sidewalk there grew a Catalpa tree. I had walked by it a thousand times in my hometown growing up. It was the exact size and shape that I remembered and with a sigh of relief, I knew I was on Main Street. But something was amiss with that Catalpa and I gave it a second look.
For one thing, it was fully leafed out, impossible in winter, and for another it was in bloom. But such blooms as had never been seen on any Catalpa I knew about. The tree was loaded with beach ball sized whitish membranes. I had to go see what this was all about and reached up both hands and pulled one off the tree. The membrane was very thin and yielded to my hands as I spread it apart. And out onto the ground spilled hundreds of pale pink blossoms with dark fuchsia centers. I was delighted by this and laughed out loud. I felt I should check once again to make sure I had the right tree, and sure enough, the Catalpa stood as plain as day trying to look ordinary, when in fact it was nothing of the sort.
I began to feel that perhaps the nightmares of my youth could be dispelled if my home town had become such an magical place. I walked further, hoping to see some familiar homes and became disoriented yet again, as the expected houses had been either torn down and replaced with new or radically remodeled so as to be unrecognizable. The trees in the yards were still the same, and the lilacs and snowball bushes stood without leaves, but in their familiar places.
Even the old fashioned rambling rose clung to the fence, where I had picked many a simple pink blossom for my mother. It was covered now with frostbitten rosehips and moldy withered leaves. But the house that should have gone with it was distorted and shrunken, covered with a new coat of garish turquoise paint. Mrs. Cooke never would have put up with such an outlandish color. Never.
Then I came to the place where the Leonard Lawson apartment house used to stand. It had been a grand old house from a hundred years ago that had been split up into apartments after Mr. Lawson’s death. There used to be two giant oaks in the front yard. It had even been elegant in its old age and reduced circumstances, still a house to be gazed upon with pride.
But the sight that met my eyes in the growing gloom of that winter night made my heart stand still. Someone had torn down the house, cut down the trees and replaced them with an equipment rental store with blue aluminum siding and cheap tin roofing. It was lit with two huge glaring floodlights that seemed to suck the life out of all they illuminated. The snow blowers, roto-tillers and riding lawn mowers behind the chain link fence outside looked an odd, washed out maroon instead of their true vibrant reds. Equipment ghosts, hunkering in the contrasting shadows of the buzzing lights. Worst of all, the sidewalk had been torn out, and the Vinca vines that used to grow there were gone. In their place asphalt and serpentine gravel, ugly and sharp spread out welcoming only cars or pickup trucks and turning a cold shoulder to pedestrians.
From somewhere, I could only imagine it was from the place where the oak trees used to stand, there came a sound. A thin high wail of pain. How could this happen? How could they tear down that wonderful old house, where people used to live and sit on the front porch and listen to the acorns drop and roll off the roof? And if it had to be torn down, why oh why did it have to be replaced by this monstrosity? Why oh why do we build such ugly, ungracious, uninviting, horrible buildings that shun people on foot, leave them no place to walk gracefully by in safety? Is the whole world to turn into asphalt and gravel and glaring blue buzzing lights? Or places where the only purpose is to take our money for inferior goods, with storekeepers whose politeness only lasts as long as one business transaction. After which, you suddenly become a stranger again. Because of this we wander as exiles wherever we go.
Where was the town I used to know? Even if it’s narrowness, and the fact that it seemed to be inhabited by a bunch of eccentric xenophobes had driven me out like a leper, (or so I thought). This town, and these people at least could appreciate the beauty of older simpler things. They were willing to put up with a little inconvenience in exchange for constancy, and respect for the work of hands that had lived before their own. And who remembered you were one of them, even when you behaved like an idiot. You at least were their idiot. Their familiar fool, that allowances were to be made for until you came to your senses.
The wail from the ground grew to a cry, and the cry to a scream and the scream was coming from my own mouth. I suddenly found myself awake and panting in the tumult of my bedclothes with tears in my eyes.
I must go home. Before it’s too late, was my only thought.”
* * * *
The book lay in my lap. My coffee had gone cold, and the bread on half my sandwich was already growing stale and hard. The fire was reduced to clear red coals crumbling into a shapeless mass. Tears were in my eyes too. Such a sensitive soul this boy was. No, he was a man now wasn’t he? Was it too late? It certainly was for his parents. But not for Jace. And not for Bogwillow.
I considered doing an editorial on the book, but thought better of it. I wasn’t sure if the town was ready to hear about the revelations of a prodigal son. And who knew? Maybe he was on his way back right now. Maybe when he had left the note, he was sizing up the town with new eyes. Maybe I would get to meet him one day, and shake his hand. Maybe he would raise children here and show them the Catalpa tree that still stood on Main Street, right next to the Leonard Lawson apartment house.
I made up my mind right then, that the first thing in the morning, I was going to go down there and take a picture of that wonderful old place. That would be the best time of day. The house faces the east, and it will look good with the morning sun shining on it. And right after that, I would walk the streets and take a look at Bogwillow through the eyes of its true, if late blooming friend, Jace Gantry.