E. Doctorow - Loon Lake

I have a comment here: I note the boy Warren Penfield’s relentless faculty of composition. Rather than apprehend reality he transforms it so that in this case, for example, in the eviction of the striking miners from the Colorado Fuel Company’s houses, the pitiful pile of his family’s belongings on the wagon bed is represented as a vision of high civilization. No wonder his father is angered by his constant daydreaming. Jack Penfield perceives it as mental incompetence. How he wonders will his son survive the harshness of this life when he the father and she the mother are no longer there to protect him? As to book learning, Warren can do that passably well, but as to plain good sense the character of his mind is not reassuring.

Neda Penfield takes a different view but not without some irritation that the boy doesn’t give her more support for it. Her view is that he is a rare soul, a finer being either than herself or her husband. By some benign celestial error he was born to them and to their life of slag who would more properly have been the child of a wealthy family going to the finest schools and with every material and intellectual advantage. He gives her qualms of course but she nourishes a private and barely articulated conviction that he is not deficient only latent, that his strength is there but still wrapped up in itself still to unfold in its fullness when the time is ripe. When will the time be ripe? His hands and feet are large and clumsy, he looms next to her sometimes like a giant he is at that stage of life when the largeness of him seems to wax and wane according to his own rhythms of confidence. She is aware as mothers are of the changes in him the manhood beginning to shine and she is comforted. But the wisdom of him has still to appear. Sometimes the light will hit his amber eye and she will feel ill at ease, as if she is living with two men rather than a man and a boy. Perhaps Jack Penfield feels this too and anticipates the revolt of his son, the loosening of his power over him, the freeing of his son from himself till he has nothing but himself and then inevitably he will be subjected to his son’s power over him. Yet he is secretly proud too and likes the boy’s good looks. Warren is gentle and distracted as ever only his ears and elbows and wrists and ankles show the power of him still to come.

Neda Penfield would like Warren to win some sort of scholarship and go away to the city to study. She wants this desperately even though she knows her life with her husband then would be hell. Jack Penfield wants Warren in the mines. He wants him in the mines to establish such rage that he will finally be in contact with the circumstances of his life, he will wake up to it. And then see what happens, then see what glorious flights of power and genius the boy has in him perhaps to become an organizer a great union orator a radical a leader of men out of their living graves of coal. Let the boy work in a crouch for ten hours hacking coal in the chilling blackness of the earth, crouching with his feet in brackish water, not knowing which bite of the pick will bring the roof down on him. Let him work for his three tons a day and bring them up to be short-weighted by the company. Then my son will justify me and sanctify my name and fulfill the genius of my line.

The wagon loaded, Warren gives a hand up to his father and after a moment the two of them teetering on the gate, he nimbly leaps down and suffers the inspection of his work. The father pushes this adjusts that but says nothing, which is the highest approval. Together they tie everything in a web of stout rope, Warren running around from one side of the wagon to the other hauling tight looping knotting and he thinks of a wonderful bridge with granite towers and steel suspension cables what bridge is that.

And then his mother comes out of the house her hands empty but for a summer straw hat, a wide-brimmed straw with a round crown, and not seeing any place to put it she places it on her head. It is such a gallant gesture, so incongruous with the rain and the state of their fortunes that the two men look at her startled and she pulls her shoulders back and defies them with her glance, her face peculiarly shadowed by the brim as if the sun was oddly proven, but they wouldn’t laugh because both have perceived in one shimmering instant before the fact of her wearing that hat is established, the still alive girl and the undefeated kingdom of their family.

She took her place on the bench and looked straight ahead over the mule’s rump. Jack Penfield went into the house and came out with the last thing, his new bolt-action Savage whose stock was oiled smooth and whose barrel was blue steel, and he placed this across his lap as he sat up behind the mule and took the reins.

And so with a lurch of the wheels they turned into the traffic of wagons winding down through the canyons. In front of the Colorado Supply Company two sheriff’s deputies stood on the porch to watch the procession. They had Winchesters cradled in their arms. Some of the families passing them made loud remarks. Some of them sang their union song. Most of them looked straight ahead and went on down the street into the descent of the prairie, too cold or too realistic to bother with the trappings of the spirit.

The rain was changing its nature, getting heavy turning hard, and Warren sitting cross-legged on top of a bureau felt the sting of ice, like steel pellets. He held out his hand and received a particle of hail. He put up his denim collar. He was facing forward but for some reason swiveled on his rump and looked back at the street just as the wagon behind picked up the pace to fill in the slack in the parade and it was she in her dress of tulips faded sitting up on her wagon on a stool like a princess borne in her palanquin, her body moving forward and back, her head moving in the lag of her body’s rhythm and he smiled and raised his hand and she smiled and raised hers, and they stared at each other their bodies gently bending and straightening in the rhythm of the mules’ pace, the wheels creaking in the mud the traces rattling like ancient music of fanfares and the two of them staring at each other like royal lovers in a procession toward their investiture under the hardening rain through the canyon of slag going down to the plains.

Thinking about that girl standing in front of the mirror and holding up the white dress on the train gliding past me out of sight, I came along the track before I even knew it into the main street of a mountain village.

It was noon on the church tower. A pretty lakeside village with a general store a gas pump a white hotel with rocking chairs on the porch, a bait-and-tackle shop. I wanted to keep going but there was a cop on the corner. Casually I crossed the street and went into a diner and ordered the baked ham and brown beans in a crock and coffee. When I finished I ordered the same thing again. The waitress smiled and the chef himself looked out through the porthole of the kitchen door to see this prize customer.

I got out of that village without trouble resuming my walk just beyond the station crossing, following the rails that forked off into a narrower cut of trees. The track went through some woods circled around a small mountain lake and then it started up a grade a long slow winding grade, I was not already in love with her but in her field of force, what I thought I felt like was some stray dog following the first human being it happened to see.

In the late afternoon I came to a miniature station house of creosoted brown logs complete with ticket window and potbellied stove. It was empty. Out the back door was the sidetracked private railroad car.

I climbed aboard. Each room had a narrow door with brass handle opening onto the corridor going down one side along the windows.