Beyond the Black Stump Read online

  At the time when he returned from Arabia he would drink no alcohol at all nor had he done so since his High School accident; his renunciation of it had been absolute. He smoked very little, perhaps one pack of cigarettes a month, fearing perhaps that the tobacco habit, too, could get hold of a man and lead him into gross excesses of the flesh. In compensation he still ate a good many candies at the age of twenty-eight; a can of wrapped peppermints was generally to be found in one of the drawers of his desk, and he had a weakness for milk shakes and ice cream in its various forms. He was an active and healthy man, the more so for his abstinence, physically well developed though sallow in appearance.

  In the club bar he raised the question of his next employment with his boss. “Will you want me to go back to Arabia after this vacation?” he enquired. “I’d like to know ahead if it’s to be back there.”

  Mr. Johnson shook his head. “Not Arabia. Have you got any preference?”

  “I could do with a domestic assignment for a time,” Stanton suggested. “I’ve been out of the United States now for three years.”

  “Are you getting married?”

  The geologist shook his head reluctantly; he had expected that. Domestic assignments for geological work within the United States or Canada were usually reserved for men with families. “Not that I know of,” he said.

  “We usually try to work married men into the domestic assignments,” Mr. Johnson said. “It’s fairer on the kids.”

  “I know it.”

  “Have you got any other preference?”

  “I’d just as soon it was a white country,” said Stanton. “I’ve seen enough of sand and Arabs to last me for a while.”

  Mr. Johnson finished his drink, offered Stanton another orange juice, and when that was refused led the way into the dining-room. He ordered Crab Louis with a large cup of white coffee for them both, and when that was on the table he said, “What would you think of Paraguay?”

  “That’s the new concession?”

  “Surely. We’ll need geologists in the field there.”

  Stanton ate in silence for a minute. “I’ll have to admit I don’t know much about Paraguay,” he said at last. “Not desert, is it?”

  His boss shook his head. “I was never there myself, but I was in East Bolivia one time, and that’s just about the same. It’s forest country, jungle you might say. Communications aren’t so hot, apart from airstrips. Most of the heavy material goes up and down the rivers.”

  “What’s the capital of Paraguay?”

  “Asuncion.”

  “Is the concession near there?”

  “Well,” said Mr. Johnson, “it’s quite an area of country, of course. I’d say the nearest point would be about two hundred miles from Asuncion. It’s in the Chaco Boreal, around Fort Diaz.”

  “The people would be Spanish—like in Argentina?”

  “I guess so. The executives and the technicians would be Spanish Americans. Do you know any Spanish?”

  “Only a few words.”

  “I’d say you’d have to learn some. It’s an easy language to get along in—not so easy to speak well. I don’t know that you’d find a lot of Spanish society out in the field. The labour would be mostly Indian.”

  “Be a change from Arabia, anyway,” said Stanton.

  They said no more about the future work, but sat for a time in the club lounge after the meal talking of other aspects of the Topex organisation. In the end Mr. Johnson said, “You’re going out West tomorrow, I suppose?”

  “Unless you want me here.”

  The older man shook his head. “I’ll talk to P.K. about the new assignment for you, but he’s in Canada right now, and after that he’s going off on his vacation. I’ll have to write you, maybe in two weeks from now.” He pulled out his pocket diary. “Let’s see, you’ve got ten weeks’ vacation coming to you—that takes us to September twentieth. I’ll see you again then.”

  They walked back together to the office, where Stanton spent half an hour in the Treasurer’s office putting in expense accounts and drawing money; from the office he telephoned his friend about a bed in his apartment, telephoned an airline office for a reservation to the West next day, and sent a telegram to his parents in Hazel. Then he walked out into the streets of downtown New York and took a bus up Broadway, savouring the city.

  He loved his country very dearly, without realising it. He was a technician, and nothing technical was worth much to him that did not come from the United States. Overseas he had wondered at the little cramped style of the foreign motor cars; now that he was back in his own country the glorious, spacious vehicles of his own land were an acute pleasure to him; the cars that he had seen in his travels overseas could not compare with the new Oldsmobiles or Cadillacs. The origins of the techniques that pleased him so did not affect his thinking; that Otto was a German and Whittle an Englishman did not seem relevant when he considered the superiority of American motor cars and American jet aircraft. Nothing was very real to him that did not happen in the United States.

  His personal experience of the world outside America had been limited to Cairo, the Arabian desert, two days in Rome while waiting for air connections, and twenty-four hours in Lisbon. He had been impressed by the motor scooters in Rome, but they were the only things that he had seen in all his travels that had made him feel his own country behindhand. He was sensible enough to realise that there was more to the world than that, that London and Paris might have things to show him that he would admire, but the United States was his home, the place with the highest standard of living in the world, the place with the most glorious technical achievements, the place where he loved to be.

  In the late afternoon he found his way into Abercrombie and Fitch and spent a delightful hour looking over the new styles in fishing rods with reels incorporated with the handle, the new styles in outboard motors and fibreglass boats, in camping gear and sleeping bags. A stainless steel barbecue set with fork, spoon, and skewer three feet long, with steel hand shields gleaming and bright, took his fancy and he bought it as a present for his father though his luggage was already overweight for the air line, and then the shops were closing and he made his way happily through the thronging crowds around Grand Central Station towards his friends in Peter Cooper Village. It was grand to be back in the United States again, but it would be even better to be back in Oregon again tomorrow, his own place.

  He was a Westerner, born and raised in Oregon and educated in California. All the United States was good in his eyes, the meanest part better than the best of the outside world, but of the United States some parts were better than others. He did not greatly care for the Eastern states, infiltrated as they were with European influences and already burdened with three centuries of tradition. The racial problems of the South distressed him mildly, to the extent that he would not have chosen to live there, and although the technical advances of the Middle West were stimulating he knew a better country to live in than the plains of Michigan or Ohio. It was not until you crossed the mountains that you came, in his opinion, to the vital and virile heart of the United States, the states where men were men. Less than a hundred years ago the immigrants had poured into his home country over the Oregon trail, travelling hard by covered wagon, fighting the Indians, facing death and injury each day of the six months’ journey that would lead them to the glorious new country in the West. The men, the women, and the children who had opened up the Pacific slopes were hard, competent, and virile types, and they influenced their country still. Stanton’s grandfather had made that journey as a child in 1861; at the age of eight he had seen men killed in an attack by Indians upon the wagon convoy, had helped his father hew a farm out of the wilderness a little to the east of where the town of Hazel now stood. Stanton knew that old man intimately for he had lived till the boy was fifteen, and he had heard from him the history of Hazel as it had grown in one man’s lifetime from the first shack in the virgin prairie on the edge of the forests and the mountains to the
place that it was now, a place of paved streets, of drug stores, of quiet, decent homes in shaded avenues, of theatres and railroad tracks and airplanes, of the Safeway and the Piggy-Wiggy café. In his view the people of Washington, Oregon, and Northern California constituted the best stock in the United States because their descent from the pioneers was the shortest; he was proud to be one of them, and infinitely happy now that he was going home.

  He did not think of these things in that detail, but they formed together to create the general happiness that stayed with him all next day as he flew westwards in the Constellation. He changed planes at Chicago about noon, and flew on through the interminable afternoon, stretched out by changes in the local time, over South Dakota and Montana to the high mountains that delighted him, that heralded the Coast. In the evening light Mount Rainier showed up ahead, snow-capped and symmetrical and lovely, and the aircraft started to lose height; they landed at Seattle in the dusk. The fresh, salt-laden breeze from the Pacific was a tonic as he stepped out of the airplane.

  He could not get home that night, but he could at least sleep in his own state. He telephoned from the airport for a hotel reservation and took a Convair southwards from Seattle to Portland. With each hour that he flew the sense of coming home grew stronger in him, the airports less magnificent and friendlier. He had not been home for three years, but the United despatcher at the gate of Portland airport came from Portage, a village not far from Hazel, and knew Stanton, and greeted him by name.

  “Hi-yah, Stanton,” he said. “Quite a time since we saw you here.”

  The young man paused, delighted, but unable to remember the despatcher’s name. “That’s right,” he said. “I’ve been away.”

  “I know it,” said the fat, uniformed man. “Some place in the East, was it?”

  “That’s right. Arabia.”

  “Uh-huh. You going on by Flight 173 in the morning?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Saw your name down on the list. Where are you stopping tonight?”

  “I’ll be at the Congress Hotel.”

  The official scribbled a note upon a pad. “I’ll fix the airport limousine for you. Five minutes past seven at the hotel.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Your mother, she came through about two weeks back. Your father, of course—he comes through quite a bit. They’re looking fine.”

  “You don’t look bad yourself.”

  “Putting on weight,” said the official sadly.

  The limousine was waiting to take Stanton to the city. With the homecoming he reverted to the idiom of his boyhood. “You know somethin’?” he enquired.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s kind of nice to be back.”

  The despatcher laughed. “’Bye now.”

  He got to the hotel at about ten o’clock, tired, but not too tired to ring his parents from the hotel bedroom. He spoke to his father and mother for some minutes and told them the time when he would land at Hazel airport; then he rang off and undressed slowly, savouring the comforts of the bedroom and the shower. It was a warm night, though much cooler than New York, and he lay for a time before sleep came to him. He had nothing to read till he discovered the Gideon Bible in the drawer of the bedside table; he leafed it through as he grew drowsy, remembering the intonations of the minister in church as the familiar phrases met his eye, one after the other.

  The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.

  That meant Arabia, of course. Well, it hadn’t.

  The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.

  Well, He had. The motor might have failed way out over the Atlantic instead of half an hour before they were due to land at Lisbon.

  This is my rest for ever; here will I dwell, for I have desired it.

  He was home again, back from his travels, in one piece. Back in his own state of Oregon, in his home town tomorrow. Gee, this Book had messages, skads and skads of them, if only you bothered to look.

  Presently he slept.

  He flew next morning in an old D.C.3 eastwards from Portland up the Columbia River valley, landing once at The Dalles. The D.C.3 Put down on the small Hazel airport in the middle of the morning and taxied into the miniature airport building, and there at the fence he could see a little crowd of people waiting to meet him. He got out of the machine carrying his plastic overnight bag and the wrapped parcel that contained the barbecue set, and walked quickly to the barrier. There were his mother and his father, cleanshaven and portly, and his sister Shelley with her husband Sam Rapke who ran his father’s business, the biggest hardware store in Hazel, and their two children, Lance, aged six, and Avril, aged four; they must have left the baby at home. All the family were there to meet him, those who lived in Hazel, and he was glad of it.

  “Hi-yah, Mom,” he said, and kissed her. She said, “Junior, you’re so brown!”

  He turned from her to his father. “Hi, Dad.” His father said, “Welcome home, son. You’re looking mighty well.”

  “I feel pretty good,” Stanton said. “Glad to be back again.”

  His mother asked, “Did you get sick at all, out in those hot places, Jun? You never said in any of your letters.”

  “I wasn’t sick a day,” he assured her.

  “Well now, isn’t that just wonderful! I got so worried you might have been sick and not told us.”

  “I wouldn’t have done that, Mom.”

  He turned to greet his sister and the children and Sam Rapke, and when that was over he turned to his father again. “Say, Dad, I got this for you when I stopped off in New York.” He handed him the parcel. To his mother he said, “I got your present in one of the bags, Mom.” The barbecue set was unwrapped there and then as they stood by the airport barrier. His father said, “Say, that’s just what we’ve been needing! We built an outdoor barbecue this spring.”

  “I know it, Dad. You wrote and told me.”

  His mother said, “Oh Junior! They’re so elegant.”

  The few bags were taken from the airplane and wheeled into the baggage room, and they went in to claim them. Carrying his grips they went out to the park. His father said, “I got something for you, son. How long a leave do you get now?”

  “Till September twentieth, Dad.”

  “Good enough. Well, that’s it. There she is.” There were only two cars in the park, a Dodge with a family already getting into it, and a great Lincoln convertible in two-tone blue, with blue upholstery, gleaming and bright. Stanton stared at it.

  “Gee, Dad—not the convertible?” They walked towards it.

  “Yours for your leave, son.”

  “But, Dad, it’s just about new!”

  “Done nine thousand miles. I sold it to Dirk Hronsky last fall.” Dirk Hronsky was the local lumber magnate. “He didn’t like it, didn’t like the power steering. He’s a wee bit heavy-handed driving on an icy road, an’ got himself a couple of skids, and his wife just didn’t care for it. So he traded it in for a new Mercury this spring, only a month or two back, an’ I kept it for your leave.”

  “Gee, Dad, that’s swell of you!” Now that he was home again the schoolboy phrases, half forgotten in his wider life, came tumbling out one after the other.

  His father and Sam Rapke put the suitcase into the trunk and closed it down; they had not allowed Stanton to carry anything. At the huge door of the car his mother said, “Now I’m getting in back while Junior drives us home.”

  He said, “You come up front with Shelley, Mom, and let Dad drive. I’ll get in back.” All his life he had longed for a great modern car like that, but now that it was his he was half afraid of it, unwilling to experiment with it before his family.

  His mother said, “No, Junior. You must drive your own car.”

  He glanced at the floor, devoid of any clutch pedal. “I don’t suppose I know how, Mom. I’ve never driven an automatic shift.” He had left the country before they had come into ver
y general use.

  His mother said, “Why, Junior, even I can drive a car like this. You get right in and drive it!”

  He slipped into the driver’s seat and explored the controls for a minute. His father got in beside him. Very gingerly, bearing in mind the motor of two hundred horsepower, he touched the accelerator. Nothing happened.

  “You got to pour it on, son, to get rolling,” his father said. “Just pour it on.”

  He poured it on, and the big car moved off. He drove it with increasing confidence and delight down the familiar highway to the town, past the well remembered stores and gas stations, across the railroad tracks and into the quiet, shaded streets where all Hazel lived, between Main Street and the High School. He drew up carefully beside the sidewalk opposite his home and stopped the motor. He sat motionless in the driver’s seat for a moment. “She’s certainly a lovely car,” he said quietly, and his parents beamed at his pleasure. He touched one of the stops upon the organ-like console in front of him, and said, “What does this one do, Dad?”

  “Raises the antenna.” He pulled it, and the radio mast grew magically upwards. He pressed it, and the mast sank down again. “Well, what do you know!” breathed the geologist. “I bet she can pick up her heels and go, on a clear run.”

  “Pass anything on the road, except a gas station,” his father laughed. “I’ve opened a charge account for you down at the garage.”

  In his house his room was exactly as he had left it three years previously, the same college banners on the wall, his fishing rods, his guns, his steel bow and arrows, his skiing boots, all carefully dusted and tended and exactly as he had left them. He was glad of it, and yet they made him feel that he had grown in stature during his travels; to some extent he had outgrown these things and if he were to live in Hazel now for any length of time his room would not be quite the same. Downstairs the house was as he had known it from the time when they had bought it in his early manhood, and yet there were changes to be seen. The old electric range that had dominated the kitchen had been ripped out and a more modern one installed that dominated it more, a new dishwasher stood where the old one had stood, a larger, grander, and more elaborate refrigerator. In the living-room a television set had appeared. In the basement the old heating plant had been ripped out and a new one installed, fully automatic, with time clocks and thermostats to control the temperature in every room, which his father demonstrated to him with great pride. A new outboard motor of improved design had replaced the old one, a new boat the old boat, and a new boat trailer the old boat trailer. His father’s Mercury and his mother’s Ford convertible were both the latest models, but that, of course, to some extent concerned the business. A used electric washing machine isn’t very easy to trade in, so three of them stood in the basement in a row, each marking a stage further in development. His father was responsible for all these innovations. As each new machine had been introduced, Mrs. Laird had smiled quietly and had displayed a distressing tendency to go on using the old one if it had been left for her to use. It took her about two years normally to get accustomed to a new machine and to cease grieving for the old, out-dated one, and by that time the new machine itself was obsolete and due to be replaced. It was a gentle joke within the family that Mom had never ceased to grieve for the Model T Ford that they had driven in the early years of marriage. “It was a lovely car,” she had once said quietly. “You couldn’t ever grind the gears, it wouldn’t go fast, and you could see where you were going.”