Iron bridge in the distance, Beyond it a city. Hotels where pimps went about their business on the sidewalks of a lost world. But the foreground is in focus, this corner of carpenter’s Gothic, these backyards running down to the freeze.
“Steamboat on Ohio River”, its smoke foul and dark, its year unknown, beyond it the far bank overgrown with factories.
“Our Wytheville House Sept. 1921”
They have moved down from Wheeling and my father wears his city clothes. Main Street is unpaved and an electric streetlamp is slung high in the frame, centered above the tracked dust on a slack wire, suggesting the way it might pitch in a strong wind, the shadows that might throw.
The house is heavy, unattractive, sheathed in stucco, not native to the region. My grandfather, who sold supplies to contractors, was prone to modern materials, which he used with wholesaler’s enthusiasm. In 1921 he replaced the section of brick sidewalk in front of his house with the broad smooth slab of poured concrete, signing this improvement with a flourish, “W.F. Gibson 1921”. He believed in concrete and plywood particularly. Seventy years later his signature remains, the slab floating perfectly level and charmless between mossy stretches of sweet uneven brick that knew the iron shoes of Yankee horses.
“Mama Jan. 1922” has come out to sweep the concrete with a broom. Her boots are fastened with buttons requiring a special instrument.
Ice gorge again, the Ohio, 1917. The mechanism closes. A torn clipping offers a 1957 DeSOTO FIREDOME, 4-door Sedan, torqueflite radio, heater and power steering and brakes, new w.s.w. premium tires. One owner. $1,595.
IV
He made it to the age of torqueflite radio but not much past that, and never in that town. That was mine to know, Main Street lined with Rocket Eighty-eights, the dimestore floored with wooden planks pies under plastic in the Soda Shop, and the mystery untold, the other thing, sensed in the creaking of a sign after midnight when nobody else was there.
In the talc-fine dust beneath the platform of the Norfolk & Western lay indian-head pennies undisturbed since the dawn of man.
In the banks and courthouse, a fossil time prevailed, limestone centuries.
When I went up to Toronto in the draft, my Local Board was there on Main Street, above a store that bought and sold pistols. I’d once traded that man a derringer for a Walther P-38. The pistols were in the window behind an amber roller-blind like sunglasses. I was seventeen or so but basically I guess you just had to be a white boy. I’d hike out to a shale pit and run ten dollars worth of 9mm through it, so worn you hardly had to pull the trigger. Bored, tried shooting down into a distant stream but one of them came back at me off a round of river rock clipping walnut twigs from a branch two feet above my head. So that I remembered the mechanism.
V.
In the all night bus station they sold scrambled eggs to state troopers the long skinny clasp-knives called fruit knives which were pearl handled watermelon-slicers and hillbilly novelties in brown varnished wood which were made in Japan.
First I’d be sent there at night only if Mom’s carton of Camels ran out, but gradually I came to value the submarine light, the alien reek of the long human haul, the strangers straight down from Port Authority headed for Nashville, Memphis, Miami. Sometimes the Sheriff watched them get off making sure they got back on.
When the colored restroom was no longer required they knocked open the cinderblock and extended the magazine rack to new dimensions, a cool fluorescent cave of dreams smelling faintly and forever of disinfectant, perhaps as well of the travelled fears of those dark uncounted others who, moving as though contours of hot iron, were made thus to dance or not to dance as the law saw fit.
There it was that I was marked out as a writer, having discovered in that alcove copies of certain magazines esoteric and precious, and, yes, I knew then, knew utterly, the deal done in my heart forever, though how I knew not, nor ever have.