Lee-Ann met Norman’s eyes. ‘Isn’t that right, Mr Price?’
Sherwood was going to be called a liar in school if he didn’t bring a picture. He had told the class about Mr Whiskers, but he said with the firm resolution of a child, ‘I can keep a secret for Mr Whiskers. I don’t want the Chinese to get him.’
In that moment there was a cat and the greatest menace in the world, the Chinese.
*
Thomas Strait wanted to show Norman something. They left the car on the rise of a dirt road because of the warning lights and a problem with the oil. They started to walk. There had still been no reference to Kenneth. Norman now accepted that what passed would be determined by Thomas Strait.
Thomas was conversant in literature, specifically Steinbeck. He had sought answers in books, then discovered Steinbeck was more socialist than he liked. He was not reconciled that a man could be overly concerned with this life without forsaking the hereafter. This was his decided belief.
Norman listened quietly. Thomas Strait was an honest man hiding a secret — bottles of booze under his bed. Within him, all the incongruities and inconsistencies of life, damnation and salvation fought it out, and somehow kindness and understanding emerged. He was a man who could give advice because of his foibles, because of his shortcomings.
Thomas Strait had got his schooling because of time served in the military at a community college with just enough communists to make it interesting.
He smiled knowingly as he said it. Sherwood, his grandson, was named after Sherwood Anderson. Thomas had read Winesburg, Ohio. What he believed was that a deeper knowledge of all things was not such a liberating gift. It left you, more times than not, alone in the world. He put opinion out there as a matter of guiding principle. He was open to debate, to seeing around an issue.
Thomas Strait was simply establishing a level playing field in the eyes of Norman, without ever overtly announcing his intention. He had that nascent gift and worldly comport of a man who could befriend a stranger in the way so few could in a world gone cold and calculated.
His eyes flit between Norman and the emerging landscape.
He continued. ‘In European literature, they are always in fear of becoming invisible, I mean up here, in the head. Inchoate feelings, Mr Price, that’s how I described it in a paper. My professor, she just about shit herself when she read it. The professors, they couldn’t give advice. They were trapped, and I was tending toward something of substance. I wore a stethoscope around my neck like a religious cross. It was salvation in a way. I had short-term and long-term goals.’
They were near the apex of the road, the land in shadow and colder, though the sky was still a clear, empty blue. This might have been how the apostles talked in the quiet remembrance of Jesus, in the distillation of what was said, and why it was said, and how it would form four gospels of a varying life, but a singular message.
Thomas said, ‘I could take your blood pressure now, Mr Price, give you a good indication of your general health and a prognosis of how you might spend the next twenty years of your life. You want me to tell you?’
There was a question behind the question. Norman had his eyes on the dirt road.
Thomas stopped with the tacit awareness that they had come to a point of obvious impasse. He said, ‘Why don’t you ask why we came and met you?’
Norman answered. ‘I might first ask myself why I came.’
Thomas acknowledged it. ‘I guess that is another way of asking it.’
This was all new to Norman. The terrain and the essential freedom of being somewhere he had never been before, and to be in the company of Thomas Strait, a man who talked like Tom Joad, and Norman, aware that Steinbeck, on his travels, he must have happened upon these straight-talkers of distilled truths, men who understood the essence of life and knew it since birth, against all the inducement that understanding and knowledge came only from books.
Off in the distance, Thomas pointed to a brown-bricked building fashioned in the clay of the river’s bed. It was a former Tuberculosis Hospital. Thomas explained, his voice reverently solemn. ‘We can only imagine the capacity for suffering people had in the past, when losing a child in birth, or to disease, was almost a certainty, and nothing lasted. Religion served its purpose. I see God as a way of allowing us to ask the right questions. I don’t think religion was ever about answers. That’s where modern philosophy got it wrong.’
Thomas kept staring across at the hospital on the hill. ‘They were so scared, everybody in town. You don’t know what fear is like until it takes the form of illness or plague. Compassion dies, and fear sets in. Supplies were just loaded onto carts hoisted up to them by a mechanical pulley. Patients went up there and died for the most part.’
They were further down along a run of fence line. In the emerging clearing, Thomas pointed to mannequins of a vintage dated to the thirties and forties. It was apparent as they got closer, each eerily lifelike, and yet of another era, the mannequins hewn with a gaunt leanness that defined a time of want and scarcity.
They were clothed in sundry outfits, coats and dresses, in sweaters and skirts, a man not unlike Mr Feldman in a long trench coat and black unlaced shoes.
The mannequins had come from a store long closed in downtown Saint Louis. Thomas explained it. Someone had the idea to use them as scarecrows, truckloads of them delivered out to the surrounding areas, and then, mysteriously, over time, they began aggregating at the base of the Tuberculosis Hospital, and then there were mannequins of children, gathered in among the adults, a community of dead souls. It just happened all of a sudden. It was never decided.
Thomas Strait shrugged in staring out at the hospital. He was arrived at some point in his head. ‘To tell the truth, Mr Price, I’m looking for something sustainable. In a Composition Text at the college they had a chapter on a Business Proposal, how to apply for grants and federal dollars. What I’m proposing would be a regional educational center where we would make up a biography card for everyone who died at the hospital. They kept copious records. One of the victims, Marshall Ames, was a confidence man who was said to have inspired Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man. This Ames made a livelihood aboard the great Mississippi paddle steamers when plantations were lost in the roll of a dice, and all that went with them, a holding of slaves, a wife and family made destitute.’
They were stopped, looking at the sun falling on the distant brownstone building.
Thomas Strait continued. ‘Aside from the bio cards, I have a script of Ames’s life and on some others. I got Kenneth reading the life of Marshall Ames for me right now.’
Kenneth’s name was dropped without the slightest hitch of unease or qualification.
Thomas Strait kept on talking. ‘Like I said, this would be a living history of a region, maybe actors dressed in period costume coming forward and announcing themselves, like ghosts. I see the dying in beds, and a clutch of infirm in a room under the salubrious warmth of light, just playing cards, talking after the times. I have in my head how it might all work.’
Thomas Strait turned and looked at Norman. ‘That about how you come upon your stories, Mr Price?’
Norman said, ‘I like the idea of ghosts, and the fluidity of decentering any one story. It would be better than a play letting people form their stories.’
Thomas Strait smiled. ‘You see now that’s what I was thinking, like you said, a decentered story that don’t occupy any one place. I think that’s the American story, Mr Price, I really do.’