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  Early in February, I want again to the Veterans Administration hospital, for an encephalograph, and the first patient I saw was the epileptic. Two attendants, in their garish white clothing, were assisting him as he stumbled across my path. They were holding him up, and walking his clumsy feet; their faces were intent. The epileptic had his head down, and he mumbled something as he went by.

  I felt healthy, being different from him, and pretentious in my leather jacket, that emblem of pride. I started a sweat, and I was uncomfortable as I made my way upstairs to the neurologist's office. There I had further perturbations, for the neurologist warned me to enter the hospital.

  "You've lost a good deal of weight since I first saw you -too much, I'm afraid. It's time something was done. Your spinal tap was normal, by the way -and so maybe something could be done."

  He was one of those men muscular but not athletic, of simple and stubborn structure, who seem designed for arduous duties. He seemed require them, like food. He was very competent, I thought, for be conversed intelligently and had a penetrating habit of vision. He had mild brown eyes which yet expressed a dark thought -a doctor's thought, about complications, malfunctions, inevitable disintegration.

  "I've been thinking about entering a hospital," I said. "But I'm not quite ready yet,"

  "Expect to be ready soon, then," he said. "But suit yourself. You're still getting around on your own, I see."

  "Still getting around," I echoed, and thought, "I always suit myself !"

  Then we went to another room down the hall where the equipment for the encephalograph was situated. I sat down, and was connected to an electric circuit through needles driven into my scalp. Technicians were busy over graph and stylus, and their footsteps were light; now and then there was an audible hum from the machinery. At one stage of the test, I was asked to breathe deeply, and in doing this I opened myself to suggestion from memory. I remembered a convulsion I had experienced just after the war. There had been a tremor in arms and legs, not more violent than those caused by energetic laughter, and then a complication and extension, as darkness meticulously converged upon me, and consciousness went out of sight in my own head, as a swimmer's white limbs might be jerked down by a shark in turbulent water. Afterwards, there were aching muscles and a temporary amnesia, and so it is with transcendency -I have always wondered that, on my coming out of it, I was not asked by my world for a prophecy.

  Some of the darkness of convulsion has remained with my seeing, so that familiar things have never since then really looked familiar.

  After the encephalograph, I went again to the neurologist, who told me that the record was normal. He looked at me rather gently, and said, "I think you wouldn't have any trouble establishing a service connection for all this. Wouldn't it be wise for you to enter the hospital without any more talk?"

  "I have a few things to do yet," I told him, and went out. In the parking lot I hesitated, staring at my motorcycle. Behind me was the hospital, an instrument of mercy and security which attracted me, and was valid for some of my troubles; under my hand was the tremendous machine that could take me out into the perplexities of life. The motorcycle, the Vincent Black Shadow (and this is a famous name, among motorcyclists, and worthy of fame) has a singular appearance, for the black frame and forks are narrow and lean, while the engine is massive and gleaming, the color of dull silver. External oil lines cross its surface like veins. The curving twin exhaust pipes explicate its power, and the power is a human accomplishment, after all.

  I elected the machine, for I wanted to do no other thing, and rode away, the exhaust crackling as I entered the traffic.

  I am continuing the decision made then. I am losing weight (and may now be under 140 pounds). I have letters from George. Twice my father has enclosed a letter with his monthly check, and in the last one he asked about George, for he had received inquiry from the military. "What has George done?" he wrote me. "Has he deserted? But Jacksons don't desert the American Army. They have borne arms in every American Army since Washington's. Do you know something about all this?" His letter ended, as was normally, with a plea: "See if you can't get back in shape, son. You have uncommon abilities, and there's a lot of useful work to do in the world.--

  I am toward a termination, surely. George is sunk in a life of idleness and poor diet, with girls and friends, no doubt, but nothing to to do that requires his abilities. Sooner or later, the FBI will get him, for someone will inform, and then he will have an opporunity to stage hunger strikes at a Federal Prison, and that will define him. Perhaps he will grow thin, like his older brother.

  I am alone now, except for Edith, whom I see on Tuesdays and Thursdays; we make love and talk, at the beach cottage. Along the water the summer houses are closed, and some of them have shutters up against the sea wind. The stucco walls are drenched to a single neutral tone; the white paint on stairs and railings is dim in the winter light. The beach is a dark tan, mottled with rocks, for at this season the tides wear the sand away from the water's edge and move it out beyond the kelp.

  We are happy to be in a warm place, indoors; the world denies itself to us, and we are brought upon ourselves. We talk, and we only one theme. Edith says, "You're really in a bad way, dear. At this rate, you'll be dead in a month. What are you going to do?"

  We know my situation precisely. The neurologist finds me normal. If I belong to a clinical category, it can only be Hysteria, and for that I could go to any one of several institutions; but I do not choose to do this.

  "I'm a victim of my will," I say to Edith. (Though the will I speak of may be only the arrogance in my self-love.) "I want to be sick."

  "And you're like going to bed with a skeleton," she answers, "I'm ashamed of myself."

  "But I'm healthy!" I say. "Against all precedent I assert that. What does it matter if I die a little ahead of my generation, if I can maintain an exemplary morality? And I may not even die so soon."

  "I think you'll die," Edith says.

  She is tranquil with me, her blue eyes intent upon me; I suspect at the cost of pain in the other stations of her life.

  "Your grip is getting light on me," she says. "It's something to do with your hands. Don't you care, Sam?"

  "I care," I say, and would like to do something pleasant for her; but I am busy -I have my eye on the future.

  And then occasionally the past rises up to plunder me, as when, late at night, I remember an episode of the war--it happened in a battered German town a few miles east of Aachen. There had been fierce fighting; in my platoon, there were only six men left of the twenty who had entered the town. We could not advance or retreat: I was caught in the duty I had accepted. On the third day there, I came to an open door, looked in, and found a German soldier sitting at a table, bent over a field telephone. He raised his eyes to me, and then reached for the pistol at his belt. I shot him with the rifle I was carrying at the hip; he rose on one leg, and I shot him twice more, so that he spun down violently in a corner, with his field cap over his eye. His left hand was in the air, to shield his pierced body, while his right leg kicked out convulsively, and the heavy boot knocked the table over.

  His cap fell off; he mumbled a few words, and blood appeared over his belt buckle. His eyelids mantled the glossy eyes, and then his fingers opened and closed, rhythmic and groping, as he continued living for perhaps twenty minutes longer.

  Blood is an argument I know, for I too have felt its spasm in the leg. There is a score which must be settled, and one of these days I will settle it. Meanwhile, I continue my recuperation, though I notice that the people I meet (and especially the doctors) have begun to talk very rapidly. I am in love with life, and have never seen it more clearly; I try to be cheerful.

  And every day the world improves itself in remoteness.

  A Revenant

  Edward Loomis

  In Chikaskia, the young man was only a few miles from the home place. He was in his car beside a gas pump that belonged to a tractor agency. Across the stre
et was the grocery store, with an unused hall in the second story, where once the Grange had feasted and deliberated the farmers' cause. Compact and shadowy above the maples was the grain elevator, near the railroad.

  The town was silent, holding its meager life. A boy in bib overalls operated the gas pump; he hung his head, and was shy. In the air was the pulverous odor of the feed store. The young man paid for gas and drove away, pleased at having risked himself so casually. There were people in the town who knew him from the summers of his childhood (and had known his mother's family through four generations); one of these might have recognized him, and he might then have been brought to the accounting which he had so far avoided.

  He was intact, who not so long ago had killed his best friend. Having seduced his friend's wife (he did not like her at all; and she admired him, tentatively, while hating him), be had let him go in the quarrel that followed the discovery. He had always

  able to surprise his adversaries, for he seemed slow before the emergency--

  Indeed, he had gouged out an eye in the fight: the first two fingers of his right hand got in behind the eyeball and he was able to bring his thumb down on the optic nerve. Then he pulled, the nerve stretched astonishingly, and snapped, and at last the job proved almost as easy as gutting a fish.

  He had walked about for a time, holding the eye in his clenched fist, and wanted to give it to the wife as a pledge of love (and it would have done well for hate) ; but he could not bring himself to it. He opened his hand, and walked away; and since then, his tactic had been to keep moving. His movements were at random. He did not have to appear anywhere; and yet no place was denied him. He was free to take jobs and even to marry. He presented himself, grinning politely, and he disappeared when it suited him. Police roadblocks did not check him -he passed unnoticed; and he avoided post offices.

  Now he was passing farms he remembered, landmarks on the way between the home place and town; they assured him that he was on his course. One farm was clearly abandoned, its lands amalgamated to a neighbor's; windows in the house were broken, and the front door was banging from the lower hinge. There was an ancient drill in the front yard, its tongue buried in the sod, and the red paint on the seed box faded away into longitudinal streaks that the wind roughened.

  The young man remembered the family that had lived there as amiable people, known to be wanting in energy; and so they had dlsappeared, leaving a windbreak of stunted cedars as the only change they had made in the landscape which for a time they had leased from the past.

  Then he came to the farm of the cousinage, and he remembered the story whispered in the family about the death of his mother's favorite cousin. Out of despondency and pain (he had fallen from one of his windmills), he had hang himself in the barn, from the track by which the hay hook -was suspended - launched himself into that air whose very dust was sweet ...

  Such was the public story, but there was a secret tale -that which a boy might hear, late at night, as he sat on the stairs with his ear to the door that opened on the parlor. In that story, the wife, a big woman, who had worked in the field as powerfully as most men -had persuaded her broken husband to go to the barn with her (and as she pushed the wheel chair, how must her eyes have looked, brightening above the slumped shoulders?). She had raised him, and the young man could appreciate that image: the powerful woman, in overalls, slowly moving her hands over the familiar, well-loved form; grunting occasionally and talking under her breath, as a man might talk to a load of hay.

  And now (the mishap forgotten) the farm was exemplary and prospering. Its paint was bright. The stonework in the first level of the barn appeared to be washed yellow limestone of the region. Hereford cattle grazed in the pasture; the wavy lines of contour plowing came up to the fences of barn and house. Two saddle horses raised their heads from the windmill tank -the heavy mother kept them for her son, who lived with her and worked at her side.

  The young man passed on, and within a quarter of a mile he came to the site of the Iron Springs Church (Methodist), which had been the church of his ancestors. He parked the car at the gate of the woven-wire fence; to his left, waiting for his attention, was the cemetery that he had come seeking; in front of him was the place where the church had been during his childhood. Bald ,pots in the turf marked the corners, where lime had poisoned the earth, and there were vague streaks connecting the corners. The grass was thick within the pattern, where the shadow of the church had endured for three generations, and the grass had been mowed recently; the smell of its oozing stems was in the air.

  The church building had been moved to town, as the young man had been told, and become a new wing to a consolidated Methodist Church, but the building held its ancient place in the young man's memory, and his attention felt it, stamped into the air like a watermark. What had it taught? He did no, know, but he was one of the consequences. In old times, a great black stove had kept the congregation warm; and nameless men had given the doctrine from the white oak pulpit.

  Reluctant and unblinking, the young man held his ground for a moment, and then he turned to the cemetery where his mother was buried. His feet moved over the coarse lawn (the native grasses, with a rye, and fecues). The cemetery, he knew, was in the care of a thriving farmer whose family lay here; he was responsible; and the young man was willing to be grateful that a busy farmer could he attentive to such duty.

  The young man knew his way. It took him past Osgood, Bridges, Gillespie, and Jackson, so that he could turn casually and look down at the pink marble of his mother's gravestone. He touched its top; it was rough. He touched the face, and it was like glass. His mother had dropped here like stone; the great weight of the coffin made the rollers groan. The young man felt a pain low in his back, and stepped away, looking down.

  The lawn had a purplish tinge -and the young man remembered the deed which had started him on this pilgrimage which had brought him at last to Kansas. He and his wife had been given to quarreling; they were talkative and violent, and within a decade they hated each other. She resented his composure, too dense to allow her through. She distrusted his privacy, and suffered agonies from his temper. He feared her knowledge, for she knew the sores that never healed; she touched him where no one else touched him, and she was exacting in her discriminations about what her pressure might do.

  Their life together was its own heavy limits, isolated against a history they could not touch or comprehend.

  And so, one night they quarreled (on the patio of their house in California), he formed her rage, her rage found his weakness, and for a moment he was unable to control his weakness -it was evening, and they were barbecuing steaks; their glasses (Martinis) were on a low iron table, and they were talking swiftly, ferociously--

  Suddenly he was upon her. His weight leaped awkwardly and lightly, as a scavenging bird leaps, and all the enormous secret of his rage was threshing in his fingers. Her throat yielded gracefully, as her body had always done; her eyes for a moment gleamed with pleasure, before they moved suddenly a little way forward in their sockets.

  A little gasp sounded from his parted lips, and he knew himself, at last, as brave enough to define his true nature. While others got up slowly from the familial chair, he could act, and find his mark. He was a serious man!

  Then he came awake, with his heart pounding high up in his chest, and an uneven dampness against his knees; and that was the earth of the rich lawn. He was kneeling beside a corpse in the orchard-like stillness and fragrance of his own land, and the corpse's head looked innocent; the lips were faintly parted. He trembled, and threw himself down on the corpse, moaning regret. He wept; his tears were slippery on those hardening cheeks.

  The garden went dark, and his mind retreated. Long afterward, he could not escape the belief that he had endeavored to make love to a corpse.

  Now he sighed, and let his fingers go their way across the deep scorings of his mother's name. He tried to remember her; he wanted her back; but he could not find a magic. She kept her di
stance, and he remembered of her only certain domestic details -her appearance in a bathing suit at the beach, the summer before her death; she had been gaunt and ill, and had a sunburn. Her appearance at the foot of his bed on school mornings, when she had come to waken him, in those days when he bad been a child in woolen pajamas.

  He moved along; above him were blue sky and white cloud, casual and mild.

  He got back in his car and set his course toward the home place, guiding himself with memories of his childhood, and when he came; to the lane he was seeking, he was cautious, for he had not been to this place for many years. He inspected the mail box -his mother's family name was just visible. The letters had flowed in little tracks downward, and some of the paint had cracked away, leaving the cloudy steel. A nameless remorse moved in him - he wished that he had helped these people of his, though he could not imagine anything he might have done. In his generation, the girl had married a lawyer in Kansas City, and the boy was a Commander in the Navy. In the next generation back, all were dead--

  He started the car up the lane, into the little grove which concealed the spring. Sycamore, cottonwood, willow, swaying fern; he stopped at the spring house built into a green bank. Beside the masonry trough that carried the delicate stream away into the black loam, he touched a fern that rose to his hand, and he remembered a coiled rattlesnake that he and his brother had once found and killed at this very spot.