A Small Death

MADELINE gagement. I could still bow but they did not know that my limbs were now more fragile. In fact, they did not know what CHAPTER 14 - they were asking, but I did. I wonder if they still use the trick of the curtain, the beams, and the dowager. I knew if I went there again I would never escape alive. A Small Death HAVE remarked that I was born in the central plains, compacted out of glacial dust and winter cold. I see animal faces as readily as though I sat with my mother's one blighted gift in a Cro-Magnon cave. The religious forms of the present leave me unmoved. My eye is round, open, and undomesticated as an owl's in a primeval forest-a world that for me has never truly departed. The boy who watched the gold crosses of his childhood swept up by a man with a scythe would scarcely hope too much for what lay forward. In one of those golden Octobers that fell between the wars, I made a journey somewhere in southern Kansas. The friend who went with me was Claude Hibbard, a paleontologist who died only a year or so ago after an intense and devoted career given to the life of the past. Claude had got word of a farmer who had found an enormous long-horned bison skull in a ,gravel pit. The man had it hanging out in the weather under the eaves of his barn. The skull proved to be a beautiful example of one of the least-known bisons, the horns having the sweep of one's ex- tended arms. The names change in the taxonomists' reports but the size of the great beast never; he belongs to the Middle Ice. The Farmer coveted the skull as a barn decoration, little realiz- A SMALL DEATH DAYS OF A THINKER ing that it would slowly flake away in the winter rain and snow. Kansas autumn. I am treading deeper and deeper into leaves It was our errand to try and secure the bones for the museum of and silence. I see more faces watching, non-human faces. Iron- the university. ically, I who profess no religion find the whole of my life a We found our man in the field. Claude bore the brunt of the religious pilgrimage. The origins of this hunger are as myste- negotiations, for he was not only a native Kansan himself but rious as the reasons why we, who are last year's dust and rain, came of a farming family. The farmer was reluctant. He was have risen from that dust to look about with the devised crystal harvesting corn and we followed the wagon, automatically toss- of a raindrop before we subside once more into snow and whirl- ing up the ears as the talk progressed in slow country fashion. ing vapor. But, however that one autumn may still color my We went up one row and down another, serving as an unpaid memory, life is complex; it changes, and my world was destined labor force. to change with it. Claude knew what he was doing. I slung in ears of corn and The change was mixed with many things in my life--a grow- an occasional word. So did Claude, but his remarks were all of ing disillusionment with some aspects of scientific values, per- crops and farms and weather. The golden afternoon waned to sonal problems, abrasive administrators, humanity itself. In its close, a blue frost was rising. "That skull," said Claude short, the war had finally come to Kansas and transformed the finally, " 'tisn't right it should be wasted here. If you gave it to pleasant, sleepy little town of Lawrence overnight. the Museum you could have your name on it, 'donated by,' or When the first Polish towns were burning, some of my stu- 'on permanent loan.' Here it'll just go to pieces. It needs to be dents had laughed, far on there in the isolationist mid-country, treated. It's been a long time in that gravel bank." It had, too. and called the newsreels "propaganda," in the disillusionment The gravel bed in which the skull had been miraculously pre- that still lingered after the first World War. Then came Pearl served had been deposited long before the last great ice advance. Harbor. A giant powder factory arose in the environs of Law- "Well," said the weatherbeaten farmer, "I dunno." We rence and hundreds of people poured in from the backwoods of threw the ears of another row into the high-sided wagon while the Ozarks and Oklahoma. Almost overnight Lawrence became he meditated reluctantly. "I reckon," he said, "if my name-" a boom town in which prices rose, people began to distrust each "It'll be in the books," said Claude. "Let's just get this last other, and desperate workers trudged the streets seeking shelter. corn row. Might as well before dark." From wary isolationism a few students turned to militant patri- So that was the way it ended, but not for me. The curtain of otism in a way sometimes reminiscent of the excesses of the first time had lifted an instant in that slow smoky autumn. I could World War. As was true of most universities, training programs almost see the great herds from which this giant came. Across for enlisted men under discipline soon emerged. them swirled the blizzards of my childhood in which I used to , My unmarried friends quickly disappeared, either called up go out alone because no one could find me thirty feet away. in the reserves or in the draft. As a physical anthropologist by As we left, the leaves in the wood were red and coming down. training, with a background in anatomy and biology, I was It was, I think, the last time I saw Claude, though his profes- shifted as essential into the pre-medical program. We taught en- sional papers came faithfully to me For many years. He was try- listed young reservists almost around the clock. Summer school ing, no doubt, his own keys to the past. As for me, I have come was no longer a matter of choice, and I labored on through at- to think I am moving in an endless extension of that single A SMALL DEATH DAYS OF A THINKER tacks of violent asthmatic hay fever which afflicted me in that denly I realized that, though it was not badly off, I was not sure climate. I had to refurbish forgotten knowledge, and my fellow of the ticking. Something was slightly wrong. I thought of the anatomists, including Dr. Henry Tracy, the grey wise head of forgotten episode of my first year in graduate school. The other the department, could not have been kinder. routine procedures followed. My troubles, however, were endless. I was the last of a line In a week or so I received my rejection. I have often won- that had volunteered and fought in almost every war since the dered in the years since, as I have come to know a little more War for Independence. Yet here I was confronted with an ut- about military intelligence, whether it was actually the minor terly impossible situation. My mother, I had come to know, was physical defects or the existing affidavits about my mother that committable without the care and attention of my aunt. All made the difference. Later, I was to know men who seemed this had been certified and was on record. Both women were never to have encountered the troubles that beset me. The uni- totally dependent upon my support. Moreover, my wife came versity was, of course, struggling to maintain its staff. home one day from the doctor's office to report a diagnosed ill- In elaborating this background, however, I have neglected a ness which necessitated surgery. We had to borrow money. Still dog whose plight actually affected me more than the turmoil I fretted, although by now four million men were under arms that swept around me. It was a small death in that war now and the landing in Europe was drawing near. Perhaps it was long since done. I do not know why I remember it with such foolish of me, in retrospect, but I was still young and there was pain, but yes, yes I do. I remember it with an uncertain guilt. a family tradition. I wanted to go. This impulse was to be sud- just as I remember my last glimpse of the desperately running denly augmented. mongrel beside the train in the cruel days of the Depression. As One day I learned, in some way now forgotten, that there it chanced, I was assisting one of my medical superiors in a was a need for men capable of staffing military government in cadaver dissection. He was a kind and able teacher, but a re- the islands of the Pacific being slowly overrun by the island- searcher hardened to the bitter necessities of his profession. He hopping technique of the Pacific war. Such an assignment took the notion that a living demonstration of the venous flow wou!d have solved the salary problem. My training and teach- through certain of the abdominal veins would be desirable. ing in social anthropology seemed to offer some hope. "Come with me to the animal house," he said. "We'll get a dog I was given a physical. My eyes were not up to the military for the purpose." I followed him reluctantly.

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