The Lost Skiff Read online

  The Lost Skiff

  Donald Wetzel

  With an introduction by Mark Harris

  New York

  To

  our friends

  Marvin and Martha Nichols

  and family

  David and Jane Abts

  Introduction

  by Mark Harris

  Donald Wetzel is our prophet. He has always, at any rate, been mine these forty years, since first I set eyes upon him on the street in Albuquerque where we then lived. He was in the company of his tall, blond, handsome, achieving cousin who was carrying a little dog in the pocket of his great jacket.

  Wetzel was starting out as a writer, though he couldn’t spell, so that he came to be not only a prophet but living proof that you needn’t know how to spell to write. (We had a dear friend in Denver named Gladys, whose possessive form Wetzel spelled “Glady’s”.) Writing is not spelling but feeling.

  Wetzel was well-acquainted with the work of William Faulkner at a time when I had scarcely heard the name. Faulkner was then avant garde and almost unknown. Wetzel also loved classical music, for which I had no ear; and his eyes saw natural things where I saw only cities. In those ways, and in others, he was in advance of me, and he existed as well as teacher and model for me, walking about with an advanced case of moral sensibility which is still in advance of the moral sense which governs us from the capitals.

  Our lives crossed and re-crossed in many places beyond Albuquerque. We went off in all directions, though not at once. In Denver, with wives and others, we shared a house dear to my memory. I wrote something of that period in a book: “Once I heard a child say to him, ‘You’re rather bald,’ and him reply, ‘Honey, I’m damn bald.’ In a house we shared in Denver his room adjoined my wife’s and mine, and when we heard his alarm clock ring we waited with amusement for the two sounds to follow: first, Wetzel’s striking a match, and then, after his first puff of cigarette, the utterance, ‘Shit!’ For Wetzel the day had begun, overhung always with a tragic sense of life I did not then understand or share. He was a white Protestant Southerner with every advantage but the capacity to make deals with society. He knew, above all, in war or civil life, that one became what one did, that process was all, method was all, men reaped what they sowed.”

  He lives now in Bisbee, Arizona, one of those towns attractive to younger artists in preference to the hustling life of the cities. It is the kind of town Wetzel has usually chosen. The artists who live there are never our conventionally achieving cousins. His living-room matters to him. Early in our acquaintance Wetzel wrote a story whose truth of prophesy is clear enough now. It was a tale, as I recall, of someone making a weapon too big for safe-keeping; so he roped off an area somehow; but that wasn’t enough, either—he needed more space; he roped off the whole town, the county, the state, and ended by roping or fencing or walling the whole State of Texas. Now there was room safely to house the weapon.

  Off the road near Albuquerque and Santa Fe things were going on at Los Alamos. This was 1947. We saw the distant lights at night, but we weren’t supposed to know what was going on. We hadn’t been cleared for loyalty by the people who did, or thought they did. But Wetzel the prophet knew what was going on and knew it was bad and knew the time would come when we’d run out of the space to contain it.

  A second story of Wetzel’s comes to mind. He has recently written it. I heard it forty years ago. It was based on this: Wetzel, some time in the early 1940s, was held in jail pending his transfer to a Federal prison housing conscientious objectors to World War Two. In jail he shared space with one of the leading criminals of the era, who was later executed at Sing Sing, New York. The criminal, as it happens, was a Jew, and in the confidence of his scholarship he perceived Wetzel as a Jew. He undertook to scold Wetzel for having resisted military service. Every good Jew should be out fighting the Nazis. The famous criminal deplored pacifists.

  Well, don’t worry, the State punished Wetzel even if the righteous criminal could not. Because of his pacifism Wetzel was deprived of many rights and privileges accorded those of us who had entered military service and more or less served. I was one who entered, served glumly for awhile, and at some point during the experience began to apprehend the danger of it all both to my body and to my moral sense or reason. Soon after leaving military service, meeting Wetzel, I was able to begin to form arguments against the idea of military power. I had had no language, philosophy, or model to support my instincts. It was Wetzel who drew from me the English to describe those emotions I had so privately sheltered during that period of solitude when I was surrounded by millions of men making great noise. I had known no cultural or intellectual setting for my fantasy.

  Wetzel’s was a service to me for which I soon expressed my gratitude. In a novel of my own I created a character, a young baseball player, who preferred his own Coward Crouch to the idea of fighting. I dedicated my novel to Wetzel who, on the other hand, odd as it now seems to me, must have felt some sort of gratitude to me as well, for he soon dedicated his first novel to me. It was more than merely quid pro quo. It was a thing we felt. We were important to each other. I mention this to clear the air of accusations of conflict of interest. We have long been friends and cannot deny it.

  The world is catching up with Wetzel. Stop, it now begins to say, you are fencing the weapon in and the human being out, outer space is a military base. Of The Lost Skiff Wetzel has written, “I feel that the little book might speak now to a mood in the country favorable to a reawakening sense of where we, humankind, fit in the planet earth’s scheme of things …” This is not to say that the book is simply programmatic. In any simple sense Wetzel never has had a program, although no careful reader will find difficulty in discerning general directions in his work. He has expressed ideas of healing and preserving as opposed to wantonness and destruction, ideas of loyalty and fidelity as opposed to savagery and opportunism, ideas respectful of Nature in a world where human beings are Nature’s allies, not Nature’s conqueror in the ancient macho tradition. It is “my personal feeling,” he has written, “that our awareness of our reliance upon and ties with all else that lives on this earth is essential to our sanity and survival as a species … that’s what I think, and so there!”

  It has been Wetzel’s achievement that he has never relinquished the clarity of the boy he was in the moment of our meeting so long ago on the street in Albuquerque. From that moment forward he preserved not only himself but certainly me from the suicidal sophistication of the consenting patriot. My wife and I and others of our young circle lived with Wetzel through the struggles of composition of his first novel, A Wreath and a Curse, which he wrote in Albuquerque and continued in Denver. During part of the Denver period he supported himself as a hotel clerk. He is still sometimes a hotel clerk. The job is congenial to him, affording him opportunity for conversation and observation, human beings arriving and departing. Once he worked in Denver for a real-estate lady. Wetzel was her telephone-answering machine. The lady otherwise employed women only and had placed an unfortunate advertisement in the Denver directory—LET OUR GIRLS SERVICE YOU. Word soon got around town that the lady’s business was prostitution, and it destroyed her. When her business failed as a victim of rumor Wetzel had no choice but to find another job, carrying the truth away with him.

  Because I lived so intimately with its makings I seem to remember A Wreath and a Curse better than any of Wetzel’s other books. He has not necessarily been wiser than he was at the beginning, but in The Lost Skiff he has told the story more richly, more subtly, and no doubt more indirectly. Here at the center of his story, as in A Wreath and a Curse, is a boy who is as innocent as a boy is bound to be in spite of everything: even in spite of his Star Roamer short-wave radio on which he lis
tens to the world.

  Willie, in A Wreath and a Curse, attempts to fortify his home against a flooding river. The boy, free of adult preoccupations, was first and quickest among his family to admit the danger of their destruction. We cannot say simply of The Lost Skiff that it, too, is a story of a boy, a family, a river. It is exactly “about” those things except that no immediate, apparent danger confronts anyone. Nobody will really be hurt here (one broken wrist), no house will be swept away, nor is the owner of the skiff absolutely desperate for its return. The very tone is of attention not to calamity but to that action of the boy which might seem to anyone else to be pointless: why seek the lost skiff?

  The boy seeks the skiff, I suppose, because he cannot do otherwise than seek it. He remains faithful to some vision of his own. He knows best. Frost has said we know best at nineteen, but Rodney is only fourteen in an age of precocity, an uncorrupted boy whose instinct is to keep the faith, to preserve his own honor, to obey the command nobody has issued except him to himself.

  I mean to say that this is not a pious book but a true book, or so it seems to me. Its action is supported by detail, for the boy knows, as his creator knows, how to live with the landscape, travel in terms of approaching storms, permit himself to abandon himself to tides and wind as they assist him. The enemy is not Nature but our arrogance when we defy it. The boy savors nature as at one point he savors the odor of breakfast cooking. He is moving to me. I row with him up or down the river in search of the object he may never find, and I may understand—as he may not yet—how the experience of quest transcends forever the merely missing hard object.

  1

  It was the lousy blue jays that woke me up. Sleeping on an open back porch the way I do, it was like they were screaming right in my ear, although I looked and they were all screaming and hopping around way over in the sand pear trees on the other side of the yard. There must have been a dozen of them, all yelling Kat, Kat Kat, in that loud raspy way they have, and kind of jumping up and down on the branches like something had got all of them mad as hell and they were having temper tantrums. If it hadn’t been so early it might have seemed funny, even. But it was hardly light, and by habit I am no early bird, and I did not appreciate being waked up from a sound sleep by such crazy loud early birds as these. But they kept it up and even got louder it seemed; Kat, Kat Kat, like it was a kind of swear word and the only one they knew. Then I looked, and sure enough, there was one of my uncle’s pitiful, half-starved little orange-colored cats—only he says they are not his, but strays—trying to slink up along the path from the barnyard to the house. I doubt if that poor cat could have hurt a one of these jays if he wanted to, but that was what all that ridiculous Kat screaming was about. Then the noise was too much, I guess, and the cat turned off the path and slunk in under the grape arbor and then into a bunch of weeds and brambles, and the jays all shut up at once, like someone had thrown a switch.

  Seemed like an awful big fuss about nothing, but who knows, maybe to a blue jay cats, any cats, are the world’s number one finks. Or maybe there were some baby jays in the bunch, just getting a lesson in how to cuss out a cat. The ways of nature are not my specialty. In fact nothing in Alabama is. I’m a stranger here, more or less. The longer I stay doesn’t seem to help much, either. Well, I had learned, anyhow, that Alabama blue jays are probably cat protestors second to none, which is a piece of information hardly worth getting up at daybreak to acquire.

  Especially since I had stayed awake late the night before plugged in to Radio Free Cuba—do they ever hate our guts—on my short wave set, listening to this fellow trying to sound as mad talking English with a Spanish accent—which has a nice sound to it, I think, no matter what the words—as he would sound if he were shouting away in straight Spanish. I get some of this, too, sometimes, when I can find Cuba—close as it is, it strays a lot, on my set anyhow—and while I don’t understand a word of it, it generally sounds like someone is catching hell. Probably the U. S. of A. My set is a five-band Star Roamer which I paid forty dollars for and then assembled myself. It came to me as nineteen pounds of electronic junk. That it works at all amazes me. The first time I plugged it in and turned it on, I went clean across the room from it and waited for it to either burst into flame or detonate. By some crazy luck, not only did it not go up in smoke or little pieces, but it was right on the right frequency on band three to pick up a ham, loud and clear, that lived about six blocks down the street from me. I’d flipped the volume on full, and this idiot down the street nearly blasted me out of the room bragging to some fellow up in Canada about his African violets, of all things. That was back in White Plains, New York, where I live most of the time.

  Here on The Hill, in Alabama, where I am now, my Aunt Vera can’t stand the squeaks and squawks the set now and then just naturally makes, so I always use the phones, the earphones, when I listen, and this way I can lie in bed and listen as late at night as I please. Anyhow, because of the jays waking me, I turned the set on and went to band two, which is regular radio, and listened to some music for a while to get the sound of the jays out of my mind. That’s how I happened to be awake when Jack Haywood came over from his house across the road and came pounding up the steps and slammed open the screen door and came on in on the porch without knocking, the way he always does. Some people have a habit of slamming doors wherever they go, but Jack is the only one I have run across yet who slams them open as well as shut. Well, you know when he’s coming or going anyhow.

  The bed where I sleep is all the way across the porch from the door, and after Jack had let the door slam shut behind him, he stood there a minute without moving—I could tell he wasn’t moving, because if he had of been I would have heard him, even with my earphones on and some outfit worse than the Monkees singing in my ears. Just for the hell of it I kept my eyes closed. Then I heard him say, “You still asleep?” I didn’t answer, and then I heard him walking toward me and felt the porch shaking a little. It’s a porch my uncle added onto the house, and it shakes easy, although Jack Haywood is big and a heavy walker, even for a country boy, and can make about any floor except a cement one shake a little if he wants to. I lay there looking up at the ceiling with my eyes shut, breathing as shallow as I could, trying to look dead. For a while Jack must have just stood there staring down at me, and then, like he was talking to himself, except loud, he said, “Holy cow!”

  Ever since the first time Jack tried my earphones on right after I came down from White Plains he’s been scared of my Star Roamer set. I hadn’t checked it out good from the trip and he claimed it had shocked his ears, an electric shock. I doubt it, but I hadn’t had it grounded right at the time, so maybe it did. So I waited, and Jack finally said “Holy cow” again, and then he said, “I can hear the music. Can you hear me?” Then I laughed and opened my eyes, and Jack laughed, too. “I didn’t think you was asleep,” Jack said, “and if you had finally electrocuted yourself it seems to me that would have at least shut the music off, too. You give me a scare for a minute though, lying there like a corpse. Hey, you don’t sleep with electricity going through your ears all night, do you?” Jack talks like that. I mean his grammar is rotten. It’s so bad sometimes I suspect that he talks that way on purpose, like if you woke him up in the middle of the night he would forget and talk pretty much like anyone else. But I’m probably wrong about that. It’s just habit, I guess. “Is it true you still sleep with a teddy bear?” I said.

  Jack laughed again. He laughs easy, I’ll say that for him. “Is it true you haven’t stopped wetting the bed yet?” he said, and then he laughed like that was the funniest thing he had ever thought of, and it probably was.

  I took off the earphones and shut off the set and sat up in bed and stretched, and then I told Jack about the jays waking me, and that if it hadn’t have been them I could see it would have soon been him, and what did he want? He had pulled up a chair by the bed and was studying my radio, the way he often does, as though if he just sits there and looks at it long e
nough he will understand how I could put a thing like that together when he cannot even figure out how to make it work. The only times he has tried, all he has come up with is squeals and squawks. That set really bugs him, but he won’t admit it. “Jays can be a nuisance,” he said, still looking at the set. “They’re noisy almost any time of the year, but especially now, when they have the new young birds out with them. Then they get fierce, especially if they see an owl or a snake. They can get so excited that I have seen them call up all kinds of other birds, too, mockers, redbirds, thrashers, even little old titmouses and Carolina wrens. I heard them once last year, about this time, right down in your uncle’s lot, and I thought sure it must be an owl or a snake, and I took my rifle and ran down there, and I never saw so many different kinds of birds making a fuss at one time in my life.”

  “No kidding,” I said. Jack will always top me if he can.

  “What it was was a sparrow hawk,” Jack said, “and all he was doing was sitting in a pine tree trying to pick some number-six shot out of his self where someone had shot him from too far off. You could see him sitting up there just pecking away at himself. So I shot him, and took him up to the house and got a knife and pried around enough to satisfy my curiosity. It was number-six shot and he was full of it. But naturally the jays could not have knowed such a thing. And not everybody else would have knowed it, either. The only time jays get quiet is in the spring, when they get ready to raise some more jays. Then they slip off in pairs and that’s the last you hear of them until about now. They don’t really slip off, but they don’t only get quiet, they get hard to see. It’s the kind of thing you can’t help but notice, like they have all flew off or dropped dead.”

  “What they saw this morning was one of my uncle’s cats,” I said.