Greener Than You Think, Ward Moore [ebook reader computer txt] 📗

with the small man's virtues, betrayed and dying painfully with so much blood upon his hands; and the eagle himself, forgotten and now again forgotten.

"I move once more. Step by step I give it up, the land we took and the land we made. Each foot I resign leaves the rest more precious. O precious land, O dear and fruitful soil. Its clods are me, I eat them, give them back; the bond is indissoluble.[222] Even the land gone is still mine, my bones rest in it, I have eaten of its fruits and laid my mark on it...."

All of which was a longwinded way of saying the Grass was overrunning Illinois. In contrast I cannot forbear to quote Le ffaçasé, though his faults, at the opposite end of the scale, were just as glaring: "It is in Kentucky now, birthstate of Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth president of the United States, a country which once stretched south of the Forty-ninth Parallel from the Atlantic to the Pacific. I have been traveling extensively in what is left of Lincoln's nation. 'Dukes,' remarked Chesterton, 'don't emigrate.' This country was settled by the poor and thriftless and now few more than the poor and thriftless remain in it.

"Let me try to present an overall picture: What is left of the country has become a nineteenth century Ireland, with all economic power in the hands of absentees. It is not that everyone below the level of a millionaire is too stupid to foresee possibility of complete destruction; or the middle and lower classes virtuously imbued with such fanatical patriotism they are prepared for mass suicide rather than leave. Because dukes are emigrating and sending the price of shippingspace into brackets which make the export of any commodity but diamonds or their own hides a dubious investment, even the pawning of all the family assets would not buy steerage passage for a year old baby. Besides there are not enough bottoms in the world to transport a hundred and fifty million people. If the Grass is not stopped, except for a negligible few, it will cover Americans when it covers America.

"No wonder a strange and conflicting spirit animates our people. Apathy? Yes, there is apathy; you can see it on the faces in a line of relief clients wondering how long an industrially stagnant country can continue their dole—even though now it consists of nothing but unpalatable chemicals—socalled 'Concentrates.' Despair? Certainly. The riots and lootings, especially the intensified ones recently in Cleveland and Pittsburgh, are symptoms of it. The overcrowded churches, the terrific[223] increase in drugging and drinking, the sex orgies which have been taking place practically in the open in Baltimore and Philadelphia and Boston are stigmata of desperation.

"Hope? I suppose there is hope. Congress sits in uninterrupted session and senators lend their voices night and day to the destruction of the Grass. The Federal Disruptions Commission has published the eleventh volume of its report and is currently holding hearings to determine how closely the extinct buffalograss is related to Cynodon dactylon. Every research laboratory in the country, except those whose staffs and equipment have been moved with their proprietary industries, is expending its energies in seeking a salvation.

"Perhaps only in the Deep South, as yet protected by the width of the lower Mississippi, is there something approaching a genuine hope, although ironically that may be the product of ignorance. Here the overlords have gone and the poor whites, unsupported by an explicit kinship, have withdrawn into complete listlessness. Some black men have fled, but to most the Grass is a mere bogey, incapable of frightening those who have survived so much. Now, for the first time since 1877 the polls are open to all and there are again Negro governors, and black legislatures. And they are legislating as if forever. Farm tenancy has been abolished, the great plantations have been expropriated and made cooperative, the Homestead Act of 1862 has been applied in the South and every citizen is entitled to claim a quartersection. There is a great deal of laughter at this childish lawmaking, but it goes on, changing the face of the region, the lawmakers themselves not at all averse to the joke."

Everything Le ffaçasé wrote was not only dull, but biased and unjust as well. It was true capital was leaving the country rapidly, but what other course had it? To stay and attempt to carry on industry in the midst of the demoralization was obviously impractical. The plants remained and when a way was found to conquer the Grass we would be glad to reopen them, for this would be a practical course, just as the flight of capital[224] was a practical course; standards of living were now so reduced in the United States it would be more profitable to employ cheap American labor than overpaid Latin or European.

55. I had now no fixed abode, dividing my time between Rio and Buenos Aires, Melbourne and Manchester. General Thario and his family lived in Copenhagen, overseeing our continental properties, now of equal importance with the South American holdings. Before leaving, and indeed on every trip back home, he visited his son—no easy thing to do, what with the young man's constant movement and the extreme difficulty of going from east to west against the torrent pouring in the opposite direction. Joe had married the female of the snapshot, or contracted some sort of permanent alliance with her—I never got it quite straight and the Tharios were deplorably careless about such details; and she proved as eccentric as he was. No appeal to selfinterest, no pleading he forgo his morbid preoccupation with the Grass for the sake of his family, could move them.

"A W—you have seen it, heard it, smelled it. Can't you explain—miraculously touched with the gift of lucidity for fact as you are for the fictions of production, overhead and dividends? Oh, not to Mama—either she understands better than I or not at all—but to the Old Man or Connie?

"As a child you learn for the first time of death: the heart is shuttered in a little cell, too cruel for breathing; the sun is gray. In an instant you forget; the sky is bright; the blood pounds. Years later the adolescent falls in love with death; primps his spirit for it; recalls in unpresumptuous brotherhood Shelley and Keats and Chatterton. Afterward the flush fades; we are reconciled to life, but the promise is still implicit. Now, however, it must be earned, awaited. Haste would destroy the savor. The award assured, pace becomes dignified.

"But death is not death; life is never mocked. The Grass is not death any more than it is evil. The Grass is the Grass. It[225] is me and I am it; 'in my father's house there are many mansions, if it were not so I would not have told you.'

"No, I suppose not; yet it hurts my liver to offer the old boy incomprehensible reasons or verbiage like 'compulsion neurosis' when all he wants is to protect me from my own impulses as he protected me from the army. Florence and I delight in him—he comes again next week if possible—but we cannot convey to him the unthinkableness of leaving...."

I heard about this visit later from the general. Joe had scoured Chicago for the alcoholic commodities now practically unprocurable, and returned in triumph to the couple's furnished room. There they entertained him with two bottles of cointreau and a stone demijohn of cornwhisky. "Touched ... filial affection ... even drank the cointreau—fiddling stuff, no wonder it was still available in the drought ... better son a man never had....

"Girl's all right. Moved in circles ... perhaps not accustomed ... bit rough in speech, but heart of gold ... give you the shirt right off her back ... hum ... manner of speaking ... know what I mean...."

But she would not add her persuasions to those of the general. "Joe's got to stay. It's not something he sat down and thought up, the way you plan dinner or whether blue goes good with your new permanent. He's got to stay because he's got to stay. And of course, so do I. We couldnt be satisfied anywhere we couldnt see the Grass. Life's too dull away from it ... but of course that's only part—it's too big to explain...."

"But George—Joe as you call him ... highly talented ... sensitive ... shouldnt be allowed to decay," the general argued. "Fascination ... understand, but effort of will ... break the spell. Europe ... birthplace of culture ... reflection ... give him a proper perspective ... chance to do things...."

Even when the evening lengthened and he became more lucid under the stimulus of cornwhisky and cointreau he could not shake them. "Judicious retreat, especially in the face of overwhelming superiority, has always been a military weapon[226] and no captain, no matter how valiant, has ever feared to use it."

"Pop," George Thario had retorted goodhumoredly, "you dragged in the metaphor, not I. Youve heard of the Alamo and Vicksburg and Corregidor? Well, this is them—all rolled into one."

56. The first snows of this ominous winter halted progress of the Grass. It went sluggish and then dormant first in the far north, where only the quick growingseason, once producing cabbages big as hogsheads, had allowed it to spread at a rate at all comparable to its progress farther south. But by now there could be no doubt left that Cynodon dactylon, once so sensitive to cold that it had covered itself, even in the indistinguishable Southern California winter, with a protective sheath, had become inured to frost and chill, hibernating throughout the severest cold and coming back vigorously in the spring.

It now extended from Alaska to Hudson Bay, covering all Manitoba and parts of Ontario. It had taken to itself Minnesota, the northern peninsula of Michigan, Wisconsin, a great chunk of Illinois, and stood baffled on the western bank of the Mississippi from Cairo to its mouth. The northwestern, underpopulated half of Mexico was overrun, the Grass moving but sluggishly into the estados bordering the Gulf Coast.

I cannot say this delusive safety was enjoyed, for there was unbelievable hardship. In spite of the great bulk of the country's coalfields lying east of the Grass and the vast quantities of oil and natural gas from Texas, there was a fuel famine, due largely to the breakdown of the transportation system. People warmed themselves after a fashion by burning furniture and rubbish in improvised stoves. Of course this put an additional strain on firedepartments, themselves suffering from the same lack of new equipment, tires, and gasoline, afflicting the general public and great conflagrations swept through Akron, Buffalo and Hartford. Garbage collection systems[227] broke down and no attempt was made to clear the streets of snow. Broken watermains, gaspipes and sewers were followed by typhus and typhoid and smallpox, flux, cholera and bubonic plague. The hundreds of thousands of deaths relieved only in small degree the overcrowding; for the epidemics displaced those refugees sheltered in the schoolhouses, long since closed, when these were made auxiliary to the inadequate hospitals.

The strangely inappropriate flowering of culture, so profuse the year before, no longer bloomed. A few invincible enthusiasts, mufflered and raincoated, still bore the icy chill of the concert hall, a quorum of painters besieged the artist supply stores for the precious remaining tubes of burntumber and scarletlake, while it was presumed that in traditionally unheated garrets orthodox poets nourished their muse on pencil erasers. But all enthusiasm was individual property, the reaction of single persons with excess adrenalin. No common interests united doctor and stockbroker, steelworker and truckdriver, laborer and laundryman, except common fear of the Grass, briefly dormant but ever in the background of all minds. The stream of novels, plays, and poems dried up; publishers, amazed that what had been profitable the year before was no longer so, were finally convinced and stopped printing anything remotely literate; even the newspapers limped along crippledly, their presses breaking down hourly, their circulation and coverage alike dubious.

The streets were no more safe at night than in sixteenth century London. Even in the greatest cities the lighting was erratic and in the smaller ones it had been abandoned entirely. Holdups by individuals had been practically given up, perhaps because of the uncertainty of any footpad getting away with his loot before being hijacked by another, but small compact gangs made life and property unsafe at night. Tempers were extraordinarily short; a surprised housebreaker was likely to add battery, mayhem and arson to his crimes, and altercations which commonly would have terminated in nothing[228] more violent than lurid epithets now frequently ended in murder.

Since too many of the homeless took advantage of the law to commit petty offenses and so secure some kind of shelter for themselves, all law enforcement below the level of capital crimes went by default. Prisoners were tried quickly, often in batches, rarely acquitted; and sentences of death were executed before nightfall so as to conserve both prison space and rations.

In rural life