Morris - The Field of Vision

1956 by Wright Morris

All rights reserved, including
the right to reproduce this book
or portions thereof in any form.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 56-8525

International Standard Book Number 0-8032-5789-9

First Bison Book printing: July 1974

Bison Book edition published by arrangement with the author.

FOR
Winona
AND I PROMISED YOU A SHIP
WITH A GOLDEN MAST

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heavn of Hell, a Hell of Heavn.

John Milton
Paradise Lost

McKee

The seat in the shady side of the bullring made McKee cold. Sol would have been better, as they called it, but McKee had wanted the best. Tell him we want the best, he had said to Boyd, but that turned out to be shade. The people over in the sun, however, looked a lot more comfortable. They were drinking cold beer, and they sat there in the sun with their shirt sleeves rolled. It just went to prove, McKee reflected, if you didnt really know what the best was, the smart thing to do was not stick out your neck and ask for it. Not in Mexico. Not if what you really wanted was a seat in the sol.

When they came out of the tunnel into the bullring McKee had felt a little dizzy, took a grip on the rail. Same feeling he got watching motorcycles spin in one of those wooden bowls. We going to sit right smack down on the drain? he had said, since that was how the bullring itself really looked. Small. Just a round hole at the bottom of a concrete bowl. And these seats they had were right on the lip of it. Cold as a street curb the moment the sun went down. Between the seats these iron bars as smooth as a pump handle, and just about as cold as a pump handle in the winter time. McKee had put his hand on one and saidturning to his grandson he had saidCold enough, bygolly, to freeze your tongue to a pump handle. You wouldnt believe it, but that boy didnt know what a pump handle was. Not knowing that he naturally couldnt grasp what McKee meant. To make it worse, when McKee explained it he couldnt get it through his head why anyone with any sense would stick his tongue to one. You go ask your Uncle Boyd McKee had said, just to get rid of him. He didnt know what to make of a boy like that.

Not that he wanted to complain. About the weather, that is. It was on the cool side in the shade, but not cold. Whereas it was eight or ten below back where they came from. Probably colder, since the Omaha paper tended to minimize the weather. People wouldnt cross the state of Nebraska at all if they knew how cold it was. They would go through South Dakota, which was even worse, but south of North Dakota so it sounded warmer. Mexico sounded hot, but that was due to the food. McKee himself would have preferred Hawaii, but that would have meant going off without their grandson, whereas by traveling in the car they could take both the boy and his great-granddaddy. They could have gone to Florida, for that matter, where they could have seen people who talked their own language, but maybe even fewer who were willing to shut up and just listen to it. But as he often said to Mrs. McKee, you could count on the fingers of one hand the people who knew what it was they wanted, or meant what they said. And she knew who he meant. You couldnt pull the wool over Mrs. McKee.

Take what hed said to Boyd. When he had run into Boyd in the Sanborns lobby, Boyd had said, How are you, McKee? and what had he replied? That he couldnt be happier. Mrs. McKee and me couldnt be happier. Thats what he had said. The moment he had said it he knew something about it didnt sound quite right. If hed been asked by anybody but Gordon Boyd he would have said it and very likely believed it, but he always wondered if he meant what he said to Boyd. So did Mrs. McKee.

These seats remind you of anything, Lois? he said, since they reminded McKee of something. The time they went to see Boyds play in Omaha. Had these reserved front seats since it was Boyds play, and didnt cost him anything. Play purported to be about a walk on the water the young man in the play planned to get around to, but there was no more on the stage than there was in the bullring. Maybe less. In the bullring at least there was sand, which was what the play called for, since the water was in this sandpit east of Polk. But on the stage in Omaha there was nothing but talk. McKee had found most of it hard to follow. He was the only man alive, besides Boyd, himself, who had been there at the sandpit when it all happened, but the scenery wasnt there, and without the scenery it didnt make sense. What sort of sandpit can you have on an empty stage? The strangest thing McKee had ever set his eyes on, a lot stranger than ghosts or flying saucers, had been a person like Boyd thinking he could do something like that. Listening to a lot of talk, in an auditorium, about a boy who was thinking of walking on water, had nothing to do with being out at a sandpit, and seeing it done. Seeing it tried, that is. Seeing him come within an ace of drowning himself. The strange thing wasnt so much that he triedit was what you might expect of a person with a screw loosebut that right up till he failed, till he dropped out of sight, McKee had almost believed it himself. It was that sort of thing people talking on a stage couldnt bring out. It wasnt only Boyd who was crazy, and believed it. McKee had believed it himself.

Dont remind you of a sandpit, does it? he said, since the bullring struck him as quite a bit like one. A dry one. The way hed like to see every sandpit. Without the water there no kid would feel he had to walk on it.

No, it does not remind me of a sandpit, she replied.

In her opinion, especially when they traveled, McKee was always being reminded of something. That is to say, everything reminded him of something else. The outside of this bullring, for instance, reminded McKee of the Lincoln Library basement. Of the big framed pictures on the walls of the basement, Roman ruins, the Coliseum, places like that. McKee had never been to Rome himself, but he had raised a boy who had lived in that basement. The ruins that looked like the bullring were over in the corner where he usually sat. The boys name was Gordon. Named after Gordon Boyd, that is. Grown up and married now, with four youngsters of his own, the oldest one right there in the bullring with them, sitting right beside Boyd, the man who had almost ruined his daddys life. Back at that time his daddy, Gordon McKee, had been just about as crazy as Boyd had been, a moody stage-struck kid who would have tried to walk on air, if the play called for it. He might not have almost drowned himself, like Boyd, but he would have been up in the air all his life if they hadnt made that trip back to New York, where he saw Boyd. Where he saw, that is, what was left of him. The great man in his life looking no different than a common bum. When the boy saw what it was like to walk on waterwhat it was like, that is, if you failedhe at least had sense enough, which he got from his mother, to give it up. You didnt have to rub his nose in his own mess to make him see the point.

Anybody want a cool drink? said McKee, and leaned forward, his hands on the rail, to look down the row to the man at the end of it. Gordon Boyd. He could look right at him since the row was curved. But he wouldnt have known it, or guessed it, if he hadnt been told. Big and soft now, almost the yellow color of the Mexicans. Habit of stroking his face, one side, as though he thought he might need a shave. Next to him was the boy, McKees grandson, wearing his coonskin hat and Davy Crockett outfit, and in a coonskin hat right there beside him was the old man. Not a real coonskin, an imitation with a stringy tail that wouldnt fool anybody, but the old man was so blind all he could do was feel it, and it felt like a tail. McKee had never openly said, nor did he like to think, that his wifes father had a screw loose somewhere, although everybody said so and he knew it himself everytime he looked at him. Now that he was eighty-seven they could blame it on his age, but the screw that was loose had been loose from the beginning. His own wifea woman with a lot of horse sensehad been the first to point it out. He didnt really live in this world, as she put it, but he left her with a string of kids to raise in it, and one of those kids, as it turned out, was McKees wife. She didnt look much like her father, but she had his pale blue eyes, and let her get a little riled and you could see his jaw jutting out of her face.