AMERICAN OBITUARY
27
and the country dogs lay in the sun. Between Hurricane Creek
and the slow-winding Sangamon there was a kind of tumultuous,
rough-and-tumble wildness about the Illinois prairie that all the
railroads had not tamed.
It
was still a vast and sprawling coun–
try of shaggy hills and undammed creeks and half-cleared
forests. In the moment before the dark came down, Frank
Mears, you remembered these farm carts coming into town.
You saw the slow dust rising from between their wheels.
You didn't know, that morning when you caught a slow
freight through Sangamon county, Frank Mears. When you
got into Springfield you gaped at Lincoln's tomb a while, and
then you got on toward Chicago.
Frank Mears, unemployed by civilization, age
22
perhaps.
Perhaps
2
5.
And whether you came from Council Bluffs, from
Sangamon county or from East St. Louis, you still wouldn't have
gotten drunk one day if you'd had a day's work to do.
So cover up the box. Beside the low siloes on prairie farms,
below the tipples of mines long abandoned or above zinc smelt–
ers silent now in the valleys, red cedar and black tamarack wait,
creeping to claim back their own. Though Sangamon county
has been laced with long steel rails the prairie still plunges, like
a wild horse with outstruck hooves, across the planned ties and
over the planned Sears-Roebuck fences, past the low siloes,
through the Indian corn, across the fields and the farms and the
mines and the factories between Hurricane Creek and the slow
Sangamon. America is a long dust-road. Frank Mears sways
in the sun.
