8
PARTISAN REVIEW
used for anything. We weren't doing anything except keeping alive.
. . . A log in the stove would burn through and settle, a board would
creak somewhere in the house. A family of skunks had settled under
the house that winter. They kept up a funny chirruping noise, and
sometimes we could smell them. My father would say from behind
the stove where his chair was tipped against the wall:
"I remember back in '98 when I first came here with a wagon
and team. The snow was hub-deep all over the the prairie. People
here never saw such a snow before and ·they haven't since. I remem–
ber. ... " And his voice would go on for a while, then he'd get up
and prowl the floor, and Bran would smoke, and I'd wish my father
hadn't spoken, for his words looked back over his shoulder at vague
pictures of dead horses and men that troubled me with a time I knew
nothing about ... wheeltracks on the road, harness creaking, voices
shouting.... And now my father was all that was left of the young
men who had come all the way from Iowa in wagons to settle a new
country, and his voice died away in the room, and the clock ticked,
and the fire burned so hot the back of the stove got red, and Bran
put down his pipe and went over and lifted a lid, and the flames
leaped up and flickered on the ceiling, and the brightened room
showed us each other's faces.
It all came down to the fact that we had to eat and we had
to have a place to sleep. Nothing mattered so much as that. I began
to wonder if anything else were worth troubling about. I hadn't
thought so before.
One morning I went in Bran's room to make the beds. I looked
down at my father's pallet and saw his pillow. It looked as if it had
hardly been touched. There was only a round shallow dent in the mid–
dle of it where his head had lain. I don't know why I noticed it that
morning, but I saw it for the first time. I saw my father for the first
time, too. I looked right through him and saw nothing, nothing for
me to hate. You can't hate a dent in a pillow.
It's wrong for the old to take pity from the young. Even when
they don't ask for it in so many words the shapes of their mouths
ask for it, their eyes looking out at the weather, their hands quietly
doing the things that must be done for living. Bran's hands in the
dishwater, Aunt Freda's hands patching a pair of Bran's ragged pants,
my father's hands sopping up the gravy in
his
plate with a piece of
bread so as not to waste a drop. Pity is wrong for the young to feel;
it drains the sap that should be used in growing. Whenever I felt hate
growing in me like hard seed, beginning to push out toward the room
and the people in it, toward my own life; when I began to feel braced
and strong, a man, not a child any longer, then it would bend and
grow back inside me. Pity was the hard wall that pushed it back. The
