Shepherd Creed

Shepherd Creed

  Copyright 2016 Paul Hawkins

  Chapter 1

  My name is John Smart, and I knew Shepherd Creed as well as any man during his life, and I want to tell his story as best I can, because in the end he was a good man in precisely the sense of how 'good' ought to be. Not great, not flashy, but good in the way one of those stoical saints is good. He may even have been great, but he never would have admitted how great he was. That would have been showy.

  He was also a “career man” of forty years with the same place of employment, and to achieve great things in that most banal of circumstances is a tribute to his optimistic human spirit. Lesser men have turned completely ashen under such circumstances, but Shepherd achieved his own quiet kind of triumph.

  *

  It was autumn and the fields that ran away on the horizon were as brown and striated as the shell of a chestnut. Orange leaves hung on the trees and fell here and there and chattered along the ground.

  The boy, who was maybe twelve, sat beneath a pin oak with a mostly dry creekbed behind him and an old Model A in front of him on the road. It was his father's car and it had survived across many years and many owners and many miles. It may even have been held together by rust. A faded tractor rested in the field across the road, and his father had left with the car while he walked to the farmhouse for assistance with his broken vehicle.

  A red dirt road that ran before him, but the real roads were coming here, the boy thought, the paved roads. The roads were to be built by the state – roads of tarmac forming endless gray lines webbing the state, linking town to town, county seat to county seat, center of industry (such as they were) to center of industry. They were to link farmers to markets, grain to elevators, businessmen to businessmen, and Wells Fargo wagons to people everywhere.

  The boy's father, Robert Creed, had sat at the dinner table one night and proudly told the boy how lucky their town was that it would get a road. Roads meant growth and money and progress. Some towns, already passed by time and trade, would not be blessed by the presence of a state road and would hasten in decline. Towns that were not a county seat or that had merely offended a state dignitary might see themselves passed by. But their town didn't need to worry about that, his father said – they were strong social democrats. And so one of the magic roads would be here, the boy thought, a slender pipeline leading to the places where important people might be. Even in his young mind he admired the project's engineering and design. The significance of the road system was marvelously important for a thing to be made of asphalt.

  *

  The boy had the misfortune to be named Shepherd Creed. It was too pious for the decidedly mechanistic boy, but his grandmother had been an agitator in the Women's Christian Temperance Union and his mother, who was a tall thin woman with pale hair in an Amish style, wore her mother's indelible stamp. The grandmother had stood next to Carrie Nation fighting the devil in a bottle, and her soul had enjoyed being fanned to a fire of righteous indignation. If the heady wars of temperance, fought in the dirt and grime of saloons, had been completed by the time of the mother, they were replaced by the quiet broader work of moral temperance; negation gave way to the slow and steady march toward purgation and perfection, the work to winnow away the remaining illusions and turn the soul away from the eyehooks of the world.

  The father was in many ways the mother’s temperamental opposite. He had no high ideals. He enjoyed planting, hunting, reaping, and repairing – all in the shadow of the low hills that began to roll green and verdant in Eastern Oklahoma. He was a man of thrift not given to drink or gambling, not so much because they were sins but because they were a waste of money and effort. He spent his days in the fields and his nights in the old out building, by lantern light, sharpening or fixing his tools. He valued not being beholden to other men. His hands were calloused and often greasy. The wife saw in his self-control the natural suggestions of preternatural rectitude. If she was holy he was good, like the classical philosophers who had not known Jesus, which is all a circuitous way of saying he did not like church much.

  The son, Shepherd Creed, had button bright eyes of light brown and curly brown hair – from his frame you could see that he would be a sturdy boy and a strong young man. But his bright eyes showed more intelligence and curiosity than they did the poetic sense of wonder that often leads to the door of religion, yet he had a kind of wonder at the disciplined inspiration to accomplish physical achievements. The innovators were more than engineers. They had a mind’s eye that could see a better place.

  He wanted to ride a train someday. And drive the tractor. And someday drive the wide clean roads paving the state, and he wanted to see new places. And he wanted to help build the roads.

  His sisters made up for his impiety – except the youngest. His three elder sisters, who looked and dressed in austerity like the mother, had thin frames and long faces and washed-out blonde hair that they often wore in a bun. They would have lived as simply as Mennonites if they could, but the youngest, who was one year younger than Shepherd, was pretty and knew it, and therefore she tossed her golden locks coquettishly at an early age because boys flitted around her likes bees to a flower, and she had a head for worldly things and knew even at an early age that boys were a means to an end.

  *

  These family politics would have sustained themselves for several years if the mother had been well. But the mother had fallen down the steps of the cellar last winter and broken her leg, and it was in the recuperation of this that a general malaise set in, an ague that was soon diagnosed as pneumonia. She could not get warm, she would not eat. The boy remembered long afternoons in winter with his mother seated by the stove, a blanket around her shoulders and her face as wan as a grayed bedsheet. The husband saw her fade away and thought it was because she had never been much but otherworldly in the first place. He invited her mother down to tend to her, her mother being old but rough and as ready in this world as in the other, but nothing but more fever set in, and though her mother was there it was the husband whom she asked to read the Bible to her, and he would bend by lamp light near her bed and thumb through the book, worn and splayed from many readings, and he would read this passage or that at her request, and in the sort of odd way that death lets things in, the two became closer than at any time since they were courting, and the man shook with tears after leaving her each evening, and he recalled in his hidden heart the love his memory had all but forgotten for her in the workaday world of things. He knelt one night and prayed for his own conversion that it might save her. But it was to no avail, and so in the early days one April she passed away, and the man was utterly alone and there was not enough meat on the clean white bones of purity to nourish him.

  Her death had a profound effect on Shepherd. For the first time he became aware of the foolishness of an expectation of constancy. One must keep moving. On top of that he felt a profound guilt that if he had been less prone to idle speculation at his own eventual grandeur she might still be here. Forever after there was a hatred at what had happened, a distrust at the 'what if' over the here-and-now.

  There was no question that the grandmother would take the boy's older sisters – except the eldest, who was betrothed to the son of the preacher. She had wanted the boy too but the man refused, saying that he should keep him to finish his apprenticeship into manhood. And she had wanted sturdy little Eudora, the youngest, but at this the girl balked with all the fervor of wild mare at a saddle, and she insisted it was out of love for her father that she stay. She was his baby, and she in her glow preserved in him a ladder out of his despair, some love of things that smelled and felt and tasted real. The grandmother had relented in her demands for Eudora because, perhaps, she intuited that any insistence would only se
nd the youth further and faster into the waiting arms of the world.

  And so one bright morning in early May the eldest sisters disappeared down the road with in a buggy, to go to Kansas where their grandmother abided, and the man took his son into the field one day, green tall with wheat, and told him of the responsibilities that he would begin to keep. The father began to work double-hard to pay for the employment of a local woman to come in during the days, to see to the chores about the place, to do some cleaning and pickling and canning, and to simply fill the aching void of a need for routine, and in this he found a lady of the church who mirrored his sensibilities for thrift and soon was running a tight ship and even keeping Eudora to her studies and Shepherd (who was increasingly inclined to go hunting) to his.

  *

  A few years passed in this arrangement until the wounded man began to find his feet beneath himself and thrive again, so much so that he came to purchase the neighboring farm and hire a man to sharecrop it. All the while Shepherd studied and found himself growing tall as quickly as Euroda (who now called herself “Topsy”) grew fair, and soon a few more years passed in which Eudora struggled at her education but to her it did not much matter, and Shepherd excelled at his, though he did not much try. Shepherd had become more man than a boy, his frame muscled from the industry of work, and his eyes were still bright with curiosity at the world. He was predicted to achieve great things and gave an oratory at the fair in the manner of Cicero and was sponsored in the farm club by the leading men of the community. He was mid-way through highschool with the hinted promise of a scholarship to the A&M college a few autumns out.

  It was then that a thunder-blow in the arrangement of the family politics struck him a second time. His father announced his love for the caretaker woman and her love for him. Eudora said she was not the least bit surprised, but Shepherd reeled from the news. There could be no replacing his mother. The father announced all of this with a tone of forced pleasantness that Shepherd had only heard one time before, when he had asked where he and his sisters had come from. The boy rebelled at the union – it gnawed at him – it was impossible. For one thing she was not in any sense sublime – she had a workaday coarseness. His mother had been beautiful. He found he could not sleep at night. He did not know he could feel so strongly, although he was becoming a cauldron of feelings lately, often at war with the world of routine. And so it was in the night that Topsy came to him and said “Let's leave.”

  At first this occurred to him as absurd, and irresponsible, but a quick check of the sentiment inside of him found all his instincts willing. He saw his future out in the rest of the world. He saw the farm grown too small for him, smaller than last summer's clothes. He was a man as much as a boy – he was fitted to escape.

  “My bag is packed and so is yours,” Topsy said. “They will be off for a honeymoon in a few days. We will take the car then.”

  And so it was done. He was sixteen and Topsy was fifteen. In the dead of night, when they were entrusted to the care of an aunt who slept through the noisy effort of it all (the creaking of the barn door, the braying of the animals, the coughing of the car) they made a break for it. If there was one thing he knew, it was how to drive a car. He had seen to it for years that his father instructed him. And so they lit out onto the wide metallic moon-reflecting roads, across the gray bands that webbed the world, toward some sort of center, they escaped.

  *

  “God loved her and she still died,” the boy said to his siter. It was the dead of night and the road was rolling underneath them. “I can’t much trust a God like that.”

  Topsy was looking at herself in the car's mirror. “What's that?”

  “God couldn't have loved someone more than he loved Mom, and she still died,” the boy said.

  “Everybody dies.”

  “They shouldn't have to – not the people God says he loves.”

  “You're tired from driving – let me drive.”

  “Since when do you know how to drive?”

  “Boys taught me.”

  “I’m fine, and in any case I'm not getting in any car with you behind the wheel thank you.”

  “Well where are we going?”

  “Dad has that brother in the city – the musician. That's why Dad doesn't like him – he's kind of a black sheep. I think he'll let us lay low until we figure out what to do.”

  “I always wanted to be a singer,” Topsy said.

  “The world will teach you if you can sing or not.”

  “You got his address?”

  “Yep – on a letter.”

  “Well then drive on in the night, country boy,” she said, leaning back. “I got to figure out how I'll get famous as a singer and plan my wardrobe.”

  “Mom wouldn't be happy.”

  “Since when do you care about what Mom would have thought?”

  “Since she isn't here and that washer-woman taken her place. And since you grew up so confoundedly stupid.”

  “Well you're your own man now, Shep, and you better get used to it. There's a big life ahead of you since the moment you stole the car keys.”

  He was going to say something but then he thought I'd be a waste of breath to bother. He just shook himself awake a little and stared at the repeating line ahead of him.

  *

  Once when he was young, his grandfather had gone to the city on business and brought Shepherd along and one image had always stuck in his mind: the contrast between rich and poor – the beggars outside the train station even as a very rich couple was exiting the depot. Pressed suits and dirty overalls; a beaded dress and broken shoes. His grandfather said that this is what happened when country folks moved to the city. It broke their connection to the earth and removed a man from the harvest of his work. In the city, some men worked but others kept the money. And when young Shepherd asked about this, his grandfather answered that this is the fix built into the system in the world of factories and smoke. But someday a pious voice would rise to fix it. History itself would make him emerge. Someone would rise up and see to it that the world was run by workers, not a collusion of bankers and crooked politicians writing laws that made them richer. In the back of his mind, and sometimes in the front of it, Shepherd let himself imagine that he might be that man – though, as I've said, he did not have that drop of poetry in his sensibility that turns water to wine, that makes people drunk with the vision you lay out and want to be at your side to see it done.

  *

  And so it was with a sense of wariness at his own eagerness to escape that Shepherd steered their vehicle to the outskirts of town and then into the sudden close ranks of unfamiliar dirty buildings and finally to their uncle's address. They arrived at a drab apartment house in about 8:00 in the morning and knocked on a numbered door. Shepherd's uncle Raymond answered. He was a lanky brown-haired man much taller than their father, and younger but apparently more care-worn. He had a pencil moustache. He opened the door in dumbfounded surprise. He looked like he had slept well after dawn and just been awakened. He rubbed his face.

  They identified themselves as his relatives, but this only made him recoil. “Good God, what are you doing here?”

  “We ran off,” Shepherd said.

  “That was a stupid thing to do. I'm calling your dad.”

  “Please don't,” Shepherd said. “He remarried and I just can't stand it. And he was always saying you ran off when you were young.”

  The man looked down at him, cinching his bathrobe. “The world was different then. You had to be a man earlier.”

  “Well, that's the way I felt when our father got married again. I felt I had to get away and grow up in a hurry. And I wouldn't have done it if I weren't serious.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen – seventeen in August.”

  “And how old's she?” He gestured at Eudora.

  “Fifteen.”

  “That's the trouble with girls,” he said, “they get a certain age and you can't tell.”
/>
  “Look, you can send her back, but take me in. I can work. I don't want to be in that house again.”

  “You're both going home. Now come in – I need to make some coffee.”

  He opened the door and the two of them walked in behind him. His rooms were gray and spartan.

  “Sit down,” he said.

  They did, in silence, while he set the coffee on. Then he settled in the kitchen chair opposite them and lit a cigarette.

  “So he remarried? I would have thought he'd tell me.”

  “It disgraces my mother,” Shepherd said, and he felt himself get hot. “And I'm getting out of there whether you like it or not.”

  The man smiled at him – the cigarette was calming him. “Look son, you have to finish school. And it's not like I don't understand. You get to be a certain age and the world doesn't fit anymore.”

  “I just hate it,” Shepherd said, but the man would not budge. He took one long pull on his cigarette and exhaled slowly and gave the boy a sideways look. “There's fire in you.”

  Shepherd nodded. “Dad got comfy. I don't want to get that way. Comfortable men settle for things.”

  His uncle rose and ran a hand through his greasy hair. “Look, it's not that I don't like you, but you don't run off at your age and not get into trouble. I got no kids and I don't intend to have any, but I'm not letting my brother's children make a mistake. I'm going to gather my thoughts then I'm going to call your dad.”

  “He’s on his honeymoon.”

  “Then I’ll drive you back myself. I’ll have to borrow a car. I’ll ask a friend tonight.”

  “Tonight?”

  “I’m a musician – we do two shows a night at a fancy hotel. I’ll ask my friend. That gives you one day of freedom.”

  “You take me home I'll just run off again,” Shepherd said.

  The uncle just ignored him. “Coffee's boiling,” the he said finally. He returned to the table with two cups. He put one in front of Shep.

  “Man up.”

  “I've been drinking coffee since I was six,” Shepherd said.

  “So you have,” his uncle said, and took a sip. “I'm not surprised. But can you play the trombone?”