From the hill-top one had a view of the city lying along the sea, a new, bright city, an unfriendly sea of a dazzling blue. I sat down on the grass by the great stone. Here, at last, was something that belonged to me and to no one else. No one would dispute with me the possession of my father’s grave. I felt excited and uplifted as if I had come into a precious inheritance. And yet what had he left me? A message of failure, an unanswered question, a sense of not having counted for him enough myself to keep him on the earth. He had shuffled me off with the rest of it. My mother must have hated him. She must have had something to do with his giving it up like that. I would have loved him. I would have understood him. If he had waited for me we would have been good companions. If he had lived I would never have gone to Paris. I would have gone west with him to his wide prairie and high skies. Everything would have been different. I had missed something. What had I missed? I looked out across the dry grass, the rolling hills, the big, bare, blazing land, the glittering sea under the windy sun, and I recognized it as mine. I had missed my life. I had taken the wrong turn.
We boarded the train again next day and recrossed the continent of America. It took us seven days and nights to reach New York. We passed through Denver, Chicago, Cleveland, and countless other cities. We crossed deserts white as sand and overgrown with cactus. In the middle of the Mohawa desert we stopped at a place called Bagdad to give the engine a drink of water. Bagdad was a single wooden shed standing in a waste of sand. Bagdad, Bagdad. It was very hot in the train. My aunt and I sat most of the time on the open platform at the end of the observation car, watching the earth fly from under the train and drinking iced drinks that the coloured porters brought us. It is very exciting to be in a train like that, rushing across the earth at such speed, suspended in space as if on a giant bridge, and the vast, the immense, the overwhelming panorama flying endlessly past. Cities, rivers, prairies, mountains, lonely farms, the steel jaws of stations engulfing you, out again through the crowding buildings of a city you will never know, full of people you will never see, into the open, the horizon endlessly wheeling, the earth under the train flying backwards, but the far edge of the earth towards the horizon wheeling with you. Thundering along, the pounding of the engine, the grinding wheels exciting your brain to a special liveliness, the train is a miraculous thing, a steel comet cushioned inside imitating a dwelling, but a long comet whirring through space, a blaze of flying light by night, a streak and a noise by day, and from it you look out upon a thousand worlds flying past, and you have glimpses, instant, quick glimpses, of countless mysterious lives, a group of children hanging over a fence waving, a farmer in a wide straw hat sitting in a blue wagon at a railway crossing, a boundless golden field behind him of innumerable garnered sheaves all gold, a village like a collection of wooden boxes, saddled horses tethered to a rope in front of an unpainted post office. Cowboys driving cattle, rolling prairies, horses, wild, running, kicking up their heels, a lonely cabin against a hill, hens scratching outside, thin smoke coming from the wobbling iron smoke stack, lost in the boundless blue; families moving, all their household goods piled on wagons, the men walking beside the horses with long whips, a mail coach lurching along a mountain road, the driver has a Colt revolver in his pocket. You know that. You hope he’ll get the highway robbers who will be waiting for him at dark. Bret Harte wrote about him. And now Walt Whitman’s country—Leaves of Grass—a great poem, the greatest. He knew. He had found out. He understood the giant, the great urge of life, in this my country.
And I thought of my father, crossing and recrossing the continent, restless, lonely, powerful, dissatisfied, an isolated man moving up and down the land, handling money, gambling with money, not knowing what to do, growing tired of it all.
I said to my aunt—“It was twenty-five years ago, but it brings him close.”
“Your father’s death?”
“Yes, it makes a difference.”
“How?”
“I’m with him. It clears the ground.”
I did not quite know what I meant then, but I know now.
We reached New York. I was suddenly filled with foreboding. In the high window of our towering hotel I sat with Patience far into the night. We sat together like watchers in a tower, and a million lighted windows shone before us in the blue night.