Broken Vessels by Andre Dubus Read Free Book Online Page B

been removed not only from the land itself, but from its spirit; or, as Sharon says, the heart. After the open country and mountains, the earth looks punished, and it is hard to believe that its people have not been punished as well, for nothing more than the desire to love and to prove oneself worthy of that by going to work.
    West of Davis there are irrigated farms and fields of yellow-brown hay with a wide black strip where they have burned it. To the south the sky is broad, nearly midwestern, but it seems lower; to the north it is hazy and broken by a mountain range. Corn is growing. Near us the low hills are grown with hay, and the trees on them are darker green against their sand dune color. Turning southwest we go through a stretch of marsh, white herons rising from it; then rows of grey ships are sitting on green and yellow grass, and we see the wide Sacramento and cross it and from the bridge we see the ships mothballed at Vallejo. We stop at Martinez and watch Casey outside with his mother and two-year-old sister, their hair moving in the breeze, Casey punching his palm with his fist.
    Then we go downriver. On the opposite bank are blond hills; then men are fishing from a wharf, there is a marina with sailboats and fishing boats, and we are going south along the Bay. It is wide, muddy near the shore, then green, and across it there are blue ridges against the pale sky. Then we see the Oakland Bridge and, far off, the Golden Gate Bridge, and trees shaped by the wind leaning forever to the east, and a teenage black boy, lean and muscular in his shorts, jogging north along the tracks, his hands high, at his shoulders, punching: hooking and jabbing the sunlit air.
    1981

O F R OBIN H OOD AND W OMANHOOD
    W HEN I WAS a graduate student at the University of Iowa I had a wife and four children, and an income of about four thousand dollars a year, and I stood in line monthly for food handed out by the state. My juxtaposition with the others in line made me uncomfortable, for I was usually wearing a tie and jacket for my duties as a teaching assistant, I was in my twenties, and I felt that, to the others in line, I looked like a man with hope and direction; at the very least, a man who was only temporarily a part of that line and the life it helped support. I brought home cans and cartons of butter, cheese, peanut butter, flour, and chunks of strange meat reminiscent of C-rations; but with imagination, the meat could be made into a casserole that was more than merely edible. I also knew, as I stood in line with the poor, that I had chosen to leave a good salary, had chosen to go to graduate school, while for those other people the act of choosing was so limited that it was not, and would probably never be, an essential part of their lives.
    But there was another way I brought home the bacon, a romantic way that could not have been romantic when it was the only way a man could feed the bodies he loved. In the fall we went hunting, my friends and I; sometimes there were so many of us that we resembled a rifle squad walking abreast through the cornfields. None of us went hunting because it was a cheap way to feed families. The money for licenses and shells would have bought more food in a supermarket. We hunted because we were friends, and because we loved to hunt: to slip between the cornstalks in autumn and, as winter started, to walk over the snow or frozen earth and the cornstalks lying now stiff as wood; to flush the rabbit and fire over his bounding tail at his head; and, best of all, the sudden rush of the pheasant, the quick shooting, and the always fair decision, in doubtful cases, about whose gun, whose finger and eye, had killed the bird. At the end of those weekend afternoons I brought home the game and placed it on the picnic table where we ate in the kitchen, and I was able to forget what it had actually cost in time and money, to see it simply as lovely meals I had brought home, a supplement to the C-ration