Mortals

He looked at Iris. She was transfixed, he would say. She sought out Ray’s hand and squeezed it.

When Kerekang’s eulogy was over, Ray felt vindication. He had been right. It would be too strong to say he’d been rapt, but what he’d felt had been close to it. He could tell it had been the same with Iris.

“Amazing,” he said to her. She was still dabbing at her eyes with sodden wads of tissue.

It had been artful, and not only in transmitting feeling. Kerekang had also covered the waterfront in terms of essential information. Ray had learned certain things he hadn’t known. Apparently Alice Wemberg had worked faithfully on her own in a vegetable gardening project for the gleaners, the vegetable gardening project, rather. She had been a principal. This fountain brings up both bitter and sweet was from Jonson and could be about the West bringing wealth and poverty at the same time, wealth for the swift, and so on. And she had given significant time to this even up to, as he had put it, annoying her husband. Who was another very very good man. So he had learned today that Kerekang was also significantly connected to the gleaners, not just casually.

The assemblage as a whole had responded about as he had. Not that they had been able to get everything, for example, Kerekang’s bravery in bringing up Dwight’s rebellion within the Agency for International Development over the hybrid maize seeds the agency was pushing. He could imagine the AID people saying that this was not what they needed to have shoved down their throats at a memorial service. Dwight had changed his mind about the hybrid maize seed. The hybrid seeds had to be bought new each season and couldn’t be saved over. But some people, in desperation, following custom, had saved them and then done what they always had when they were desperate, eaten them instead of saving them, and then, because the hybrid seeds were treated with mercury, had died, poisoned. It still happened, in bad years. So when Dwight had understood this, he had turned against the hybrids, which was not what AID had sent him to Africa to do, which meant that AID had its own separate reasons for wanting to wave goodbye to him. Kerekang had praised Dwight and Alice equally, as examples of whites who had come to Africa to be of genuine assistance, in contradistinction to many other whites who came to Africa and, in the guise of helping, took more than they ever gave. They were not to be classified with the white ants. That had gotten Ray’s attention. The White Ants was a pamphlet in which the agency was interested, very. It was an inflammatory parable comparing whites in Africa to termites, but the truth was that literarily it had a certain grace and force, which was not an observation Ray could share with Boyle. The White Ants seemed to be everywhere.

And all this had been packed around a splendid thing, a virtuoso reading, not a reading, a rendition, because the performance had been from memory, of a poem by Tennyson, a fairly long one, “The Golden Year.” Tennyson was not a poet Ray considered interesting, but during the rendition he’d kept thinking Bravo. Somehow Kerekang had penetrated Tennyson and found something splendid there. And although the Tennyson had been just one ingredient in the eulogy, it had been the heart of it, for Ray. It was what had rapt him away. He was sorry to say that this didn’t happen to him much anymore. It could still happen with Milton, if he got rolling, reading late, alone, on an empty stomach, oddly enough. Or if he was tired. Then it could happen. It had happened the first time he’d touched Milton. It was the whole point of literature, or one of them, anyway. Absent awhile from my designs was a line from somewhere that described that feeling of being extricated from yourself in a flash, in a liquid way, without struggle. Movies lacked the power to do it for him, certainly never movies on tape. He felt in his breast pocket for a handkerchief and in the process switched off the microcassette recorder he carried there. Kerekang was on tape, if he wanted to hear this again. The quality would be poor, probably, due to distance, although this was a new machine and the damned things were getting more miraculous all the time. Gerard Manley Hopkins had been a revelation, a jolt, the first time through. But Hopkins was too rich, unlike Milton, who was just rich enough, just bejeweled enough. Knowing how to distribute his effects was a great secret Milton had, one of many.

“What was that thing he read?” Iris asked. Ray wanted to keep thinking about it, not talk about it.

“Tennyson,” he answered, “‘The Golden Year,’” letting her see that he didn’t want to talk.

She didn’t see it. “Get me some Tennyson, then. That was wonderful.”

“You won’t like it,” he said.

“Well, what if I do? I think I might.”

“I don’t think you will. What we just heard was exceptional because of the performance part of it.”

“I liked Milton and you were certain I wouldn’t.”

“Well, I was selective. Also I don’t think you liked Milton a lot, did you?”

“I did. I loved Areopagitica.”

“That isn’t poetry, of course.”

“It’s Milton.”

“Okay! I’ll get Tennyson for you, I will, I will.”

“If I wasn’t up to Milton, I wonder if there was anybody around qualified to remedy that pathetic situation.”

“You mean I should have been your tutor.”

“Who better?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. We could try again, I guess.”

“Please don’t overwhelm me with your enthusiasm.”

He didn’t want to get into the vexed question of her literary education and what, exactly, his responsibilities in this area were. The ideal observer would say that since he taught Milton at work, he had a right not to have to teach it again when he got home. Or was it that, in not bringing Milton to Iris, he was trying to protect himself from a declaration from Iris that Milton was… less than she expected?

Also, he didn’t like the way one thing led to another when the subject came up of what she should be reading. For example, since he claimed to love the novel, why didn’t he read more of them, and why, when he did read them, did it seem he read so few novels by women? Did his interest end with Jane Austen? The problem was that they had a fundamental difference over reading, revolving around the proposition, her proposition, implicit, that whatever you read should be discussed and dissected with your mate, which created a certain pressure to read works of a certain caliber and to read with a certain mindfulness you might be in the mood to escape from. Right now he didn’t want to think about it.

The gravamen, roughly, of the poem Kerekang had recited was that those who strove for the coming of universal justice should never be downhearted, because, as Ray was reconstructing the sentiment, in the act of virtuous struggle you are somehow partaking of the Golden Year even though it hasn’t temporally arrived yet. He would have to listen to it again, or read it, but that was about right. It sounded lame in summary, yet it had been thrilling, especially during Kerekang’s complete, heroic embrace of the Welsh accent in which the heroic member of the hiking group expressed his defiant positiveness about the future. Sections of the poem were still with him.

When wealth no more shall rest in mounded heaps,
But smit with freer light shall slowly melt
In many streams to fatten lower lands,
And light shall spread,
and man be liker man
Thro’ all the season of the golden year…

And then the windup, in the voice of the old, indomitable do-gooding Welshman in rebuttal to the pessimism of the younger men in the party about the possibility, ever, of justice, general justice, being achieved.

What stuff is this!
Old writers push’d the happy season back,
The more fools they, we forward: dreamers both…
Then something he’d lost, then something ending with
That unto him who works, and feels he works,
This same grand year is ever at the doors…