Crossroads
- Автор: Франзен Джонатан
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Жанр: Современная русская и зарубежная проза
Электронная книга - «Crossroads». Краткое содержание книги:
Universally recognized as the leading novelist of his generation, Jonathan Franzen is often described as a teller of family stories. Only now, though, in *Crossroads* , has he given us a novel in which a family, in all the intricacy of its...
“We’re praying that he’ll repent,” his mother said placidly. “Then we can all be together again.”
Her equanimity was consonant with the primacy of Christ in her life, the secondary nature of everything else. The commandment to honor one’s parents came from the Old Testament. In the New Testament, although the rejoicing at a sinner’s reclamation was hundredfold, the sinner was first required to repent. Never mind an offending parent—you were supposed to pluck your own offending eye out. His mother was only as radical as the Gospel itself.
On Christmas morning, on the snow-dusted porch of their house, Russ found a small chest of white oak, the size of a child’s coffin. The wood was smoothly planed and fragrant, the brass fittings stippled with hand manufacture. Inside it was a note. For Russell on Christmas, I reckon you have enough tools to fill this, Love from your Opa.
Russ, weeping, carried the chest inside. He wept again later in the morning, when his father instructed him to get an ax and chop it up for kindling.
“No,” he said, “that’s a waste. Someone else can use it.”
“You will do as I say,” his father said. “I want you to look into the fire and watch it burn.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” his mother said mildly. “Let’s just put it away for now. My father may yet repent.”
“He won’t,” his father said. “Nothing in this world is certain, but I know his mind better than you do. Russell will do as I say.”
“No,” Russ said.
“You will obey me. Go and get an ax.”
Russ put on his overcoat, took the chest outside, as if he intended to obey, and carried it through the streets of Lesser Hebron. Because he loved his grandfather and love was the essence of the Gospel, he didn’t even feel defiant. He felt, instead, that his parents were somehow mistaken.
The blacksmith shop was shuttered, chimney smoke rising from the low rooms in back. Russ was less afraid of his father’s wrath than of finding his grandfather with a harlot, but Clement was alone in his little kitchen, boiling coffee on the woodstove. He looked like a new man—closely shaved and freshly barbered, his fingernails clean. Russ explained what had happened.
“I’ve made my peace with it,” Clement said. “I already lost your mother when she married, and that’s as it should be. No more than what the Scripture asks.”
“She’s praying for you. She wants you to—repent.”
“I don’t hold it against her. Your father, yes, but not her. She’s godlier than any of us. If Estelle were baptized again and married me, I don’t doubt that your mother would accept her. But I’ll be a sick old man soon enough. I don’t want Estelle feeling she has to take care of me. It’s blessing enough to have her now.”
The verb to have, the very name Estelle, the carnality they evoked, made Russ queasy.
“If God can’t forgive me,” Clement said, “so be it. But who’s to say if your father knows what God forgives? I’ve been to the Lutheran church, over to Dobbsville, with Estelle. Good people, plenty Christian—there are many ways to skin a cat. I can’t say as I’ve tried any of them, but I’ve skinned a raccoon, and the adage has it right. There are different ways of doing it.”
Leaving the beautiful chest safe with Clement, Russ went home and confessed to his mother what he’d done. She kissed him and forgave him, but his father never really did, because Russ had made his choice. When he went to Arizona and discovered for himself the different ways a cat could be skinned, the only disclosive letters he wrote were to his grandfather.
The alternative service camp was in the national forest outside Flagstaff, on the site of a former CCC camp. It was administered by the American Friends Service Committee, but a good third of the workers shared Russ’s faith. After he’d shoveled dirt for some months, painted picnic tables, planted trees, the camp director asked him if he could use a typewriter. Though still only twenty, Russ was among the older workers, and he’d had five semesters of college. The director, George Ginchy, set him up with a foot-tall Remington, its keys yellowed to the color of custard, in the antechamber of his office. Although Ginchy was a Quaker, from Pennsylvania, he was also a longtime college football coach and Boy Scout leader. His camp had a bugler who began the day with reveille and ended it with taps, a cook whose job title was quartermaster, and now, in Russ, an aide-de-camp. Ginchy liked everything about military life except the killing part.
One morning in the spring of 1945, the sun rose on a dusty black relic of a truck parked outside headquarters. Inside it, upright and silent, since sometime in the night, had been sitting four Navajo men in black felt hats. They were elders from Tuba City and had come to petition the camp director. George Ginchy welcomed them, widened his eyes at Russ, and asked him to bring coffee. Taking a pot into the office, Russ found three of the Navajo men standing against a wall with their arms crossed, the fourth studying a framed topo map in the corner, all of them silent.
Russ had never seen an Indian before, and he had so little worldly experience that he didn’t recognize the sensation in his heart as love at first sight. He thought the Navajos’ faces moved him because they were old. And yet, if he’d been asked to describe their leader, who wore a turquoise-clasped string tie beneath a fleece-collared coat, stiff with dirt, he might have used the word beautiful.
Ginchy uncomfortably said, “How can I help you gentlemen?”
One of them murmured in a strange tongue. The leader addressed Ginchy. “What are you doing here?”
“We, ah—this is a service camp for men with a conscientious objection to war.”
“Yes. What are you doing?”
“Specifically? It’s a bit of a hodgepodge. We’re improving the national forest.”
This seemed to amuse the Navajos. There were chuckles, an exchange of glances. The leader nodded at the pine trees outside and explained, “It’s a forest.”
“Land of many uses,” Ginchy said. “I believe that is the Forest Service motto. You’ve got your logging, your hunting, your fishing, your watershed protection. We’re improving the basis for all that. My guess is, somebody knew the right people in Washington.”
A silence fell. Russ offered a mug of coffee to the leader, who wore a wide silver ring on his thumb, and asked if he wanted sugar.
“Yes. Five spoons.”
When Russ returned from the antechamber, the leader was explaining to Ginchy what he wanted. The federal government, through its agents, had impoverished the Navajos by requiring severe reductions of their stock of cattle, sheep, and horses, and by unfairly siding with the Hopis in their land disputes. Now the country was fighting a war in which the Navajos sent their young men to fight, and conditions were bad on the reservation—fertile land eroding, the remaining stock fenced out of good pasture, too few able hands available for restoration work.
“War is bad for everyone,” Ginchy agreed.
“You are the federal government. You have strong young men who won’t fight. Why help a forest that doesn’t need helping?”
“I’m sympathetic, but I’m not actually the federal government.”
“Send us fifty men. You feed them, we’ll shelter them.”
“Yeah, that’s … We have procedures here, roll calls and so forth. If I sent people to your reservation, they’d be off my reservation, if you take my meaning.”
“Then you come, too. Move your camp. There isn’t any work to do here.”
“I don’t have authority for that. If I asked for authority, the government would remember I’m here. I’d rather they not remember.”
“They’ll forget again,” the leader said.
Already, in his first minutes of acquaintance, because he instinctively loved them, Russ grasped that the Navajos weren’t lesser than white men but simply very different. In his later experience, they were unfailingly blunt about what they wanted. They didn’t say please, didn’t bow to convention or authority. Disqualifications self-evident to white men were meaningless to them. White men chalked up the frustrations of dealing with them to orneriness and stupidity, but Russ, that morning, saw nothing stupid in them. It hurt to think that they’d come all the way from Tuba City, a drive of several hours, and sat for further hours in a freezing truck, with an idea that made sense to them. It hurt to think of them returning empty-handed, in some unguessable state of mind—disappointment? Anger at the government? Embarrassment for having been naïve? Or just mute perplexity? Russ had been thirteen when his beloved farm dog, Skipper, fell sick with what his mother said was cancer. The dog’s pain and infirmity soon reached the point where she made Russ ask a neighbor to shoot him and bury him. For Russ the hardest part of saying good-bye had been that Skipper couldn’t understand what he was doing to him, or why. The Navajo elders were the opposite of dumb beasts, but this only made imagining their perplexity more painful.