Electric Light of the
World
by Doug Crandell
I am from the first electrically lighted city in the world ¾ the same town as Crystal Gayle. Once, for Halloween, I dressed up as her, long brown hair tickling the ground, but my father ripped me out of the get-up and made me go as ‘a injun who’d just seen the lights.’ He had my mother use iodine on my legs, arm and skinny chest and told her to make sure I went like the boy I was; like what he and others were taught the Indians’ skin must’ve looked like when our town was so strangely illuminated more than a century ago. The Fort Wayne Gazette called it "the strangest light ever exhibited in the United States." But even now, I still dream of Crystal’s hair; it’s all that length.
As I stood near the cenotaph that marked the electricity memorial, I was having a hard time remembering why I’d decided to drive the two hours from Indianapolis to come back home. Luminarias bought and arranged by the Future Homemakers of America lined the pea gravel path that circled the huge limestone rock. If I had forgotten any of the town’s history, it was all there for me on the bronze foot plaques, and hand painted signs that surrounded the monument.
Across the dead end street, three small boys were playing. They ran in circles, woo-wooing and patting their red mouths with the fingertips of one hand. Beyond them, I could make out the frame of a pick-up truck slowing down to make a right turn. The boys instinctively stopped their circling and froze in place. A clopping noise broke the rhythmic gurgling made by the river’s white dalles, as the truck’s wheels tossed caked mud from its tires. When the truck stopped a man wearing several layers of coveralls elbowed the door open. He got out and stood by the truck. He hollered, "Randy! Come on! Your grandma’ told ya’ to be home an hour ago. Come on son!"
I didn’t even see the little boy get in, nor had I noticed the insignia on the truck’s driver side door until the man backed up the vehicle, almost hitting my legs with the back bumper. He glanced briefly at me, without any hint of recognition, as he gunned the engine and took off in a swirl of fuel fumes.
The truck belonged to Swan’s Farm, a hoggery run by his family, and he was Murphy Swan, my childhood friend and then some. He was the only other person alive who knew that it was my father, the man I had just driven two hours to see perform his last auction, who had accidentally ground my arm off. I was not aware that Murphy had fathered a child, but it came as no surprise to me. He had gotten heavier-framed, and grown a thick, black beard. If I had not known that a corn picker had threshed his brother, Eric, to death two years before, I would’ve mistaken Murphy for him. But even under the bulky thermal clothing and bushy beard, I could detect Murphy’s sinewy form. It had been ten years since I’d last seen him, and even then it was at a friend’s wedding, making it impossible to talk at any length; a confinement I am sure he found comforting at the time.
The truck braked momentarily at a stoplight. I watched the glaring red brakes of his truck as they ebbed on and off, and thought maybe he had seen my one arm in his rear-view mirror and was preparing to stop and come back. Or, maybe he had seen me and was pumping the brakes with involuntary spasms of anxiety, at the unlikely possibility that I was back in town.
***************
The breakfast with my parents at the Huddle House was uneventful, and the conversation trailed off after about fifteen minutes, leaving us talking about the weather again. My mother’s eyes, sooty and wide, appeared more tired than I had ever remembered seeing them.
My father looked as he always had, with rosy cheeks and a small paunch under crisp flannel, his baldhead concealed with a beige Stetson. He’d never been able to bring himself to admit that it was him, not a faulty fuse, that was responsible for my arm being ripped from its shoulder socket. He had simply not seen me when he flipped the power on to the auger. I remember him choking out the words to my mom in the emergency room, "The switch just kicked on, didn’t it Peter?"
He had said it was the damnedest thing, and from that day on, when our eyes would meet, a kind of current would run between us, like our secret was bound together by energy. His fabrication had become mine, and over the years I had even altered it some myself. When an acquaintance at a party or a stranger in public had the nerve to pry about what had happened to my arm, like I was a museum relic fully accessible to their whims of curiosity, I usually would site bogus wiring and defective switches as the culprits of my predicament. The hazards of farm life they would say, and I would nod a knowing affirmation. Sons will always abet their father's inventions, and I had told his story well.
At the small orange table in the Huddle House, with the gray light of winter slanting in from the greasy windows, he fiddled with the buttons on his shirt, and pretended to adjust his hat. It was clear I made him nervous and I believed then, that he was locked inside a lie I was certain he was prepared to take to his grave.
We paid our bill and got up; we agreed to meet at their house the next morning, after I’d conceded I would help with the auction sale. As I watched their car pull slowly away, I felt a dread come over me. I could see the courthouse and its summit from the parking lot of the Huddle House. The divining rod on the top of its copper cupola had the customary gigantic Mylar light bulb, which was applied every year just before the town’s celebrations went into full swing. When the crude electrical switch was thrown in March of 1880, the Miami Indians watched from the banks of the river in lit dismay. It has been said that when our forbearers were first introduced to electric light, they had the tendency to stare at them and then report with disdain, that the lights had caused them not to be able to see anything at all. A fact that was rarely discussed in any of the town’s annual celebrations revolving around light bulbs, electrical currents, and an artificial black out staged to simulate what the years before arc carbon light would have been like.
It was slowly beginning to turn dusk, and as I peered up at the courthouse from the old canal streets below, the bulb-balloon flickered first on with illumination, and back off again before buzzing permanently into a soft glow of radiance. I felt a tightness in my chest begin, as I walked through town to my hotel.
************
I was waiting outside the copper revolving doors of the inn when I noticed that the back seat of my father’s Subaru station wagon was missing my mother. I yanked the passenger’s side door open with the anger that she had reneged on our plans. "Where’s mom?"
"Oh, your mother’s knee was actin’ up again, so she decided to rest a bit today. Told me to tell ya’ that she’d come along tomorrow. That woman sure ain’t what she was when I married her. Course, …" I cut him off before he was able to continue his rambling, a pattern of his that could go on forever. He gunned the car, swerving to miss an old couple jaywalking with their heads down.
"Where are we going?" I said, trying to reconcile the awful reality that I was going to have to work with him.
"Your mother didn’t tell ya? We’re goin’ to your ole’ pal’s dad’s place. The Swans. Old man Swan died last fall and they sold out to one of those big hog corporations. It’s been quite a controversy around here, with the smell and all. Your mother took a pot pie out to them when he passed and they were signing the contract with D& D Swine Producers right then and there. Awful really, the old son-of-a-bitch wasn’t even cold in the ground ‘fore those bastards from D&D had built new confinement buildings and changed their whole place around. Course, it wudn’t the boys’ fault, what with prices the way they are. It didn’t help things none though that old man Swan had doubled his debt tryin’ to keep up neither. Murphy hired on with ‘em and has been running the thing locally. Every month or so the big wigs come in from Detroit and make him account for every grain of corn those hogs shit out."
The windows of the car became fogged, as he recounted the history of Murphy’s family. I could feel the familiar tightening in my sternum that had nearly delivered me into a fit of sobbing the night before, and asked, "Will he be there?"
"Who? Murphy. Yeah, I ‘spect. He’s the one that thought he should get rid of all the old farm implements and such. He called me a couple months ago right as I was retiring, and asked me if I would do one last sale for him. I said, hell yes Murphy, your old man was a hell’uva guy and I would be proud to do the sale."
As he turned the car, I held onto the door handle to keep from scooting nearer to him on the slick vinyl seat. I dug my fingertips into the handle and braced myself for the images I knew were going to come pouring into my mind’s eye. The hot hay field was back again. I could see Murphy on the edge of a bale of hay as we took a break upon the front planks of an already stacked wagon. His shirt was off, and the sun was reflecting like shards of mirrors from his tan torso. He pulled me close and we kissed one another hard on the mouth. As the movie reeled on in my head, I gripped the side of the seat, and felt the cold sweat on my head. I gazed forward, as if the window shield had become a drive-in-theater screen at dusk, difficult to make out its scoured pictures. My head was numb with recollection, and I thought for a moment I was going to be okay, but then the image of Murphy’s father, lurching from along the hay wagon, hit me like hail in the face and I let out what I thought was an audible wince. I could see him there, wielding the pitchfork like a rifle, and hollering red faced, the veins on his neck engorged with blood. I pushed my feet into the floorboard of the car as the sight of him stabbing me in the ribs with the pitchfork raced past my closed eyes.
My dad didn’t ask what was wrong, and assumed it was the stump of my arm that had elicited my squirming in the seat. I had used the phantom pains of my nubbed arm on many occasions as the primary excuse for my outright, visible reaction to recalling the last day Murphy and I shared in the sun. After he took me to a Quick-Med clinic in Kokomo, and the on-site physician declared I was fine, but needed a tetanus shot, we only saw one another in the dark. We would be together only three more times before Murphy asserted that he could not be the cause of me receiving any more pain.
When he told me we couldn’t continue to see each other, we were in an abandoned hayloft half destroyed by a tornado. The rays of dusty sun light leaning in through the large hole in the roof, bathed his taut body in a shroud of golden haze, as he struggled to inform me of our demise. I know he meant what he said, that he feared I would be hurt more if we carried on our relationship, but we both knew that it was the town that kept us from being together. The county simply could not tolerate two young men in love. And so, we climbed down from the hay mow, wet-cheeked and as hollow as the musty nooks and crannies that filled the sagging barn, to a late August sunset bruising the sky in a weak smear of iodine. We set our feet upon the fescue ditches of Old State Road 24, he heading further out to the countryside, and me loping back in town toward an empty house to pack and leave for college.
************
When my father and I did get to the farm, Murphy was not there. According to his mother, who now appeared more to me as an apparition than as the kind, hair-bunned matriarch of the Swan farm family, he had gone in to town to meet with the D&D folks to discuss a lagoon problem. She recounted, in a Hepburnish tremble, that the hog shit flowing from under the fourteen confinement buildings had not found its way into the lagoon where it was to have been kept as a rank, yet benign agent. Instead, about four hundred gallons of what she said the D&D men called "effluence" had made its way into a nearby stream. As she talked my heart ground with pity knowing that what she was saying would sicken Murphy. He had always hated the killing part of farming, and preferred to be outside in a waist-high field of soybeans, but now he was supervising a factory of fourteen thousand hogs.
The buildings were a mile or more from her front steps, where she was harking out deep green jellies of phlegm into a white handkerchief as she spoke with us about the fretting Murphy had been engaged in. Even at that distance, the putrid smell of the shit lagoon steaming in the cold wafted up from where the buildings sat in a low basin, which had once been a bluegrass waterway employed as a soil erosion barrier for the lush crops that no longer surrounded the homestead. The squealing sounds of thousands of hogs, jam packed into too small an area, required Mrs. Swan to lift her mucous stained hankie to her ear several times in a futile effort to hear, as my dad explained repeatedly that we would go ahead and get started with sorting out the sheds’ contents.
**********
My mother never did make it out to the farm to help with the pre-auction primping, and I’d begun to think the trip home had been useless. But on Wednesday, the last day we spent sorting the sale items, Murphy pulled into the yard of the farmhouse, and lumbered his way toward the damp and dilapidated smokehouse where my dad and I were using masking tape to identify lots of goods. My father and I saw him at the same time, and in a low declaration of knowledge that had been kept secret, he nudged me with his elbow and said, "Ya’ know his ole’ lady ran off with one of the banking partners of D&D, don’t ya?" He didn’t let me answer before he piped up again and said, "Your mother didn’t tell ya’?"
Murphy came to the door of the smokehouse and stopped outside its framed entrance, stuck his head in, and with a smile said, "Hey Peter, mom said you were out here helping with things. Back in town for the big light festival right? They don’t have anything like it in Indy huh, and you just had to have a funnel cake is my guess. Am I right?" He grinned, and I was stunned with the intimacy in which he greeted me. I stood in place for a moment with a hand full of greasy bolts dripping into an oily pool on the ground before me.
I cleared my throat and said, "No. No, I came back to see dad do his last sale, but.." My voice trailed off as he all at once was inside the small area where we were working. He pulled supple leather gloves from his hands, the baring was a disrobing that made my legs go weak; wrists like iron end-to-end and thick long fingers of bone white-heat that extended out to within inches of my hip, as he offered a handshake. We clasped hands and shook. Our eyes locked and he again grinned at me. He said, "With all that has been going on, it’s good to see someone who only has to visit this place, Peter." We continued to shake hands as my dad interrupted, "Well, tell us Murph, did ya’ get the lagoon fiasco taken care of?" Murphy didn’t look at him and only said, as we continued shaking hands, "No."
Murphy invited me back out to the farm on the following day to have breakfast with his mother and son. And while I was eager to spend time with him, I couldn’t help wondering how they were able to eat anything within that fog of stench. After breakfast we took a walk upwind from the basin, along the old fence rows that had once divided the land into separate forty acre squares of rotated crops. Friable ragweed shot up from the bottom of the fence, as Murphy allowed his left hand to open up into a lazy cusp and brush their dead tops in a relaxed saunter.
"I bet this is quite a sight for you to behold. Me out here on what amounts to a meat factory and open sewer." He stopped walking and I followed suit. "I mean this is just what a big time architect from Indy is into isn’t it? A two acre lake of shit and squalling hogs?"
We turned to one another and I just looked at him. He had grown even more handsome over time, with the same big, brown bovine eyes of his youth, and his mother’s olive skin. I didn’t comment on his provocations, but said, "Murphy why don’t you just take the money from the sale and move in to town? I know this has to be awful for you."
He glared at me at first, and then the creases around his eyes softened, as he put a hand on my shoulder and smiled. He said, "And do what Peter? Take a job at one of the fast-food joints. ‘Sides with this water poisoning thing, I’ll be lucky if D&D and the town both don’t string me up." We said nothing more to one another as we approached the end of the only crop field still left on their property. Buckshot and shelled corn were strewn around the stalk’s stubs, as the curdling sounds of quail hens died in the riven trees along the woods. His dad was dead, the festival was on, and I was a familiar risk for the taking.
*************
That night in my room at the River Inn, a ruction outside my door woke me up. I went to the door and opened it; I had to squint from the light pushing in from the hallway. Murphy stood outside the door with his head hanging low, the pockets of his jeans bulging from his fists balled up inside them. "What’s wrong Murphy?" I asked.
Without looking up he said, "A child in town, ‘bout the age of Randy, he’s sick. The sheriff called and said they think it’s the poisoned water from the lagoon. Sheriff said he’ll be alright though. I need you to help me?" Murphy told me about his plan as I dressed and packed.
We drove through the city, where the festival was running late into the night, and out to the frozen countryside. When we got to the farm, it was so dark that only the stink of the lagoon indicated we were in the right place. Murphy told me to wait by the car as he went inside the house to get his son and kiss his mother goodbye. He’d arranged for her to be evacuated from the farm via an aunt whose car was idling behind the house. With Randy safely asleep in my rented car, and his mother and aunt half way down the lane now, we opened the trunk to get the jugs of gasoline and shredded sheets from the hotel.
One by one we opened the gates of the confinement buildings, freeing the hogs into the vast expanse of hard clay furrows that flooded the meager inlet of woods. The pigs sprinted across the fields, grunting and kicking out their hind legs for the first time in their lives. As I was starting to soak the first torch with fuel, something moved behind me in a darting motion, making a swishing sound as it came nearer. At first I thought it was a stray hog, confused with its newfound freedom. But then, as a hand grabbed the unlit torch from my clutch, I knew we had been caught.
"You stupid little bastards. Don’t you know they’ll think something is fishy if you use gas?"
Hearing the ruckus, Murphy came creeping along the edge of the first building holding a tire iron, willing to do what he had to. When he saw it was my father, he lowered his weapon and came to my side. My dad threw the gas and rags into the trunk as Murphy and I stood silently watching him.
"I’ll short circuit the fuse box and they’ll think that the festival’s fake blackout forced an accident out here. I’ll tell ‘em I saw the sparks flyin’ from the Ole’ Durnbaugh Road transformer when I came out to do some last minute prep on the sale items."
He started laughing in an unsettling, nervous fashion, as he warned us, "You better get your asses movin’, those porkers will be makin’ it to the city limits in no time. Those silly sons-a-bitches whoopin’ it up in light bulb hats will no doubt get the sheriff." Coughing interrupted his laughter as he shot up to me, gave me a fast, tight hug and waved us off. He disappeared into the dark toward the emptying hog buildings.
Murphy and I looked at each other for an instant, and then turned toward the buildings to see small blue sparks popping from where we could hear my dad breathing. He yelled once more in a thick voice of emotion, "Get the hell outta’ here!" We walked to the car quietly and got in.
A few minutes later, as we drove away, the town purposefully blacked itself out in one surging buzz to commemorate the advent of electricity. Everything around us turned to dark. The only light inside the car was the blue-green glow of the dashboard washing over Murphy and his sleeping baby boy, as he drifted off into an inert sleep I was happy to bear witness to. And we left the town behind us as it once may have been, a black hole with the ordained potential to let us be.
*********
Outside Indianapolis, Murphy and Randy were still sleeping, their eyelids like veined hulls as we drove beneath the ocher light of the bypass’ lampposts. Randy squirmed in his seat next to his father, and then turned to cuddle up into the cleft of Murphy’s bushy beard. A furtive grin creased his rosy-cheeked face as he burrowed further into the arms of his father. A redolent smell of hickory smoke and mellow sweat from Murphy’s insulated coveralls filled the car; the vents re-circulated the warm, pungent air like a heart.
We drove through the downtown, past old brick warehouses and vacant, whitewashed stockyards, around the limestone pillars of the Statehouse and Civil War Memorial, toward my office in the arts district where I would have to type a letter explaining my intended leave of absence before any of the secretarial pool arrived.
I pulled the car into the parking lot. Murphy and Randy were still oblivious behind a deep curtain of sleep; their extremities flinched with the certain gestures of dreaming. For Murphy, it might have been the re-playing in his sub-conscious of us freeing the hogs. Or the twitching in his sleep might have been coming from an entirely different mental source, one that was not being recalled from recent events, but rather deeper down; a dream related to his decision to come away with me.
I decided to leave the car running and sprint up the four flights of stairs to my office where I thought I could come up with some excuse for my having to abruptly be off from work. As I neared the top of the stairs it occurred to me that my fellow architects might think I had the dreaded virus and was taking time off to examine my options. The thought was one that gave rise to others; I wondered if Murphy had ever been with anyone else but his wife. Could he have been involved with men on the side? Was he positive? My stump, concealed stylishly with a well-pressed and pinned-up blue oxford shirt, ached with what felt like the same pain that was now quivering into my skull.
I shook my head to get some control. As I unlocked the oak door to the office, birds began to chirp in the cold branches of the trees; on an electrical line a dead dickcissel hung upside down, its beak frozen open, eyes like beads. I went inside.
The office was quiet except for the soft hum of the gas furnace and the occasional beep coming from the CAD software backing itself up on three large computers. I sat down at the front desk and pecked out a note that mentioned I was going to stay on at my parent’s home to help my father with a room addition he and my mother had decided to build. I knew the note would sound phony but I couldn’t come up with anything better, so I taped the note to the main door and went to my office to get my passport. It wasn’t as if Murphy and I’d talked about where we’d be going, but I felt safer with an overseas option. As I tucked the passport into my carry-on, I realized Murphy would most likely not have a passport and that certainly his son wouldn’t.
I looked around the office and sighed. I went to the television in the lobby and switched it on in hopes of catching some news about the traveling conditions heading south. When the screen warmed up and the picture bleeped into focus I could see the faint outline of something familiar. Was it part of one of my dreams? It felt like I was viewing something prosaic, like I was witnessing a well-known scene from the inside out. The picture cleared up. A man was standing with a microphone next to a slab of rock. My mind figured out the obverse angle; it was the limestone memorial and people who dressed like my parents were crowded around the newsman as he held his ear and spoke loudly.
"Apparently it was here Dick that the man was found. It was a strange night here indeed, what with the hogs crashing the Electric Light Festival and the fire out at a nearby hog farm." I turned the sound up.
The man paused as he answered his anchorman back in the studio, "No Dick, authorities are not releasing the victim’s name at this point. Not until the family is notified."
The man strained to listen into his earpiece again. He reported some more, "All we know now is that the deceased apparently had something to do with the hog farm fire and that he presumably walked from that farm into town where he collapsed here at the monument. As I stated earlier he was found with severe burns on most of his body. And it’s those many fuses that were found inside all of his pockets that have police baffled."
The man began to sign off. He said, "Yes Dick this is certainly not the kind of thing that this small community is accustom to. This year’s festival has many wondering about the joy of living in the first electrically lighted city in the world." The anchor in the studio shook his head and told the correspondent, "Thank you for the report Bob." Bob held his mic low, still pressing the side of his ear; he shook his head too and tried to look sad. Somehow, the television report seemed like deja vu, as if I had already known my father was gone. A vision of my poor, lonely mother being forced to identify my dad’s burnt body made me want to hide out in one of the hall closets, but instead I sucked in some breath and began moving.
I turned off the television and went to the window. Through the Venetian blinds I could see the car; the windows were fogged. It looked so warm inside there; the exhaust fumes hung around the bumper like perfect clouds, heavenly. I breathed on the window and rubbed off the dew; the car was still there.
In an instant the phone began ringing off the hook. I walked over to it, pulled the receiver from the cradle and put it on the desktop. I thought of all the homes that would soon be waking, of the people inside them flipping on lights, and how all the things around them could now be fully seen.
Doug Crandell is the recipient of the 2001 Sherwood Anderson Writer's Grant in the sum of $10,000 as well as the 2001 River City Award in Fiction in the sum of $2,000 sponsored by the Hohenberg Foundation. Booker Prize winner, Peter Carey, was the judge. Doug's work has appeared or will in the Indiana Review, Nebraska Review, Glimmer Train, River City, Oklahoma Review, Sulphur River Literary Review and Hawaii Review.
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