A Grain of Wheat Page 2

  A large part of the tragedy of his home life boiled down to the fact that each of his parents had a distinct idea of what he should become, but both of them lacked the foresight to set aside their preoccupations long enough to put some effort into igniting their respective ambitions in him. Lars’ driving ambition was to leave his son a well-established farmer, but he did nothing to interest him in farming. The two were nearly strangers. They never worked or played together. Steve learned nothing of the joy and satisfaction of a job well done. The impression his father made on him was of a restless, tense, fundamentally unhappy man. There always seemed to be something demanding Lars’ immediate attention. After all, tomorrow would be soon enough to start teaching the boy the ropes of farming. Being a man of means, he had enough hired help to look after the normal chores on which most farm boys were raised.

  Julia Pearson was equally ineffective in laying a foundation on which to build her aspirations for the lad. In her mind she had a picture of Steve growing up to become a God-fearing professional man who would not be continually tempting the patience of God by endlessly pursuing his own personal ambitions. Perhaps he would be a pastor or a doctor whose whole purpose would be to please God and serve people. But her little evening pep talks succeeded rather in sowing the seeds of discord and suspicion in his heart. It didn’t take him long to realize that the prongs of her words were aimed at his father, but he had no clear idea why. And the example of her apparent helpless submission to the kind of life she despised inspired in him no confidence in whatever way of life she espoused. That was just the trouble—she was so resigned to the oppressing situation in which she found herself trapped that she had long since ceased to espouse anything actively. The message one might glean from her life was that most people are evil, not many people understand this, and those who do are very sad. She failed on the whole to give Steve any reason to suspect that under some conditions, life can actually be meaningful and enjoyable.

  Not until he entered grade school in town did he discover entirely on his own that it was actually possible to enjoy life from time to time and to forget the bitter melancholy that normally hung over it. This was an epochal discovery for it released him, at least momentarily, from the two dominant forces in his life—the constant state of tension and strain he experienced in his father and the perpetual solitary sadness he experienced in his mother. Thus he virtually stepped out of the frame of reference of both parents neither of whom had any concept of a life driven by diversion. His father’s life was driven by his ambitions. His mother’s life was consumed by her pessimism. His life, meanwhile, was increasingly defined by seeking out pleasurable experiences and reproducing them whenever possible.

  Stephan developed a sort of schizophrenic personality that automatically adapted itself to sudden changes in his environment. Away from home he was an entirely different person from the person he was in the cheerless atmosphere of the big cold farmhouse. As he grew older and began to see his parents’ behaviors as two concentric ruts going nowhere, he became ever more restless at home. Time and again he would bound off across the prairie early in the morning on days when there was no school and not return until suppertime or later. Nobody had much of an idea of just what he did in those long hours all by himself but, from the hints picked up by his friends, it became generally known that he was a sharp observer like his father and comfortable in his own company like his mother.

  Old Lars Pearson unwittingly aggravated the disintegrating situation in the home by providing Steve with anything he asked for—a horse and tack, a rifle, riding clothes, and in 1915 a spanking new Model T Ford. The ungainly thing was soon seen sputtering and roaring around the countryside like a mad monster, raising great billows of dust in its wake. Stephan Pearson needed no destination to induce him to leap into the stately machine and take off down the lane. All he needed was a ringing tension building up in his muscles and a hint of the sensations of power and freedom he would feel behind the wheel. He was plainly the envy of every less fortunate lad for miles around.

  Among his friends he was known as the quiet one who was game for anything and who was never so animated as when he was at the center of a prank. Reflective of his amusements during this period of his life are the numerous clever maneuvers he engineered from time to time, all of them calculated to embarrass the ridiculous as he conceived it. I recall from our college days one such event which he recounted for us one evening with a mixture of enjoyment and pain.

  One day he and a group of cronies succeeded in greasing a husky piglet and slipping it just before closing time into the high school library when the librarian wasn’t looking. A set of chains and a padlock on the main door finished the job. Then they hid in the bushes outside a window and watched what happened. As he told it, three spindly young females and the old librarian let out a scream, flew to the door and, finding it padlocked, leapt on top of some tables. Meanwhile, the piglet, no less alarmed than the women, made quick work of some lower shelves in the nonfiction and took frantic refuge in the reference room. Then the boys ran around to the other side of the school, pretending to come from the opposite direction. Overhearing the terrible racket, they notified the principal that something was apparently wrong in the direction of the library. Following the panic-stricken man to the trouble spot they quickly assessed the situation, cursed the scoundrels who would do such a thing, and offered to break through the glass in the door. The desperate man nodded. Stephan grabbed a nearby chair and smashed a large hole in the glass panels of the door. The boys ducked inside and made off after the porker.

  Catching a slimy mass of slithering and squirming flesh is no easy task under any circumstances, especially when the mass is as terrified as that poor piglet was. But, as Stephan told it, the boys made rather more work of it than necessary. By the time they finally wrestled it out of the library through the shattered door, it had liberalized its education in almost every subject offered by the library. Herding it out through the main entrance, Stephan called out to the principal not to worry about the door: his dad would replace it. And he did.

  This masterpiece of strategy was just one of the many mostly harmless pranks of which Stephan was the chief—and normally the anonymous—tactician. He would usually dream them up while he was supposed to be doing something distasteful to him, like working in the library on an assignment on “The Life and Times of Alexander Pope” in the presence of the prim and proper spinster librarian and her prim and proper helpers, when the inspiration for the greased pig came into his head. The funeral director, an especially annoying teacher, a visiting evangelist, several prominent businessmen, one conceited fellow student, and other appropriate candidates as well, all found themselves on the butt end of some unexplainable and embarrassing turn of events sooner or later, skillfully engineered incognito by Stephan.

  To his teachers as well as to his pals, he was the quiet one who rarely tended to business. Some of them were inclined to consider him a dull pupil, for in those days most people took it for granted that intelligence and industriousness went hand in hand. Nevertheless, he did remarkably well on his tests, considering how seldom he studied. Occasionally he even displayed unusual sensitivity. His English teacher, for example, was fascinated by his compositions which displayed not so much grammatical perfection and sentence balance as originality and lucidity of thought. They were always scratched-out first copies, a practice of which she never succeeded in breaking him. There was something about his unique approach to any subject which placed them in a category all their own. Once she assigned the prosaic theme, “My Favorite Animal.” Most of the class chose the horse for its beauty and strength or the bee for its cheerful dedication to its work or the dog for its faithfulness. But Steve chose the cowbird since it didn’t have to worry about finding its food (it simply followed the cows around) or raising children (it cleverly laid its eggs in other birds’ nests) or getting an education (instinct provided it with all it needed to know); therefore it could spend all its time do
ing what it felt like doing, not just a few brief moments of it. This viewpoint, which ignored all traditional virtues and aesthetic considerations, was something of a shock to the teacher. But, after all, this was Stephan Pearson. She regarded him as one of her more interesting problems.

  The lone exception to this record of jagged mediocrity was mathematics. On the average day the subject simply presented no challenge to him, but on special days something about it sparked his curiosity and drew him ineluctably in, way in. In either case, he was always leap years ahead of the class and the teacher when it came to grasping principles and applying them. By consistently outthinking and outfiguring his mathematics teacher, this indifferent young man baffled him even more than he baffled his English teacher. This was the only noticeable indication in his school days of the budding genius buried within him.

  “Friends” he had, as we have noted. Yet he never knew one soul in the first nineteen years of his life with whom he felt completely at ease. This state of affairs was rendered all the more unnatural by the fact that his restless agitation when forced to do something disagreeable to him betrayed a continuous and progressive inner disturbance that cried out for help, or at least a listening ear. But his experience at home made him suspicious of everyone’s motives. Survival, not resolution, was the modus operandi of his family. You kept your convictions largely to yourself, observed the necessary domestic forms and rituals, and did nothing to disturb the artificial crust that held everything together. To Steve this became the template for how he understood society at large. Each man carried on his private thoughts behind his personal barricade and presented to the world only the cold symmetry of the barricade itself. It was unthinkable to him to probe into the secret world behind someone else’s barricade or to admit anyone else into the secret world behind his.

  It was in this frame of mind that Stephan Pearson graduated from high school and took a look at the world. Although he had no idea what he wanted to do, his mother did. She enrolled him in Christiania College for the coming year. It would be a story in itself to relate how this single tangible fact jolted old Lars from his dreams for Steve and forced him to face the stark truth of his neglect. Realizing in his soul’s soul that Steve would never be a farmer, his life became the pathetic tale of a man whose all-consuming goal in life has been shattered but who from sheer force of habit continues to plod doggedly onward towards where it once was.

  Steve, for his part, was neither excited nor dismayed by the prospect of attending Christiania College. After high school was over, he had hovered in the air of indecision just long enough to appreciate the value of having something to do, some place to go.

  Thus it was that in the fall of 1919, Stephan Pearson began his student years at Christiania College in St. Mark, Minnesota, there ostensibly to prepare for a life of professional service in accordance with the wishes of his mother, but really because he had nothing better to do.

  III

  The fiery beauty of autumn had long since faded away. No longer was the rolling hilltop campus of Christiania College crowned by the dazzling scarlet of symmetrical maples or the more regal purple of twisted oaks. The piles and ridges of wind-driven leaves were gone too, buried under the accumulation of two late-fall snowstorms. The temperature was already taking those deep plunges so characteristic of Minnesota winters, and the wind was sweeping as usual across the barren fields and whipping over the crest of the hill on which Christiania stood. Fine particles of icy snow cut like shredded glass into the face of anyone brave enough to venture out across the naked campus. The challenge of a long hard winter had arrived with its clean fair-handed fury. The hardy country folks accepted it head-on, leaning into the wind in their thick fur-lined coats or huddled around their fires indoors. The cold on the outside served to concentrate the warmth on the inside, and the forbidding brutality of nature tended to intensify the intimacy shared among friends and family members.

  But for one young man on the campus of Christiania College, this was a period of creeping disintegration. To all outward appearances, Stephan Pearson was very little changed from his high school days. He was still the quiet one wherever he went, still an enigma to his professors. They did not know quite how to interpret the nervous detachment that often descended on him during their lectures: Was he daydreaming, bored, or pursuing some line of thought suggested by the lecture? He was still attracted to the ranks of those fellow students who made a practice of severing their ties to the college every weekend and just letting themselves go. But he was not always comfortable in their company either.

  Among his friends in those days was Tom Mahler, a tall, sturdy, handsome veteran of the First World War who was taking premedicine in the hope of following in his father’s footsteps. He roomed across the corridor from Steve and seemed to enjoy Steve’s company on his weekend excursions into the countryside around St. Mark. Since St. Mark was his hometown, he was acquainted with several farmers in the area who made a decent home brew. More often than not, they were joined by such lads as Lute Odegaard, a quick-witted farmer’s son from Western Minnesota, and by Steve’s roommate, Ted Bjornson, the tall lanky son of a South Dakota Ford dealer. The recent passage of the Prohibition Amendment and the firm stand Christiania College took against intoxicating beverages added measurably to the attractiveness of these weekend excursions.

  But the normal course of the average day provided Steve with numberless irritations. Each morning the entire student body was required to gather in the chapel for a full half hour devoted to worship and instruction. In one form or another, the students were regularly reminded of their Christian duty to be good stewards of the God-given talents entrusted to them, which was synonymous with their duty to study diligently and get a solid liberal arts education. Was not the Parable of the Talents ample evidence that squandering our gifts will earn us the wrath of God? Steve sat through such counsel impassively. He could barely stomach harangues of this sort. They ran so counter to the observable facts of life. His dad would admirably have filled their bill, and yet he was just about the least happy man Steve knew. People who toiled and ground their lives away had to die in the end just like anyone else, and most of them never experienced a day of true enjoyment all the while. This kind of talk was so annoying to him that he wrote off whatever good there might have been in other aspects of chapel and came to look on it as a choice time to catch up on his sleep in a rear pew.

  And then there was that cursed obligation to sit through sixteen hours of didactic droning each week. And they took attendance in those days! So he would sleep until the last moment every morning, skip breakfast, and saunter off to his first class. Between classes he would meet some buddies in the Tiger’s Haunt and play checkers or eat ice cream. Every chance he got he would abandon the campus altogether, taking long hikes through the fields, even in bad weather. Occasionally he would skim through a textbook, but ordinarily he spent his time doodling away on a blank sheet of paper, drawing cars, horses, math formulas, war scenes, and intricate designs of all sorts. Sometimes he merely sulked around his room in seething agitation, as though he were about to burst.

  The only courses that interested him in the slightest degree were his mathematics and science courses. He frankly despised his required religion course taught by a young Th.D. who enjoyed displaying the shock value of his newly acquired skills in what he “modestly” called higher criticism.

  In a word, Steve’s life was torn between a myriad of things that disgusted him and a mere handful of things that he enjoyed. If he had had his way, he would have turned his back on the former and spent all his time on the latter. But that was impossible. Wherever he turned he was ensnared by distasteful obligations: his textbooks were always staring at him, his schedule was always glowering at him, his professors were always nagging him, his mother’s letters were always admonishing him. At times his disgust would turn to rage and he would seize the nearest book and hurl it to the floor or storm out of his room and charge blindly down the hill out into
the open fields.

  For the first two or three months, the weekends transformed him into a different person. In the company of his pals he felt free to set loose his wit and unleash his mischief. There was always plenty of beer and cigarettes to create a convivial mood on the farms where Tom Mahler took his buddies. Before winter set in, they rented horses and rode all over the place or hunted small game in the many nearby woodlots. But when Sunday night came, they had to be cautious not to betray the faintest whiff of beer on their breath when they returned to the college, and on Monday morning it was back to the same old grind. The Stephan Pearson of the school week and the Stephan Pearson of the weekend remained separate personalities until somewhere around Thanksgiving time. Then for some reason Steve began having a difficult time throwing off his sulkiness and wearying disgust when the weekend came. With the grim blanket of sloppy snow that set a limit to what you could do on weekends came a heavy feeling of the futility of it all. It smothered him wherever he was. He was constantly fidgeting, anxious about everything. His barricade was being breached on every hand. He was finding it more and more difficult to hide himself behind it, more and more difficult to keep his true feelings of disgust from showing.

  Just before Christmas recess, the boys decided to have a free-wheeling party at the Brennan farm within walking distance of the hill. Joe Brennan was a middle-aged bachelor who welcomed the weekends the boys spent at his place every bit as much as the boys themselves did. He had no qualms about their proposal to invite some girls to this party.