If someone had told Addis Adair what he looked like, they’d have said: not tall, small-bodied but hard-muscled, broad-shouldered, lean legs longer than you’d expect for the rest of his body, dark complexion, black black hair that curled at his neck; and a look of devoutness, of solemness on his face. He had wandered for a while, in some kind of lust, sadness and joy—all combined in him and moving him on. Most of all he wanted his youth, wanted it for his own, to handle as he pleased, as he felt driven to, or just to have it (his youth) and let it alone, like a member of his body. He was a runaway from what threatened his youngness, his beautiful secret, so that he could keep it and use it in its own time. For some reason, in some way that he could not understand, Jewel was threatening something very private in him. “God guide me,” he prayed, “and help me and look over me as I go.”
Lately he had realized how deep his feelings were and how deep his needs were. He did not want to lose the days of his youth, his precious days that were his and would never come again. It seemed to him that anyone who would spoil or foul those precious days, tender and hurting, would be truly evil, would be harming something sacred.
There was the sense of having all the time in the world and yet very little. He was not going to be Jewel’s prisoner any longer. A personal feeling, a turned-in secret, very intimate, came upon him, touching him very deeply and blindly hurting him.
As he went down the railroad tracks that night, he felt a mixture of excitement and heartbreak. What was this life? He had to go into it, to find out. What did it mean, this strange thing—life—that had its restless sources like springs in the ground and that had nothing to do with lifeless places. You could feel it in the soil: here you could put your hand and feel coldness, aridness, dumb clay: here you could feel energy and quickness and struggling and richness; here you planted, here the green grew. So he was looking for one of the centers of life, where life clustered and went deep and rich, and already he knew that there would be hurt and confusion and despair, for where deep life was, there was turmoil as well as peace. He sought life—he knew that was why he was leaving.
And walking on the railroad tracks—the train was now gone and never came that way again on those rusted, weed-covered ties and rails—he thought, for the millionth time, it seemed, of his strange poor lost other father, Ace. The older he got, though Ace had gone by the time he was only five, the more vividly, the more intensely he remembered Ace. Ace had been a kind of ghost, a spirit moving over and with him, through his life. Ace! If he had known Ace! He felt, now, that Ace was going with him, traveling down the railroad tracks, off into the dark beyond, into the dark unknown. As he had grown up, though Jewel had kept him closely to her and away from the world, Addis had gathered word of Ace from this one and that one who once in a while came on the place. And, most of all, a lingering presence of Ace gave him a sense of the man—some instinctive knowledge, primitive and of the heart and genitals and blood. The man Ace, his other father, had entered Addis’ spirit and lived in him, dwelt in his heart. The sadness and doubt around his terrible death were now relieved forever, as though he, the violently buried Ace, had been lovingly borne up from his tomb of confoundment, reconciled and brought to peace. And the love of Addis had done it. Addis had come upon a little oval photograph of Ace no larger than a silver dollar (he could hold it in the palm of his hand, cup his hand over it), with the bill of his Switchman’s cap turned devilishly to the side, over one ear, with a look of tenderness and hurt on his stern face. Addis had stolen the Switchman’s cap off the nail it had hung on all these years, and he had stolen the photograph and felt he was taking Ace for his own, into his life forever, as his eternal companion of sorrow and orphanage. He always carried the photograph in his pocket in a Prince Albert tobacco can, along with a few other precious possessions: a small glass swan from a box of candy crackers long ago, and a rainbow in full color on a piece of isinglass framed by cardboard which came from a loaf of Wonder bread. The Prince Albert can was also his money wallet (he had left with ten dollarbills and two quarters, which he had saved for this time.
One thing he most loved, and it was his secret, was to walk on wire. He would never know, never even questioned, why he was so anxious to learn to walk really well, barefooted on a piece of clothesline. It was as natural for him as wanting to swim. He had, early on, found that he could do it quite easily. He had used Jewel’s clothesline stretched between the washhouse and the tree near it and had fallen a few times, but got up and tried again. He had never thought any more about this feat than that it gave him joy and made him feel free. When he left, the only thing he took from the place was Jewel’s clothesline. He had learned to walk on this length of wire and it had become dear to him, very personal; it knew his feet, and his toes knew the wire, had grown callouses against its bruising hurt. He had to have it. He substituted another for it and Jewel would never know the difference.
As he walked down the railroad track, with the Switchman’s cap on his head, the coil of wire around his shoulder (it was so personal to him and went away with him as close as a part of his body) and the little photograph of Ace in his pocket in the tin box, he said good-bye to the town of his imprisoned childhood and his orphaned lonesomeness. And to Jewel. He loved her and he would miss her, but he could not give his life to her. She was not his mother; and lately he had kept telling her please to go lightly with her protestations of motherhood, that she was not his mother. He had had to do this and had not meant it to be cruel. He just had to have it straight and clear. Jewel wept and wept; all day again and through the night he heard her sobbing. Poor thing—she had had only him and now she would have nothing. But he couldn’t stand it, being out of life, or not knowing what the world was, being in a prison with Jewel. He was fifteen and had to have his life for himself, had to have his bitter orphanage for his own, to have it and to understand it and to take it into the world. Jewel would get along. In fact, she would be better off without him around to torment her by making her have to pretend she was his mother, and she would have more peace without having to hear his denials that stabbed her with heartbreak. Now she would have to face life’s reality and accept the truth. She would have suffocated him with possessiveness, strangled him with her tormented mother’s affection. He couldn’t breathe. He was an orphan. He belonged to no one he knew. Somewhere were his parents, unless they were dead. He was tired of trying to imagine his true mother and father, as tired as poor Jewel was—she’d see, now that she was relieved of him—of having to make up a son out of him. He was an orphan. And now he was free. Parentage, kin, bloodkin, what did they mean? He was outside all that; he had none of it. He was alone. And now the time had come for him to declare his natural aloneness, his purity, his oneness.
The Texas moonbeams fell over his face and shone coppery on the rusted tracks and silvery on his ring of wire. Ace! scattered brokenhearted in the roundhouse ground, your true friend, but not your son, is going away. Ace! your everlasting companion who loves you and whose love you never got to know (would it have changed you? would it have saved your life, if you had known the love that I would come to have for you? No. How sad that you would have to die for me to love you!) Ace! who died for me. Come away with me now. Ace! who died because of me, follow me and be my guide. We will go to wonderful places and have a marvelous adventure. I hope you know how you’ve touched my life, how you now hold my life and my dreams. I understand you. You have to be an orphan to understand a sonless father, a wifeless husband, to understand a lonesome person. Funny that he felt he was leaving Jewel to be with Ace, to go away with him, companions in freedom and adventure and loneliness.
Now he was leaving a strange and hidden life that Jewel had made for him back in that darkened house. She had kept him away from everybody. Fewer and fewer visitors came. He would sit on the leaning well house and look out over the place. Standing up, he looked out as far as he could see. He felt strange and odd as he grew older. Very early he knew about sexual power, the fierceness of something, some yearning, some excited longing that he had felt touching him in his hidden personal place, lifting him and blindly hurting him, that seemed to be the center of himself, as if it were his heart there under his thigh, drawing to it most everything that happened and affecting most everything he did. This feeling was something to have to go around with and he knew, for himself, would be with him always, now that it had come. He loved it and feared it, wanted it and didn’t.
But what was this sadness over him as he went on? It was for Jewel. As his eyes opened and he saw things more clearly—as if his eyes were coming into focus—he saw this peculiar woman. She never let him go; wherever he was she would suddenly be there; he grew up at her feet, knees, side. It was then, when he was around eleven, that he began to escape from her, to hide, to flee. What was this thing in him that drove him to run away, to break loose? From then on, his memory was of Jewel’s voice calling him. Addis! Addis! Come here! When he finally came to her, crawling out of a hiding place or coming back from where he had started—sometimes even on the road, a foot even on the road that ran near the house, to go on down it and away, to go alone or find the Gypsies that occasionally passed by and join them, the flashing Gypsy girls and the sly and sultry men. And when he would come back to Jewel she’d grab him to her and cry and clutch him until she dug her fingernails into his flesh. How she held him! It worried and scared him. It made him shudder, hold himself hard so as not to fight loose, it made him feel caught and he could feel the heat rise in him; he felt angry and he was afraid, as he grew older and stronger, that he would thrust Jewel away from him and throw her down. Something warm was in Jewel, though, that often held him to her as she clutched at him—what he was trying to turn away from was pulling him back. When he had finally broken away, he was trembling and felt personal, secret. He had scarcely seen another woman. The black woman Mary Bird came sometimes to help wash, and all day he would watch her in the well house. She was about thirty, he guessed. And once in a while girls that lived way up the road and back in the trees would be on the road—he’d catch their silent figures going down the road. Once he almost followed them, to go home with them, where he imagined they would all sit together at the kitchen table and eat together; and it would be warm and happy. But even then he knew he would have to leave them; he would always have to go away, to leave. He was an orphan. Addis! Come here! the voice called. But he would not. He would keep himself away and he would not touch anybody, only himself when he had to, when he was startled and overcome by the special pain of himself, when only to move a little was to break open something ready to burst in him, something clogged and strutted and heavy to bear, and out it would burst, an explosion out of himself, a miracle, a mystery, and an ecstasy.
Well, he had gone on that night, on the railroad tracks under the white moon of Texas, on away. When he passed the roundhouse ruin, tenderness rushed through him and he whispered, “Good-bye, Ace, that I never knew, in the roundhouse grave, hello Ace that came back to me and now lives in me and goes with me, the new Ace that came to me a long time ago and now goes with me. Good-bye Ace, hello Ace.”
For Ace had really become a living presence in him and around him. Did Ace have to die to enter Addis’ life? Why did he have the assurance, the feeling that Ace had had to die in order to be with him? It was one of the things he wanted to find out about, one of the many things, but probably the most important of all, that he wanted to talk to somebody about. In a way, he was not running away, but after somebody to talk to, to have conversations with, to ask questions, for a while before he would have to run away again, even from them, who had talked closely and lovingly with him. He was so used to silence. In the last strange and anxious year, he and Jewel would go day upon day without speaking hardly at all, and on some whole days they had not spoken a word. He sometimes said some words aloud to hear himself speak, and then his voice sounded hollow and strange and not his own. His loneliness was sometimes almost unbearable, but it was his to bear, he had grown up knowing this, and he had Ace and drew the sense of Ace close to him, almost like prayer, and felt—well, he guessed—fathered and consoled. And how strange for him to feel that he, fatherless boy, had become a kind of father to Ace! He would take care of Ace, protect him, give him consolation, father him; and again, in this new light, in the light of this new discovery, this insight, he asked himself, what is a father, anyway? Can somebody be both son and father?
He put up his clothesline and walked it on street corners in the little towns, or in fields and meadows. He made two folding poles and strung the wire between them. In time he had acquired a worn satin top hat and a pair of old cowboy boots soft as the side of a cow, with small shining silver stars still bright on them. He walked the wire at open-field church meetings, outdoor celebrations. He lived on the contributions watchers put in a bucket. For many months he wandered and traveled, earning his way on his wire. He discovered that he had a hold over people, that he could hold them in thrall. He felt a power. Some thought he was the Second Coming, Jesus on a clothesline walking it like He did water. Others were a little afraid of him, he looked so dark, and in his black frazzled satin hat he looked scary and threatening and sensual in his somber, brooding kind of beauty. Was he a Gypsy? What was he? In his power and dominion over his witnesses he nevertheless estranged people—which was his nature and what he meant to do—so there was no problem of anybody invading his privacy. He was a lone figure treading a wire like a bird or a dark angel, a dusky moth, something winged over the towns; and so he moved on.
Once in a while he was told to move on by a suspicious little town. But nobody made passes at him, whispered suggestive words to him or sent him obscene notes, although his attraction to them was sexual. But they turned it into something pure. His soul, his deeper purity drew them to him. What people apparently felt was his dark contradicting purity, his holiness; and he became a kind of saint figure in the Panhandle—exactly why, nobody could explain. But his passionate performance would convert more than corrupt, seduce to penitence more than to prurience, for some mysterious reason. People brought him food and they brought gifts, and he endured and went on.
Yet he never opened his mouth, this speechless wire dancer, this strangely appealing saint of the clothesline in the dry desertland, on the dusty mesas of the Panhandle; and nobody tried to make him talk. His performance was executed in absolute hushedness. Addis was like a hypnotist. His audience was enraptured and, too, utterly hushed. This silent balancing figure hovered over Texas, as much aboveground as on the ground—a hushed flight not of clouds but of ground mists.
For a year he wandered and performed. He slept in missions, in fields, under bridges, all through the western desert-land in the dry red-dirt and black-dirt windy towns blown over by red winds and black winds. He never made a friend.