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Later, after things had changed for us, and the kid had come along, all of that, Fran would look back on that evening at Bud's place as the beginning of the change. But she's wrong. The change came later - and when it came, it was like something that happened to other people, not something that could have happened to us.
[...]
Fran doesn't work at the creamery anymore, and she cut her hair a long time ago. She's gotten fat on me, too. We don't talk about it. What's to say?
“Let me say how sorry I am,” the baker said, putting his elbows on the table. “God alone knows how sorry. Listen to me. I’m just a baker. I don’t claim to be anything else. Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human being. I’ve forgotten, I don’t know for sure. But I’m not any longer, if I ever was. Now I’m just a baker. That don’t excuse my doing what I did, I know. But I’m deeply sorry. I’m sorry for your son, and sorry for my part in this,” the baker said. He spread his hands out on the table and turned them over to reveal his palms. “I don’t have any children myself, so I can only imagine what you must be feeling. All I can say to you now is that I’m sorry. Forgive me, if you can,” the baker said. “I’m not an evil man, I don’t think. Not evil, like you said on the phone. You got to understand what it comes down to is I don’t know how to act anymore, it would seem. Please,” the man said, “let me ask you if you can find it in your hearts to forgive me?”
It was warm inside the bakery. Howard stood up from the table and took off his coat. He helped Ann from her coat. The baker looked at them for a minute and then nodded and got up from the table. He went to the oven and turned off some switches. He found cups and poured coffee from an electric coffee-maker. He put a carton of cream on the table, and a bowl of sugar.
“You probably need to eat something,” the baker said. “I hope you’ll eat some of my hot rolls. You have to eat and keep going. Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this,” he said.
He served them warm cinnamon rolls just out of the oven, the icing still runny. He put butter on the table and knives to spread the butter. Then the baker sat down at the table with them. He waited. He waited until they each took a roll from the platter and began to eat. “It’s good to eat something,” he said, watching them. “There’s more. Eat up. Eat all you want. There’s all the rolls in the world in here.”
They ate rolls and drank coffee. Ann was suddenly hungry, and the rolls were warm and sweet. She ate three of them, which pleased the baker. Then he began to talk. They listened carefully. Although they were tired and in anguish, they listened to what the baker had to say. They nodded when the baker began to speak of loneliness, and of the sense of doubt and limitation that had come to him in his middle years. He told them what it was like to be childless all these years. To repeat the days with the ovens endlessly full and endlessly empty. The party food, the celebrations he’d worked over Icing knuckle-deep. The tiny wedding couples stuck into cakes. Hundreds of them, no, thousands by now. Birthdays. Just imagine all those candles burning. He had a necessary trade. He was a baker. He was glad he wasn’t a florist. It was better to be feeding people. This was a better smell anytime than flowers.
a different ending to the story about the boy & his birthday cake
think about this in the context of: the baker just wanting to make ends meet, versus rebelling against the alienation of his labour and instead embracing his connections with other people
Patti said, 'Vitamins.' She picked up her glass and swirled the ice. 'For shit sake! I mean, when I was a girl this is the last thing I ever saw myself doing. Jesus, I never thought I'd grow up to sell vitamins. Door-to-door vitamins. This beats everything. This blows my mind.'
'I never thought so either, honey,' I said.
'That's right,' she said. 'You said it in a nutshell.'
'Honey.'
'Don't honey me,' she said. 'This is hard, brother. This life is not easy, any way you cut it.'
[...] But some days he didn't drink any coffee. He forgot, or else he just didn't feel like coffee. One morning he woke up and promptly fell to eating crumb doughnuts and drinking champagne. There'd been a time, some years back, when he would have laughed at having a breakfast like this. Now, there didn't seem to be anything very unusual about it. In fact, he hadn't thought anything about it until he was in bed and trying to recall the things he'd done that day, starting with when he'd gotten up that morning. At first, he couldn't remember anything noteworthy. Then he rembered eating those doughnuts and drinking champagne. Time was when he would have considered this a mildly crazy thing to do, something to tell friends about. Then, the more he thought aobut it, the more he could see it didn't matter much one way or the other. He'd had doughnuts and champagne for breakfast. So what?
[...] "[...] For a while, my wife and I loved each other more than anything or anybody in the world. And that includes those children. We thought, well, we knew that we'd grow old together. And we knew we'd do all the things in the world that we wanted to do, and do them together." He shook his head. That seemed the saddest thing of all to him now - that whatever they did from now on, each would do it without the other.
[...]
[...] he backed up and started at the beginning, back when Eileen was eighteen and he was nineteen, a boy and girl in love, burning with it.
[...] "Once, when I was in high school, a counselor asked me to come to her office. She did it with all the girls, one of us at a time. 'What dreams do you have?' this woman asked me. 'What do you see yourself doing in ten years? Twenty years? I was sixteen or seventeen. I was just a lump. This counselor was about the age I am now. I thought she was old. She's old, I said to myself. I knew her life was half over. And I felt lie I knew something she didn't. Something she'd never know. A secret. Something nobody's supposed to know, or ever talk about. So I stayed quiet. I just shook my head. She must have written me off as a dope. But I couldn't say anything. You know what I mean? I thought I knew things she couldn't guess at. Now, if anybody asked me that question again, about my dreams and all, I'd tell them.
[...]
[...] "'I'd say, 'Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.' That's what I'd say." [...]
t came to him that he didn’t want to see the boy, after all. He was shocked by this realization and for a moment felt diminished by the meanness of it. He shook his head. In a lifetime of foolish actions, this trip was possibly the most foolish thing he’d ever done. But the fact was, he really had no desire to see this boy whose behaviour had long ago isolated him from Myers’ affections. He suddenly, and with great clarity, recalled the boy’s face when he had lunged that time, and a wave of bitterness passed over Myers. This boy had devoured Myers’ youth, had turned the young girl he had courted and wed into a nervous, alcoholic woman whom the boy alternately pitied and bullied. Why on earth, Myers asked himself, would he come all this way to see someone he disliked? He didn’t want to shake the boy’s hand, the hand of his enemy, nor have to clap him on the shoulder and make small-talk. He didn’t want to have to ask him about his mother.
Your landlord allowed you to live on his land, to use a small portion of it to grow maize and vegetables and to graze cattle. He allowed you to raise your family there. Customarily, he and his neighbours would build a little farm school in which your children could complete their first three or four years of schooling. If somebody fell gravely ill, you got a child to run to the big house and the farmer would take the sick one to the doctor.
In exchange, he asked for your family’s labour: yours, your wife’s, your children’s. That was the deal.
True, each district had its customs, its set of unwritten rules. If your employer breached what was considered reasonable, there were ways of making his life hard. But still, the white man’s judgement counted a great deal. He could, for instance, until recent times, pull your kid out of school to work on the farm. He could restrict the number of cattle you could graze to a minimum and thus deplete your family of its assets and its wealth. For the relationship to work, something human had to pass between you and the white man, something generous.
When apartheid ended in 1994, some two million black South African labour tenants were living under the proprietorship of 50,000 or so white farmers. What was to become of their relationship now that apartheid was over? For everyone to cast ballots in the same election, each vote counting as much as the next, and then to return home to a world of conqueror and conquered – the dissonance was too jarring. The Mitchells were new, but they had stepped into the drama of an endgame.
the elision in the "something generous" line is remarkable - the implication is that the landlord has no reason to be generous, and yet it's the only way for the relationship to be humane ...
Mitchell started from the beginning. He spoke of the building rule and of the collection of names. He said, too, that each family was restricted to keeping five head of cattle.
Mashabana rose once more and said that he did not accept Mitchell’s rules. He would keep as many cattle as he pleased. From the Cube family came murmurs of encouragement. There and then, through the police interpreter, Mitchell told Mashabana to pack his bags and leave. If he remained any longer on this land where he had been born, Mitchell told him, he would be trespassing.
Mashabana turned and walked away while the others remained grim and silent. Three weeks later, the young blond man who had witnessed these scenes at his father’s side was dead.
this poor soul really believes in the inalienability of property rights huh
It was the darkness inside him that allowed me into his story. He could not blow his son’s killers to pieces. And the police had arrested nobody. When I came along he saw an opportunity. He would expose a little of himself to me and I would expose his enemy to the world. ‘I have done no wrong,’ he told me several times, ‘so even if you are working for the CIA, I have nothing to worry about.’
He had a lot to worry about. To climb out of the ditch of vengeance into which he had fallen, to gain enough height to see the tale I was bound to tell, was an imaginative journey he could not take. These notes I jotted down – about his living room, his shotgun, about the absence of his wife – were to be enlisted into the story of his terrible relationship with his tenants. However carefully I might write, however alive I might be to historical forces beyond his control, the fact remains that in putting Arthur Mitchell on the page I was asking whether he was responsible for his son’s death.