The machinery lurches into motion, sending the weary cage of men and boys down to the hidden darkness deep in the heart of the country.
For its heart is rich in dark treasures.
In the scab-tough oil fields of Oklahoma, giant iron derricks peck wounds into the ground. Oil gushes from the broken land like a promise, a baptism in crude hope, fuel for the engines of the nation’s desires. The roughnecks bathe in the sudden shower, and though they will never see its riches, never reap the harvest of its black gold, they celebrate as if it could be theirs at any time—a birthright promised to them, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, a race run in perpetuity.
The afternoon sun rises into the wide sky, high and hopeful as a stock market arrow. Frost wears away from the patchy soil, no match for the day’s warm optimism. A few hearty buds poke through on the trees. Already they yearn for spring, a constant striving.
In a clapboard one-room church nestled beneath the barren branches of a magnolia tree, a revival reaches its peak. Faithful arms beseech the sky. Bodies rock forward and back, spines bent into question marks, souls waiting for deliverance from doubt and uncertainty, waiting for a reason to fall to their knees in the sawdust with tear-stained cheeks and sin-purged hearts.
The immigrants pour into the cities, and the edges of the neighborhoods fray, then braid themselves into new American patterns. These new Americans push out into this country one step ahead of ancestors touching spectral fingers to the generations of the diaspora. Go, they whisper, but do not forget us.
Outside a redbrick prison, protestors set up for another day of placards and marches, cries for justice that go unheard by the two Italian anarchists inside—a fishmonger and a shoemaker, seekers of the American dream now appealing their fate in its court while the electric chair bides its time.
The lady in the harbor hoists her torch.
The Gold Mountain twinkles in the early-morning fog hugging the shoreline of California, a pretty mirage.
The atoms vibrate, always on the verge of some new shift.
Shift and the electrons lean toward particle or wave.
Shift and the action requires a reaction.
Shift and the stroke of a typewriter elevates i to I, changes God to god.
Shift and the beast acquires a thumb; the thumb, a weapon.
Shift and rights become wrongs; the wrongs, justification.
It’s all in the perspective.
Dusk approaches now, stealthy.
Their prayers done, the faithful collapse in an exhausted heap. The preacher’s white shirt has gone transparent with sweat. The cicadas raise their collective hymn. Pressed by wind and the weight of unanswered prayers, the trees bend their arms low, brushing the first hope of spring across heads weary with belief.
In another part of town bordering the cotton fields, where three small girls sleep cheek to jowl on a cot at the back of a sharecropper’s shack, a fleet of Model Ts and trucks creep forward with headlights off. Men in hooded white robes unfold themselves from these silent vehicles and lumber forward, lugging their own cross and a can of kerosene. Fathers and brothers, uncles and cousins are dragged from the shacks and down the front steps while the women scream—for mercy, for hope, for naught. The rope is hoisted. The kerosene poured. The match is struck against the cross, setting the night on fire, a false light in the dark, and the screams pitch into keening.
Through the radios of the nation, a lady preacher calls out to the lonely: “Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?”
In a tent at a winter’s fair, smiling nurses ask questions and gather information from volunteering families. They ask, Have you ever demonstrated special abilities? Have you ever seen in your dreams a funny man wearing a stovepipe hat? Would you care to have a simple blood test? No, it won’t hurt—just a small stick, we promise. At the end, after the tears and blood, they bandage the children’s tiny wounds and deliver to the proud parents a bronze medal: Yea, I have a goodly heritage. Something to crow to the neighbors about.
Another boastful crop in the land of plenty.
The dusty road cuts through sleeping fields, which wave golden with corn in the summer. An old farmhouse sits not far from a weathered barn and a lone, gnarled tree. The tractor and plow are idle. Though it is late, the mailman’s truck rattles down the bumpy, mud-swollen road. He parks beside the mailbox, digs inside his pouch, retrieves the letter. After a last check of the address to be sure—number 144—he pushes it inside the mailbox, shuts the door, and lowers the small metal flag.
Night falls on the white-picket fences and red barns. On the Burma Shave signs and billboards for Marlowe Industries reassuring sleepy roadside travelers that all is as it should be. On the searchers, the seekers, the strivers, the dreamers—indefatigable adherents of a can-do spirit. On the unremarkable sedan of the Shadow Men folding into the seams of a night already unfurling its blanket of forgetting across the country as it ushers them into dreams.