N.B.: This is not an essay, but a short story, written in the spring of 1984 for John Hersey’s final fiction writing seminar at Yale. It won two senior prizes for short fiction at graduation and was published in Blair & Ketchum’s Country Journal in 1985. A year later it was re-published in Braille in the Ziegler Magazine for the Blind. The writer Annie Dillard praised the story and personally encouraged the author to continue writing.
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THE WILD RIDE OF MISS IMPALA GEORGE
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In a dream I walk in a sunlit valley. The sun is very bright, but not hot. There is a farmhouse and a woman. In the distance I hear the sound of rushing water like voices.
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I FISH THE LAKE FROM A SMALL BOAT, an aluminum v-hull with a ten-horse outboard that skips. Nine months ago I purchased a small sonar device that reads water depths to within six inches and I have spent most of this spring and summer making a detailed map of the lake bottom. It is a large lake, eighteen miles long. My device locates submerged weedlines, sudden drop-offs and other structures that might hold fish. There are houses under this lake.
Mainly it is just the foundations that survive. I have mapped it all out. Fifty years ago this was all farmland. In my quiet months on the lake I have recorded thirty-one and three-fifths miles of stone walls, six farmhouses, and untold tree stumps. The town records bear me out. It all lies beneath forty feet of lake water. Over my time here I have come to know the sunless contours of these farms well. I have often felt an urge to slip overboard. From records and documents I have gotten many of the names of the farmers and some life histories. The oddest is from an oral history, but it seems to check out. Her name was Miss Impala George.
From her demeanor you might gather, as did most people who lived in Danbury at the turn of this century, that Miss Impala George was somewhat of a half-wit, that her roof was wanting, as they would say, some few more pallets of shingles to keep out the rain. Whether anyone could prove this is doubtful, for with her oddness came an elusiveness and what little her schoolmates could recall of her was a girl who could add figures and spell, who according to Charles Forbes stood at the very head of her class until the eighth grade when she was graduated with the rest of her generation to the hat factories at the edge of town.
If we are going to burden her memory with a single quality — and we appear headed in that direction — it should be one that suits her. Of the qualities we might choose — of idiocy, of eccentricity, of buffoonery and the like — we will choose awe, because it was with an awkward and childlike awe that she saw this world. It was because she saw in the trees and grasses of her region the poetry and trappings of a marvelous planet that she was held in the public eye as a rare hazelnut, as a loon.
Impala owes her years among us to a mercenary exchange between a Greek sailor and one of those tragic women whose lives ask no more comment than that she was an American Indian born in 1870 and that she died in childbirth. The father of the child put out to sea in the sixth month of the pregnancy, but in the fourteenth week of his voyage there was a fire in the hold and he perished. It was three days later in a still moment on the Atlantic, as Panagiotis the midshipman draped the blue and white flag over a small cedar box containing the ashes of a life, marrying in a dusty cloud those ashes to the sea, that Miss Impala George was lifted, dripping, from the calm darkness of her mother’s womb.
Imagine Aaron Bedient of Bedient’s Hardware as he observes Miss Impala George riding her wooden bicycle along White Street. Her hair is long and black and she is whistling. Imagine Aaron’s brows meeting as a ladybug lights on her arm. Imagine the whites of his eyes as she beholds the ladybug instead of the milk-wagon and is nearly killed.
Imagine the faces of Danbury society, rich and poor, when the Newtown Bee announces the engagement of Miss Impala George, the daughter of a sinful Indian and an anonymous Hellene to Ezekiel Wooster, the great-great-grandson of the General David Wooster who died in his defense of Danbury during the infamous Tyron’s raid of 1777 — to Ezekiel, direct descendant of David who had witnessed with his own eyes this town become ash by British hands.
It was an April wedding held on the town green between the bronze statue of General Wooster and a cannon from his war. For its pomp it relied on the returning robins, for its color on the unpursing buds.
Imagine a blue sky. Imagine a white bride. Imagine the veil lifted and the kiss bestowed. Imagine the whispering and the consternation when this white bride, overcome with joy under this blue sky, bestows a kiss on the forehead of the town beggar who has come out here with the others on this clear spring day.
Most of the town had come out; even the Ives family, as if witnessing the actual rites of this ceremony would somehow lift a veil from their own eyes and work some righteous magic on the disturbing fact of this union, but the ceremony, with this exquisite slap, only added to their stupefaction, and when it was learned that the couple would settle five miles outside of town, where stood the Wooster farm, they behaved as most people will when something indomitable and disturbing is removed from their sight. They were silently cheered.
As if to move against the prevailing evidence, the citizenry continued to address her by her maiden name. When she came into town it was usually on business for her husband and these trips were rare. Sometimes her trips seemed to lack purpose though. She wandered like a young girl through alleys and into hitching posts, into the druggist’s, past balms and tonics, past horse pills and bubble gum. Toward the back of the store, behind the soda counter stood Anson Ott in his druggist’s apron. “Hey ho, Geronimo,” he said, “what’ll it be Miss George?” She turned on her heel and left.
Mr. Bedient, on the wooden stoop in from of his wheelbarrows, watched her walk up the stairs past him and bolt right. She sniffed a scythe, pinched an eggcup and was gone. “She’s still a wingnut, all right,” he said, “still a leaky nib, heh, heh.”
It was true that the years had changed her little. Her hair was up in a bun now, because she was a farmer’s wife, not a schoolgirl, and her clothes were puritanically simple in color and cut, but she still looked at her food the way a dog does when he’s not sure about it, she still considered the great elms on White Street with a tragic sigh.
For years their life was quiet. Together they managed the small farm through the seasons. Then Electricity stole into the valley like a spooked horse, wild and unexpected. It met with a significant and human resistance that could not be measured in ohms. Up went the powerlines; up went the hackles, up they went.
As the moon has watched our stirrings over these centuries, so Ezekiel in a decade watched the lines obscure his sky. He watched them connect and reconnect, first at right and then at other angles, until what had begun as an elegant and linear order of metal and glass became an eyesore and a confusion. From where he stood, there was no geometry to it, and according to Billy Blake who flew over the area in a single engine biplane, it was a mystery and a mess from up there too, “only worse,” he said, “because I can see how far they go. Forever.”
Years later, a letter arrived, dated August 1932, informing Ezekiel that in order to assure a consistently high level of electrical power, the ground he called home and that his ancestors broke in 1684 would become the bottom of an eighteen-mile lake, to serve as the back-up water source for the Housatonic Valley hydro-electric dam.
That evening, after dinner, Ezekiel walked out of the house and into his fields. He watched the sun set and heard the birds calling to one another, and he wept. In the morning he sharpened his plow and began turning a fallow field in the north that would never be fertile again. In December he was buried.
Impala’s resolve through her husband’s funeral and through the long preparations for the summer event, in which the Housatonic River would be diverted to fill the long, winding valley, was mysterious. It seemed that she might have protested, but she did not, and finally the great day came.
There was much celebration. At several points along the eighteen miles of the valley, barricades were erected well above the proposed water line and festooned with bunting. Speeches were made, ribbons cut, souvenirs sold, and the torrent unleashed. No one saw Miss Impala George escape.
Several people later claimed that they had known of her plan to return to her home and meet the river head on, but the people who remember her that day remember a cheerful woman, hardly a suicide case. Several accounts have her making a beeline through the crowd in the general direction of her house. Others say she was safely behind the barricades throughout the whole affair. One man insists that he saw her far up the valley on her rooftop. He claimed that she was singing and that he had called out to warn her, but that she only waved at him and smiled.
One might expect the story of Miss Impala George to end on some tragic note, to find her in some moment of repentance hiding beneath her staircase like a newt under a log before a storm — to hear her small screams drowned by the unspeakable force of a river unleashed — to see the devout citizenry witnessing her destruction from the sidelines as some renewed proof of that ageless force of righteousness which in the Great Flood washed away the sins of the world and in Exodus drowned the Pharaoh’s soldiers — the simple retribution of water seeking its own level that is our firm, physical assurance of a just world.
But that is not how it happened. Onlookers said they saw her riding the wave’s crest through the valley as though she were on a float in a parade, waving at the people behind the barricades and pointing at things that would never again see the sun except through murky green water, as though she were a tourist in the back seat of a convertible Ford. She was dressed in her best Sunday clothes and she carried on her lap a small white wicker purse that more than one person said looked like a creel. She was never seen again.
But I think she is here now as I watch these blips on my sonar device — these fish that find their shade in the masonry of another century. The rubble of the Wooster place harbors some of the best trout in the lake. Where her petunias stood swim bass and frogs. Where her marigolds bloomed, sunfish fan their nests. Here are crayfish and duckweed, salamanders and trout.
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When the wind picks up in the north, carrying with it along the furrow of this valley the wide curtain of some summer storm — there, there is Miss Impala George, the spawn of ashes and blood, a freshwater Aphrodite, a freshwater pearl, riding the crest of its power like an Indian princess in a glass canoe.
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END
