Goddamn right it was out of order, if it wasn’t, I could have …,” and so forth. The performers were popular, like mimics or banjo players. Let’s have the Arkansas poop, upperclassmen called, as if summoning a favorite fool. But it was not something as homespun as this that made Farris stand out. It was not something you could memorize.
Looking back I see that later, as officers, in Salt Lake City, Manila, Hawaii, wherever we went among strangers, he waspicked out as the one they wanted to know. He did it by his appearance, which was masculine and which somehow set itself as a standard. As I think of him he has a luster like something made of wood, something durable and burnished. But there was also his behavior; he was completely unselfconscious, like an animal. If I use the word “animal” to describe him it is not only in tribute to his ease but to natural responses which in him were unimpeded. He was without flamboyance or the kind of eagerness that repels. Even now I sometimes enter a room thinking of him doing it, imperturbable, assured, drawing people’s interest, their admiration. Heads might not turn but some equilibrium changed, as in a solution when an electrolyte is added.
I have tried to know what it was that created this. I can see him stand, walk, smile, but, as with a woman you are afraid of, I do not know what he is going to say, only that it will be something I envy, probably for its candor. You could be with him constantly, even bored with him, and be no closer to discovery. Intimacy did not betray him, no examination could reveal his magic. It was like the glitter on the sea, which, scooped up, vanishes. Something priceless had been given him, the power to attract, to be trusted. You could not imagine him dead—whatever happened, he would get through. That was written on him. It was the promise of nature herself.
Irresistible to women, of course, and with a normal interest in them. They, on the other hand, were more intent. Though not yet married, and placid in his desire to be, he bore the mark of family: brothers, uncles, in-laws, a world in which family was accepted as everything—women recognized it immediately as the thing in him that was genuine and desirable. Alone with them, I am sure, he behaved naturally, by which I mean without needless constraint. A girl once told him, I knew you were a West Pointer from the way you folded your pants over the back of the chair. I imagine it being afternoon as he did this, with the light slipping through the blinds.
I remember that a few years later, having come back to Conway for it, he called off his wedding at the last minute. He told his fiancée it was no good, he didn’t really know her, though they’d been thought of as a couple since high school. She protested. She hadn’t changed a bit since then, she said; it had been seven years. Well, if she hadn’t, he said, he knew damn well he had.
Though we were in the same company it was not until flying school or down in Texas the summer we graduated, with the khaki-colored airplanes baking in the sun like abandoned cars, that we became friends. In Salt Lake City, waiting to be sent overseas, we flew together over the great, desolate lake and snowy ground. Rising from damp beds in Manila at four in the morning with cocks crowing somewhere, we drove through rancid streets to Nichols Field for the early run to Japan, transport pilots, fallen to that in the aftermath of the war, and later we were stationed together in Honolulu, living in old wooden bachelors’ quarters, the sort of building that in the South sits on short stacks of bricks. I had a new yellow convertible that had been shipped over on the Lurline. Farris had a room paneled in cedar which he had found, sawed, and nailed up expertly board by board, but he was a country boy and knew how to do anything. One of his favorite words was “silly.” It could apply to anyone or anything and was deflating. He once handled a surly,
Looking back I see that later, as officers, in Salt Lake City, Manila, Hawaii, wherever we went among strangers, he waspicked out as the one they wanted to know. He did it by his appearance, which was masculine and which somehow set itself as a standard. As I think of him he has a luster like something made of wood, something durable and burnished. But there was also his behavior; he was completely unselfconscious, like an animal. If I use the word “animal” to describe him it is not only in tribute to his ease but to natural responses which in him were unimpeded. He was without flamboyance or the kind of eagerness that repels. Even now I sometimes enter a room thinking of him doing it, imperturbable, assured, drawing people’s interest, their admiration. Heads might not turn but some equilibrium changed, as in a solution when an electrolyte is added.
I have tried to know what it was that created this. I can see him stand, walk, smile, but, as with a woman you are afraid of, I do not know what he is going to say, only that it will be something I envy, probably for its candor. You could be with him constantly, even bored with him, and be no closer to discovery. Intimacy did not betray him, no examination could reveal his magic. It was like the glitter on the sea, which, scooped up, vanishes. Something priceless had been given him, the power to attract, to be trusted. You could not imagine him dead—whatever happened, he would get through. That was written on him. It was the promise of nature herself.
Irresistible to women, of course, and with a normal interest in them. They, on the other hand, were more intent. Though not yet married, and placid in his desire to be, he bore the mark of family: brothers, uncles, in-laws, a world in which family was accepted as everything—women recognized it immediately as the thing in him that was genuine and desirable. Alone with them, I am sure, he behaved naturally, by which I mean without needless constraint. A girl once told him, I knew you were a West Pointer from the way you folded your pants over the back of the chair. I imagine it being afternoon as he did this, with the light slipping through the blinds.
I remember that a few years later, having come back to Conway for it, he called off his wedding at the last minute. He told his fiancée it was no good, he didn’t really know her, though they’d been thought of as a couple since high school. She protested. She hadn’t changed a bit since then, she said; it had been seven years. Well, if she hadn’t, he said, he knew damn well he had.
Though we were in the same company it was not until flying school or down in Texas the summer we graduated, with the khaki-colored airplanes baking in the sun like abandoned cars, that we became friends. In Salt Lake City, waiting to be sent overseas, we flew together over the great, desolate lake and snowy ground. Rising from damp beds in Manila at four in the morning with cocks crowing somewhere, we drove through rancid streets to Nichols Field for the early run to Japan, transport pilots, fallen to that in the aftermath of the war, and later we were stationed together in Honolulu, living in old wooden bachelors’ quarters, the sort of building that in the South sits on short stacks of bricks. I had a new yellow convertible that had been shipped over on the Lurline. Farris had a room paneled in cedar which he had found, sawed, and nailed up expertly board by board, but he was a country boy and knew how to do anything. One of his favorite words was “silly.” It could apply to anyone or anything and was deflating. He once handled a surly,
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