I went out into the street, where the dogs lay on the
shady side under the corrugated iron awnings, and walked down the
block till I came to the harness shop. There was one vacant seat
out front, so I said how-do-you-do, and joined the club. I was the
junior member by forty years, but I thought I was going to have liver
spots on my swollen old hands crooked on the head of the hickory
stick like the rest of them before anybody was going to say anything.
In a town like Mason City the bench
in front of the harness shop is – or was twenty years ago before the concrete slab got laid down – the
place where Time gets tangled in its own feet and lies down like an old
hound and gives up the struggle. It is a place where you sit down and
wait for night to come and arteriosclerosis. It is the place the local
undertaker looks at with confidence and thinks he is not going to
starve as long as that much work is cut out for him. But if you are sitting
on the bench in the middle of the afternoon in late August with the
old ones, it does not seem that anything will ever come, not even your
own funeral, and the sun beats down and the shadows don’t move across
the bright dust, which, if you stare at it long enough, seems to be
full of glittering specks, like quartz. The old ones sit there with their
liver-spotted hands crooked on the hickory sticks, and they emit a
kind of metaphysical effluvium by virtue of which your
categories are altered.
Time and motion cease to be. It is like sniffing
ether, and everything is sweet and sad and far away. You sit there among the
elder gods, disturbed by no sound except the slight spasmodic
breathing of the one who has asthma, and wait for them to lean from the
Olympian and sunlit detachment and comment, with their unenvious and
foreknowing irony, on the goings-on of the folks who are still snared in the
toils of mortal compulsions.
