from Four Good Things

The mountain north of Pasadena has severe

and angular back canyons where the light is always

unexpected, out of place, too simple for the

clutter of the granite blocks along the creeks.

The slopes have low rough shrubs, some firebreaks.

It rains sometimes, and then the soils wash easily

through Rubio and Eaton canyons to the small

catch-basins and the storage tanks. The bedrocks

tilt toward the west, and so the seepage

drains that way. Along a wall of the Arroyo,

it comes down in springs named Tibbets, Ivy,

Flutterwheel. These are the only steady water,

and the Indiana colony had hauled it out

in tubs and barrels to their lots. They’d cleared

the greasewood from the flats and planted groves of

orange and peach trees, built their houses in the

California Style with battened redwood boards.

Nearer the Arroyo, on its terraces,

they saved a few live oak. They’d have December

picnics there and afterward would walk from

that side, down the bluff. The floor was cool,

and there were sycamore and alder, loose

irregular new channels through the willows.

On the other side, and south, below the San Rafaels,

more oak, the sun. They’d take a new way back.

Their lots extended east to the Lake Vineyard

Land and Water Company. And as a grudging

compromise between that tract and theirs,

the Central School was built in the dry neat

rows of the orchards east of where they lived.

Excursion parties from the Middle West were taken

mostly with the climate. At the citrus fairs,

the charts and produce showed them that it didn’t freeze.

Storms were rare and offered the consoling interest

of a flood in the Arroyo, loud and stupid

boulders the size of safes colliding down the wash.

A new hotel faced south on Colorado. Like the

Ward Block to its right across Fair Oaks,

it was substantial, frame, with dormers and

brick chimneys. Each had its widow’s walk

and looked as much like Boston as it needed to.

Someone from Los Angeles brought in a telephone.

He hooked it up in the store on the southeast corner,

rode back downtown and called and asked for

so-and-so, who wasn’t there. From that one

crossing, there were fewer lots each month,

new storefronts and more traffic, speculating

boomers and pikers, midnight sales, bands and free

lunches at the auctions. Owners were induced to move

east on Colorado to more eligible locations,

but the cross-streets led through dusty tent-lined

orchards to the chaparral. The boom came back

toward the center and was done. What they’d been

selling was the weather and a place to live, and

that was what was left. As their one industry,

the Novelty Works of Mr. Wakeley went on stuffing

scorpions and trapdoor spiders, horny toads,

small animals and birds. The balance of trade was

not in Pasadena’s favor.

But there were jobs. James Scoville kept men doing

rockwork on the banks above his groves. The Arroyo

narrowed there, and so he had them build a

pumphouse and a dam and turn a railroad trestle

upside down between two concrete footings.

This was the central bridge. It crossed to open

ranchland that would subdivide more slowly than the

woodlots on the bluffs. Another bridge, La Loma,

farther south, was taller, with a wider span and

sycamores around its girders. It had replaced the

Johnston bridge and made it easier to sell the tracts.

The wealth of the invisible elite went into homes on

Grand and Orange Grove, Raymond, Nithsdale Rd.,

Arroyo Terrace, Bellefontaine, new bungalows

that looked much less expensive than they were.

In their commissions, Charles and Henry Greene

used common and available materials,

stones from the Arroyo, bricks, a simple flexible

pine frame of 2 x 4s and hand-split cedar shakes,

porches that were railed with the same rough timber

as the posts and beams and trusses and the overhanging

rafters for the roof. Their costs were mostly labor.

They’d show the workers where they wanted

terraces and knolls, what trees and shrubs to save.

A local factory expanded to keep up with them,

and they’d make daily visits there to oversee

the millmen and the carvers or the quality of

lumber that had just been shipped. Their mason did

exactly what they called for on retaining-walls,

the color of the fill, which stone or clinker at what

angle to the rest. Each minor thing they cared about

earned what it had to do with matters that were

not their business. Where the money for a house had

come from, what the Mayor had in mind, or

Public Works, or how the street would look with lights—

affairs like these beyond the garden stayed

accessible, a movement to and from the house

implicit in its horizontal lines. The roof was

long and relatively flat. Beams above the frames of

doors and windows were much broader than the

frames themselves and paralleled the covered

entryways and porches. Even the stairs inside

were less than vertical, each section of the railing

carved from a single piece of teak and joined to

all the other teak—the notched and interlocking

kickplates, the splines and level boards that were

the facing of the well. Their stairs were furniture.

A bench along a landing had the same insistent

finish as the inglehook, the same square

ebony caps for screwheads as the chairs and tables.

Everything showed you how it went together.

A scarf or box-joint, metal straps, continuous

sure banding from the hallway into any room.

There was tile and leaded glass, but it was mostly

wood—mahoganies and walnuts, oak, redwood or

white cedar wainscots, doweled and pegged loose

furniture in teak or birch or lignum-vitae, a smooth

self-lubricating wood that didn’t crack. The grain

inside was outside too in rafters and stiff rounded

beam-ends that were oiled and rubbed. They looked

penetrable to light, looked as if they could

absorb and carry it at any single time toward the

one best place inside. Lucile’s house on Holliston

was miles from the Arroyo. But it was imitation

Greene & Greene, a less impressive version of their

simplest large two-story frames. Its eaves on

both the north and south reached almost to the

neighbors’ lots, lots that for several blocks each way

repeated themselves with slightly different houses.

The man she’d bought it from was still a

pharmacist at Lake and Villa. He didn’t know me

and I never spoke to him. He had a massive

tumor on his neck and jaw, and I would be

amazed each time I saw him that he wasn’t dead.

Until a year or so before he’d sold the house,

there’d been an organ with the pipes extending to an

upstairs bedroom, probably the room across the hall from

Donna’s. There would have been no floor between

the first and second stories, our den and sewing room

a single shaftlike chamber that the sound would fill.

It’s just as likely that the floor had been there

all along, exactly as we knew it, with the organ

somewhere else. But of all the rooms downstairs,

only the den could open to the room above it.

With the ranks of pipes along the wall that

backed against the stairs, there would have been

high windows to the south and west, and possibly,

around three sides, a thin railed walk one got to

from the upstairs hall. I might let myself care

more about how well or what he played if it were

clearer to me how the organ looked. If I know

anything about its wood, I know it from the

oak-frame sliding doors between the den and

living room. So if the console had been quartered oak,

the case was walnut—no tracery around the pipes,

the same plain cuts as for the cabinets and counters

everywhere downstairs. How many manuals there were,

or knobs with nameplates for the pitches and the stops,

if the bench was free or fixed, or whether the

pedals for the naturals were strips that flared

slightly in their alignment toward the darker sharps—

the whole clear shape of it in that one place remains as

closed to me as how it worked, as the feeders and the

reservoirs, the valves, the layers of coarse felt between

the double panels of the swell-box; as how the sliders

kept the air below the upper-boards and pipes

and let it go and let it sound the way he

wanted it to sound, the wind inside the pipe

striking against a lip and coming back, contained and

vibrant for the time he kept it there. Its shock to the

air outside the pipe was how it sounded, the way he

wanted it to sound, or as it might have sounded

if the room were larger and the sounds dispersed and mixed

less palpably, went on together with the light or

darkness in the room. There wouldn’t have been time

between the sounds to count them to be sure that

nothing of the piece was missing. Nor was there time

for me, at any moment in the sewing room, to know

the changes that the light had worked downstairs.

Not that I would have tried to know, or done much more

than suffer my current fit of pouting. I’d hear Lucile

walk past the stairs toward the kitchen in her busy

self-important way. Maybe she’d leave. From a back

window of the sewing room, I’d see her in her car and

starting out the driveway. These were the least

obstructed windows in the house. Late in the day,

haze showed its tired agreement with the house next door,

the shingles dull and olive like the rusted screens, the

asphalt paper on the roof. I could see my aunt’s

back yard on Chester. Trees as far west of us as Lake

marked off the streets in staggered elevations—palms,

short rows of deodars and jacarandas. At night,

from a window in the southern wall, the top three

letters on the tower for the academy kept coming on

one at a time, then all together.

[...]

Richard Arkwright was a barber. He toured the

markets and the farms and bought the hair of

country girls and made it into wigs. When he

hired John Kay to build a frame for spinning

thread from the strands of cotton, manufacture was

domestic—looms and jennies in the kitchens of the

small freeholders and the farmers who would

sell their cloth to merchants. Wool was the English

staple trade, a privilege of the landed graziers.

All gentlemen wore silk. Raw cotton was a coarse

adherent fiber from Brazil and the Antilles.

It had to be opened and cleaned and have its strands

laid parallel by two large cards that worked it

back and forth between them. Drawing made the slivers

equal in thickness by redoubling them, and roving

made them thicker still and left them ready to be spun.

Arkwright’s water-frame replaced the hand’s inexpert

pulling and pushing, movements that begin and end

and can’t repeat themselves exactly. At Cromford,

with the money of two hosiers, he built a gas-lit

mill above the Derwent. He needed journeymen

clockmakers who did tooth and pinion, a smith who

forged and filed. Afraid that no one man would know

“all that I should expect he might,” he was

“determined to let no person see the works.” He wanted

“locks and hangings for the windows; good latches

for the outer doors, and for the inner doors as well.”

To make the other money come to him,

he specified as little as he could in all his

patents. And as he sold the plans, he built six

factories in Lancashire. At Glasgow, he was made

an honorary burgess and was taken to the

Falls of Clyde, at New Lanark, where he would

build another mill. He advertised for weavers,

framework-knitters. Children who were seven could have

constant employment. In the riot against machines,

they burned his mill near Chorley. He was threatened:

“I will lie in wait for you in this town Nottingham

or wherever I most likely to find you. I will

ashure shute you as your name is what it is.

Dam you do you think the town must be ruled by such a

barber as you.” Contemporaries thought he was

a Newton or Napoleon. He was knighted and named

High Sheriff of Derbyshire. He claimed that

he could pay the national debt if he were

left alone to make his money; and when he died,

the income from his mills was more than that of most

German principalities. He was asthmatic. An

economist of time, he worked at English grammar as he

traveled in a post-chaise with four horses driven

always at top speed.

He lost his patents at a trial in 1785.

The industry was open. In the damp valleys,

at breaks in the long profiles of the streams,

new spinning mills went up. They were too far

outside the towns to worry that they’d be

inspected—close enough to send their thread

to upland workshops by the new trans-Pennine

turnpike roads, or by the new canal that crossed the

valley of the Calder, through the Craven drumlins

east to the other watershed, and Leeds.

There was so much thread that barns were fitted up

with handlooms that could weave good fustians and cambrics.

Cotton was its own new country, and the landlords

feared the moneyed men. Land could itself be

capital, the business of the aristocracy.

Each landlord had his broken straggling plots,

their furrows running lengthwise to the rounded

headlands where the plough would turn. He knew

which land was his, but it was open and was grazed

collectively by several owners. Between

harvest and sowing, even his farmers’ pigs would

graze there with the sheep. Cows grazed the catchwork

meadows on the terraces, or at the watersides.

Enclosure was the landlords’ plan to change their

strips of arable to larger straighter fields.

They would appropriate the wastes—the marshes and moors,

the peat-bogs where the farmers got their fuel.

Commons had been “a profit which a man hath in the

land of another, as to pasture beasts thereon,

cut wood, catch fish, hunt coneys, and the like.”

In most of the Midland parishes, there were now

Acts for Enclosure of the Open and Common Fields,

new roads with wide grass verges to a ditch,

then quickset hedgerows, ash, occasional small

farmsteads with a croft, no lanes, the landlord’s

manor and his park, and in the fields the

thickets for his foxes. It cost him less to

graze than till. The stiff clay soils would hold

a year of wheat, another of spring corn, lie fallow.

The land would yield him more if he could save

the labor of his farmers and the cottagers.

Tenure at Will was his prerogative to put them

off the land when he was through with them.

As he engrossed more farms, they set his hedges,

drained and marled the looser tracts and planted

clover, turnips, and lucerne. He managed

breeds of stock and turned them out to graze the even

turf across the hillocks. Enclosure had made

“fat beasts, and lean poor people.” With no one skill

peculiar to themselves, they left the villages for

workshops in the north. The Earl of Leicester said

“I look around and see no other house than mine.

I am like the ogre in the tale, and have eaten up

all my neighbors.”

Copyright Credit: James McMichael, excerpts from “Four Good Things” from The World at Large: New and Selected Poems (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996). Copyright © 1996 by James L. McMichael. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Source: The World at Large: New and Selected Poems (The University of Chicago Press, 1996)