---

Robinson Jeffers - Thurso’s Landing
Work rating: Low

1 2 3 4 
"I`m going to the head of the rock to smell the rain.
Why not? I can`t make Mark live
By smothering here." "The rock?" "Uh, what y` call the Landing.
I believe the air`s free there." He closed his eyes
And fists, and smiled. Helen said sharply to Luna:
"The little package is mine: let it lie, I’ll take it.
Bread and meat." Reave`s mother looked back and saw
Her throat shuddering and swallowing as strained with sickness
At the thought of food. "Why: how long are you staying up
there?"
"While our ... the light lasts," she answered, and swallowed,
and said,
"Olvidia`s here if you need anything." The mother:
"Reave. This is not in your line, to run off from trouble.
She leads you I think." "Run?" He rolled his head on the thick
neck. "Run,
To a man with no legs. And she leads me: you are very greedy
to make humiliation perfect, ah?
I might have a grudge too . . . wi` that dog . . . ugh. Mother, mother:
You endure something and so do I: but bodily pain is ignoble
and soils the mind. If ever
I should talk wildly ... no danger: I can bear much more than
anything yet . . . you`ll not take it to heart,
Put it aside as just foam and nothing. I love you and respect you,
and when you are bitter with me I know
How life has used you.
About the other thing: have you ever known me to turn back
from something begun? I`ve grown touchy,
But not all changed." "In this raw air," she answered,
"In the likely rain to go up: you told me your trouble turned
fiery after a rain." "I am ashamed,"
He said dully, "to leave you in sorrow. I can do nothing here,
not even walk to Mark`s room.
A man like me, crippled out of use, hurt out of patience and so forth,
May`s well go picnics. . . . D`y` see that star?" "What?" "The
star." "There`s no star, Reave." He drew his hand
Over his eyes and said, "No star? None? Oh, yes there is.
Thousands, but in the house we can`t see them. Well, Helen.
Move me, ah? March."
That frame of redwood sticks
And canvas was laid on the bed against him, Reave shifted
The living part of his body onto it, the others
The lower part. Helen saw his jaws locked
Not to express pain, she heard the breath
Hiss through his nostrils, and thought that she must detach
Her nerves from feeling with his, or all her remnant
Of strength to help him would bleed away to no purpose: but a
superstitious
Fear forbade any restraint of sympathy,
It looked too much like betrayal; and Reave might suffer
Some mystic loss. She took one of the whittled
Litter-handles, the old woman another, and Luna
The two at Reave`s feet; so they conveyed him forth
And edged him onto the truck-floor. He felt his mother`s
Eyes probe him, then to cover pain and the shame
Of helplessness: "You ought to rig up a mast
And tackle," he muttered with flat dry lips,
"To hoist your deck-load aboard." "Reave, for God`s sake,"
Helen cried. "What?" he said. "Ships are bad luck I think."
"Fool." "Yes"; and she said panting, "Oh, you`re quite right,
Call it a ship. I`ll sit on the deck beside you.
Our lives are taken away from luck and given
Higher." The old woman looked at her lifted face
And began fiercely to speak, and looked at Reave`s, and clutched
The broken board-ends of the floor of the truck
By his feet, where the steel binding was sprung. "I will stay with Mark,"
She said harshly. "It`s been promoted," Helen said,
"From being the barge for calves to the butcher.
Now . . ." The mother: "I think, Reave, this woman
Is faithful now." "A ship," Helen said, "exploring
The open ocean of pain to try if there`s any
Shore." "You have not the courage," she answered.
"But as you deal with Reave I will deal with you,
And twice as much. I have nothing to hold me." She turned to
the house
And the car moved; before she came to the door-step
She fell down in the path; but no one saw her,
For Helen looked at Reave, Reave at the sky,
And Luna drove. The old woman dragged her hands
Through the wet earth and stood up, lifting her yellow
Asturine face: as when a goshawk is caught in a steel trap at a
pole`s end,
That was feathered with a bird for bait, and the farmer comes
with death in his hands and takes down the pole, she turns
In the steel teeth and outstares her captor with harder eyes.

                                                    Pitching and slipping on stones
And greasy earth, the truck toiled up the farmlane; Helen
watched the lines in Reave`s face, and risings
Of muscle in his cheek when he locked his jaws when a jolt
racked him. Once, when the fore-wheels and then the rear
Struck in succession and Reave`s lips tightened, she laid her
hand on his fist: "That was the cable," she said,
And wished that she had kept silence; and said, "It lies in the
canyon mud like a killed snake: your enemy
Was under your wheels." But whether he heard her or not he
made no sign.

                          At the turn to the county road
Mill creek is bridged; the stream ran full, on the bridge was a
whirlwind funnel of sucks and splinters, then Helen
Looked up the redwoods and saw the racing sky, and a ray of sun
plunge like a sword, cut northward,
And be withdrawn. They climbed the cliff-cut zig-zag stair of
the road; when they neared the crest
The blanket streamed up, stripped from Reave`s feet, and Helen
With a sudden sea-gull cry caught it down again
And said "Oh, Reave!" as if waked from a dream
That drove toward some unbearable end. "We can`t
Go out to the rock, but if you can bear it
We`ll go on farther than that, we`ll go on to town.
The doctor will have to do ... at least something
To still your pain." "All the opium in India.
Brought low enough without that"; he muttered more,
But the streaming wind took it away, then Helen:
"Oh Reave be merciful: spare me once.
We couldn`t tell that the storm was stripping the high places
When we planned this, down below, I can`t bear it." The wind
tilted the truck on the steep springs
When it gained the crest and turned quartering; Reave struck
the floor with his hand, holding his body with the other to
stay it
From rolling, and groaned, "I guess you can bear it." "You don`t
know," she said,
"What stands on the rock . . ." she stoppered her mouth with
her knuckles against the teeth, and breathed through them,
and said,
"You have no mercy: your choice is wise. Here is the gate."

XXII
                          At the cliff-line, in the lee of one of those heavily
Timbered platforms on the very brow, from which the lime-kegs
used to be slung to the ship`s hold,
They rested at length; but only the cripple`s insane invincible
stubbornness had brought them to it, by the gullied
Overgrown road. A broken shed on the staging, long ago unroofed
by some former storm,
Still offered a brittle screen of standing planks, splintered, singing
in the wind; Thurso`s companions
Laid him in that shelter on the sea-brow platform. He gathered
and governed pain in a long silence, and said,
"Did you see that riffraff under the floor, in the joists and
braces?"
"What?" Helen said dimly. "Sticks and grass: wood-rats` nests.
Kindling. When this spell of rain ends
We`ve only to drop a match and all the platform
Flies into ashes: while Luna pries the old engine-boiler
Down the cliff into the sea: we`ll have our rock-head
Clean as at first." She answered, "Oh: that?" and shivered
In the whirl of the broken wind, saying, "Reave: listen.
Do you think he minds?" "Hm?" "Your father. Because if he
Lives after his death, envying and doing evil,
Then death, that I have always been sick with fear
To think of, is not an end, and you and I
Might look down at our lives laughing
From a great height." "Dead as a dog," he said.
"I never thought anything else. Grieving for Mark
I may’ve talked foolishly. We`ll erase his leavings
For pleasure and to clean the world." "You don`t know.
7 don`t know. They won`t tell," she said grievously.
"Another man, Reave, is dead also. They fall and fall
Like apples in a wind. Johnny Luna told me." She stood up
And called Luna from prying at the truck`s mudguard,
Where it was bent to the tire by a stump of oak,
"Was it the Vasquez boys that told you?" she screamed
Down the loud wind. Luna climbed up the platform
And stood with his blank slate face bent from the storm,
Saying "What you want?" "I was so troubled this morning,
I hardly listened to you: didn`t you tell me
Armstrong was killed?" He nodded gravely, and Helen:
"I`m glad. Are you glad, Reave?" "No. Rick Armstrong?"
He said groaning, turning himself on his shoulders,
"How did Rick Armstrong die?" "All in a minute,"
She answered, "how was it? In his car, Johnny?"
"He drive too fast at the bridge." "When was that?" Reeve said.
"I don` know. Maybe las` week. Vidal Vasquez
He talking about." Reave said, "It`s too bad.
He was a good fellow: but the single fault
I`ve never understood yet. Well. Time and chance." Helen, suddenly
shaking like the erect boards
Behind her in the wind: "Is it nothing, nothing to you? It was
something to me! Hush. I`ll be still. I hoped
You`d feel an old debt paid, and be pleased, and I`d
Be dearer to you. He`s dead, you understand? He`s gone down.
You live." Reave gazed up in slight wonder; Helen sighed
And turned to Luna: "That`s all. Thank you for lying. It was
no good." The Indian went carefully down,
And back to the car, clinging by the platform timbers in the
current of wind.
Helen crouched again
On the planks beside Reave`s mattress, she kept jerking her hands
together and drawing them apart; the screen
Of boards behind her whistled and clapped like something heard
on a ship; the ragged skies and wreaths
Of mist rushed by, and crescent-moon-shaped flurries of foam
on the streaked sea; the rock and the platform
Were driving up wind with dreadful increasing speed, the deck
and the hull. She moistened her lips to whisper
Silently: "Mark`s out of it. Oh happy, Oh happy! but the racing
engines
Will burst with this. Is the time now?"

                                                               Reave never slept, he
lay and looked up with broad light eyes
At the driven sky; the upper eyelids cut the blue circles, the
lower missed them; his face was motionless
Like worn hard wood, but all the while he felt pain. It was hateful
of him to leave the duty to a woman;
Lie there fallen; wait to be saved; what had they come up for!
And when she killed her lover to please him
He had not cared.

                                She turned herself toward the clattering
boards and undid the package,
And turned again, holding the things in her hands,
Hidden in her lap. The engine in her side was quieter,
But the ship glided dreadfully faster, giddy with speed.
She swayed upright and went around him to approach him
From the north side, so that her right hand
Was under his chin when she knelt down and kissed,
And babbling something of love drew his own sharp hunting-knife
Between the jaw and the jut of cartilage, with such
Hoarded unconscious violence that both the arteries,
And the tubes between them, and much of the muscle sheath
On the right of the throat were severed; his head jerked to the left,
The great wound gaped and sighed, all in a moment
Mattress and blanket, the planks, the whole world of sense,
Were painted with blood and foam. He heard her crying
She`d done it for love, he formed his lips to say "Bitch,"
But breath and the light failed; he felt the animal
Flurry of death waggle his arms and head,
No pain from the loins down. Then all was perfect
No-pain.

                  Helen stood up from her deed
And said "I have the other thing in my fingers.
Oh Johnny Luna, go down and tell his mother
That the ship has found land." But when she looked,
Luna was still tinkering the truck. She ran
To the platform-end, and the wind threw her on the planks,
She lay on her breasts and thighs, crying "Tell the old woman
To come up here and see him like a king in Babylon
With his slave lying at his feet."

                                                       Her face and the blood
Moved him to flee into the wind and down
The rock-path in the cliff-side.

XXIII
                                                      Reave`s mother labored up the
steep face, Luna behind her.
The wind had sagged toward the southwest and somewhat declined
in violence, so that a wide-winged hawk
That had been hungry all day was able to hang in the birdless
air of the rock-head when they came up,
Probing with her eyes wild buckwheat bushes and sage and the
polished leaves of the barren strawberry; she looked
Nailed to the firmament, her twitching wings like the spread
hands of a crucified man fighting the nails;
But Helen imagined her a vulture and was screaming at her.
                                                  When Reave`s mother came,
Helen made shift to sit up on the planks beside her slain man,
and staring with enormous violet eyes
From a stained shrunk face, began to make words in a voice that
was not her own: "I was afraid you`d not come.
I have to tell you. But now I`ve taken Reave`s lifetime of pain
upon me to spend in an hour or two,
And my throat`s burnt, but I have to tell you
As clearly as I might be able, because you ought to understand
that I am not vile to the very end,
And have done well. His death was rapid. But for mine, after
I`d done it, if I`d taken any easy way
Out, you`d have scorned me; and the watchful world might `a.
thought I`d done it unworthily, what I did out of pure love
And pity; or thought that I die to escape punishment. Don`t come
near me yet, for I`ve not finished. I read
In the Sunday paper, how they dug out the grave of a king in
Babylon and found his women about him
With their skulls knocked in; I planned to honor
Reave in that way: he was like a king in some ways, and if he
had found any great thing to do
He might have done greatly."

                                                She fell, drawing up her knees,
and the mother said: "What poison?" Helen made no answer,
But being asked a third time: "No," she answered faintly, "a
woman`s poison, a white one. The little tablets
I used for fear of having a baby, in our happy time." She fixed
her eyes on the vacant air
Above the sea-edge: "Why there`s that tiny tiny thing with the
yellow mop
Come up to see us. Keep her off, please.
No, Hester. No. You may watch if you like but I alone
Am allowed to lie at his feet, my love is proved."
The old woman answered, "There`s nobody." She crept on the
platform for the wind threw her down, and crept past Helen
To Reave and said, "How did you do it? Did he let you do it?"
Helen, coughing with laughter in the poison fever:
"Reave let me? Have you gone crazy? I knifed him while I
kissed his mouth." She cried with pain
At the end of speaking, and the mother: "I knew he would never
give in, why did I ask? You have done well,
You always were treacherous, you did it easily." She found the
hunting-knife
And took it up from the blood against Reave`s shoulder,
Then Helen cried, raising herself on her hands,
"You must not! You have no right. I alone saved him,
Alone to die with him." "When you die I will lay it down.
You are not to get well." Helen gasped, laughing
And retching, "Oh that’s all? Old fool.
Those little white things, meant to fight the seed of our lovers,
Are seed themselves, I`m pregnant and swell fast,
Baby death, darling, darling."

                                                   She widened terrified
Eyes and said staring: "I can`t
Be silent in pain like Reave: Oh, I did hope to.
I never dreamed, Oh, ooh; Oh, ooh." The old woman watched her
Attentively across Reave`s body, and let the knife
Drop on the planks. Helen heard it, and after a long while
She said, stretching her throat, "Be merciful to me.
As I was merciful to Reave. I can`t bear
The next hour. . . . Unless it would seem wrong?
Reave not be honored enough?" "I think your time
Is near," she answered.
"There is an end or I`d help you: it will be braver in us
Not to keep begging death out of the cloud
Before he is ready." But she crept under the wind
Around Reave`s body and kissed Helen`s hand, and remained
with her
Tenderly until she died.
                                The platform is like a rough plank theatre-stage
Built on the brow of the promontory: as if our blood had labored
all around the earth from Asia
To play its mystery before strict judges at last, the final ocean
and sky, to prove our nature
More shining than that of the other animals. It is rather ignoble
in its quiet times, mean in its pleasures,
Slavish in the mass; but at stricken moments it can shine terribly
against the dark magnificence of things.

Luna came up the platform and stood shaking,
Leaned over against the wind; the old woman said:
"We can do nothing. She had a wasteful gallant spirit.
It is not poured out yet; go down for now."

                                                              Toward evening the
seas thundered on the rock, and rain fell heavily
Like a curtain, with one red coal of sundown glowing in its dark.
The old woman stood up
And fell, and stood up and called: "Now come, it is time. . . .
To bear . . . endure ... are poor things, Johnny; to live
And bear what we can`t strike back at: but we come to them
Unless we fall off before. . . . Has the car lights?
Help me: you`ll have to carry all the weight. I am the last
And worst of four: and at last the unhappiest: but that`s nothing."
357
Source
The script ran 0.005 seconds.