Free John's Wife: A Novel by Robert Coover Page A

as anything Bruce’s grim misgivings might have led him to imagine. Yes, the worst he’d feared was true. But then, a small creek once crossed over, the humpback bridge nearly pitching him through the roof when he hit it, a little wooded patch rose up on the far shore as if conjured from the weedy soil, and on the other side of that the town appeared and showed a bit of grace: smooth tree-shaded streets with wide-porched houses sitting landscaped lawns, brightly bordered with the seasonal flower show, this followed by a cool green park leading to the town center where young women smiled at him as he passed by, the streets here lined with Lincolns, Caddies, and a Mercedes-Benz or two that put his scrap of rented tin to happy shame. The Pioneer Hotel was a musty relic with frayed linens and prewar plumbing, but all the gang were there, the antediluvian bar and lobby dust astir with their sudden booming talk and laughter. A few bolts of aged sour-mash poured by brother Waldo and an afternoon round of golf on what turned out to be inventive sunswept fairways and well-kept greens revived Bruce wholly, and after the obligatory rehearsal dinner, enlivened by brother Beans rising to toast the bride’s family with his fly vividly agape, the stag party that followed restored his faith in the human comedy and in his old boonfellow John, wired though he may have been.
    That park Bruce passed, no longer there, once hosted Sunday Sousa bands, political campaigners, homemade carnivals, and horseshoes tournaments, as well as the famous Pioneers Day pageants, at one of which, a child still, princesslike in white organdy and lace, John’s wife had starred as The Spirit of Enterprise. This pageant, third and last to be penned by school bard Ellsworth, graduating senior about to flee these rustic precincts for what he called the center stage, was a centennial paean to creation, prairie-style, and so eulogized the century’s builders, not least old Barnaby, wee Enterprise’s very father, whose beloved city park now served as his encomium’s mise-en-scène and shaded him where he proudly sat. In time, his son-in-law’s civic center, newest proof of initiative’s power to transform, would concretely rise in Barnaby’s name where John’s wife once performed, its all-weather Olympic pool become her bikini’d daughter’s rock-scripted stage for performances of a more speculative sort, but on that long-ago day the old park seemed ageless, eternal, some sort of sacred site, mother to them all, even the oldtimers forgetting for the moment that it had not always been there, but Barnaby had built it. How sweet his daughter was that day as she recited, in Ellsworth’s accents, Ellsworth’s lines about the builder’s Olympian power to sow his seed upon e’en the thornéd and rocky waysides of the world and see whole cities rise defiantly like living parables of imagination’s potency, untrammeled reason’s finest crops!
    Here in Reason’s beauteous grove we stand,
Its glory being: ‘Twas made by human hand!
    Though most that leafy sunswept day applauded, enchanted by the pretty child, angelically aglow in the dappled light, and moved by the tears in her father’s eyes (a rich man, yes, a pillar and a patron, but old-shoe common, one of us), some grumbled that that oddball boy who wrote the thing had courted blasphemy with his foolishness, messing with the Good Book like that, then had compounded his sin by the use of an innocent child for his impieties’ transmission. They were not far from wrong, though only Gordon, privy to the throes of composition, knew to what extent his irreverent friend had with his Olympish wordplays mocked the town: the seed of the city fathers, whom Ellsworth slyly, in a rhyme with “creators,” compared to “master painters,” not so much sown as spilled, this town, he said to Gordon, a hand-job made by, of all trades, the jack-ofs. Not for me, twiddle-dee! Kiss my bum, twiddle-dum! This grinningly