An End of Loving the Land

AN END OF LOVING THE LAND / C. W. Gusewelle FOR AS LONG AS I HAVE BEEN acquainted there, more than half my life now, people of that country neighborhood have nurtured their idea of the panther. No one I've ever known has actually seen the creature. But nearly everyone has a relative or friend who knows a man—nameless, perhaps, but not to be disbelieved—who only last week met the thing in the lights of his pickup truck on some night lane as it bounded across between two fingers of the woods. Or who found its pug marks pressed deep into the sand of the stream bank at the bottom of his calf pasture—prints that, when others came to look at them, had been washed away by rain. On a certain rise of ground where two lanes meet there stands what must once have been a fine stone house, or even a grand and rather pretentious house, fallen now into ruin. The crossroad is at the geographic center of the county, and the story told locally, with whatever truth, is that the house's builder imagined it would one day be the court house. But his gamble failed. The town grew up on the river instead, seven miles distant. Some years later the man left and the house was abandoned. Cornices crumbled and plaster fell. Time and weeds took that road corner, though the square outline of the house still can be spied through an enclosing jungle of trees. For a time it was rumored that the panther denned in its cellar. I went there once with a flashlight and crept cautiously down the stone stairway into the mouth of the dark, a nightmare of cobwebs like gauze across my face. Empty kerosene cans, broken dishes, a rusted stove-pipe oven and heaps of faded ledger sheets were all I found. It was a cramped, wet cellar. And except for the persimmonseeded scat of a raccoon, and mice scuttling quickly among the stones at the edge of the light's beam, there was no evidence of any other animals using the place. I decided then, and have believed since, that there is no panther anywhere about—that it is a creature only imagined, although the invention is undeliberate and the myth may, in its way, actually be necessary. Suppose that you had lived so long in a place, had failed so long there, that nothing was left undiscovered. Everything about the The Missouri Review · 9 locality was known, and the sum of everything known was disappointment. It would still be necessary to believe in something more. You would make a myth, if nothing else were possible. You would put in the too-well-known woods some wild thing—something strange, anyway, capable of mystery and surprise. And its presence at the edge of the mind would somehow comfort you by its suggestion of other possibilities still unexhausted—about that place, or even about yourself. The panther of that neighborhood lives not in any earthen den or stone cellar, but in the aching need of beaten spirits. And it is real enough that when people speak of it I do not argue any more or ask for proof. That reach of country, seen from the window of a car passing quickly through, has what the eye records as a kind of ragged beauty. Rust orange meadows of broomsedge, rippling in the wind, undulate away black-speckled with colonizing cedars to wash up against the bristling wall of darker woods. In the land's sudden folds are steep, stony places where, in the wet of springtime or for several hours after a beating rain, short-lived little streamlets rush sparkling and muttering down. Wooden barns, like foundered ships, lean against the sky—their spines broken, tin roofs curling open to weather, unpainted plank sides a fine shade of polished silver. Somewhere near each barn would be the smaller stone rectangle of a house foundation, a house burned. And, in the woods behind, a network of stone walls laid up by the first man who cleared the meadow. The walls do not lie straight, but bend and wander by nowinscrutable...