I’d like you to read a story that has a very obvious symbol at the end. Read the story “Somebody’s Son,” and then we will discuss it together.
“Somebody’s Son”
by Richard Pindell1
He sat, washed up on the side of the highway, a slim, sun-beaten driftwood of a youth. He was hunched on his strapped-together suitcase, chin on hands, elbows on knees, staring down the road. Not a car was in sight. But for him, the dead, still Dakota plains were empty.
Now he was eager to write that letter he had kept putting off. Somehow, writing it would be almost like having company.
He unstrapped his suitcase and fished out of the pocket on the underside of the lid a small, unopened package of stationery. Sitting down in the gravel of the roadside, he closed the suitcase and used it as a desk.
Dear Mom,
If Dad will permit it, I would like to come home. I know there’s little chance he will. I’m not going to kid myself. I remember he said once, if I ever ran off, I might as well keep on going.
All I can say is that I felt leaving home was something I had to do. Before even considering college, I wanted to find out more about life and about me and the best way for us (life and me) to live with each other. Please tell Dad—and I guess this’ll make him sore all over again—I’m still not certain that college is the answer for me. I think I’d like to work for a time and think it over.
You won’t be able to reach me by mail, because I’m not sure where I’ll be next. But in a few days I hope to be passing by our place. If there’s any chance Dad will have me back, please ask him to tie a white cloth to the apple tree in the south pasture—you know the one, the Grimes Golden beside the tracks. I’ll be going by on the train. If there’s no cloth on the tree I’ll just quietly, and without any hard feelings toward Dad—I mean that—keep on going.
Love, David
The sunset that evening was a violent one. Jagged clouds, trapped in cross-currents, rammed each other like primitive men-of-war2 and burst into flames, burning one by one into deep purple ash.
It made the boy sad to see the sun go down. He had learned that always at the moment when darkness prevails, loneliness draws closer.
A series of headlights made a domino of the highway. High beams flickered over him curiously. He put out his thumb almost hesitantly, wishing he didn’t have to emerge so suddenly, so menacingly. One by one, the cars passed him, their back draft slapping him softly, insultingly, on the cheek.
Much later, turning woodenly to gaze after a car, he saw the glow of taillights intensify. Brakes squealed. The car careened wildly to a stop, and he was running down the road to capture it, his breath rushing against his upturned collar and the taillights glowing nearer as in a dream.
A door was flung open like a friendly arm reaching out to a tired swimmer. “Hop in, boy.”
It was a gruff, outdoors voice. “I pret’ near missed you. You ain’t easy to see out there.”
“Thanks, mister.”
“Forget it. Used the thumb a lot myself when I was a kid.”
“How far are you going?” asked David.
The man named a small place in Iowa about two hundred miles away. David settled back in anticipation of a good ride.
“Where you headin’?” the man asked him.
David glanced at him. His nose was big and jutting; his mouth, wide and gentle. His was a face formed without beauty—without hesitation. He had a tough-friendly way of accepting David as a man, something which David was still young enough to appreciate as a fine luxury.
The boy looked out on the highway with affection. It would be a good ride with a good companion. “Home,” he said with a grin. “I’m heading home.”
The man heard the smile in the boy’s voice and chuckled. “That’s a good feelin’, ain’t it? Where ‘bouts?”
“Maryland. We have a farm about thirty miles outside of Baltimore.”
“Where you been?”
“West Coast, Canada, a little of Mexico.”
“And now you’re hightailin’ for home, huh?” There was a note in the man’s voice as if this were a pattern he understood intimately.
“Yes, sir.”
* * * *
David smiled wryly to himself, remembering another day. It was in the San Joaquin Valley.3 He was picking grapes. As usual, the sun ruled mercilessly. Grape leaves drooped. Pickers were humped in varying attitudes of defense, some with bandannas covering the backs of their necks. Even the dirt had sagged beneath the blazing heat, crumbling into limp, heavy powder.
David looked down at his feet plowing through the grayish stuff. For four hours now it seemed he had not raised his eyes from his feet. He stopped abruptly and looked back down the row, measuring his progress. He had gone maybe fifty yards.
The faint clink of scissors landing in his half-filled basket came to him and then the foreman was bawling at him, “Hey! Where do you think you’re going? It ain’t lunchtime yet!” David stared at his feet and the dust; and his feet were stretching out as far as they could reach, his fist was tight around the handle of his suitcase, and the dust swirling madly behind him. He didn’t even stop to pick up his money.
When he reached the highway and the cars kept passing him, it was all he could do to keep from jumping out in front of them to make them stop.
“Yeah,” the driver was saying now, “I know how it is.” The corners of his eyes crinkled as if he were going to smile, but he didn’t. “I was out on that same old road when I was a kid. Bummin’ around. Lettin’ no grass grow under me. Sometimes wishin’ it would.”
“And then, afterward,” David asked, “did you go back home?”
“Nope. I didn’t have no home to go back to, like you do. The road was my only home. Lost my ma and pa when I was a little shaver. Killed in a car wreck.”
“That’s rough,” David said with such feeling the man glanced at him sharply.
The boy was staring into the night. The man shifted his grip on the wheel, deftly straddling a dead jackrabbit. He spoke softly to the boy as if he were aware he was interrupting important thoughts, “Bet you could do with some sleep.”
“You sure you won’t be needing me later to help keep you awake?” David asked.
“Don’t worry ‘bout me none. I like drivin’ at night. You just lean back there and help yourself.”
“Well, okay,” David said. “Thanks.”
Some time later, he was awakened by a sharp decrease in speed. They were entering a town. He sat up and jerked the letter out of his jacket pocket. He had almost forgotten.
“Excuse me, sir, but would you mind stopping at a mailbox so I can mail this? I want to make sure that it gets home before I do.”
“Course not,” the man said. “Here’s one comin’ up now.” He pulled over to the curb and stopped.
When the boy got back in, the man said kindly, “Bet your folks’ll be tickled to hear from you.”
“I hope so, sir.” David tilted his head back and closed his eyes.
The next day, rides were slow. They were what David called “farmer rides,” a few miles here, a couple of miles there, with long waits in between.
Toward nightfall, he forsook the unfriendly asphalt and swung onto a panting, slow-moving freight aimed stolidly east. As the train trundled laboriously over the Mississippi, a few drops of rain slapped the metal floor of his gondola car, and then, suddenly, he was surrounded by water, the river beneath him, and everywhere else, walls of rain. He crawled into a corner and huddled under some scraps of heavy paper that had been used to wrap freight.
For thirty miles, the rain pounded him, slashing his paper hut to tatters and turning his clothes into puddles of mush.
As, cold and wet, he swayed with the motion of the car, his last seven months haunted him. A spinning constellation of faces, flaring up and dying away, careened toward him. Faces of truck drivers, waitresses, salesmen, cops, employment agents, winos, tramps, cowboys, bartenders. Faces of people who had been kind to him; faces of people who had used him. They went on and on.
Well, he would never see them again. He had experienced them quickly, dazedly, as they had experienced him. He had no idea where they were now, and they did not know where he was.
Finally the rain stopped. He lunged erect, inviting the warm, night air to dry him. He looked out over the top of his racketing steel box. He faced east—toward home. They didn’t have any idea where he was, either.
The train was hammering along beside a highway. He stared at the houses on the other side. How would it be at home? Would his house be like that one, the one with the porch light burning? Or would it be like that one, where the porch was dark and where over each of the lighted windows a yellow shade was pulled down firmly to the sill?
A couple of days later, in the middle of Maryland, maddeningly close to home, the flow of rides narrowed to a trickle and then ceased altogether. When cars weren’t in sight, he walked. After a while, he didn’t even bother to stop and hold out his thumb. Furiously, he walked.
Later, seated on the passenger train—the only freights around here ran at night—he wished with slow, frightened heartbeats that he were back on the road, headed the other way.
Three inches from his nose was the dust-stained window through which in a few minutes he would look out across his father’s fields. Two different pictures tortured him—the tree with the white cloth and the tree without it. His throat closed and he could hardly breathe.
He tried to fortify himself with the idea that whether or not he still was welcome, at least he would see the place again.
The field was sliding closer, one familiar landmark at a time. He couldn’t stop the train. The frenzied wheels were stamping out the end of the crescendo that had begun with the clink of the scissors in his half-filled basket of grapes. Nothing could postpone the denouement4 now. The tree was around the next bend.
He couldn’t look. He was too afraid the cloth would not be there—too afraid he would find, staring back at him, just another tree, just another field, just another somebody else’s strange place, the way it always is on the long, long road, the nameless staring back at the nameless. He jerked away from the window.
Desperately, he nudged the passenger beside him. “Mister, will you do me a favor? Around this bend on the right, you’ll see an apple tree. I wonder if you’ll tell me if you see a white cloth tied to one of its branches?”
As they passed the field, the boy stared straight ahead. “Is it there?” he asked with an uncontrollable quaver.
“Son,” the man said in a voice slow with wonder. “I see a white cloth tied on almost every twig.”
| Speaker | "Somebody's Son" Discussion |
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Instructor: What was the symbol that you saw at the end of the story? |
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Delaney: Was it the white handkerchief? |
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Instructor: Good. What did the handkerchief symbolize? |
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Sadie: I think it was a symbol of his father’s love. I like that the father didn’t just tie one handkerchief. |
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Instructor: I like that, too, Sadie. That’s my favorite part of the story, actually. |
Before I became a parent, I knew that parents love their children. Now that I have my own children, however, I can completely understand why there was a white handkerchief on every branch. These handkerchiefs were not just a way of making sure that the boy came home, they were symbols of the emotion that his father felt. He loved his son, and he obviously wanted more than anything for him to come home. I just think it is beautiful.
1. Pindell, Richard. “Somebody’s Son.” Goodman’s Five-Star Stories: Choices. Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, 2002, 79–81.
2. men-of-war: battleships.
3. San Joaquin Valley: an agricultural region in California
4. denouement: the final outcome