"You know
Orion always
comes
up sideways.
Throwing a leg up over
our
fence of mountains,
And rising on his
hands,
he looks in on me
Busy outdoors by
lantern-light
with something
I should have done by
daylight,
and indeed,
After the ground if
froze,
I should have done
Before it froze, and a
gust
flings a handful
Of waste leaves at my
smoky
lantern chimney
To make fun of my way
of
doing things,
Or else fun of Orion's
having
caught me.
Has a man, I should
like
to ask, no rights
These forces are
obliged
to pay respect to?"
So Brad
McLaughlin
mingle
reckless talk
Of heavenly stars with
hugger-mugger
farming,
Till having failed at
hugger-mugger
farming,
He burned his house
down
for the fire insurance
And spent the proceeds
on
a telescope
To satisfy a life-long
curiosity
About our place among
the
infinities.
"What do you want with
one
of those blame things?"
I asked him well
beforehand.
"Don't you get one!"
"Don't call it blamed;
there
isn't anything
More blameless in the
sense
of being less
A weapon in our human
fight,"
he said.
"I'll
have one
if I sell
my
farm to buy it."
There where he
moved
the
rocks to plough the ground
And ploughed
between
the
rocks he couldn't move,
Few farms changed
hands;
so rather than spend years
Trying to sell
his
farm and
then not selling,
He burned his
house
down
for the fire insurance
And bought the
telescope
with what it came to.
He had been heard
to
say
by several:
"The best thing
that
we're
put here for's to see;
The strongest
thing
that's
given us to see with's
A telescope.
Someone
in
every
town
Seems to me owes
it to
the
town to keep one.
In Littleton it
may as
well
be me."
After
such
loose talk it
was
no surprise
When he did what
he
did and
burned his house down.
Mean laughter
went
about
town that day
To let him know
we
weren't
the least imposed on,
And he could
wait---we'd
see to him tomorrow.
But the first
thing
next
morning we reflected
If one by one we
counted
people out
For the least
sin, it
wouldn't
take us long
To get so we had
no
one
left
to live with.
For to be social
is to
be
forgiving.
Our thief, the
one who
does
our stealing from us,
We don't cut off
from
coming
to church suppers,
But what we miss
we go
to
him and ask for.
He promptly gives
it
back,
that is if still
Uneaten,
unwornout, or
undisposed
of.
It
wouldn't do
to be too
hard
on Brad
About his
telescope.
Beyond
the age
Of being given
one for
a
Christmas gift,
He had to take
the
best way
he know how
To find himself
in
one.
Well,
all we said was
He took a strange
thing to
be roguish over.
Some sympathy was
wasted
on the house,
A good old-timer
dating
back
along;
But a house isn't
sentient;
the house
Didn't feel
anything.
And
if it did,
Why not regard it
as a
sacrifice,
And an
old-fashioned
sacrifice
by fire,
Instead of a
new-fashioned
one at auction?
Out
of a house
and so
out
of a farm
At a stroke (of a
match),
Brad had to turn
To earn a living
on
the
Concord
railroad,
As
under-ticket-agent
at
a station
Where his job,
when he
wasn't
selling tickets,
Was setting out
up
track
and down, not plants
As on a farm, but
planets,
evening stars
That varied in
their
hue
from red to green.
He got a good
glass
for six
hundred dollars.
His new job gave
him
leisure
for star-gazing.
Often he bid me
come
and
have a look
Up the brass
barrel,
velvet
black inside,
At a star quaking
in
the
other end.
I
recollect a
night of
broken
clouds
And underfoot
snow
melted
down to ice,
And melting
further in
the
wind to mud.
Bradford and I
had out
the
telescope.
We spread our two
legs
as
we spread its three,
Pointed our
thoughts
the
way we pointed it,
And standing at
our
leisure
till the day broke,
Said some of the
best
things
we ever said.
That
telescope
was
christened
the Star-splitter,
Because it didn't
do a
thing
but split
A star in two or
three
the
way you split
A globule of
quicksilver
in your hand
With one stroke
of
your
finger
in the middle.
It's a star
splitter
if
there
ever was one
And ought to do
some
good
if splitting stars
'Sa thing to be
compared
with splitting wood.
We've looked and
looked,
but after all, where are we?
Do we know any
better
where
we are,
And how it stands
between
the night tonight
And a man with a
smoky
lantern
chimney?
How different
from the
way
it ever stood?"