TO IHAB HASSAN

                                                            TO IHAB HASSAN

For the first time in a while I have been resting.  At our age, the trauma of what May and I had lived through...and in our own home!...it’s perhaps surprising that either of us could rest at all.  Resting is not something people nowadays take much pleasure in, but I do, or, rather, I am.  I had not gone to the office since “the affair,” and May had also stayed home.  But then, she was injured enough to need to, whereas I just needed to for my mental health.  Mental health?  At the time of Oakley’s call, I had been “diverted” by another “affair.”  That one, too, has come to rest, or rather, has found its natural conclusion, pretty much without any more involvement by me, though I have been closeted these last few days with the old friend whose “affair” it was, him bringing me up to date on how things turned out.  Well, well, Easter has come and gone, spring has come hard upon us, and the rainy season is passing—and May and I have gotten just that much older.  I rest back in my chair, now, let my hands drop from the keyboard, and what do I see?  Your face, Ihab.  Your face as I knew it all those years ago.  Why is that?

     Why do I think of you now?  At such a time?  But honestly, your face has come to me from time to time.  Over the years, when I have found myself in a more-than-usual contemplative mood, you have returned, and strange resonances have taken hold of me. 

I don’t even know if you are still alive.  If you are, you must be over ninety, maybe even over a hundred.  I met you for the first time in Kyoto, Japan.  You taught an American Studies seminar, and I came up from Kyushu to take it and to pal around with my Japanese colleagues in a world-class city.  The city was all it was trumpeted to be, cultivated, beautiful, well mannered, as only the Japanese could be, at least in those days—some thirty-five, forty years ago?  Forty?  I think at least.  You were not a young man then.  When I left Japan, a year and some after that seminar, I went on for my CPA, after which, finding employment and settling into what turned out to be my life’s work, I applied to the NEH Summer Seminar program to attend a seminar you were teaching, this time on the theme of postmodernism.  I had credentials in those studies and even had written a little.  To my surprise I got that fellowship and headed out to the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, which is your home institution.  Is or was.  I don’t know.  I suppose I could try to find you online, but the knowledge either way would only spoil the inspiration behind this writing.  That NEH seminar took place thirty years ago.  You were less young then.  I was, though, still.  I am not anymore.  But something of you has stuck with me, Ihab, something I want to uncover, to dig up from those years, to examine in the daylight.  I think it will make for some interesting telling, after the “event,” so to speak, and weaving together threads of some still unexamined events that come to me now in this period of rest.

     I think back to Kyoto.  You had gray wavy hair and were very thin then.  In fact, you hadn’t changed at all between Kyoto and the next time I saw you, in Milwaukee, all those years later.  How did you manage that? I had changed.  I don’t know if I was wiser, but I had already begun to gray, had two children, and had experienced deaths in the family and among friends, and I had known hardships, become familiar with human frailties that people don’t begin to know until they amass some years behind them.  I had become that person.  But not alone.  I had May with me.  You never met May.  True salt of the earth that woman.  I met your wife, but I don’t remember her name.  I do remember she was younger than you, and I remember she was beautiful, which is why, no doubt, I remember.  But you were still Ihab Hassan, and I learned things from you.  I need to pick out those things, because your staying with me all these years has to mean something, something beyond merely remembering.

     So, let’ get down to it.  In Kyoto you had us read Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body, along with Hayden White, Herbert Marcuse, and I don’t know who or what else.  I don’t remember much of these readings.  I do remember you, though, and the impression you made on me telling us what you wanted us to know from these readings.  You let fall on one occasion, in response to a question I put regarding the great deal of Marxist theorizing we were being exposed to, that Americans could never be susceptible to Marxist thinking, no less to the Soviet style collectivism.  I assumed you had in mind the tradition of Jeffersonian democracy that we tell ourselves lies at the root of both American culture and American politics.  But I was wrong.  I asked you to elaborate. And this is where it gets interesting.  You said, as though it were all so obvious it didn’t bear stating, that Americans were so accustomed to acting on impulse and living their urges, that any form of collectivism would be so stifling they couldn’t bear it, and that imposing a Soviet style collectivism would inevitably result in mass insurrections.  It seems, you added, it would be easier to exterminate us than to dominate us. 

     I sat at that table, my Japanese colleagues having no clue, feeling like a kind of bomb had gone off in my head.  Was it revelation?  Did I suddenly come to realize something about myself I would otherwise not have come to know?  Or was it that this was so obvious, and I was just too dumb to realize it?  Was what you said, Ihab, an indictment of American life and culture or was it genuine praise, an acknowledgment of something so ingrained and innate in us that we don’t see it, but others, people who are not conditioned by our way of life, do see it and define us by it?   

     I had that feeling, that sense, of inadequacy—to judge, to ascertain the truth of things.  But you, Ihab, you just went on, without skipping a beat, with your talk on Norman O. Brown, all of which is now oblivion to me.  But with what vividness you appear now—standing in front of that portable chalk board that had been pushed to one side of the tables laid out in a square at which I sat with my Japanese colleagues, listening to you, taking notes, reacting internally as I did—and I in that room return to myself. 

     It’s a long span of years I look back upon.  I can say, as I contemplate these years, that these traits—acting on impulse, living one’s urges—have never defined me, nor have they defined May, and our lives together.   Has my life been so deliberate that there has never been room in it for impulse and urge?  No.  There has been, of course.  The notion is a bit ridiculous, isn’t it, Ihab?  I quite agree with you.  Yes, yes, I hear your voice, “A nation of people like you, my good friend, would be more than boring.  Yes.  It would be deadly, stultifyingly  boring!”  Agreed.  Is it just me and her, Ihab?  It’s a long time since you planted those thoughts in my head.  I have often tried to see myself in terms of those traits.  Tried to see May, too.  I see more of them in my children, maybe because they are more adventurous.  But maybe, also, because they are so much less inclined to worry about the future, about being prepared, about keeping resources in reserve for hard times—lessons one must learn from the acts of living itself and which no “saying” will make one feel the necessity of. 

     What do I see in others?  Do other people in America tend to conform to your judgment?  I have to admit, I do see these traits among people everywhere.  These traits—aren’t they the very stuff of fiction?  What our stories are all about?  These traits are, I have come to realize, what make us human, Ihab, not merely what make us American. 

     When you taught that seminar in Kyoto, people in China were nearing the end of that nightmare called the “cultural revolution.”  Very few, if any, acted on impulse and lived their urges.  Today, these are possible for them.  And there is more joy among the Chinese now than there has been for a hundred years.  Maybe more.  What does it mean?  Does it mean anything, Ihab?  Did you mean anything by it that I have missed all these years?  Does acting on impulse and living our urges corrupt the idea of freedom?  Or are these ways of living the essence of what freedom means for people? 

     I think about the lives May and I have lived, about the deprivations, the living without, and the squeezing of nickels out of pennies.  I think of our children, of how we shaped them into the people they are today.  I think of the coziness of the home we made.  The friendships.  And I don’t see it, Ihab.  Not in us.  Not in May and me.  But I have always been moony.  Not moody.  There is a difference.  I have known moody people and learned how to avoid them.  No one has ever had to strategize how to avoid May and me.  Avoidance.  How does avoidance square with acting on impulse and living our urges?  I have avoided a lot in my lifetime, I have, Ihab.  Have you?  I wonder.  I wonder about a lot of things.  Franklyn in handcuffs.  A house burned to the ground.  A grieving husband and father.

     Some time ago, before the turn of the year, a farmer came to the house.  I had been idle for a while, working among my papers, writing some, avoiding the office, and more or less enjoying the seasonal transformations—the trees going all red and yellow.  I had nothing on my mind.  You have to realize, Ihab, that this idleness is so rare for me that I was actually enjoying it.  One of your “impulse” moments?  It may be.  It was not a state from which I “needed” diversion.  I was happy.  Yes, in retrospect, I can say that.  May, now, she finds diversion in multitasking, at home, at work, wherever.  She takes up six projects at one time and makes no progress in any of them.  But she makes a huge mess, which she luxuriates in.  How can I complain?  What makes her happy, well, makes her happy.  I, on the other hand, take leisure seriously, walk up Main Street and down, stop and visit with people along the way coming and going from the shops, or I walk out to the lake and let the lake breeze tassel my hair, sit on the bank, stare at the water.  Until I can stand it no more.  Then I hi me back to the office. 

     The “office,” on the other hand, was my livelihood for thirty-plus years.  I started it and worked it myself for years, and when I had built up a reliable clientele, I finally hired someone to help.  That “office” has grown into an institution in this town, and it now employs sixteen people.  As its founder, I keep certain privileges. One of these is an office that no one but me enters.  Sometimes, a person I have known for many years, and whose taxes I have calculated profitably to him, wants or needs to see me, to talk about some exceptional problem, or some exceptionable circumstance, and who trusts me to find a way to help.  He calls upon me and lays a burden on me I cannot shirk.  Even though I am retired, I keep that office for this reason, mostly, but I keep it also because I just need to go there from time to time, to make myself useful when leisure becomes unbearable.  You know, Ihab?  Sometimes acting on impulse just doesn’t cut it.  I crave the opposite.  I need to be called upon, to act, not on impulse, but with deliberation, with care, strategically, and with a purpose to achieve.  I don’t feel grounded enough in the real world unless I get to do this from time to time.  How it was with you, Ihab, I don’t know.  Did you give yourself to some kind of “carnival of crime in Connecticut”? 

     Anyway, Ihab, this farmer, he came not to my office, because I hadn’t been going there, but to the house!  That’s a sign of desperation.  How could I, idle as I was, refuse to hear him?  I didn’t.  May showed him into the living room, and he sat down across from me on the same couch where Franklyn had sat not so very long ago and just looked at me, looked at me as though he expected some kind of revelation to scroll across my forehead. 

     I said, “Irwin, something in particular bring you here, or are you gonna sit there and look at me till supper time?” 

     He just shut up his mouth then, which was hanging open a bit, and shuffled himself about in the seat, taking what time he needed to actually get started.  I didn’t know at the time, but poor Irwin Haas was having monstrous problems, and I emphasize the plural.  He just didn’t know how or where to begin. 

     Irwin farmed.  He owned about 2500 acres.  But he was getting old, like all of us, you know, Ihab?  It’s a pain, and people just never learn to appreciate that fact.  There is some kind of block in our psyches that keeps us from recognizing it.  You know all about this, being at least thirty years older than me, maybe more.

     Irwin still farmed, though.  His bones creaked.  But that wasn’t what brought him to me.  Two years ago he was approached by one of those firms wanting to put up wind farms in South Dakota.  They offered a deal, pie in the sky, to Irwin.  And then one of those ethanol plants that got put up near the Minnesota border sent people around to recruit farmers to grow corn exclusively for the plant.  You know, another pie in the sky deal.  Irwin, he’s expecting to get rich real soon and to leave off farming altogether, letting the guarantee of the crop lure one or more of his sons back to the farm.  None of this worked out for him. 

Now he stood to lose a lot of acres, and the how and why of it was what brought him to me, and, of course, how to prevent the loss that would grieve him to death, the loss of acres, parts of his very own flesh.  He really expected me to pull rabbits out of the hat for him.  Which I did.  Sort of.  That’s what all this writing is about.  What brought you back to me with such force.  What made those words of yours that had such power to start me thinking start ringing in my head again.  Yes, Ihab. Impulse, living the urge, is what brought Irwin to the pass he was in.  It wasn’t greed.  That was the impulse of those who were putting the screws to him.

Irwin’s wealth was tied up in his land.  On paper, he was worth millions.  In reality, he couldn’t buy a new vacuum cleaner for his wife.  This is the lot of farmers.  Irwin was no different.  When one chance after another came to him to make what he thought was hard earned income after all the years he sweated to pay back loans and feed his family, he was ready to exploit them.  But it was Irwin who got exploited.  And to get out from under the burden of those windmills, whose upkeep threatened to bankrupt him, and whose profits went almost entirely to the California company who got Irwin to sign those contracts, he had to sell some land.  Had to.  That was, in the end, how those people far away planned it all out.  And Irwin, he saw how he’d been taken, and he wanted to get even, not ahead, just even, so he came to me for help. 

     He put the contract on the coffee table across from him, folded and dog-eared and crinkled and creased after having been carried in his jacket pocket and his pants pocket, been thumbed, recarried, rethumbed, and on and on, so that I could actually see hairs from poor Irwin’s head caught in its folds.  I took it and laid it on the glass on my side of the table and began to scan it, and when I finished, I returned to one article and read it over, and then read it over again.  This one was the culprit,  the fine-print clause, that a lawyer would have alerted Irwin to if Irwin had bothered to help himself that way before partnering up with these scoundrels. 

     Anyway, I sat back and looked up at the ceiling, as I am prone to do when I have someone with me and I need to pull myself away mentally to get a handle on things.  I leaned back into the sofa, put my hands behind my head, and noticed cobwebs silkily draping across the ceiling just above the door to the dining room, which I was facing, and the thought occurred to me that the oldest trick in the accounting trade was to hide money by manipulating double-entry bookkeeping—one makes the credits and debits equal out, and no one is ever the wiser. 

     I knew how to fix Irwin’s problem without it costing him either acres or cash, and I figured I could make him owner of a dozen windmills to boot.  Yes, they were scoundrels, those California people, planning from the very start to take Irwin to the baths, but they were innocents when it came to manipulation.  I would make them beggars.  Oh, I smiled.  Ihab?  I have to confess there is a dark side to what I have done all my life to earn a living.  Not that I exploited that side for my own profit—I never did that.  I have a clean conscience.  But the IMPULSE, Ihab, the IMPULSE to “do unto others” was just overwhelming, and poor Irwin looked so helpless, and stood to lose so much to their chicanery, well, it was overwhelming. 

     Irwin saw the slow smile creep across my face, and he sat back in the filtered light of the living room sort of relieved, because he knew before I said anything that I was going to rescue him.  He smiled back at me. 

     “Well, Bill, can you beat these guys?”

     “At their own game, Irwin.  You go home, now, and relax, and I’ll get to work.  I know just what to do.”

     Well, well, well.  I felt such a surge of energy, Ihab, such a jolt, that I came out of the doldrums in which I had been wallowing, and, renewed, literally skipped out of the house to the office.

California Wind, Inc.!  I can imagine how those scoundrels laughed when they selected this name for their corporation, which had only a single purpose, to defraud Irwin Haas.  Oh, it wasn’t Irwin in particular, you see.  It was, or could have been, any South Dakota farmer in the right region impulsive enough to bite at the bait they dangled in front of him.  It was Irwin who bit.  But it might just as well have been any other of hundreds of farmers just like Irwin. 

     The California swindlers put up enough money to make the scheme look legitimate.  It went like this: they put up the money to build the first windmill on acreage set aside from Irwin’s farm.  Once that windmill was completed and came on line, its earnings would help finance, with money from the same bank that Irwin relied on for his farm, the building of the second one; and when that one came on line, the two together would finance the building of the third, and so on.  By the time the twelfth windmill came on line, the so-called “wind farm” would be earning profits, of which Irwin would be the recipient of a full 25 percent.  The “wind farm” consumed five hundred of Irwin’s twenty-five hundred acres.  The proviso in that small-print clause, which Irwin, in his eagerness to exploit what seemed to him a real opportunity, overlooked, held that the owner of the land would be responsible for all taxes accruing to the corporation as a consequence of property revaluation, but taxes from the sale of electricity would be assessed to Corporate Wind, Inc., of which Irwin had been named chief officer and stock holder.  In the small print, the scoundrels had named themselves as recipients of the wind farm, including the acreage upon which it sat, which in the contract became part of California Wind, and named themselves recipients also of the corporation in case of default.  This was the scheme.  Irwin had swallowed it whole.  He was impulsive: seeing himself as both owner of the land and chief corporate officer made such an impression on him, he just couldn’t resist.  But now, with the IRS calling for an audit, seeing how he had been set up, he was ready to fight.  I knew Irwin enough to anticipate serious consequences for those swindlers in California and, more likely than not, for himself, too, if I hadn’t gotten involved.

All I did to turn the tables on those boys was to show, by careful manipulation of the corporation’s credits and debits, that the land the wind farm was on actually decreased in value because it was no longer agricultural but was now acreage supporting a failed business, and to show, also, that instead of earning profits, the sales of electricity were insufficient to pay off the loans, and thus no taxes were accruable, but that with sufficient government investment the wind farm could be made profitable.  You have to realize, of course, what skillful bookkeeping this involved.  But I had partnered with the IRS so often to save my clients’ farms, that this was all routine for me.  But, to get back to it, with Irwin as landowner and as chief corporate officer and stockholder, I had only to prevent default to reverse the Californians’ planned outcome.  It was so easy, I mean, it was like taking candy from the proverbial baby.  I didn’t feel bad, though.  I gave Irwin a new lease on life.  But I also set him up for the vengeance of scoundrels who were not about to go peacefully into that good night.  It was bloody, in the end.  And it was my fault for being. . .innocent?  Impulsive?  Naïve?  Ihab, I feel just as down now as though I had spilled the blood myself.

     My weapon was the fax machine, a not very blunt instrument for the wielding of death.  Funny, isn’t it?  I had only just recently given in to buying a cell phone.  I, in my twenty dollar khaki slacks and tweed jacket, wielding ledgers and fax machines, outsmarting those sharks in California!  But I guess there was more going on than merely my bookkeeping.  There were also at work those attitudes that make the so-called cultural elite look at people like Irwin and myself as yokels, ripe for the picking.  But spiders build their webs in South Dakota as well as California, and they eat ripe enough bugs here, too.  By which I mean, we were no yokels, but we were not prepared for what happened.

     It began when two strangers visited Irwin’s farm, and he was not home.  His wife was in the farmyard, out behind the decrepit old hay barn where they kept a fenced-in shed as a little coop for chickens.  Old Netty, crouched on her arthritic haunches, was clucking and scattering corn in the pen, and the chickens were scratching and clucking in response, and above the wire fence she half felt and half discerned a darkening that didn’t come from a cloud.  Alarmed, she looked up and saw two men standing just beyond the pen on the other side staring at her.  These men were dressed in suits and ties, and though they were windblown, she could see that they were stylishly groomed.  For a moment she just looked at them, letting her adrenaline settle, but when they started to come round the pen, she laboriously pulled herself up onto her feet and let out in her normal, farm friendly way, “Hello!  Can I help you?  Have you lost your way?”

     “We’re looking for Irwin Haas,” one of them said as they neared her.

     “Why, he isn’t here just now,” she replied and instantly regretted implying that she was alone.  “Irwin comes and goes,” she began to clarify in a way that might give them second thought if they had mischief in mind.  With a hand coming to her cheek and a sly smile she said, “He’s always with somebody fixing or hauling or tinkering or whatnot.”  She scattered the last of the corn in the tin she brought from the barn, and asked again, “Can I help you?” feeling like she had said enough to caution them.

     “We got business with Mr. Haas,” the other one said in a tone that made Netty take notice.

     She looked carefully at the two men, then, and decided that inviting them into the house would be unwise.  She cast about in her mind for a way she might encourage them to leave.

     “If you let me know how he can reach you, I’ll tell him you came,” she said in as helpful a tone as she could muster, thinking that she had hit just the right note.  Suddenly, as she glanced at their faces, she became afraid.  There was no friendliness in them, and there was no amiability in their demeanor.  These men, she could plainly see, did not mean well.

     The two of them stood just as they were for an uncomfortable long time, adding to Netty’s discomfort.  She wanted to turn and run, but her hips were so arthritic that she could barely walk anymore.  As the silence persisted, she could feel her heart beating, but she bravely kept her eyes fastened to the men’s faces.  Then they seemed to turn in concert with one another, as though they shared some inner communication, and walked back around the chicken coop towards the barn the way they had come.  Netty hobbled after them as best she could and watched them get into a white sedan, she did not know what kind, and drive away.  The whole experience, from their ominous appearance to their odd withdrawal, had been frightening, and she was afraid.  She had lived many years on the farm and had never known anything like it to happen before.  She walked in her slow arthritic way to the house.  Coming into the kitchen from the farmyard, she crossed to where the phone hung on the wall just beside the door to the dining room.  She picked up the receiver and began calling everyone she knew to find out where Irwin was and get him home.

     Later, after having been told by Netty all about the men and how they frightened her, Irwin called on his neighbors, Bob and Trish Nielson, old friends of many years with whom he and Netty had shared so many of life’s occasions, and told Bob all about the California business and the sense of menace Netty felt by the visitation.  What followed was a typical response: out came the shotguns.  It is too bad Irwin didn’t come to me then.  I would have got Chief Comer involved, and knowing him, he would not have rested until those men were neutralized.  But Irwin didn’t come to me.  They were not abstract things, those men, like the contract, the deal, the fraudulence.  They were flesh and blood.  They existed in another domain from the one in which he recognized me. 

     Irwin Haas and Bob Nielson set up defenses at Irwin’s farm.  They were thinking cowboys and Indians, with themselves as defenders of the homestead and the visitors as the marauders, coming for blood.  They hid loaded shotguns all over the place—the barns, the kitchen of the farmhouse, the sheds, on the seat of the tractor, on a plow blade, everywhere.  No matter where they might be when the “enemy” returned, a shotgun would be in reach.  Neither man gave any thought to the possibility that those men meant no harm, that they only had in mind questioning him.  Those men frightened Netty.  That was enough for them. 

     Just let a farmer imagine someone is after his land, after it in some kind of scheming way, and you will have the same outcome.  It’s as predictable as day and night.  What saved them from catastrophe on that occasion is that the men didn’t come back to the farm.  Perhaps they were wise enough to realize the danger.  What they did was take a room in the Thunderbird motel and phone Irwin that evening and tell him they wanted to talk about the wind farm, about his plans for the future, and about their investments.  Irwin sighed and wiped his forehead and figured the emergency had passed, and then he and Bob cracked a beer, sat down at the kitchen table, and discussed how Irwin had got the better of those California wise guys. 

     But those men meant harm.  Netty’s intuition was exactly right.  Irwin told me this story when all was done, when May and I had begun to come down after Franklyn’s attack and find a little peace.  We sat in the living room, I in that place on the sofa where I normally sit, and Irwin exactly where Franklyn stood on the other side of the coffee table before he assaulted me.  I mention this because of the ironies and of the violence the two incidents entailed.

     The man he spoke with, Irwin told me, had invited him, Irwin, to come to the motel, but Irwin said he just didn’t feel right about that and invited them instead to join him for coffee at the Canyon, a coffee shop at the corner of Second and Main.  The man agreed, and Irwin went at the appointed time.  When he entered, he easily recognized one of the men from Netty’s description of them.  He joined the man and asked about the other.  The man said that the other wasn’t going to join them.  He began to ask Irwin then a few very reasonable questions about the wind farm, its earnings, and Irwin’s plans for the future.  Unbeknown to him, the other man was heading out to Irwin’s farm, and this man did not have reasonable questions to put to anybody. 

     Netty was just finishing feeding the chickens.  She had put away the tin which she always filled with corn from the bin in the barn, had closed up the bin, and was about to return to the house when she saw that white car coming down the road towards the house.  Just beside the barn Irwin had his plow all ready to be hooked up to the tractor, which sat for the moment in the barn, awaiting Irwin’s return.  The fields were dry enough now to be plowed and got ready for planting.  Irwin would have been well along the first of his fields if he hadn’t had this meeting with the California man in town.  Netty waited, apprehensively, for the car to come into the yard, as it did before. 

     The man pulled up near the plow, seeing her there, and got out and gestured to her in a friendly enough way.  She calmed a bit and prepared to ask again what he wanted when he came rather quickly toward her.  He grabbed her left arm and began dragging her toward the car.  Netty, both in pain from the awkward movements the dragging caused and frightened by the man’s violence, tried to resist by pulling against him.  The man turned on her then and slapped her in the face with all his might.  Stunned by the blow, Netty fell to the gravel on her hands and knees.  The man stood in front of her and snarled, “Get your ancient ass off the ground and get in the car!”  Netty, still trying to clear her mind from the blow, saw the shotgun resting on the blade of the plow, where Irwin, in his paranoia yesterday, had put it. 

     She rose feebly and pretended to stumble forward in order to misdirect the man, who stood directly in front of her, and the instant he began to turn towards the car, she bolted to the plow, grabbed the shotgun, turned it on the man who still did not know what was happening, and pulled the trigger.  She was so close to him that the blast, catching him on the left shoulder, lifted him off the ground.  Netty stood crookedly, leaning on the shotgun, its muzzle pressed into the gravel between her feet, and looked at him, wondering if he was dead, her head still slightly swimming from the force of the blow.  When she saw he wasn’t moving, she turned, hauled the shotgun onto her shoulder, and hobbled as best she could to the house.  She climbed the three steps into the kitchen, put the shotgun on the table to keep it near, and called the police chief, looking all the while out the door at the man lying still where he had fallen.  The injured man survived his wound, but neither of the two men survived the investigation by Comer and then later by the FBI. 

     Irwin is a happy man, in spite of Netty’s near nervous breakdown, and now her desire to get off the farm once and for all and come into town.  He came to tell me how the whole thing worked out and to pay me generously for my role in it.  I took his check.  It was a lot of money.  I figured May and I deserved it.  I was glad for Irwin, and I was sorry Netty had to be the one to face the violence.  But now that they were planning on leaving the farm, she would undoubtedly find comfort in the social embrace of the town.  The men admitted to the plot cooked up in California.  Netty was to be taken there to be their bargaining chip.  Whether in the end they would have done her harm, we will never know.  Irwin and Netty foiled them, though, as May and I had foiled Franklyn, or, at least, had escaped from his clutches. 

     So much for acting on impulse and living our urges.  Ihab, there are impulses and then again there are impulses.  Urges, and urges.  I am not certain we can always separate them, even that we can always distinguish them.  The higher ones from the lower, I mean, if one can use such language.  I do know that we ought as a people to relearn how to repress.  That might sound a little nutty.  I know.  Especially now, in the Twenty-First Century.  But a little repression of the urges, of the impulses, might make life a bit more civilized.  What do you think, Ihab?