Alive and Dead in Indiana Read Online Free Page B

with me?
    We crossed back into Indiana. Sleeping, she didn’t wake up till I slowed for an Amish buggy around Nap-panee. Horses and wagons were everywhere on the roads and in the fields. I got the car wheels to straddle the manure. That part of the country is the way Henryville was when I was growing up. Broad-brim straw hats and beards, suspenders and serge. Lordy, what I’ve seen. Now she wasn’t half an hour away from where I picked her up in Fort Wayne, but she was way back in time. She was losing ground. She made me pass a wagon real slow as she stared, from behind her sunglasses, deep into the bonnet of the lady driver. She wanted to know what they were doing in the fields. Why they looked the way they looked. It was all so far away to her.
    Not much farther up U.S. 6, she said here was where she would get out. All she had to do was say the word. She thanked me. I pulled over and stopped, got out and fetched her roll from the trunk. We’d parked next to a muckfield planted in peppermint. It had already been cut and raked into rows. The air reeked of it and onions in a field nearby. No shade in sight. She hadn’t gotten a thing from me but a ride down the road. I told her to be careful.
    I was able to look back at her a long time since the peat fields are so flat. I wondered if she realized what a difference a few feet make, that just this side of Fort Wayne is that continental divide turning the river back on its tributaries and dividing up the country as sure as the mountains out west. She probably didn’t know how it all fit together. A small rise on the plain could cut her off forever. I turned a corner and never saw her again. I drove the rest of the day and night only stopping for gas.
    Now it’s your turn to tell me what this is all about. Who was she? Has something happened? Have I broken some law?
    All the time I was with her I could see she didn’t know word one about drummers or bums or bindle stiffs. But who was I to tell her? The roads are different now. But what’s it to do with me? I’m glad that part of my life is behind me.

ALFRED KINSEY, ALONE, AFTER AN INTERVIEW, DREAMS OF INDIANA
     
    I could never tell a dirty story. There is the one about the new convict and the numbered jokes, but that is not the type of thing I am thinking about. Well, anyway, the new convict calls out a number, and no one laughs because some people can’t tell a joke. Pomeroy used to laugh at that one, probably more out of respect than anything else. I was, by that time, a kind of authority.
    In the fall, Clara and I would borrow a car and head out of town on a Sunday. The leaves would be turning. I like the way fall works. The leaves not turning really, only the green going, and the carotene showing through for once.
    We always saw it on our way to Brown County, saw a car pulled off onto the shoulder, occupants out there picnicking or napping near an overlook. And with the leaves forgetting themselves all around us, so would we. We’d try to get a look at the parkers. All this nature, but what we wanted was a look at each other. I always used this anecdote to teach my beginning classes the concept of species recognition. Interbreeding population is the last distinction before variety, I am convinced. It is the only instinct. Our heads are literally turned.
    Martin kept expecting the women to lift their blouses. He was always saddened by the disparity between the public and the private history. He never doubted which was true. I remember him going over the histories of his classmates at Indiana. With the files open before him, he just sat there shaking his head. He had believed everything his friends had told him.
    The first warm day and the whole department would head out to the quarries around Bloomington. Imagine, in the first days of spring, their spouses within reach again, everyone is on the lookout for the return to life of some specific fauna. All these men, knowing the oestrus of their special species, have