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feature, their faces, all at once the same face, the face that never existed
until now, the pure face of America.
EXTERIOR. PRAIRIE. DAY
(Long shot) Farmhouse.
(Close up) Petticoat falling on to porch of farmhouse.
Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, the
Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana . . . Oh, those enormous territories! That green
vastness, in which anything is possible.
EXTERIOR. PRAIRIE. DAY
(Close up) Johnny and Annie-Belle kiss.
"Love Theme" up.
Dissolve.
No. It wasn't like that! Not in the least like that.
He put out his hand and touched her wet hair. He was giddy.
Annabella: Methinks you are not well.
Giovanni: Here's none but you and I. I think you love me, sister.
Annabella: Yes, you know I do.
And they thought, then, that they should kill themselves, together now,
before they did it; they remembered tumbling together in infancy, how their
mother laughed to see their kisses, their embraces, when they were too young
to know they should not do it, yet even in their loneliness on the enormous
plain they knew they must not do it. . .do what? How did they know what to do?
From watching the cows with the bull, the bitch with the dog, the hen with the
cock. They were country children. Turning from the mirror, each saw the
other's face as if it were their own.
[Music plays.]
Giovanni: Let not this music be a dream, ye gods.
For pity's sake, I beg you!
[She kneels.]
Annabella: On my knees,
Brother, even by our mother's dust, I charge you
Do not betray me to your mirth or hate.
Love me, or kill me, brother.
[He kneels.]
Giovanni: On my knees,
Sister, even by our mother's dust, I charge you
Do not betray me to your mirth or hate.
Love me, or kill me, sister.
EXTERIOR. FARMHOUSE PORCH. DAY
Upset water-tub, spilling over discarded petticoat.
Empty rocking-chair, rocking, rocking.
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It is the boy -- or young man, rather -- who is the most mysterious to
me. The eagerness with which he embraces his fate. I imagine him mute or
well-nigh mute; he is the silent type, his voice creaks with disuse. He turns
the soil, he breaks the wills of the beautiful horses, he milks the cows, he
works the land, he toils and sweats. His work consists of the vague,
undistinguished "work" of such folks in the movies. No cowboy, he, roaming the
plains. Where the father took root, so has the son, in the soil that was never
before broken until now.
And I imagine him with an intelligence nourished only by the black book
of the father, and hence cruelly circumscribed, yet dense with allusion,
seeing himself as a kind of Adam and she his unavoidable and irreplaceable
Eve, the unique companion of the wilderness, although by their toil he knows
they do not live in Eden and of the precise nature of the forbidden thing he
remains in doubt.
For surely it cannot be this? This bliss? Who could forbid such bliss!
Was it bliss for her, too? Or was there more of love than pleasure in
it? "Look after your sister." But it was she who looked after him as soon as
she knew how and pleasured him in the same spirit as she fed him.
Giovanni: I am lost forever.
Lost in the green wastes, where the pioneers were lost. Death with his
high cheek-bones and his braided hair helped Annie-Belle take off her clothes.
She closed her eyes so that she could not see her own nakedness. Death showed
her how to touch him and him her. There is more to it than farmyard ways.
INTERIOR. MINISTER'S HOUSE. DAY
Dinner-table. Minister's wife dishing portions from a pot for her
husband and her son.
MINISTER'S WIFE: 'Tain't right, just ain't right, those two out
there, growing up like savages, never seeing nobody.
MINISTER'S SON: She's terribly pretty, Mama.
The Minister's wife and the Minister turn to look at the young
man. He blushes slowly but comprehensively.
The rancher knew nothing. He worked. He kept the iron core of grief
within him rustless. He looked forward to his solitary, once-monthly drink,
alone on the porch, and on those nights they took a chance and slept together
in the log cabin under the patchwork quilt made in the "log cabin" pattern by
their mother. Each time they lay down there together, as if she obeyed a voice
that came out of the quilt telling her to put the light out, she would
extinguish the candle flame between her finger-tips. All around them, the
tactility of the dark.
She pondered the irreversibility of defloration. According to what the
Minister's wife said, she had lost everything and was a lost girl. And yet
this change did not seem to have changed her. She turned to the only one she
loved, and the desolating space around them diminished to that of the soft
grave their bodies dented in the long grass by the creek. When winter came,
they made quick, dangerous love among the lowing beasts in the barn. The snow
melted and all was green enough to blind you and there was a vinegarish smell
from the rising of the sharp juices of spring. The birds came back.
A dusk bird went chink-chink-chink like a single blow on the stone
xylophone of the Chinese classical orchestra.
EXTERIOR. FARMHOUSE PORCH. DAY
Annie-Belle, in apron, comes out on homestead porch; strikes metal
triangle.
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ANNIE-BELLE: Dinner's ready!
INTERIOR. FARMHOUSE. NIGHT
Supper-table. Annie-Belle serves beans. None for herself.
JOHNNY: Annie-Belle, you're not eating anything tonight.
ANNIE-BELLE: Can't rightly fancy anything tonight.
The dusk bird went chink-chink-chink with the sound of a chisel on a
gravestone.
He wanted to run away with her, west, further west, to Utah, to
California where they could live as man and wife, but she said: "What about
Father? He's lost enough already." When she said that, she put on, not his
face, but that of their mother, and he knew in his bones the child inside her
would part them.
The Minister's son, in his Sunday coat, came courting Annie-Belle. He is
the second lead, you know in advance, from his tentative manner and mild eyes;
he cannot long survive in this prairie scenario. He came courting Annie-Belle
although his mother wanted him to go to college. "What will you do at college
with a young wife?" said his mother. But he put away his books; he took the
buggy to go out and visit her. She was hanging washing out on the line.
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