Silence and space and an unimaginable freedom which they dare not imagine.

The gaunt paterfamilias would drive them into town to church on Sundays with the black Bible on his knee wherein their names and dates of birth were inscribed. In the buggy, his shy, big-boned, tow-headed son in best, dark, Sunday clothes, and Annie-Belle, at thirteen, fourteen, increasingly astonished at and rendered shy by her own lonely flowering. Fifteen. How pretty she was growing! They came to pray in Gods house that, like their own, was built of split logs. Annie-Belle kept her eyes down; she was a good girl. They were good children. The widower drank, sometimes, but not much. They grew up in silence, in the enormous silence of the empty land, the silence that swallowed up the Saturday-night fiddlers tune, mocked the rare laughter at weddings and christenings, echoed, a vast margin, around the sermons of the preacher.

(Close up) Annie-Belle, smiling, breathing in the scent from her posy.

EXTERIOR. FARMHOUSE PORCH. DAY

Soranzo: Have you not the will to love?

The dusk bird went chink-chink-chink with the sound of a chisel on a gravestone.

(Close up) Petticoat falling on to porch of farmhouse.

Clink of fathers bottle against glass.

Sister, even by our mothers dust, I charge you

JOHNNY: Annie-Belle, youre not eating anything tonight.

EXTERIOR. FARMHOUSE. DAY

There was a rancher had two children, a son and then a daughter. A while after that, his wife died and was buried under two sticks nailed together to make a cross because there was no time, yet, to carve a stone.

Annabella: Yes, you know I do.

Empty rocking-chair, rocking, rocking.

The Ministers wife and the Minister turn to look at the young man. He blushes slowly but comprehensively.

Giovanni: On my knees,

(Close up) Johnny and Annie-Belle kiss.

EXTERIOR. PRAIRIE. DAY

He put out his hand and touched her wet hair. He was giddy.

The "Love Theme" swells and rises. She jumps up to tend him. The jogged mirror falls.

Ministers son tethers horse. He has brushed his Sunday coat.

John Ford (1586-c.1639). English dramatist of the Jacobean period. His tragedy, Tis Pity Shes a Wliore, was published in 1633. "Deep in a dump John Ford alone was got/With folded arms and melancholy hat." (Choice Drollery, 1656.)

EXTERIOR. PRAIRIE. DAY

Annie-Belle, in apron, comes out on homestead porch; strikes metal triangle.

Upset water-tub, spilling over discarded petticoat.

Annabella: Thats as the fates infer.

Giovanni: Heres none but you and I. I think you love me九_九_藏_书_网, sister.

Dinner-table. Ministers wife dishing portions from a pot for her husband and her son.

Then the mother lay with the prairies and all that careless sky upon her breast, and the children lived in their fathers house. So they grew up. In his spare time the rancher chiselled at a rock: "Beloved wife of. . . mother of. . ." beneath the space at the top he had left for his own name.

ANNIE-BELLE: Dinners ready!

Dissolve.

Supper-table. Annie-Belle serves beans. None for herself.

Clink of bottle on glass.

The Ministers 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.

The light, the unexhausted light of North America that, filtered through celluloid, will become the light by which we see America looking at itself.

Sun going down over prairies.

In the fragments of the mirror, they kneel to see their round, blond, innocent faces that, superimposed upon one another, would fit at every feature, their faces, all at once the same face, the face that never existed until now, the pure face of America.

[He kneels.]

NOTE:

For pitys sake, I beg you!

Love me, or kill me, sister.

Pan blue sky, with clouds. Johnny and Annie-Belle, dwarfed by the landscape, hand in hand, heads bowed. Their hands slowly part.

She told her boy: "Look after your sister." He, blond, solemn, little; he and Death sat with her in the room of logs her husband split to build. Death, with high cheek-bones, wore his hair in braids. His invisible presence in the cabin mocked the existence of the cabin. The round-eyed boy clutched his mothers dry hand. The girl was younger.

For surely it cannot be this? This bliss? Who could forbid such bliss!

Bang, bang, bang.

[Music plays.]

Takes her hand. Kisses the little wound.

Brother, even by our mothers dust, I charge you

She pondered the irreversibility of defloration. According to what the Ministers 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.９9lib•ｎet 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.

America begins and ends in the cold and solitude. Up here, she pillows her head upon the Arctic snow. Down there, she dips her feet in the chilly waters of the South Atlantic, home of the perpetually restless albatross. America, with her torso of a woman at the time of this story, a woman with an hour-glass waist, a waist laced so tightly it snapped in two, and we put a belt of water there. America, with your child-bearing hips and your crotch of jungle, your swelling bosom of a nursing mother and your cold head, your cold head.

Father on porch, feet up on railing, glass and bottle to hand.

Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana . . . Oh, those enormous territories! That green vastness, in which anything is possible.

"Seven years bad luck --"

A dusk bird went chink-chink-chink like a single blow on the stone xylophone of the Chinese classical orchestra.

Its central paradox resides in this: that the top half doesnt know what the bottom half is doing. When I say the two children of the prairie, suckled on those green breasts, were the pure children of the continent, you know at once that they were norteamericanos, or I would not speak of them in the English language, which was their language, the language that silences the babble of this continents multitude of tongues.

Blond children with broad, freckled faces, the boy in dungarees and the little girl in gingham and sunbonnet. In the old play, one John Ford called them Giovanni and Annabella; the other John Ford, in the movie, might call them Johnny and Annie-Belle.

Soranzo: Who, then?

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.

Annabella: Methinks you are not well.

Annabella: Not you.

Giovanni: Let not this music be a dream, ye gods.

Giovanni: I am lost forever.

EXTERIOR. PRAIRIE. DAY

Annie-Belle on porch, washing dishes in a tub. Tears run down her face.

Correction: will become the light by which we see North America looking at itself.

EXTERIOR. FARMHOUSE. DAY

EXTERIOR. FARMHOUSE PORCH. DAY

Do not betray me to your mirth or hate.

ANNIE-BELLE: Oh!

Love me, orwｗｗ•９９ｌiｂ•neｔ kill me, brother.

MINISTERS WIFE: Taint right, just aint right, those two out there, growing up like savages, never seeing nobody.

[She kneels.]

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 others face as if it were their own.

Bang, bang, bang. Johnny shoots the bottles one by one.

(Fathers point of view) Johnny shooting bottles off the fence.

John Ford (1895-1973). American film-maker. Filmography includes: Stagecoach (1938); My Darling Clementine (1946); She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949). "My name is John Ford. I make Westerns." (John Ford, Andrew Sinclair, New York 1979.)

Since his wife died, the rancher spoke rarely. They lived far out of town. He had no time for barn-raisings and church suppers. If she had lived, everything would have been different, but he occupied his spare moments in chiselling her gravestone. They did not celebrate Thanksgiving for he had nothing for which to give thanks. It was a hard life.

ANNIE-BELLE: I think he likes me, Johnny.

Ministers son rides along track in long shot.

Annie-Belle will bake bread, tramp the linen clean and cook the beans and bacon; this lily of the West had not spare time enough to pause and consider the lilies of the field, who never do a hands turn. No, sir. A womans work is never done and she became a woman early.

In his hand, a posy of flowers -- cottage roses, sweetbrier, daisies.

EXTERIOR. FARMHOUSE PORCH. DAY

"Love Theme" up.

Imagine an orchestra behind them: the frame house, the porch, the rocking-chair endlessly rocking, like a cradle, the white petticoat with eyelet lace, her water-darkened hair hanging on her shoulders and little trickles running down between her shallow breasts, the young man leading the limping pony, and, inexhaustible as light, around them the tender land.

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 he九九藏书r. There is more to it than farmyard ways.

She washed her hair in a tub. She washed her long, yellow hair. She was fifteen. It was spring. She washed her hair. It was the first time that year. She sat on the porch to dry her hair, she sat in the rocking-chair which her mother selected from the Sears Roebuck catalogue, where her father would never sit, now. She propped a bit of mirror on the porch railing. It caught the sun and flashed. She combed out her wet hair in the mirror. There seemed to be an awful lot of it, tangling up the comb. She wore only her petticoat, the men were off with the cattle, nobody to see her pale shoulders except that Johnny came back. The horse threw him, he knocked his head against the stone. Giddy, he came back to the house, leading his pony, and she was busy untangling her hair and did not see him, nor have a chance to cover herself.

Bang, bang, bang.

Johnny and Annie-Belle walking on the prairie.

No. It wasnt like that! Not in the least like that.

INTERIOR. MINISTERS HOUSE. DAY

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? Hes 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.

Holds up pricked forefinger; blood drops on to a daisy.

MINISTERS SON: Let me . . .

EXTERIOR. FARMHOUSE PORCH. DAY

ANNIE-BELLE: Cant rightly fancy anything tonight.

She lowered her head and drew her foot back and forth in the dust. Her breasts hurt, she felt queasy.

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.

Annie-Belle, clean dress, tidy hair, red eyes, comes out of house on to porch. Clink of fathers bottle against glass.

Sound of the wind buffeting the sheets, the very sound of loneliness.

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 wwｗ.99ｌｉｂ.ｎetvoice 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.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

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.

(Long shot) Farmhouse.

Do not betray me to your mirth or hate.

What did the girl think? In summer, of the heat, and how to keep flies out of the butter; in winter, of the cold. I do not know what else she thought. Perhaps, as young girls do, she thought that a stranger would come to town and take her away to the city and so on, but, since her imagination began and ended with her experience, the farm, work, the seasons, I think she did not think so far, as if she knew already she was the object of the object of her own desire for, in the bright light of the New World, nothing is obscure. But when they were children, all they knew was they loved each other just as, surely, a brother or a sister should.

. . . make it better.

Row of bottles on a fence.

Did she die of the loneliness of the prairies? Or was it anguish that killed her, anguish, and nostalgia for the close, warm, neighbourly life she had left behind her when she came to this emptiness? Neither. She died of the pressure of that vast sky, that weighed down upon her and crushed her lungs until she could not breathe any more, as if the prairies were the bedrock of an ocean in which she drowned.

Annie-Belle smiles, takes posy.

Annabella: On my knees,

Now they walk with gradually increasing distance between them.

MINISTERS SON: Shes terribly pretty, Mama.

The Ministers wife made sure Annie-Belle knew a thing or two when she judged it about the time the girls bleeding started. The Ministers wife, in a vague, pastoral way, thought about a husband for Annie-Belle, a wife for Johnny. "Out there, in that little house on the prairie, so lonesome. . . Nobody for those young folks to talk to cept cows, cows, cows."

"Why, Johnny, I declare --"

INTERIOR. FARMHOUSE. NIGHT