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"A young man, a Fighting Sawmaker about eighteen years old, is strolling insouciantly past my phone booth now, wearing the sacred blue and white. He looks dangerous, but he wouldn't harm a soul. His two best subjects in school were Citizenship and Problems in Modern American Democracy, both taught by his basketball coach. He understands that anything violent he might do would not only weaken the Republic, but would ruin his own life, too. There is no work for him in Rosewater. There is damn little work for him anywhere. He often carries birth-control devices in his pocket, which many people find alarming and disgusting. The same people find it alarming and disgusting that the boy's father did not use birth-control devices. One more kid rotten-spoiled by postwar abundance, one more princeling with goose-berry eyes. He's meeting his girl now, a girl not much older than fourteen— a five-and-ten-cent-store Cleopatra, a four-letter word.

"Across the street is the firehouse—four trucks, three drunks, sixteen dogs, and one cheerful, sober young man with a can of metal polish."

"Oh, Eliot, Eliot—come home, come home."

"Don't you understand, Sylvia? I am home. I know now that this has always been home—the Town of Rosewater, the Township of Rosewater, the County of Rosewater, the State of Indiana."

"And what do you intend to do there, Eliot?"

"I'm going to care about these people."

"That's—that's very nice," said Sylvia bleakly. This was a pale and delicate girl, cultivated, wispy. She played the harpsichord, spoke six languages enchantingly. As a child and young woman, she had met many of the greatest men of her time in her parents' home—Picasso, Schweitzer, Hemingway, Toscanini, Churchill, de Gaulle. She had never seen Rosewater County, had no idea what a night-crawler was, did not know that land anywhere could be so deathly flat, that people anywhere could be so deathly dull.

"I look at these people, these Americans," Eliot went on, "and I realize that they can't even care about themselves any more—because they have no use. The factory, the farms, the mines across the river—they're almost completely automatic now. And America doesn't even need these people for war—not any more. Sylvia—I'm going to be an artist."

"An artist?"

"I'm going to love these discarded Americans, even though they're useless and unattractive. That is going to be my work of art."

4

ROSEWATER COUNTY, the canvas Eliot proposed to paint with love and understanding, was a rectangle on which other men—other Rosewaters, mainly— had already made some bold designs. Eliot's predecessors had anticipated Mondrian. Half the roads ran east and west and half the roads ran north and south. Bisecting the county exactly, and stopping at its borders, was a stagnant canal fourteen miles long. It was the one dash of reality added by Eliot's great grandfather to a stock and bond fantasy of a canal that would join Chicago, Indianapolis, Rosewater and the Ohio. There were now bullheads, crappies, redeyes, blue-gills, and carp in the canal. It was to people interested in catching such fish that night-crawlers were sold.

The ancestors of many of the night-crawler merchants had been stockholders and bondholders in the Rosewater Inter-State Ship Canal. When the scheme failed utterly, some of them lost their farms, which were bought by Noah Rosewater. A Utopian community in the southwest corner of the county, New Ambrosia, invested everything it had in the canal, and lost. They were Germans, communists and atheists who practiced group marriage, absolute truthfuless, absolute cleanliness, and absolute love. They were now scattered to the winds, like the worthless papers that represented their equity in the canal. No one was sorry to see them go. Their one contribution to the county that was still viable in Eliot's time was their brewery, which had become the home of Rosewater Golden Lager Ambrosia Beer. On the label of each can of beer was a picture of the heaven on earth the New