Echoes in the Darkness Read Free

two boys-careened around the Continent in a rented Volkswagen bus while he hungered to see every site where the bard had so much as walked.
    They rattled into Rapallo where Pound had been arrested at the close of World War II for treasonable collaboration with the Fascists. They tracked down a former friend of the poet who still lived in the same house she had occupied as a child when she was Pounds neighbor. The woman couldn't speak English but managed to understand Bill Bradfield's Spanish.
    She revealed to him a treasure trove. Her house was filled with books by and about Pound, and photos, and memorabilia. It was a day of joy!
    They found a prison compound near Pisa and visited Ezra Pounds former cellblock as other pilgrims visit Lourdes. Bill Bradfield clipped a piece of the barbed wire that encircled the now defunct compound and treated that snippet like a sliver from the True Cross.
    They met and lunched with the man who owned the property where the camp had been. Bill Bradfield assured him that his land would be very valuable, after Ezra Pound attained his rightful place in the world of letters. He advised the man to build a grand monument, a tribute to the poet.
    But the simple Italian said, "My roses are a tribute. It is enough."
    Venice, of course, was a challenge. They went to every lodging, every restaurant, every bar that Ezra Pound had frequented.
    She really worried in Austria, when they got to the very doors of a castle occupied by the poet's daughter. But by now, Bill Bradfield had lost some of his heat. His blue eyes weren't quite as bright, and after some urging, he agreed that Pound's daughter wasn't likely to receive two Pennsylvania schoolteachers and a couple of kids, even if he could convince her that he had known her old man back in Washington.
    Sue Myers was thirty-two years old by then, and felt fifty when they finally arrived at a tiny Austrian town mentioned in
    The Cantos. The Austrian town had prospered during the Great Depression when its mayor had created and issued his own money. He dated the currency and decreed that it would depreciate in value each and every week it was not used; therefore, the money circulated and people traded vigorously for it.
    Ezra Pound had immortalized the town as a tribute to Mussolini and he'd made the grandiose generalization that what worked on the village level could work on a national level. Indeed, on a global level.
    At the entrance to the village there was a little bridge bearing a plaque written in German. Sue Myers was finally able to contribute something to the intellectual business at hand. She'd studied German in college and could translate.
    Bill Bradfield was excited to discover that the plaque was a testimonial to the mayor whose economic brainstorm had saved the village. The daughter of the mayor was still alive, and thrilled him even further by giving him pieces of the old money to add to his collection of Pound memorabilia. She also graciously showed them her father's library and it was just as Ezra Pound had described it! She even had an old photo of the poet holding a neighbors baby.
    Well, that was about it. He had the rusty barbed wire, the dated money, and several other relics. Sue Myers had anemia and frazzled nerves and was being driven nuts by his bored teenagers.
    She'd fought with the older boy relentlessly for ten months. The younger had a crush on her and that was almost as bad. Whenever they'd arrive in a new town, she'd slip them some lire or francs or pesetas and tell them to get lost until it was time to move on.
    Bill Bradfield, after concocting the elaborate cover story to explain Sue Myers to his sons, had stuck to it. He was always reassuring them that she was nothing more than a colleague from the English department who happened to be going to Europe, and that they'd pooled their bucks. For a time the boys wanted to believe that two grownups could share the sleeping quarters in the Volkswagen bus while they slept outside in a