A World Lost: A Novel (Port William) (10 page)

Carp Harmon was tried and sentenced to two years in the penitentiary.
This also was never explained to me, though I knew that my elders
resented the lightness of the punishment. I learned of the trial itself only
from Jess Brightleaf, who told me that my father had asked him not to
attend. If Jess had gone to the trial, then my grandfather would have
wanted to go too. The reason for that I understood without being told.
Given my grandfather's character, his age, his grief and anger, he would not have considered himself subject to the restraints of the court, and my
father did not want him raging there.

Later, after I knew that his sentence had expired, I spent a lot of time
wondering what would happen if Carp Harmon gave me a ride while I
was hitchhiking. Hitchhiking was another thing Henry and I did that we
were absolutely forbidden to do. Our mother had read of many horrible
things that had happened to hitchhikers, none of which I thought would
happen to me. As I knew from experience, people I did not know who
picked me up on the road I traveled, the Port William road, were likely
to greet me by asking, 'Ain't you one of Wheeler Catlett's boys?" or "I
don't reckon you'd be a Catlett, would you?" What I worried about was
getting picked up by Carp Harmon. Though I had not knowingly ever
seen him, I had no doubt that I would recognize him. And I knew that I
would need great courage, greater courage than I was sure I had, to speak
the necessary words, which I had rehearsed: "Carp Harmon, you son of
a bitch, you killed my uncle." And then perhaps he would pull out his .38
pistol and shoot me?

But he never gave me a ride; as far as I know, I never laid eyes on him
in his life.

Another encounter that I grew to expect, as I grew into understanding
of what I remembered of Uncle Andrew, was with a first cousin, some
strange boy or young man, as I put it to myself, whom I would recognize
because he would look something like Uncle Andrew, or even something
like me. But if he exists, he has not come forward. As far as I know, I have
not laid eyes on him either.

Widowhood gave new impetus to Aunt Judith's role as a sufferer. In the
eighteen years that remained to her, she needed more sympathy than
ever, and now more than ever she was persistent in asking or hinting for
it, and was more than ever unappeasable. It was as though every calamity
that Momma-pie had forestalled or denied by her masks of superiority
had fallen on Aunt Judith, who was as naked to them as a shorn lamb.
Whatever her faults, Aunt Judith lacked her mother's arrogance.

Yet as her afflictions grew she seemed to become increasingly selfconcerned. Her sufferings finally were not at all conditioned by the
understanding that others also suffered; she suffered in an almost pristine
innocence, as if she were the world's unique sufferer and the world waited
curiously to hear of her pains. She was so prompt and extravagent in
pitying herself that she drove away all competitors.

She called Grandma Catlett on every anniversary of Uncle Andrew's
birth and death, and on every other anniversary or holiday that reminded
her of her loss and her suffering. She kept this up year after year, speaking of "our Andrew." Grandma said that she was grateful for these attentions, but they cannot have been easy for her.

Nor was Aunt Judith an easy burden for my father, who, in Uncle
Andrew's absence, became her adviser and protector. He fulfilled his
duties faithfully, but without, I think, ever having the satisfaction of feeling that she was satisfied.

When Momma-pie died, my father had the duty, among others, of
taking Aunt Judith to the undertaker's to pick out a coffin. He got me to
go along, but both of us together were as unequal to the occasion as he
would have been alone. We knew that Aunt Judith had been dependent
on Momma-pie for many things. We knew that Momma-pie's death
would leave Aunt Judith much lonelier than before. But our sympathy
was so much a surplus as to be hardly noticeable.

Handkerchief in hand, chin quivering, Aunt Judith said many times
that she was going to be awfully lonely now. Many times she said she did
not know what she was going to do. She gazed lingeringly into every
one of the coffins, of which there was a roomful, and every one of them
reminded her of her loss and renewed her grief. Every one of the coffins
had something about it that Momma-pie would have liked, and at these
reminders of Momma-pie's tastes and preferences Aunt Judith's voice
would become a whisper and she would dab at her eyes. She was using
her grief to invite sympathy, and in doing so falsified her grief, and in falsifying her grief made it impossible to sympathize with her. And she
compounded the difficulty by the innocence of perfect self-deception;
she had, I feel sure, no idea what she was doing. And what was one to
say? I could find in myself not the least aptitude for the occasion. I longed
to exchange places with the wallpaper or the rug. My father, having
assured Aunt Judith that he would do all he could for her, had almost as
little to say as I did. She placed and left us in our embarrassment as she
would have seated us at a table.

For some years she worked as a typist in one of the offices in Hargrave.
Later, she contracted glaucoma and became virtually blind. She made
her way about the town then truly alone, avoided under cover of her
blindness by people who could no longer bear her importunities for sympathy and her endless recitation of her ills.

My last clear, unshakable memory of her is from the summer of 1949,
when I was fifteen. One afternoon as I was walking in front of the courthouse, I called out to one of my friends, and in the same instant looked
across the street and saw Aunt Judith. She had recognized my voice, and
she turned to stare sightlessly toward me. I did not want to go to her; I was just empty of the willingness to do so. I went on as I intended to go,
pretending under her following blind gaze that it was not my voice that
she had heard and that I was not myself.

For want of compassion - aware that I would inevitably fail to be
compassionate enough, but also for want of enough compassion -I
denied that I was who I was, and so made myself less than I was. This
was my first conscious experience of a shame that was irremediable and
hopeless - a shame, as I now suppose, that Uncle Andrew may have met
in himself, in her presence, many a time.

This surely was the punishment that she dealt out, wittingly or not,
willingly or not, to him and to the rest of us. And if at times in the past
I could abandon her to the self-martyrdom of the self absorbed, and
though I see now better than then how impossible she was, still I am
sorry. For I can no longer forget that loss and illness and trouble, however
a person may exploit them, cannot be exploited without being suffered.
Aunt Judith exploited them and suffered them, and suffered her exploitation of them. She suffered and she was alone.

And so she is inescapable. In my mind I will always see her standing
there in the street, her head tilted stiffly up, hopelessly hoping for some
earthly pity greater than her pity for herself.

The house that Uncle Andrew seemed most to be gone from was not,
for me, the one where he had lived in rented rooms with Aunt Judith and
Momma-pie. Nor was it my own house at Hargrave, orJake and Minnie's
at the Crayton Place. Where I most often met his absence and was obliged
to deal with it was at Grandma and Grandpa Catlett's.

Grandpa had been born in an earlier house on that site, the last of five
children, about a year before the end of the Civil War. That house burned
when he was six, and the present house was built on the old foundation.
In the second winter after Uncle Andrew's death, Grandpa took sick,
went to bed, and did not get up again.

All his life he had gone to the barn at bedtime to see to his animals and
make sure that all was well. That winter, staying at night with Grandpa,
my father went to the barn at bedtime and returned to say that all was
well. 'And then," my father said, "he would be pleased."

"The day after I die," Grandpa told my father, "get up and go to work."
He died where he was born, in the same corner of the same room, though
in a different house. And on a raw day in the late winter we carried him,
dressed up, to Port William and left him there in the hill under the falling
rain.

The year and a half and a little more between the day of Uncle
Andrew's death and the day of Grandpa's funeral seems to me now to
have been a time of ending, not just of lives but of a kind of life and a kind of world. I did not recognize that ending as consciously then as I do
now, but I felt its shadow. Uncle Andrew had not belonged to the older life;
though he had grown up in it, he had lived away from it. He belonged to
the self-consciously larger life that came into being with the First World
War, and that was now rapidly establishing itself by means of another
war, industrial machinery, and electric wires. But though that new world
was undeniably present on the roads, the life of our fields still depended
on the bodily strength and skill of people and horses and mules. In
the minds of my grandfather and Dick Watson, the Brightleafs, and the
Branches, the fundamental realities and interests and pleasures were
the same as they had been in the minds of the people who had worked
in the same fields before the Civil War.

The first death after Uncle Andrew's had been Dick Watson's, and Dick,
like my grandfather, belonged to that older world. That the two of them
belonged also to two different and in some ways opposite races did not
keep them from belonging in common to a kind of humanity. They were
farming people. What distinguished them from ever-enlarging numbers
of people in succeeding generations was that they had never thought of
being anything else. This gave them a kind of integrity and a kind of
concentration. They did their work with undivided minds, intent upon
its demands and pleasures, reconciled to its hardships, not complaining,
never believing that they might have been doing something better.