A World Lost: A Novel (Port William) (12 page)

She told of the roads and distances of the old days, of the time when
the little patch of woods by Dick Watson's house had been part of a
bigger woods that went on and on. She told of slavery times, when my
great-grandmother, resting after dinner in the room over the kitchen,
heard Molly, the cook, tell the cat, "Old Lizzie's asleep now, and I'm
going to beat the hell out of you." She told of the end of slavery, when
all the slaves went away, and Molly returned and was sent away. "You
have your freedom now," Lizzie told her, "and you must go."

She told and retold, because I wanted to hear, of the night the soldiers
came, and of the burning house.

She talked of Grandpa. There had been serious estrangements and
difficulties between them, for both of them were strong-willed people,
and they had not always willed the same things. But now in his absence
that we both felt, she took pleasure in remembering him in his youth and
his pride. She said, "He was the finest-looking man on the back of a
horse that ever I saw." She said he was a beautiful whistler. She had loved
to hear him, off somewhere in the distance, calling his cattle. She knew
what hard times and failures and disappointments had cost him, and she
sorrowed for him as she sorrowed for herself when she had been young
and proud, paying the same costs. There had been times when they had
barely made it.

As a young wife she had lived with her mother-in-law, about whom I
never heard her complain, and she remembered much that Lizzie had
remembered: what the cook had said to the cat, for example, or an exchange of letters between Lizzie and her brother, James. James,
Grandma said, was elected to the state legislature. When he was to be
sworn in, he invited Lizzie to attend the ceremony. She wrote back, "I
have nothing suitable to wear." And James replied, "Wear the simplest
thing you have, and let your manners correspond."

One of my favorite people in Grandma's stories was Grandpa's older
brother, Will, indolent and vagrant, careless and fearless, a comedian
drunk or sober, a disappointment and an aggravation to everybody, and
yet dear.

"Will," Grandma asked him once, "were you ever in love with Sally
Skaggs?"

"Yes, Dorie," he said, "I loved her a little once."

It was Uncle Will who cut off Uncle Andrew's long golden curls "to
turn him into a boy," and broke Grandma's heart.

She told also, troubled and yet amused, of her own younger brother,
Leonidas, whom we all called "Uncle Peach," who would get drunk and
say to her, "Sing'Yellow Rose o' Texas' to me, madam."

And it was Uncle Peach who had allowed Uncle Andrew to fall into
the fire when he had just begun to walk, leaving what I thought a most
attractive set of small scars across the backs of the fingers of Uncle
Andrew's right hand.

Grandma recalled a Negro farmhand, Uncle Mint Wade, who argued,
"You will read in the Bible whereupon it say, 'The bottom rail shall be the
rider.' "

And she remembered Uncle Eb Markman, who pronounced, "The
world is squar' and got four cawners to it."

From her reading she had culled a few phrases that she liked to repeat.
It pleased her to speak of sleep as "nature's sweet restorer." Her speech
had touches of self-conscious elegance that she used in tribute. Of dancing she would say, "It's a lovely thing, stepping to the music."

Our most frequent and fearful topic was the weather. Both of us were
afraid of storms, which seemed to be uncommonly frequent in those
days. Grandma would tell about storms that she remembered, and we
would discuss the problem of where to be safe in case of a windstorm.

Before a thunderstorm, she would put a pillow over the telephone,
theorizing that the feathers made good insulation and would prevent the lightning from coming into the house along the wire. And having affixed
the pillow to the wall so that it covered the phone, she would always
quote Uncle Will: "I believed that too, Dorie, till I saw lightning strike a
goose."

When a cold spell would come late in the spring, causing us to feel
that some fundamental disorder was at hand, she would quote from a
source I have never found: "The time will come when we'll not know the
winter from the summer but by the budding of the trees." And though
that time has never come, I believed then that it would come, and I
believe it still.

Like many country people of her time, she did not have a very secure
belief in progress. She believed that hard times did not go away forever,
but returned. She had known hard times, and she did not forget them.
There had been a winter, when my father was about seven years old,
when Grandpa's tobacco crop had not brought enough to pay the commission on its own sale. Grandma could not have forgotten that if she
had lived a thousand years. My father's lifelong devotion to the cause of
the small farmers of our part of the country dates from that memory,
and it holds its power still over Henry and me.

It seemed to have gone by Uncle Andrew without touching him.
Uncle Andrew was sometimes burdened and was sometimes a burden to
himself, but he also had the gift of taking things lightly. Grandma would
quote, with disapproval and with a laugh, his reply to Grandpa, who was
worrying about a field infested with wild onions: "The cows'll eat 'em,
and I don't have to sleep with the cows."

Grandma was thirteen when her mother died. Her father never
remarried. She and her sisters grew up keeping house for themselves
and their father and attempting with less than success to give a proper
upbringing to Uncle Peach. For Grandma and her sisters, somehow, a
mark of respectability and even gentility had been set. They cherished
the schooling they got from the Bird's Branch School and McGuffey's
Eclectic Readers, one through eight. All her life Grandma had struggled
and aspired, and her ambition had been confronted and affronted at
every turn by the likes of Uncle Will and Uncle Peach and Uncle Andrew,
too wayward to be approved, too close and dear to be denied.

Uncle Andrew and Uncle Will and Uncle Peach passed and returned in
her thoughts and her talk like orbiting planets. They divided her mind;
they troubled her without end. She could see plainly what a relief it
would have been if she could have talked some sense into their heads
and straightened them out. It would have been a relief too if she could
have waved them away and forgotten them. In fact, she could do neither.
They were incorrigible, and they were her own. In their various ways
and styles, they had worried and vexed and grieved her "nearly into the
grave," as she would sometimes say. And they also charmed and amused
and moved her. They were not correctable because of the way they
were; they were not dismissable because of the way she was. She loved
them not even in spite of the way they were, but just because she did.
With them she enacted, as many mothers have done, and many fathers
too, the parable of the lost sheep, who is to be sought and brought back
without end, brought back into mind and into love without end, death
no deterrent, futility no bar.

And so she suffered. She looked upon the human condition, I think,
as not satisfactory -as unacceptable, notwithstanding that we are in it
whether we accept it or not. She was a professed Christian and loved her
little weatherboarded church, but I think that it was not easy, and may
have been impossible, for her to make peace with our experience of mortality and error, of owning what we cannot correct or save, of losing
what we love.

Grandma was fiercely, fiercely loyal to her own, and just as fiercely
exclusive in electing her own. Within the small circle of her own, she
was capable of profound charity; outside it, she could be relentless and
unforgiving. And the boundary was not impermeable. Sometimes Uncle
Andrew, for one, had been safely inside it, and sometimes he had been
outside. When you were outside, as I knew from my own experience,
her anger was direct and her tongue sharp.

Her term of execration was "Hmh!" which she could deliver as con-
cussively as a blow and in tones varying from polite disbelief (for the benefit of guests) to absolute rejection. Her term of contempt was "Psht!"
With it she could slice you off like the top of a radish.

Uncle Andrew had crossed the boundary into and out of her good
graces many times. The nights of those years after his death, as we sat and talked, she was forever picking apart the divergent strands of her
feeling for him. She would be pleased or amused or appalled, or amused
and appalled both at once. And always she grieved.

When he was little, with that head covered with golden curls that she
could not forget, he was beautiful. He could sing like an angel. And yet
he was difficult and mischievous and never still. From the womb, virtually, he lived always a little beyond anyone's anticipation. Even before he
could walk, she would have to restrain him by pinning his dresstail under
the leg of the bed. He had hardly learned to walk when he flung her good
blue pitcher onto the flagstones by the porch step. When he was old
enough to receive as a gift his own little hatchet, he chopped one of the
rungs out of the banister. She would say regretfully and a little proudly
that after he started to school he had become a good fighter. Proudly and
a little doubtfully she would say that there never had been anything like
the way he could dance.

When he was ready for college, Grandma and Grandpa sent him to
the University of Kentucky in a blue blazer- as handsome a young man,
they thought, as they had ever laid eyes on - and to do so they spent all
they had; Grandpa went without underwear that winter. When he went
to Lexington to see his son, he looked everywhere and could not find
him, for Uncle Andrew's adventures had begun. His fame as a dancer
apparently began during his brief stay at the university.

Grandpa failed in Uncle Andrew, as he succeeded in my father, and
it was a bitter failure. Except for the energy that both of them possessed
in abundance, Grandpa and Uncle Andrew were as unlike as a tree and
a bird. Grandpa could not tolerate, he could not understand, Uncle
Andrew's waste of daylight. For him, Andrew was the name of whatever
was careless. "Sit up!" he used to say to me as I went by on the pony. "You
ride like your Uncle Andrew." It was not that Uncle Andrew rode badly
but that he rode carelessly, his mind elsewhere, and Grandpa believed,
and said, that "a man ought to keep his mind on his business"- he meant
busy-ness, whatever you were doing. Uncle Andrew was Grandma's failure too, of course. It was a mutual property, that failure; it bound them
in mutual suffering and even mutual sympathy, and yet I think it stood
between them like a heap of thorns. I imagine that their ways of regret
were different. Perhaps Grandpa only saw what had happened and named it and bore it, whereas Grandma saw before her always the beautiful
child and forgave and hoped. Perhaps. I do not know.

When Grandma and I looked through her collection of photographs
that had come with letters from various family members, we would
come to a picture of several men in army uniforms squatting in a circle,
shooting craps. One of them unmistakably was Uncle Andrew, who had
sent the picture, and she would always say "Hmh!" and she would laugh.
The laugh seemed both to acknowledge her embarrassment and confess
her delight. She delighted in him though he had grieved her nearly into
the grave.

He was on her mind forever, and as the evening wore on toward
bedtime she would begin again to grieve for him. And always as we
approached her grief, we were divided. My loss was nothing like hers.
My loss had occurred within the terms of my childhood; it was answered,
beyond anything I felt or willed, by my youth and unbidden happiness
and all the time I had to live. Her loss would be unrelieved to the end of
her life, never mind that she would live on until I was grown and married; her loss was what she had lived to at last and would not live beyond.
I could feel that she had come to loss beyond life, unfathomable and
inconsolable, as dimensionless as the dark that surrounded the old house
and filled it as we talked.

He was on my mind forever too, as I now see. But I was a child; for me,
every day was new. I lived beyond my loss even as I suffered it, and without any particular sympathy for myself. And what I have grown into is not
sympathy for myself as I was but sympathy for Grandma and Grandpa as
they were. I see how time had brought them, once, their years of strength
and hope, energy to look forward and build and dream, as we must; and
I see how Uncle Andrew took all they had vested in him, their precious
one life and time given over in helpless love and hope into the one life and
time that he possessed, and how he carried it away on the high flood of
his recklessness, his willingness to do whatever he thought of.

I see now what perhaps I have known for a long time that I would see,
if I looked: He was a child who wanted only to be free, as I myself had
been free back at the pond that afternoon of his death. He was a big,
supremely willful child whom Grandma and Grandpa and Aunt Judith
could not confine, and who could be balked by no requirement or demand. And yet, hating confinement, he had been confined - in a hapless marriage, in bad jobs, sometimes in self-reproach, and finally in a
grave with which he had made no terms. He had been confined because
he had confined himself, as only he could have done, because he was the
way he was and would not change, or could not. It was knowledge of his
confinement, I think, that so surrounded us with pain and made us
grieve so long.