A World Lost: A Novel (Port William) (15 page)

Unable now to put it off any longer, I went to the office of the Weekly
Express and searched out the account of Carp Harmon's trial. According
to the article I had already seen, the trial had been set for the September
term, but I found that it had been moved to the January term because in
September the jurymen had needed to be at home, harvesting their
tobacco. In January the jury heard the case and gave their verdict. Carp
Harmon received his sentence of two years in the penitentiary. The
article in the Weekly Express seems meant only to explain the brevity of
the sentence. These are the relevant paragraphs:

"During their lunch hour, according to Harmon, Catlett made a remark to Harmon's daughter and Harmon knocked him down. Catlett
apologized. Later in the afternoon Harmon went to the scene of work
where Catlett and his helpers were and he shot Catlett when Catlett
reached for a 2 x 4, following some words between them.

"Harmon testified that he went back to the scene of work to nail a
covering over a well. He said Catlett told him to get off the premises
along with a remark about his daughter, whom he included in the order
to stay away. Harmon said that he fired when Catlett reached for the
piece of timber.

"When questioned as to why he had a gun on his person, Harmon
said he had been told that someone had run his trotlines."

The jury obviously believed the story of the "remark" to Carp Harmon's daughter- as did the reporter for the Weekly Express. If it was a lie,
it was the work of a good liar, who could make his story both plausible
and consonant with Uncle Andrew's character, which would have been
pretty generally known.

The Weekly Express writer evidently had believed the story also when
it was told six months earlier at the examining trial. What seems significantly different between the two accounts is the appearance in the second of the two-by-four, which was not mentioned in the first.

If the story of the "remark" is true, and if it is true that Carp Harmon's lawyer later admitted that he had told a lie, then the lie may have
been this business of the two-by-four, for it is the only reported detail
that would have supported an argument of self-defense.

At any rate, I now had learned the basis of the story about the well
cover that I had heard when I was a child.

Why, as I got older, did I not ask my father for his version of these
events? Now that he is dead, it is easy to wish that I had asked. And yet I
know why I did not. I did not want to live again in the great pain I had felt
in the old house that night when he had wept so helplessly with Grandma
and Grandpa. I did not want to be with him in the presence of that pain
where only it and we existed. If I were to speak to his ghost, perhaps I still
could not bring myself to ask. When I am a ghost myself, perhaps we will
talk of it.

If you go toward Stoneport from the high ground instead of along the
river, you go at first through a country of excellent broad ridges, farmland greatly respected for its depth and warmth. And then the upland
becomes more broken, the ridges narrower, the hollows steeper, the soil
thin and rocky. The road to the lead mine turns off one of the ridges and
follows a creek bed, usually dry in summer, down into a narrow, wooded
hollow. Much of that country is now wooded and has been so for a long
time. The farming on those slopes was done in clearings that moved
about in place and time as the trees were succeeded by crops, which were
succeeded after a short time by a new growth of trees. Now, after its
inevitable diminishment by such cropping, the land has been almost
entirely given back to the trees.

After it has brought you down nearly to Stoneport on the river, the
road passes the site of the old lead mine, which lies off to the right on the
far side of the creek. There is still a weedy clearing, originally a hole in
the woods to accommodate a hole in the ground. The clearing has
remained open because the floor of the hollow has been leveled and covered with tailings from the mine. A squatter has recently lived there in an
old bus, which is now abandoned and surrounded by weeds and junk. The
main building of the mine, which housed its heavy machinery, was up on
the slope. Its foundation, now bare and weathered, straddles the creek,
which was used to bear away some of the waste from the extraction of the ore. Behind it, the deep well that Carp Harmon was so anxious to
protect is still without a cover; the surface of the water, twenty feet
down, is covered with a floating crust of plastic jugs and bottles. Somebody has tried to "improve" the spring of good water down by the road
by digging a deep trench into it with a backhoe. The nature of the place
seems more insulted by the ordinary acts and artifacts of the present
than by the mining of half a century ago.

I went there once with my father when he and Uncle Andrew and the
others were in the process of buying the buildings, and I had never been
back. I did not even know how to get there until R. T. Purlin went there
with me on a hot August afternoon not long after I had hunted up the
story of Carp Harmon's trial in the Weekly Express.

We pulled off the road, now blacktopped but still just a narrow track
coming down through the trees. While we walked over the valley floor
and then climbed up over the old foundations into the returning woods,
R. T. gave me the story again as the place brought it back to mind.

'Andrew parked his car yonder where you left your truck. Just pulled
in off of the road, the way he did every day. Him and Jake went there to
get the top off of Andrew's jug on their way to the spring. That fellow
stepped out of the bushes must have been right there. Maybe he had
stood there a little while, watching them."

He pointed into the air over the foundation of the main building. "Me
and Col, we never seen him. We was way up maybe thirty feet in the
framework of that building- big timbers! - tearing it down. And we
heard the shots: Bam! Bam!

"I said, 'What the hell was that?'

'And Col said, `I think that guy has shot Andrew'

'And down we come."

"Did Uncle Andrew say anything after he was shot?"

"Naw. He went to hurting then. He never said anything."

`And Carp Harmon threatened Jake and ran off?

"He run right back down the road," R. T. said, and he acted out Carp
Harmon's flight, running and then stopping to look back, running and
looking back.

'And then you all loaded Uncle Andrew into the car and started for the
hospital."

"Yeah."

'And you drove?"

"I was the only one that could drive. Jake and Col didn't know how.
Andrew had let me drive around a little on the farm. I never had drove on
the road. I done pretty good that day till we got up to the top of the lane
and onto the blacktop and I started trying to go fast. I had a hard time
then to keep in the road. And Andrew was just kicking the car to pieces.
We was lucky to make it."

What a ride that must have been for a sixteen-year-old boy who could
barely drive, was badly frightened, and who loved the hurt man kicking
in pain! In only a few seconds they had been carried from their ordinary
work into a moment impossible to be ready for: Uncle Andrew fallen,
holding his belly with bloody fingers, Carp Harmon's footsteps going
away down the gravel road, nothing now in sight or memory that was
quite believable, Uncle Andrew's car sitting there without a driver.

It started to come to me. I began to imagine it, as I knew my father
had done, time and again, seeing it as it must have happened and as he
could not help seeing it.

And now I too saw them there. I knew how it had been, as if this imagining had suddenly descended to me from my father. I saw them as they
lifted Uncle Andrew and got him into the car and as Jake and Col got in,
leaving the driver's seat empty.

I heard R. T, not just excited but scared now as well: "Who's going to
drive?"

I heard Jake -helpless, angry, bewildered, in a hurry, and yet necessarily resigned: "You are, I reckon."

I saw the black car lurch backward into the road, and then lurch forward, gravel flying from under its wheels as it started up the hill.

And all this happened while I was swimming in the pond, for the
moment safe.

R. T. and I loitered around the place a while longer, trying without success to find a rock that R. T. could identify positively as lead ore. He was
sure that there had been many such rocks lying around when they had
been working down there, but we could find none. Giving up at last, we got into my pickup and started on down toward Stoneport, less than half
a mile away.

`And you say Uncle Andrew didn't make a pass at Carp Harmon's
daughter?"

"Nawsir. He never," R. T. said. "It was me that girl was talking to.

"I'll show you," he said. We were coming into Stoneport, just a few
houses and other buildings scattered around a white weatherboarded
church. R. T. showed me the small house where Carp Harmon had lived.
He showed me the empty place where fifty years ago had stood the store
belonging to P. R. Gadwell. He showed me the place on the roadside
opposite where Uncle Andrew had parked his car under the trees.

"I was sitting in the car," R. T. said, "and the girl was leaning against
it, talking to me. That fellow could stand in his yard and look right down
the road at Andrew's car and see her there. That's how it all got started."

It is a wide street, the view unobstructed from the yard of the house
that was Carp Harmon's down to Uncle Andrew's parking spot, a distance
of three or four hundred feet. And so R. T's version of the story had the
plausibility of a true line of sight. It could have happened the way he told
it. He could have been himself the bait of a trap that had caught Uncle
Andrew.

And yet R. T's memory, as I knew by then, was not safe from his imagination. He had told me, on two different days, both that he had and that
he had not seen Carp Harmon as he came up the road before the shooting. And on that very day he had told me two versions of his and Col
Oaks's hearing the shots; in the first version, R. T. had said, "What the
hell was that?" and in the second, Col Oaks had said it. If he had seen
the shooting, which he must have done if he had seen Carp Harmon's
approach and had tried to warn Uncle Andrew, he apparently had found
it too painful to remember. I don't think that these were falsehoods in the
usual sense but rather that R. T., in brooding over the story for so many
years, had imagined it from shifting points of view, had imagined what
he had not seen, had seen what he had not remembered. There is no
assurance that he had not imagined also things that had not happened.

If Uncle Andrew had not, in fact, made the "remark" to Carp Harmon's daughter, then why did both P. R. Gadwell and Jake Branch testify
that Uncle Andrew apologized to Harmon?

The defense lawyer's story, true or untrue, depended for credibility on
the general knowledge of Uncle Andrew's character. I was not the only
one who assumed that if he had thought of it, Uncle Andrew would have
openly propositioned a girl in a public place. According to that story, as
I suppose the jury heard it, a man who lives by impulse invites his own
destruction; if he is destroyed as a result of one of his impulsive acts, then
a kind of justice has been done. Character is fate, and Carp Harmon was
no more than the virtually innocent agent of the appointed fate.

If that story is false, if it was R. T. the girl was talking to, then Uncle
Andrew's fate had nothing to do with his character and everything to do
with chance and the character of Carp Harmon.

But R. T. told me something else that I cannot forget, though perhaps
it leads nowhere. He said he had heard that Carp Harmon had been
wanting to kill somebody for a long time. "People down there shied him,"
R. T. said. "He'd been carrying his pistol hid under a rag in the bottom
of a ten-quart bucket. He wanted to kill somebody and make a big name
for himself. He thought he could kill an outsider and lie his way out of it
-which is about what he done."