A World Lost: A Novel (Port William) (16 page)

This story has the standing merely of gossip, but some gossip is true,
and Carp Harmon would hardly have been the first of his kind who went
about with a hidden gun, looking for somebody to kill. If the piece of
gossip is true, then the other explanations are not explanations but merely
excuses. But a man looking for somebody to kill can presumably find reasons and candidates everywhere, the human race being what it is. If Carp
Harmon was in fact such a man, then why did he choose Uncle Andrew,
who was not even the only available outsider?

Well, I know too that Carp Harmon was a widower, raising his daughter by himself, undoubtedly afraid for her and afraid for that considerable part of his own self-respect that was at her disposal. And he believed,
as he told the court, that somebody was running his trotlines; he was
prepared to shoot whoever it was. He was exceptional in none of thisneither in his fear nor in his suspicion nor in his violence.

Nor in his carelessness. Murder, I suppose, is the ultimate carelessness.
But Carp Harmon's seems to have been a fearful carelessness, the carelessness of a man who fears that he is small or that he is being held in contempt. And in Uncle Andrew, at least before their violent encounter in Gadwell's store, he saw a man who must have seemed fearlessly careless,
a man completely unabashed, carrying on as he pleased without regard
to the possibility that somebody might mind. To a man fearing to be held
in contempt, Uncle Andrew would have appeared to be the very holderin-contempt he had been expecting, whose every gesture identified him
as a lifter of skirts and trotlines, a man insufferably sure of himself.

If that is true, then I return again to the thought that Uncle Andrew's
character was his fate, and Carp Harmon the agent of it.

But if murder is the ultimate carelessness, it is also the ultimate oversimplifier. It is the paramount act (there are others) by which we reduce
a human being to the dimension of one thought. I knew the utterly reckless and fearless, unasking and unanswering Andrew Catlett that Carp
Harmon saw. But if Uncle Andrew sometimes possessed a sort of invulnerability of exuberance and regardlessness, he was no longer regardless
when he apologized to Carp Harmon. Then he had become pathetic,
because, as events would soon prove, it was too late. Carp Harmon cannot have known the quietness and the look by which I knew that Uncle
Andrew sometimes bore his life and fate as suffering. Carp Harmon cannot have known, as I know, that for Uncle Andrew there was always a
time or a timelessness after (and before) the fact when he wanted to be a
better man - if for nothing else, for me.

And all along I have had to wonder what difference I might have made
if Uncle Andrew had let me go to Stoneport with him, as I wanted to.
Might my presence somehow have unlocked the pattern of the events
of that day? Might a small boy, just by being there, have altered the
behavior of two reckless men by the tiny shift that might have been
needed to change all our lives? Might it be that Uncle Andrew's great
mistake was so small a thing as ignoring my advice that I should be taken
along? Who can know? Who can know even that the difference, if it had
been made, would have been for the better? It might be that if I had gone
I would merely have witnessed the shooting. In which case I would not
have needed to ask certain questions.

Finally grief has no case to make. All its questions reach beyond the
world. And now I am done. The questions remain; the asking is finished.
This gathering of fifty-year-old memories, those few brown and brittle pages of newsprint, all those years stand between me and the actual event
as irremediably as the end of the world.

Finally you must believe as your heart instructs. If you are a gossip or
a cynic or an apostle of realism, you believe the worst you can imagine.
If you follow the other way, accepting the bonds of faith and affection,
you believe the best you can imagine in the face of the evidence. And so
at last, like R. T, I must believe as I imagine and as I therefore choose. I
choose not to argue with the story of the "remark" to Carp Harmon's
daughter, because it seems both likely and unlikely, and now it makes no
difference. I choose not to believe the argument of self-defense; why
would even a reckless man with only a two-by-four attack a man with a
pistol? I choose to believe that Uncle Andrew said, "Don't shoot me," for
it is too plain and sad to be a lie.

And so at last I can imagine it as it might have been.

It is early in the afternoon. The sun is still shining nearly straight down
into the tight little valley where Uncle Andrew, Jake Branch, Col Oaks,
and R. T. Purlin are dismantling the framework of the main building of
the lead mine. The two younger men are at work high up on the heavy
timbers, which they are prying loose and letting fall. Uncle Andrew and
Jake stand back as the timbers drop, and then move them out of the way
and begin pulling out the nails. It is strenuous, dirty, and dangerous work
(Uncle Andrew was right not to let me come along). In the small clearing
there are stacks of timbers, sorted according to dimension, and piles of
corrugated tin. The sun strikes all surfaces with relentless brilliance.
Metal objects, including the tools the men are using, if laid down for long,
become painful to pick up. There is no breeze; the air is humid, heavy,
and still.

Uncle Andrew's sleeves are rolled above his elbows. His arms are shining with sweat and flecked with dirt. His shirt is soaked. And yet he wears
his soiled and rumpled clothing and his narrow-brimmed straw hat with
a kind of style. He is quick to take part in the talk that comes and goes or
to pick up a joke; otherwise his face resumes the expression it has when
he is enduring what must be endured. The noontime events down at the store have remained with him. He was knocked down (with an unopened
quart can of oil, R. T. said), and he apologized. These facts lie in his belly
like something indigestible. What has been done needs undoing, and
cannot be undone. As many times before, it is not the present that surprises him but the past, the present slipped away into irrevocability. As
many times before, he would like to turn away, find an opening, get out.
He feels his own history crowding him, as near to him in that heat as his
clinging shirt, as his flesh itself. He feels the weight of the history of
flesh. He feels tired. He thinks, "I am already forty-nine years old." He
has not drunk since they returned to work, and he is thirsty.

"Jake," he says, "let's go get us a drink, and leave it with the boys for a
while."

The two of them put down their tools. They go to the car where Uncle
Andrew left his thermos jug, the water in it by then too warm to drink.
Off in the shade they can see the spring flowing out beneath its mossy
ledge.

And then Carp Harmon steps from behind the trees, already close,
and he has a pistol in his hand. Two men, both drawn to that giddy edge
where people do what they think of doing, have come face-to-face, and
one holds a pistol, and one does not.

"I'm going to kill you," Carp Harmon says, and Uncle Andrew knows
he means it.

This, I imagine, was his second direct confrontation with his fate, the
first having occurred in the road ditch on the night before his wedding.
And I imagine that in this latter moment he knew clearly at last what he
was: a man dearly beloved, in spite of his faults.

"Don't shoot me," he says. He is praying, not to Carp Harmon, but to
another possibility, his own sudden vision of what he means to the rest of
us - of what we all had meant and the much more that we might have
meant to one another.

"Don't shoot me."

And Carp Harmon fires forever his two shots.

Except for his silent whirl with Mrs. Partlet that afternoon in Minnie
Branch's kitchen, I never saw Uncle Andrew dance, but prompted by
so many who did see and who remembered, I have often imagined him
dancing.

He went into the music, I imagine, alert and aware and yet abandoned, as one might go running into the dark. Invested with the power
that women granted him, he would be wholly given over to the music,
almost gravely submitted to that which moved him, and yet elated, in
reckless exuberance carried away.

I imagine a ballroom in some hotel - in Lexington or Louisville, or
Columbia or Charleston - a large room dimly lit, a band on a dais at one
end. The room smells of flowers, perfume, tobacco smoke. There is loud
talking and laughter, Uncle Andrew in the thick of it, a little drunk. There
is a sort of aura of careless delight about him, a suppressed extravagance
of physical elation, as though he might at any moment do something that
will draw the attention of the whole room to him. He seems himself to
be unaware of this.

He is aware of the woman sitting beside him. (Who is she? She is, let
us say, Aphrodite herself, for the while. Custom cannot stale her infinite
variety.) For the while his being is directed toward her like the beam of a
lamp, and she knows it. She casts back his light, granting him love-as I
did, as we all did, because he had the power of attracting it; not ever asking for it, he called it forth.

The band members shift in their seats, take up their instruments, and
begin another song. They play "Don't Get Around Much Anymore," a
song elegant and inconsolable. (It may have come too late for him to
have danced to it, but it is the one song I can remember hearing him sing,
and so I imagine him dancing to it.) He reaches out without a word; the
woman gives him her hand. They rise and walk onto the floor, dancing
even before they dance. They step into the music. The woman's weight
on his arm, given to him, he forgets his feet. The two of them ask and
answer one another, motion for motion. He holds her with an assurance
that is almost forgetfulness, and yet is entirely attentive to her and to the
song that moves them:

A trumpet solo sways, gleaming, in the air. Under it the man and
woman turn and soar. The woman rests upon his arm, leaning back, at
one with him in their now weightless flight. The little while it lasts, he
does not know where he is.