A World Lost: A Novel (Port William) (17 page)

One day maybe forty years ago my father told Elton Penn, "I almost did
something once that I would have been awfully sorry for."

Elton told Henry and me not long afterward. We had been at work
and were resting, as it happened, in the shade of some locust trees beside
the tobacco barn that had been built of our share of the materials salvaged from the lead mine. Henry and I were grown boys then, eligible to
be told things that Elton found it lonely to know by himself.

"I wonder what he meant," Elton said. "I couldn't ask him."

The two of them had been in my father's car, driving through the
fields, looking at the condition of everything and talking, as they often
did. My father, for some reason, reached over and opened the glove compartment. When he did so, Elton saw a small nickel-plated.32 revolver
lying among the papers and other things my father kept there.

"What are you carrying that for, Wheeler?" Elton asked.

I no longer remember the reason. Probably he was on the lookout for
stray dogs. He had sheep in those days, and dogs were always a worry.

Elton asked him if he had bought the pistol in fear that he might need
to defend himself. We all knew that my father had once defended a man
in a murder trial, at the end of which the acquitted defendant had been
shot and killed by the victim's brother. Elton wanted to hear about that.
But my father only shook his head and said that once he had almost done
something he would have been sorry for.

Sitting under the locusts, we tried to think what it might have been. We
decided, with the barn there to remind us, that it must have had something to do with Carp Harmon, though we did not know for sure.

Of course, we did not know at all. I don't remember that any of us
ever brought up the subject again, though we were all much interested in
my father and we talked about him interminably.

He fascinated us, I think, because he was so completely alive and passionate and intelligent, so precisely intent upon the things he loved, so
eager to get work done, so fiercely demanding of us, and yet so tender
toward us. We would be angry at him often enough, and yet he delighted
us, and we were proud of him. Elton loved to mimic my father's way of
driving up in his car in a hurry, rolling the window down, patting the
accelerator with his foot while he talked to you, and then-bzzzt! -
taking off again, sometimes in the midst of your answer to what he had
just asked you. He could use the telephone the same way, hanging up
the instant he found out what he had called to learn, leaving you talking
to the dead receiver. But sometimes when you were out at work he would
seem just to ease up out of nowhere; you would look up and there he
would be, sitting in the car, watching you and smiling, glad to have found
you, glad to be there with you. Wonderful conversations sometimes happened at those times.

One day in the early spring Elton was disking ground a long way from
the house. The day turned cold, and he had not worn enough clothes.
Gradually the chill sank into him until his bones ached. And then, as he
came to the end of one of his rounds, he saw my father driving up. Elton
left the tractor and got into the car. My father turned up the heater and
the two of them sat there and talked of the coming year while Elton quit
shivering and got warm. Finally, having only a little left to do, Elton
returned to the tractor and my father went on wherever he was going.

In such wanderings and encounters, my father enacted his belonging
to his country and his people. He could be as peremptory and harsh as a
saw -we younger ones all had felt his edge -but he knew how to be a
friend. One night when he was old, he named over to me all those of the
dead who had been his friends. He said, "If they are there, Paradise is
Paradise indeed."

He had a horseman's back, like his father, and would often sit on a
chair as if it were a stool. He was wide awake and on watch, as if he
expected a fly ball to be hit to him at any moment. He rarely loitered or
ambled. Until he began to fail, when he was well into his eighties, he
moved with great energy, a certain lightness, and the resolution sometimes of a natural force.

Even his gaiety was resolute. Or his gaiety came of a sort of freedom
within his resolution. He was determined to do what he had to do; he
would look for no escape; he was free. I always loved to watch him dress
for the office, for often at that time he would be in a high good humor,
dancing as he buttoned his shirt and knotted his tie, sometimes already
wearing his hat before he put on his pants. He had things he wanted to
do, and he could hardly wait.

I sat many a time, waiting for him, in the outer office where Miss Julia
sat, typing, at her desk. I would know he was coming when I heard the
street door open suddenly and almost in the same moment slam shut,
rattling the glass, and then I would hear his footsteps light and rapid on
the stairs, for characteristically he would be running. At the top, there
would be two hard footfalls to check his speed, and he would hit the
door, turning the knob, and the door would open as by the force of an
explosion in the hallway, admitting my father, who would say all in one
sentence: "Hello Andy Miss Julia what did we do with that Buttermore
file?"

It would be the same when he came home: swift footfalls on the porch
steps, three long strides across the porch followed by the implosion of the
door -and there would be my father going full tilt to hang up his hat.

One day not long after Carp Harmon had been released from the penitentiary, my mother heard that pattern of sounds when she should not
have heard it: in the middle of the morning. Nobody but my father came
into the house that way, and she went to see what had brought him
home. All this she told me after he was dead.

When she came into the front of the house, he was taking that little
nickel-plated pistol from the top of the corner cupboard in the dining
room.

"What are you doing?" she said.

It measures the strength of his love for her that he answered her
straight. He said that he had seen Carp Harmon in town, and he was
going to kill him.

I know well the look that anger put into my father's eyes; I can guess
the size of the job my mother had on her hands.

She put herself in his way. She told him that killing Carp Harmon
would not bring Uncle Andrew back. She told him he had more to think
about than just Uncle Andrew. Or just himself. He had to think of his
children, who would have to live with what he did.

He had to think of her.

It took her a long time, but she talked him out of it. He put the gun
away.

She had spoken the simple truth: He could not bring Uncle Andrew
back; he could not make justice by his own hand, according to his own
will. She knew he was almost defeated, fallen under the weight of mortality and affliction and his own inclination toward the evil that afflicted
him; he was nearly lost. And she called him back to his life and to us.

He told her one day that now he had nothing to live for.

And then," she told me, "I let him have it. I felt for him as much as
one human ever felt for another, but I let him have it. And it did good! "

In that time of grief and discouragement and defeat -it comes clear
to me now - all that my father was and would ever be depended on my
mother. I can see how near he came to turning loose all that he held
together, and how, in holding it together, with my mother's help, he preserved the possibility of our life here; he quieted himself, lived, stayed
on, bore what he had to bear. With my mother's help, he kept alive in his
life our lives as they would be.

In the summer that I turned ten, the summer of Uncle Andrew's death,
all the tobacco and corn on the Crayton Place was grown in the same
field in the middle of the farm. The field was divided in two by a road,
just a dirt track, by which we went from the gate on one side to the gate
on the other. To the left of the road, going back, was a long, broad ridge,
sloping gently to the fences on either side. To the right of the road and
on the far side of the ridge, the slope was broken by hollows and was
somewhat steeper. The field was beautifully laid out, so that all the rows
followed the contours of the ridge. This was particularly noticeable in
that far right-hand corner where the plowlands were smaller and were
divided by grassed drains. The design of the field would have been my
father's work: a human form laid lovingly upon the natural conformation of the place.

There came a morning when I stood in the dust of the road with a hoe
in my hands, looking at the field, and was overcome by sudden comprehension of what was happening there. The corn was a little above kneehigh, the tobacco plants about the size of a man's hat, both crops green
and flourishing. R. T. and I were hoeing the tobacco. I could see Jake
Branch plowing corn with a riding cultivator drawn by a good pair of
black, white-nosed mules named Jack and Pete. Somewhere beyond the
ridgetop, Col Oaks was plowing tobacco with a single mule, old Red, and
a walking plow. The air smelled of vegetation and stirred earth. Beside me, R. T. was filing his hoe. Standing there in the brilliance with my ears
sticking out under the brim of my straw hat and my mouth probably
hanging open (somebody was always telling me, "Shut your mouth,
Andy!"), I saw how beautiful the field was, how beautiful our work was.
And it came to me all in a feeling how everything fitted together, the place
and ourselves and the animals and the tools, and how the sky held us. I
saw how sweetly we were enabled by the land and the animals and our
few simple tools.

My moment of vision cannot have lasted long. It ended, I imagine,
when R. T. finished sharpening his hoe and nudged me with the file and
handed it to me. It was a powerful moment, a powerful vision nonetheless. I have lived under its influence ever since.

Its immediate result was that I became frantic to own a mule. I saw
how, owning a mule, a boy could become a man, an economic entity, dignified and self sustaining, capable of lovely work. I fixed my mind on
Pete, who was a little the tallest and a little the most stylish of the pair
Jake Branch was working that day in the corn rows. My conversations
with Uncle Andrew were all dominated by my obsessive importunings
and proposals for the purchase of the mule. I wanted to buy him on
credit, giving Uncle Andrew and my father my note for the full amount,
and pay for him by my work-which, given my irregular employment
at a quarter a day, would have taken quite a while.

It was a boy's dream, sufficiently absurd, and yet the passion that
attached to it I am still inclined to respect, for I still feel it. But Uncle
Andrew thought my obsession was funny, when he did not think it a nuisance. This was my first inkling that, as much as I wanted to be like him,
we were not alike. It was not a difference that I rationalized or made much
of, but I remember that it troubled me; something in the way I was had
set me apart from him, and I could not help but feel it. Though I know
more fully now than then how much I loved him, and though I love him
still, that is still a memory that troubles me.

After his death, anyhow, I went on to teachers who were more exacting: to Elton Penn, for one, and through Elton, to my father. Elton, whose
father had died when Elton was only a little boy, had made himself a student to my grandfather Catlett and to my father. My father thus spoke to
me through Elton before I learned to listen to him in his own right. And so from the influence of Uncle Andrew I came at last under the influence
of my father, as perhaps I was destined to do from the first.

Elton and my father were alike in their love for farming and for work
well done. They loved the application of intelligence to problems. They
saw visions of things that could be done, and they drew great excitement
both from the visions themselves and from their practical results. I loved
those qualities in them, and longed to find or make the same qualities in
myself.