A World Lost: A Novel (Port William) (2 page)

I was comfortable with the two of them as I was with nobody else,
and I am unsure why. It was not because, as a white child, I was free or
privileged with them, for they expected and sometimes required decent
behavior of me, like the other grown-ups I knew. They had not many
possessions, and the simplicity in that may have appealed to me; they did
not spend much time in anxiety about things. They had too a quietness
that was not passive but profound. Dick especially had the gift of meditativeness. Because he was getting old, what he meditated on was the
past. In his talk he dreamed us back into the presence of a supreme work
mule named Fanny, a preeminent foxhound by the name of Strive, a longrunning and uncatchable fox.

There had been, anyhow, only three of us at the table in Grandma's
kitchen that noon: Grandma and Grandpa and me. After dinner, Grandpa
got up and went straight back to the barn. I sat on at the table, liking the
stillness that filled the old house at such times. The whole world seemed
stopped and quiet, as if the sun stood still a moment between its rising
up and its going down; you could hear the emptiness of the rooms where
nobody was. And then Grandma set the dishpan on the stove and started
scraping up our dishes. She had her mind on her work then, and I headed
for the door.

"Where are you off to, Andy, old traveler?"

"Just out," I said.

She let me go without even a warning. The good old kitchen sounds
were rising up around her. As I went out across the porch I heard her
start humming "Rock of Ages." When she was young she had been a
good singer, but her voice was cracked now and she could not sustain
the notes.

I went down through the field we still called the Orchard, though only
one old apple tree was left, and then into the Lower Field, across the part
of it that had been cut for hay, and then followed the dusty two-track road
around the edge of a field of corn. I saw the groundhog that I planned to
shoot as soon as I got old enough to have a.22 rifle. Grandma always put
dinner on the table at eleven-thirty, and so it was still close to noon. My
shadow was almost underfoot, and I amused myself by stepping on its
head as I went along. I was wearing a coarse-woven straw hat that Uncle
Andrew had bought for me, calling it "a two-gallon hat, plenty good for
a half-pint." The sun shone through holes in the brim in a few places,
making little stars in the shadow. I walked fast, telling myself the story
of myself: "The boy is walking across the farm. He is by himself. Nobody
knows where he is going. It is a pretty day."

On the far side of the cornfield I went through a gate into the creek
road and then through another gate into the lane that went up to the
Brightleafs' house. There was a row of tall Lombardy poplars that somebody had planted along the little stream that flowed from the Chatham
Spring. When I got into the shadow of the first poplar I stopped and
called, "Oh, Fred!"

Nobody answered. All around it was quiet. I walked the steppingstones across the stream and went up to the house, knowing already that
nobody was home but not wanting to believe it. I went all the way up to
the yard fence and called again. It was a fact. Nobody was there, except
forJess Brightleaf's old bird dog, Fern, who had a litter of pups under the
front porch, and Mrs. Brightleaf's old hens who looked at me from their
dust holes under the snowball bush and did not get up. It was hot and
sweaty, the kind of afternoon that makes you think of water.

Everybody was gone, and for a minute or two I felt disappointed and lonesome. But then the quiet changed, and I ceased to mind. All at once
the countryside felt big and easy around me, and I was glad to be alone
in it.

I looked at the sugar pear tree, but no pears were ripe yet, and I went
on down to the spring. Some of the Chathams had lived there once and
had left their name with the good vein of water that flowed from the
bedrock at the foot of the hill. But the Chathams probably had not called
it the Chatham Spring; probably they had called it after somebody who
had been there before - maybe after an Indian, I thought. People named
springs after other people, not themselves.

The Chatham Spring was cunningly walled and roofed with rock.
There was a wooden door that you opened into a little room, moist and
dark, where the vein flowed out of the hill into a pool deep enough for
the Brightleafs to dip their buckets. The water flowed out of the pool
under a large foot-worn rock that was the threshold of the door. The
Brightleafs carried all their household water from the spring.

I opened the door. When my eyes had accepted the dimness I could
see the water striders' feet dimpling the surface of the pool and a green
frog on a glistening ledge just above the water. I fastened the door and lay
down outside at the place I liked best to drink, which was just below the
threshold stone where the water was flowing and yet so smooth that it
held a piece of the sky in it as still and bright as a set in a ring. The water
was so clear you could look down through the reflection of the sky or
your face and see maybe a crawfish. I took my hat off and drank big swallows, relishing the coldness of the water and the taste it carried up from
the deep rock and the darkness inside the hill. As I drank, the light lay
warm on my back like a hand, and I could smell the mint that grew along
the stream. When I had drunk all I could hold I put my nose into the
water, and then my whole face.

The Chatham Spring had never been dry, not even in the terrible
summers of 1908 and 1930 and 1936. People spoke of it as "an everlasting spring." There was a line of such springs lying across that part of the
country, and all of them had been cared for a long time and bore the
names of families: Chatham and Beechum and Branch and Bower and
Coulter. There were days, I knew, when my Grandfather Catlett would
ride horseback from one to the other, arriving at each one thirsty, to drink, savor, and reflect on the different tastes of the different waters,
those thirsts and quenchings, tastes and differences being signs of something he profoundly knew. And I, as I drank and wetted my face, thought
of the springs and of him, my mind leaning back out of the light and
into time.

From the spring I went back to the creek road and across and through
another gate and up the long slope of an unclipped pasture. I could see
my grandfather's steers gone to shade in a grove of locust trees on up
the creek. I walked a while through the ripened bluegrass stems and the
clover and Queen Anne's lace, and then I came to a path that led up to a
gate at the top of the ridge. There was a fairly fresh manure pile in the
path, and I stopped to watch two tumblebugs at work. They shaped their
ball, rolled it onto the path, and started down the hill with it, the one in
front walking on its forelegs and tugging the ball along with its hind legs,
the one in the back walking on its hind legs and pushing the ball with its
forelegs. For a while I lost myself in poking around on my hands and
knees, looking at the other small creatures who lived in the grass: the
ants, the beetles, the worms, the butterflies who sought the manure piles
or the flowers, the bees that were working in the clover. Snakes lived in
the field too, and rabbits and mice and meadowlarks and sparrows and
bobwhites, but I wasn't so likely to come upon those by crawling around
and parting the grass with my hands.

After a while I went on up to the gate, and through it, and across the
ridge to the pond. That field was the one we called the Pond Field.
Grandpa said that when he took over the farm as a young man, that field
had been ill used and there were many gullies in it. He had made the
pond by working back and forth across a big sinkhole, first with a breaking plow, and then with a slip-scraper in which he hauled the loosened
earth to the gullies and filled them. And thus he restored the field at the
same time that he dug the pond. A breeze was moving over the pond,
covering the surface with little shards and splinters of blue sky. I shucked
off my sweaty clothes and laid them in the grass.

Fred Brightleaf and Henry and I were absolutely forbidden to
swim in the pond, or anyplace else, without a grownup along. We were absolutely, absolutely forbidden to go swimming alone, without at least
another boy on hand to tell where we had drowned. My poor mother,
terrified by my transgressions, attempted to keep me alive until grown
by a remedy known in our family as "peach tree tea"- a peach (or lilac)
switch applied vigorously to the shanks of the legs. This caustic medication inflicted great suffering on me and on her, and produced not the
slightest correction in my behavior. If she had been able to whip me
while I was swimming, then the pain might have overridden the pleasure
and destroyed my willfulness. But since her punishment was necessarily
distant from my immersions, the pleasure outweighed the pain and
lasted longer. Back there at the pond by myself I could maintain for at
least a while the illusion that I was no more than myself, Andy Catlett, as
ancestorless as the first creature, neither the son of Bess and Wheeler
Catlett nor the grandson of Dorie and Marce Catlett and Mat and Margaret Feltner.

I crossed the rim of deep cattle tracks at the edge of the pond and
waded in, feeling the muddy bottom grow soft and miry underfoot.
When I was in knee-deep I launched myself flat out, smacked down,
went under, came up, and swam my best overhand stroke out toward the
middle. If Fred and Henry had been there we would have raced. Being
alone, I took my time. When I got out to the deep place I sucked in a big
breath and dived. Way down where the water was black and cold it was
revealed to me that if I drowned before I lived to be grown I would be
sorry, and I kicked and stroked at the dark, watching the water brighten
until my head broke out into daylight and air again.

I swam back into shallow water. This partial concession to my
mother's fears made me feel absolved without confession, forgiven without regret. I turned over on my back and floated for a long time. Looked
at from so near the surface of the pond, the sky was huge, the world
almost nothing at all, and I apparently absent altogether. The sky seemed
a great gape of vision, without the complication of so much as an eye.
Now and then a butterfly or a snake doctor or a bird would fly across
and I would watch it. But what really fascinated and satisfied me were the
birds high up that, after you had looked into the sky a while, just appeared
or were just there: a hawk soaring, maybe, or a swift or a swallow darting
about.

There were three joys of swimming. The first was going down out of
the hot air into the cooling water. The second was being in the water.
The third was coming out again. After I was cooled and quiet, a little tired,
and had begun to dislike the way my fingertips had wrinkled, I waded
out into the breeze that was chilly now on my wet skin. I stood in the
grass and let the breeze dry me, shivering a little until I felt the warmth of
the sun. And maybe the best joy of all, a fourth, was the familiar feeling
of my clothes when I put them on again.

For a long time then I just sat in the grass, feeling clean and content,
thinking perhaps of nothing at all. I was nine years old, going on ten;
having never needed to ask, I knew exactly where I was; I did not want
to be anyplace else.

What moved me finally was hunger. I thought of the bowl of cold biscuits
that Grandma kept covered with a plate in the dish cabinet. If she was in
the kitchen when I got there, she would butter me two and fill them with
jam. If she was not in the kitchen, I would just take two or three from the
bowl and eat them as they were, and that would be good enough.

When I came over the ridge behind the house and barns and started
down toward the lot gate, I was pretending to be a show horse. Our father
had taken Henry and me to the Shelby County Fair not long before. We
had watched the horse show in the old round wooden arena, and I had
brought home a program that I read over and over to savor the fine
names of the horses. And often when I was out by myself I did the gaits.