A World Lost: A Novel (Port William) (4 page)

After dark that night somebody took Henry and me to Granny and
Granddaddy Feltner's house up at Port William. I do not know which of
the grown-ups had decided that we would be better off there, but I am
sure they were right. On the way to Port William we stopped at Grandma
and Grandpa Catlett's, I suppose to let me get my extra clothes and whatever else I had left.

While we were there one of the grown-ups said to me, "Don't you
think you ought to go speak to your grandma?" It would have been like
my father to say that, and he may have been there, but I don't remember.
It could have been Aunt Lizzie, Grandma's sister. This was fifty years ago,
and I have forgotten some things. But I must have been too filled with
astonishment and alarm even to have noticed some things that I wish
now I could remember.

I remember climbing the stairs again, by myself this time, and going
into the bedroom where my grandmother was. She was in the dark,
alone. I could barely see her lying motionless on the old iron bed. Her
stillness touches me yet. She seemed to lie beneath the violence that had,
in striking Uncle Andrew, struck her and struck us all, and now she
merely submitted to it, signifying to herself by her stillness that there
was nothing at all that could be done.

What had happened to us could only be suffered now, and we would be suffering it a long time; I knew that as soon as I entered the room. I
had been sent perhaps with the hope that seeing me might be of some
comfort to her, but I remember how swiftly I knew that she could not be
comforted. Comfortlessness had come and occupied the house. She had
been felled, struck down, and there she was, greatly needing comfort
where there was no comfort. I walked over to the bed and stood beside it.

She must have recognized my footsteps, for she said in a voice that I
would not have recognized as hers if it had not come from her, "Oh,
honey, we'll never see your Uncle Andrew again. We never will see him
anymore."

Perhaps it was the next day that Henry and I, dressed in our Sunday
clothes this time, were taken back to Hargrave, stopping again at Grandma and Grandpa Catlett's, why I do not know. It was a sunny morning.
The hushed old house was occupied by the usual population of neighbors come to do what they could. I remember only my Grandfather Catlett sitting in the swing on the back porch, wearing his straw hat as he
was apt to do even in the house, forgetting to take it off, his hands clasped
over the crook of his cane. Cousin Thelma was sitting beside him. She
was smiling, speaking to him with a wonderful attentiveness. He was
trying, I remember, to respond in kind, and yet he could not free himself
of his thoughts; you could tell it by his eyes.

When we got to our house at Hargrave we did not see our father and
we did not see Aunt Judith, Uncle Andrew's wife. The house was full of
flowers and quiet people, who got even quieter when they saw us. Our
mother, smiling, met us at the door and welcomed us, almost as if we
were guests, into the front room, which had been utterly changed to
make way for the coffin that stood on its trestle against the wall farthest
from the door.

Our mother led us over to the coffin and stood with us while we
looked. Lying in the coffin, dressed up, his eyes shut and his hands still
with the stillness of death, was Uncle Andrew And so I knew for sure.

Henry and I seemed to be like people walking in what had been a
forest after a terrific storm. Our grown-ups, who until then had stood protectingly over us, had fallen, or they were diminished by the simple,
sudden presence of calamity. We seemed all at once to have become tall;
it was not a pleasant distinction.

We stayed at Port William in the care of Nettie Banion, Granny Feltner's
cook, while Granny and Granddaddy and our aunt Hannah went to Hargrave for Uncle Andrew's funeral. When we heard the car returning into
the driveway, we went around the house to meet them. Granny and
Granddaddy greeted us as if it were just an ordinary day and we were
there on an ordinary visit. It was a kind pretense that became almost a
reality, something they were good at.

But Hannah, who was young and not yet skilled in grief, could not
belie the actual day that it was. Tears came into her eyes when she saw
us. Forcing herself to smile, she said, "Boys, he looked just like he was
asleep."

Hannah was married to our Uncle Virgil, who was away in the war.
She was beautiful, I thought, and I imagined that someday I might marry
a woman just like her. She was always nice to Henry and me, and it was
not just because she loved Uncle Virgil who loved us; she was nice to us
because she loved us herself. I was far from seeing any comfort in what
she said to us about Uncle Andrew; I knew he was in no ordinary sleep.
But it was good of her to say it, and I knew that as well.

When all this happened I was younger almost than I can imagine now.
It is hard for me to recall exactly what I felt. I think that I did not grieve in
the knowing and somewhat theoretical way of grown people, who say to
themselves, for example, that a death of some sort awaits us all, and who
may have understood in part how the order of time is shaped and held
within the order of eternity. I had no way of generalizing or conceptualizing my feelings. It seems to me now that I had no sympathy for myself.

Only once do I remember attempting in any outward or verbal way to
own my loss. I admired a girl named Marian Davis who was in my room
at school. One afternoon in the fall of the year of Uncle Andrew's death,
we were walking home in the crowd of boys and girls that straggled out
along the street. Marian was walking slightly in front of me. All at once it came to me that I might enlarge myself in her eyes by attaching to
myself the tragedy that had befallen my family. I stepped up beside her
and said, "Marian, I reckon you heard about Uncle Andrew." Perhaps she
had not heard-that did not occur to me. I thought that she had heard
but was dumbfounded by my clumsy attempt to squander my feelings;
perhaps she even sensed that I was falsifying them in order to squander
them. She pretended not to hear. She did not look at me. In her silence a
fierce shame came upon me that did not wear away for years. I did not try
again to speak of Uncle Andrew's death to anyone until I was grown.

Perhaps I did not grieve in the usual sense at all. The world that I knew
had changed into a world that I knew only in part; perhaps I understood
that I would not be able ever again to think of it as a known world. My
awareness of my loss must have been beyond summary. It must have
been exactly commensurate with what I had lost, and what I had lost was
Uncle Andrew as I had known him, my life with Uncle Andrew. I had lost
what I remembered.

I was Uncle Andrew's namesake, and I had come to be his buddy. "My
boy," he would call me when he was under the influence not only of the
considerable tenderness that was in him but of what I now know to have
been bourbon whiskey.

When I first remember him, Uncle Andrew and Aunt Judith were living in Columbia, South Carolina, where Uncle Andrew was a traveling
salesman for a hardware company. They came home usually once in the
summer and again at Christmas. They would come by train, and my
father would take Henry and me and go to meet them. When Aunt Judith
came early and Uncle Andrew made the trip alone, he would not always
arrive on the train we met. I remember standing with Henry on the station platform while our father hurriedly searched through the train on
which Uncle Andrew was supposed to have arrived. I remember our disappointment, and our father's too brief explanation that Uncle Andrew
must have missed the train, leaving us to suppose that when he missed it
Uncle Andrew had been breathlessly trying to catch it. In fact, he may
have missed it by a very comfortable margin; he may have been in circumstances in which he did not remember that he had a train to catch.

His and Aunt Judith's arrival, anyhow, certainly made life more interesting for Henry and me. Aunt Judith, who was childless, was affectionate and indulgent - in need of our affection, as she was of everybody's,
and willing to spoil us for it. Uncle Andrew was so unlike anybody else we knew as to seem a species of one. He was capable of adapting his
speech and manners to present company if he wanted to, but he did not
often want to. He talked to us boys as he talked to everybody else, and in
that way he charmed us. To us, he seemed to exist always at the center
of his own uproar, carrying on in a way that was restless, reckless,
humorous, and loud. One Christmas-it must have been 1939-Henry
and I conceived the idea of giving him a cigarette tin filled with rusty
nails. Our mother wrapped it prettily for us and put his name on it. A
perfect actor, he received it with a large display first of gratitude and
affection, and then, as he opened it, of curiosity, anticipation, surprise,
indignation, and outrage. He administered a burlesque spanking and
stomping to each of our "bee-hinds," as he called them, uttering
throughout the performance a commentary of grunts, raspberries, and
various profane exclamations. Thus he granted success to our trick.

At about that time his drinking seems to have become a problem
again. My father, who could not rest in the presence of a problem -who
in fact was possessed by visions of solutions - decided that Uncle Andrew
should come home and farm. Borrowing the money, my father bought
two farms, one that we continued to call the Mack Crayton Place about
five miles from Hargrave, and another, the Will Bower Place, adjoining
Grandma and Grandpa Catlett's place nearer to Port William. Uncle
Andrew, according to the plan they made, would look after the farms
while my father concentrated on his law practice. My father sent Uncle
Andrew enough money to buy a 1940 Chevrolet, and Uncle Andrew and
Aunt Judith came home. Uncle Andrew was then forty-five years old, five
years older than my father.

That homecoming gave me a new calling and a new career. Uncle
Andrew and Aunt Judith rented a small apartment in a house belonging
to an old doctor in Hargrave. Uncle Andrew began his daily trips to the
farms, and I began wanting to go with him. I was six years old, and going
with him became virtually the ruling purpose of my life. When I was not
in school or under some parental bondage, I was likely to be with him.
On the days I went with him, the phone would ring at our house before
anybody was up. I would run down the stairs, put the receiver to my ear,
and Uncle Andrew's voice would say, "Come around, baby."