A World Lost: A Novel (Port William) (5 page)

I would hang up without replying, get into my clothes as fast as I could, and hurry through the backstreets to the apartment, where Aunt
Judith would have breakfast ready. She made wonderful plum jelly and
she knew I liked it; often she would have it on the table for me. Uncle
Andrew called coffee "java," and when Aunt Judith asked him how he
wanted his eggs, he would say, "Two lookin' atcha!" singing it out, as he
did all his jazzy slang.

To me, there was something exotic about the two of them and their
apartment. I had never known anybody before who lived in an apartment; the idea had a flavor of urbanity that was new and strange to me.
Uncle Andrew and Aunt Judith had lived in distant places, in cities, that
they sometimes talked about. They had been to the South Carolina seashore, and Uncle Andrew had fished in Charleston Harbor. I had never
seen the ocean and I loved to quiz them about it. Could you actually ride
the waves? How did you do it? If you looked straight out over the ocean,
how far could you see? I could not get enough of the thought that you
could not see across it. Besides all that, Aunt Judith was the only woman
I knew who smoked cigarettes, and this complicated the smell of her
perfume in a way I rather liked.

We would eat breakfast and talk while the early morning brightened
outside the kitchen window, and they would smoke, and Uncle Andrew
would say, "Gimme one mo' cup of that java, Miss Judy-pooty."

Finally we would leave, and then began what always seemed to me
the day's adventure; I knew more or less what to expect at breakfast, but
when you were loose in the world with Uncle Andrew you did not know
what to expect.

The Chevrolet was inclined to balk at the start, and Uncle Andrew
would stomp the accelerator and stab the engine furiously with the
choke. "That's right! Cough," he would say, stomping and stabbing, "you
one-lunged son of a bitch!" And the car would buck out of the driveway
and up the low rise like a young horse. He treated all machines as if they
were recalcitrant and uncommonly stupid draft animals. When the car,
under his abuse, finally learned its lesson and began to run smoothly, he
would look over at me, screwing his face up and talking through his nose
-in the style, probably, of some cabdriver he remembered: "Where to,
college?"

"Oh," I would say, laughing, "up to the Crayton Place, I reckon."

Of the two farms, Uncle Andrew much preferred the Crayton Place,
where Jake and Minnie Branch lived-and so, of course, I preferred it
too. The Bower Place was perhaps a little too close to Grandpa Catlett's;
also the tenant there, Jake Branch's brother, was a quiet, rather solitary
man who thought mostly of keeping his two boys at work and of staying
at work himself. But at the Crayton Place, what with Jake's children and
Minnie's children and Jake's and Minnie's children and whichever two or
three of Minnie's six brothers Jake had managed to lure in (or bail out of
jail) as hired hands, together with the constant passing in and out of more
distant relations, neighbors, and friends, there was always commotion,
always the opportunity for talk and laughter and carrying on. Some
rowdy joke or tale could get started there and go on for two or three
days, retold and elaborated for every newcomer, restlessly egged on -
over the noisy objections and denials of whoever was the butt of it-by
pretended casual comments or questions asked in mock innocence. Minnie never knew the number she would feed at a meal. I have seen her put
biscuits on the table in a wash pan, three dozen at a time.

Perhaps Uncle Andrew had some affection for farming. He had, after all,
been raised to it-or Grandpa, anyhow, had tried to raise him to it. But
he was unlike his father and my father, for whom farming was a devotion
and a longing; it was not a necessity of life to him. He saw to things, purchased harness and machine parts, did whatever was needed to keep
men and teams and implements in working order, and helped out where
help was needed. But what he really loved was company, talk, some kind
of to-do, something to laugh at.

When our association began, I appointed myself his hired hand at a
wage of a quarter a day. Since I was not big enough to do most of the jobs
I wanted to do, I tended to spend the days in an uneasy search for something I could do to justify my pay. I served him mostly as a sort of page,
running errands, carrying water, opening gates, handing him things.
Occasionally he orJake Branch would dignify me with a real job, sending
me to the tobacco patch with a hoe or letting me drive a team on the hayrake. But Uncle Andrew never let my wages become a settled issue. Sometimes he paid me willingly enough. Sometimes I would have to argue, beg, and bully to get him even to acknowledge that he had ever heard of
the idea of paying me. When the subject came up in front of a third
party, he would say, "It's worth a quarter a day just to have him with me."
That confused me, for I treasured the compliment and yet felt that it
devalued my "work."

One day when he and I were helping Jake Branch set tobacco on a
stumpy hillside, a terrific downpour came upon us. R. T. and Ester Purlin,
two of Minnie's children from her first marriage, and I were dropping the
plants into previously marked rows, and the men were coming behind
us, rapidly setting them in the rain-wet ground, all of us working barefoot to save our shoes. When the new hard shower suddenly began, we
all ran to the shelter of the trees that grew along the hollow at the foot
of the slope. Uncle Andrew and I stood beneath a sort of arbor made by
a wild grapevine whose leaves had grown densely over the top of a small
tree. For a while it was an almost perfect umbrella. And then, as the rain
fell harder, the foliage began to leak. The day was chilly as well as wet,
and Uncle Andrew was wearing a canvas hunting coat, which he now
opened and spread like a hen's wing. "Here, baby," he said. I ducked
under and he closed me in. For a long time I stood there, dark and dry in
his warmth, in his mingled smell of sweat and pipe tobacco, while the
rain fell hard around us and splattered on the ground at our feet.

In the winter when nightfall came early, he would often stop by our
house as he was going home. He would come in and sit down. My father
would lay aside the evening paper, and they would talk quietly and companionably, going over the stages of work on the farms, saying what had
been done and what needed doing. Uncle Andrew would have on his
winter clothes: an old felt hat, corduroys, the tan canvas hunting coat,
and under that a lined suede jacket with a zipper. He would not take off
his outdoor clothes because he was on his way to supper and did not
intend to stay long. I would climb into his lap and make myself comfortable. Perhaps I appeared to be listening, but what I was really doing was
smelling. There was the smell of Uncle Andrew himself, which was a
constant and always both comforting and exciting, but on those evenings
his clothes gave off also the cold smells of barns and animals, hay and tobacco, ground grain, wood smoke. Those smells charmed me utterly
and saddened me, for they told me what I had missed by being in school.

"Take me with you in the morning," I would say.

And he would say, "Can't do it, college." Or, in another mood, he
would give me a hug and a pat. "I wish I could, baby, but you got to go to
school."

For children his term of endearment, which also was Grandpa's, was
"baby." He called me that when he felt tender toward me, as he often did,
nearly always when he was drinking but often too when he was not.

He might have wanted a boy of his own, I sometimes thought, and
maybe I was the kind of boy he wanted. At school I took to signing myself
"Andrew Catlett, Jr." Sometimes it seemed unfair to me that I was not
his son. I wanted to be a man just like him.

I liked his rough way of joking and carrying on. Often when I showed
up at his apartment, he would say in his nasal slang, "Hello, bozo! Gimme
five!" And we would do a big handshake.

His term of emphatic agreement was "Yowza!" Or he would say, Aw
yeah!"-pronounced as one word: 'Aw'eah! "which was both affirmative and derisive. He could make one word perform lots of functions.

Anybody dead and buried, especially any of Aunt Judith's relatives,
was "planted in the skull orchard."

Anybody licked or done in had been "nailed to the cross."

His threats to Henry and me, even when somewhat meant, were
delivered with a burlesque of ferocity that made us laugh: "I'm going to
stomp your bee-hind!" he would say. "I'm going to rap on your dingdong! I'm going to cloud up and rain all over you! I'm going to get you
down and work on you!"

He would sometimes put on Henry's or my straw hat, much too small
for him, insert an old magnifying lens in his eye as a monocle, look at us,
and say, "Redwood fer dittos, college!" What that meant I do not know; I
don't know even if those are the right words. That was what it sounded
like. Wearing the "monocle" and tiny-looking hat, speaking sentences
imitated, I suppose, from somebody he had run across somewhere away,
he could transform himself, sometimes a little scarily, into somebody we
had never seen before. Leering and mouthing, carrying on an outrageous blather of profanity and nonsense, he could make us laugh until we were
lying on the floor, purged, exhausted, aching, and still laughing.

We had a mongrel bull terrier bitch named Nosey that he did not
especially care for. Somebody told us we ought to bob her tail. As we did
with all out-of-the-way propositions, we laid this one before Uncle
Andrew

"Uncle Andrew, do you know how to cut off Nosey's tail?"

"Why, hell yes!" he said, opening his pocketknife, "I'll cut it off right
behind her ears."

And then he mimed the whole procedure, whooping and making
raspberries, laughing at himself, until it was funny even to us.

Sometimes, for reasons unclear to us then, he would feel bad and need to
sleep. In Jake Branch's yard under the big white oak, or in the woods at
the Bower Place, or on the shady side of one or another of the barns, he
would open both doors of the car, stretch out on the front seat, and sleep
an hour or two, or all afternoon. I would be utterly mystified and even
offended. How could anybody sleep when there were so many things
to do?

Or Henry and I would bring Bubby Kentfield and Noah Burk and
maybe two or three more around to the apartment on a Sunday afternoon and find him asleep on the couch.

We would tramp into the room in a body, like a delegation, assuming
that if he was not in a good mood, we could get him into one. We
believed that there was strength in numbers.

"Uncle Andrew, we was wondering if you'd take us swimming."

"Yeah, Uncle Andrew, we want to go to the quarry."

He would turn his head reluctantly and look at us. "Aw God, boys,
you all don't need to go swimming."

"Yes, we do. It's hot."

"Well, go on then!"

"Well, we need you to go with us."

"No, you don't."