A World Lost: A Novel (Port William) (8 page)

The conversation went on casually enough for a while, and then it became humorous, and finally hilarious, carrying a sexual allusiveness that
was grown-up and powerful; even I could recognize it. They paid no more
attention to me than if I had been yet another infant too young to talk.

The laughter itself seemed to draw Uncle Andrew and Mrs. Partlet to
their feet. He extended his left hand; she granted her right. He placed his
right hand on her back and waltzed her around the room to a tune that
they both appeared to have in mind, the two of them laughing and Minnie laughing from her chair. Uncle Andrew danced Mrs. Partlet backward to the tub of soaking diapers, where to keep from falling in she had
to push against him, and she did. And then she whooped and ducked
away, still laughing, under his arm.

He looked at me. "Come on," he said. "Let's go."

The women still laughing behind us, we went out the back door and
past the well pump and the cellar wall.

And then Mrs. Partlet followed us out. `Andrew," she said.

When I looked back, Mrs. Partlet was standing in front of Uncle Andrew, all flushed and flustered, her hands on his forearms, saying
something to him that I was not supposed to hear.

He turned away, attempting to return to the hilarity of the moments
before, but failing, and knowing it. "I got all the women I can take care
of already."

His face as he came away was solemn-looking, as it was sometimes
when he was quiet.

To him, I think, the idea of consequence was always an afterthought.
He did not expect consequences; he discovered them. When he could,
he laughed them away. When they pressed in through his laughter, he
shut his mouth and bore them. What he had done was his fate, and so he
bore it.

The second apartment that Uncle Andrew and Aunt Judith rented after
they moved to Hargrave was the upstairs -three rather low-ceilinged
rooms and a kitchen-of a small frame house not far from their first
apartment. The new one had a bathtub. It also had two bedrooms, and
so Momma-pie left her room in the Broadfield Hotel and moved in with
her daughter and son-in-law. After that Uncle Andrew had to laugh more
than ever to keep the consequences at bay. His home life now required
him to deal constantly with two women whose dignity and self-esteem
depended upon illnesses that were frequent, dramatic, and potentially
fatal and that Uncle Andrew was therefore obliged to take lightly whenever he could. I remember Momma-pie's patient and saintly smile, which
told the world how much she had borne and how much she was resigned
to bear. For if Uncle Andrew's instinct for the outrageous was unfailing,
so was Momma-pie's instinct for the vengeance of patient endurance.

One of Uncle Andrew's favorite loitering places was the Rosebud Cafe
just off the courthouse square in Hargrave. The Rosebud sold beer, and
my parents did not allow me to go there; it seemed even to me to be no
place for children. I never went there alone or with my schoolmates. But
in those days I went there often with Uncle Andrew. The Rosebud was
owned and run by Miss Iris Flynn, who always had three or four nice
young women working for her. It was a good-humored, interestingsmelling place, full of light from the big front windows in the daytime, and at night dim, lit mainly by neon -as I knew from standing on the
walk in front and peeking in. Uncle Andrew loved to go there in the lulls
that came in the late morning and the middle of the afternoon. Often,
then, we would be the only customers. Uncle Andrew would order soft
drinks for us, and then he would sit, tilted back in his chair, talking and
cutting up with Miss Iris and the other women. They would gather round,
or stop in passing, to join in the talk and the carrying on. These interludes were intensely interesting to me, and I devoted a lot of study to
them.

One night when I was eating supper with Aunt Judith and Uncle
Andrew and Momma-pie at the little table in Aunt Judith's kitchen, I said,
"Uncle Andrew, how come you spend so much time talking to those
women down at the Rosebud?"

Momma-pie assumed her smile of sweet patience.

Uncle Andrew looked at me and said, "Well, I'll be goddamned!"

But he was already laughing. He either was embarrassed or knew he
ought to be, and his embarrassment tickled him. For there I sat, the
would-be friend of his bosom, his trusty hired hand, and I had betrayed
him.

Burlesquing indignation to disguise whatever she felt -and maybe
amused at me too; she could have been-Aunt Judith said, "Well! The
next thing I know, Uncle Andrew'11 be out in my car with one of those
Rosebud girls!"

Uncle Andrew said, 'Aw'eah! Stretched out in it!"

The big flow of his laughter poured out, and all of us, in our various
styles, went bobbing away.

My memories of Uncle Andrew are thus an accumulation of little pictures and episodes, isolated from one another, unbegun and unended.
They are vividly colored, clear in outline, and spare, as if they belong to
an early age of the world when there were not too many details. Each is
like the illuminated capital of a page I cannot read, for in my memory
there is no tissue of connection or interpretation. As a child, I either was
interested or I was not; I either understood or I did not. Mostly, even
when I was interested, I did not understand. I had perhaps no inclination
to explain my elders to myself. I did not say to myself, "Uncle Andrew is
wild," or "Uncle Andrew does not think beforehand," or "Uncle Andrew
does whatever he thinks of." Perhaps it was from thinking about him
after his death, discovering how much I remembered and how little I
knew, that I learned that all human stories in this world contain many
lost or unwritten or unreadable or unwritable pages and that the truth
about us, though it must exist, though it must lie all around us every day,
is mostly hidden from us, like birds' nests in the woods.

For a long time after Uncle Andrew's death, when the phone would
ring early in the morning, I would be out of bed and halfway down the
stairs before I remembered his absence and felt the day suddenly change
around me, withdrawing forever from what it might have been.

That was the way it went for I cannot remember how long. Uncle
Andrew was right at the center of the idea I had formed of myself. I was his hand, his boy, his buddy, who was either always going with him or
always wanting to go with him. I had wanted to be like him. It had not
occurred to me to want to be like anybody else. That he was no longer
present was a fact I kept discovering. It puzzled me that I did not cry; perhaps I would have, had I been able to name to myself what I had experienced and what I felt. Uncle Andrew had been a surprising man; often
you did not know what he was going to do, and this was because he often
did not know what he was going to do himself. But his death was a bigger surprise to me than anything I had seen him do while he was living.
That he had been killed on purpose by another man, for a reason that
was never adequately explained to me, made his death as much a mystery as it was a surprise. It was therefore a problem to me as much as it
was a grief; I thought about it almost incessantly.

For my sake, I suppose, not much was said about Uncle Andrew or his
death in my presence. Or maybe it was not for my sake. How easy, after
all, would it have been to find the words? What could have been said that
would have been adequate or fitting to a calamity so great and so new?
The grown-ups' grief, especially my father's, stood silently around the
life and death of Uncle Andrew like a wall or a guardian grove. I could no
more have spoken of him or asked about the manner of his death than I
could have doubted that he was dead.

Somebody told me merely that Carp Harmon had killed Uncle
Andrew because Uncle Andrew had failed to cover a well near the lead
mine, as he had promised he would do. I asked for no details, accepting
the story as the truth, which it partly may have been, though I came to
doubt it.

We had an upright piano at our house, and sometimes in the evening my
father would play. I had no gift for music, but I liked to hear him and
to watch him. He played hymns and popular tunes, sitting very straight
at the keyboard, playing with precision and strong rhythm. What I
best remember him playing, sometimes singing as he played, was "BellBottom Trousers," a sprightly, morale-boosting song that was popular
for a while during the war, and another, a love song, "One Dozen Roses."
After Uncle Andrew's death, my father never played the piano again. This was to me the most powerful of all the signs of the change that had
come.

He went on with his law practice, of course, but now he also resumed
the care of the farms. By then, he had to look after Grandpa Catlett's
farm, which we called the Home Place, in addition to the Crayton and
Bower Places, because after Uncle Andrew's death Grandpa was less and
less able to see to it himself. All this, however great the burden or regrettable the cause, was one of the blessings of his life. Unlike Uncle Andrew,
my father had a genuine calling to be a farmer. Farming was his passion,
as the law was; in him the two really were inseparable. As a lawyer, he
had served mostly farmers. His love of farming and of farming people
had led him into the politics of agriculture and a lifelong effort to preserve the economy of the small farms. In my father's assortment of passions-his family, the law, bird hunting, and farming - farming was the
fundamental one; from farming he derived the terms and conditions of
his being. It was farming that excited him until he could not sleep: "Like
a woman!" he would say in his old age, amazed and delighted that it
could have moved him so. When he could, he would take a day off from
the office to farm: Maybe he would work all day with the cattle or sheep;
I remember days too when he would get everybody together to harness
and drive for the first time the new teams of two-year-old mules. He
made the rounds of the farms every evening, after the office was shut, to
see to his livestock, to learn what had been done, to find out what needed
doing, or just to drive his car through the fields and look. Or he would
stop and sit, and let the world grow still around him. Often he would be
out on one of the places, driving and thinking and looking, talking to
Jake or Charlie Branch or one of the Brightleafs, before office hours in
the morning.