A World Lost: A Novel (Port William) (9 page)

Sometimes he would be late getting back.

"Where's Wheeler?" some would-be client, glancing in at my father's
still-empty chair, would ask his secretary.

Miss Julia Vye would raise her hands in a gesture of helplessness and
take a noisy little sip of air over the end of her tongue. "Heaven knows
where! Out somewhere in afield, I suppose! "

One day as I walked past my father's car, parked on the street in front
of his office, I saw a large grasshopper sitting on top of the steering wheel. By the time my father had owned a car for a year or so, the paint was
thoroughly scratched by bushes and briars, and the radiator was choked
with seeds.

On Sunday afternoons, after church and dinner, he would be at farming again-he couldn't keep away from it-making the rounds that day
with Grandpa, as long as he was able, or with Elton Penn or Nathan
Coulter or Henry or me, or sometimes with all of us, Henry and I along
to open the gates, to be teased and admonished, to listen. My father
would drive slowly and alertly, turning the car abruptly this way or that
to show an animal or a field to the best advantage.

When he could not go to the farms himself, he often sent Henry or
me or both of us to do some piece of work he wanted done. He almost
routinely overtaxed our abilities - as on the day he sent us, when we were
still small boys, to separate the bull from the herd of cows on the Crayton Place and drive him to the Home Place; we saw a lot of the country
on that trip, for the bull went into every side road and through every
open gate he came to. Or else our father sent us to have some pleasure
that he was too busy to have himself but that he imagined we could have
if only he appointed us to have it and described it suggestively enough:
He knew where we could catch a mess of fish or find a covey of birds, and
he would tell us not only how to conduct the adventure he had in mind
but also how to enjoy it.

Sometimes, later, he would say, as if thinking aloud, how much his
interest and enthusiasm had been damaged by Uncle Andrew's death,
how that had baffled and delayed him, and I knew that this was so. He
regretted bitterly and always the loss of Uncle Andrew, and of that part
of his own life that he felt had gone with Uncle Andrew to the grave. But
if he was damaged, he was not destroyed; he still had more than half his
life to live, and he was a farmer to the end.

Now, looking back after all my years of thinking about the two of
them, I cannot help wondering how satisfactorily their partnership might
have continued if Uncle Andrew had lived. I know that my father knew
that Uncle Andrew was wild -I am pretty sure that he knew the extent
of his wildness and what it involved-and yet my father spoke even less
of that than of his grief. At the time of Uncle Andrew's death, he and my father had been partners for something like four years. As far as I know,
it had gone well enough. Perhaps Uncle Andrew would have proved
responsible enough and my father patient enough for their partnership
to have endured-who could know? I know only that after Uncle
Andrew's death my father suffered not only a lost reality but also a damaged dream. It was a dream bound to sustain damage and to cause pain,
and yet he never gave it up, and he passed it on. He dreamed, simply, of a
world intact, the family together, the place cared for, and all well.

Perhaps without much awareness that he was doing it, or why, he transferred his dream of partnership to Henry and me. Because he needed so
much for us to share his interests, his demands on us were often burdening and overburdening, though they taught us much that we needed to
know. In spite of his impatience and his sometimes immense exasperation at our shortcomings, he gave us also his love for the ordinary excellences of farming and of life outdoors, and his extraordinary pleasure
in them. He could be absorbed and exalted in watching a herd of cattle
graze or a red fox crossing a field.

In his eagerness to have us learn and to fill us with experience, he put
us into the hands of other teachers. Often, in the summer or on weekends, he would take us with him on his morning rounds and just leave
us wherever work was going on.

"Here," he would say to Jake Branch, for often it would be Jake with
whom he left us. "Put 'em to work."

And to us he would say, "I want you to work and I want you to mind.
Listen to Jake and do what he tells you."

"Jake," he would say, "make 'em do. Make 'em mind."

And Jake would say, "Aw, Mr. Wheeler, don't you worry about them
boys. Them boys is all right. Me and them boys get along."

My father would touch the accelerator then, and be on his way.

Everything was different at Jake's and Minnie's without Uncle Andrew.
It was quieter and plainer than it had been, and it was sad. As elsewhere, little was said about Uncle Andrew in his absence. Even Minnie, who
talked easily about anything, would speak his name with care, as if both
eager and reluctant to remember him. But it was Minnie who told me
the little that I knew for many years about Uncle Andrew's last day.

'Andrew," she said, as if announcing her topic, "he come here that
morning to bring Ab home. Ab got his hand cut, it was a bad cut, Andrew
taken him to the doctor and then brought him here. And I'm here to tell
you, Andrew knowed then that something was going to happen to him.
He knowed it. He said he felt bad, and could he have a drink of water. I
drawed a fresh bucket and give him a drink.

"We about had dinner ready and I said, 'Here, Andrew, set down and
eat before you go back.'

'And then he started out the back door; he come in at the front door,
bringing Ab in. I said, Andrew, it's bad luck to go in one door and out the
other.'

"He said, 'It don't matter. It don't make any difference.'

"He went on out the back door. And it weren't but a little while then
till he was dead.

"He knowed something was going to happen, I'm atelling you. He
knowed it as sure as I'm setting here."

I believed her. Her story seemed to me to show that Uncle Andrew's
death had been fated. Whether he entered into the course of his fate by
coming in and going out by different doors, as at birth and death, or by
some other way, I did not know. But I felt that on the day of his death he
had been fated to die, and that he knew it.

Her story made me see him as he had been when he came into the
kitchen with death's shadow over him and asked her for a drink of water,
and drank, and set down the glass. I heard him say, "It don't matter. It
don't make any difference." I can hear him yet. I can see the expression
on his face as he says it. The shadow of his death is already on him. He
speaks in eternity even as he is speaking in time.

And yet Miss Iris Flynn told me many years later that on that morning,
having left Ab with the doctor, Uncle Andrew stuck his head into the
door of the Rosebud, gave her a grin, and said, "Hi, babe!"

But of those two glimpses of him on that day, Minnie Branch's is the
most powerful. I still raise with myself the question whether it is bad luck to come in by one door and go out by another, which I still associate
with that old darkness of fate and calamity. And when I have it on my
mind, I still go out by the same door I came in.

Only once was I ever admitted into the unqualified presence of the family's grief. One night in the late fall of the year of Uncle Andrew's death,
I went with my father on his farm rounds after he had left the office for
the day. In the dusk of the early evening we stopped to see Grandma and
Grandpa Catlett. Grandma asked us and we stayed for supper. This was
something my father had always done from time to time, but perhaps he
had not done so since Uncle Andrew's death.

Grandma's kitchen was not so harshly utilitarian as Minnie Branch's
- it was neater, and the chairs at the table matched - but in its furnishings
and aspect it was nonetheless a room mainly to be used. It had no fuss
about it, nothing decorative except a calendar. It was a fairly large room,
containing in addition to the table and chairs an iron cooking stove, a
small coal oil stove sometimes used in hot weather, a wood box, a flour
box, a dish cabinet, and by the back door a small wash table with water
bucket and pan and a towel made of a flour sack hanging on a nail, the nail
protruding through a carefully worked buttonhole. By then, I believe,
there would also have been a small refrigerator. The table and chairs were
old, covered with many coats of paint, the old coats chipped and cracked
beneath the new. I remember from about that time a dishpan that had a
leak and was slightly rounded on the bottom; when Grandma set it on
the hot stove it was continuously rocked by little explosions of steam. Her
fine things consisted of a set of silver teaspoons, a beautiful old painted
pitcher, and a cut-glass bowl.

The table, covered with an oilcloth, stood under the windows on the
north wall. Cellar, smokehouse, henhouse, and garden were still live
institutions in those days. There would have been a crock of fresh milk;
Grandma would have fried a stack of corn batter cakes on the griddle;
she might have had a baked ham or a hen; the only sign of the war would
have been a scarcity of sugar.

While we ate nobody said anything that was not necessary. I was left
out of consideration almost as much as I had been in Minnie Branch's kitchen on the day of Uncle Andrew's dance with Mrs. Partlet, and that
was unusual.

When the meal was over, we went through the cold hall to the living
room and sat down. Grandpa and my father sat on opposite sides of the
stove, in which there was a fire. Grandma sat in her little spindle-backed
rocker. I sat off to myself by the stand table on which was Grandma's
small brown radio. Perhaps, feeling the sorrow in the room, I wanted to
turn on the radio, but I did not turn it on. I could not have turned it on,
or asked to do so. As several times before in the months since Uncle
Andrew's death, I felt as if I had just happened into a world that I had not
imagined, in which I found no comfort. I had an obscure feeling that it
would be politest to be somewhere else but that there would be no polite
way to leave. The grown-ups sat in their chairs for a while, not speaking,
and then they started to cry - all three of them. They wept without moving or speaking, each as if alone. And then they ceased. My father and
Grandma removed their glasses and wiped away their tears, my father
with his handkerchief, my grandmother with a corner of her apron.
Grandpa simply raised his right hand and passed his forefinger under his
eyes.

No more was said in the car that night as my father and I drove home.
I can imagine now that he was searching his mind for something to say
to me. He would have been aware of the difficulty for me of what I had
witnessed, for he was not unaware of much. Demanding as he could be
at times, when sympathy was needed he was generous, and he was good
at finding the words. But I cannot imagine what he could have said to
ease or mitigate the grief that had shown itself so nakedly to me. I was
glad he said nothing.