A World Lost: A Novel (Port William) Read online

  And all along I have had to wonder what difference I might have made if Uncle Andrew had let me go to Stoneport with him, as I wanted to. Might my presence somehow have unlocked the pattern of the events of that day? Might a small boy, just by being there, have altered the behavior of two reckless men by the tiny shift that might have been needed to change all our lives? Might it be that Uncle Andrew's great mistake was so small a thing as ignoring my advice that I should be taken along? Who can know? Who can know even that the difference, if it had been made, would have been for the better? It might be that if I had gone I would merely have witnessed the shooting. In which case I would not have needed to ask certain questions.

  Finally grief has no case to make. All its questions reach beyond the world. And now I am done. The questions remain; the asking is finished. This gathering of fifty-year-old memories, those few brown and brittle pages of newsprint, all those years stand between me and the actual event as irremediably as the end of the world.

  Finally you must believe as your heart instructs. If you are a gossip or a cynic or an apostle of realism, you believe the worst you can imagine. If you follow the other way, accepting the bonds of faith and affection, you believe the best you can imagine in the face of the evidence. And so at last, like R. T, I must believe as I imagine and as I therefore choose. I choose not to argue with the story of the "remark" to Carp Harmon's daughter, because it seems both likely and unlikely, and now it makes no difference. I choose not to believe the argument of self-defense; why would even a reckless man with only a two-by-four attack a man with a pistol? I choose to believe that Uncle Andrew said, "Don't shoot me," for it is too plain and sad to be a lie.

  And so at last I can imagine it as it might have been.

  It is early in the afternoon. The sun is still shining nearly straight down into the tight little valley where Uncle Andrew, Jake Branch, Col Oaks, and R. T. Purlin are dismantling the framework of the main building of the lead mine. The two younger men are at work high up on the heavy timbers, which they are prying loose and letting fall. Uncle Andrew and Jake stand back as the timbers drop, and then move them out of the way and begin pulling out the nails. It is strenuous, dirty, and dangerous work (Uncle Andrew was right not to let me come along). In the small clearing there are stacks of timbers, sorted according to dimension, and piles of corrugated tin. The sun strikes all surfaces with relentless brilliance. Metal objects, including the tools the men are using, if laid down for long, become painful to pick up. There is no breeze; the air is humid, heavy, and still.

  Uncle Andrew's sleeves are rolled above his elbows. His arms are shining with sweat and flecked with dirt. His shirt is soaked. And yet he wears his soiled and rumpled clothing and his narrow-brimmed straw hat with a kind of style. He is quick to take part in the talk that comes and goes or to pick up a joke; otherwise his face resumes the expression it has when he is enduring what must be endured. The noontime events down at the store have remained with him. He was knocked down (with an unopened quart can of oil, R. T. said), and he apologized. These facts lie in his belly like something indigestible. What has been done needs undoing, and cannot be undone. As many times before, it is not the present that surprises him but the past, the present slipped away into irrevocability. As many times before, he would like to turn away, find an opening, get out. He feels his own history crowding him, as near to him in that heat as his clinging shirt, as his flesh itself. He feels the weight of the history of flesh. He feels tired. He thinks, "I am already forty-nine years old." He has not drunk since they returned to work, and he is thirsty.

  "Jake," he says, "let's go get us a drink, and leave it with the boys for a while."

  The two of them put down their tools. They go to the car where Uncle Andrew left his thermos jug, the water in it by then too warm to drink. Off in the shade they can see the spring flowing out beneath its mossy ledge.

  And then Carp Harmon steps from behind the trees, already close, and he has a pistol in his hand. Two men, both drawn to that giddy edge where people do what they think of doing, have come face-to-face, and one holds a pistol, and one does not.

  "I'm going to kill you," Carp Harmon says, and Uncle Andrew knows he means it.

  This, I imagine, was his second direct confrontation with his fate, the first having occurred in the road ditch on the night before his wedding. And I imagine that in this latter moment he knew clearly at last what he was: a man dearly beloved, in spite of his faults.

  "Don't shoot me," he says. He is praying, not to Carp Harmon, but to another possibility, his own sudden vision of what he means to the rest of us - of what we all had meant and the much more that we might have meant to one another.

  "Don't shoot me."

  And Carp Harmon fires forever his two shots.

  13

  Except for his silent whirl with Mrs. Partlet that afternoon in Minnie Branch's kitchen, I never saw Uncle Andrew dance, but prompted by so many who did see and who remembered, I have often imagined him dancing.

  He went into the music, I imagine, alert and aware and yet abandoned, as one might go running into the dark. Invested with the power that women granted him, he would be wholly given over to the music, almost gravely submitted to that which moved him, and yet elated, in reckless exuberance carried away.

  I imagine a ballroom in some hotel - in Lexington or Louisville, or Columbia or Charleston - a large room dimly lit, a band on a dais at one end. The room smells of flowers, perfume, tobacco smoke. There is loud talking and laughter, Uncle Andrew in the thick of it, a little drunk. There is a sort of aura of careless delight about him, a suppressed extravagance of physical elation, as though he might at any moment do something that will draw the attention of the whole room to him. He seems himself to be unaware of this.

  He is aware of the woman sitting beside him. (Who is she? She is, let us say, Aphrodite herself, for the while. Custom cannot stale her infinite variety.) For the while his being is directed toward her like the beam of a lamp, and she knows it. She casts back his light, granting him love-as I did, as we all did, because he had the power of attracting it; not ever asking for it, he called it forth.

  The band members shift in their seats, take up their instruments, and begin another song. They play "Don't Get Around Much Anymore," a song elegant and inconsolable. (It may have come too late for him to have danced to it, but it is the one song I can remember hearing him sing, and so I imagine him dancing to it.) He reaches out without a word; the woman gives him her hand. They rise and walk onto the floor, dancing even before they dance. They step into the music. The woman's weight on his arm, given to him, he forgets his feet. The two of them ask and answer one another, motion for motion. He holds her with an assurance that is almost forgetfulness, and yet is entirely attentive to her and to the song that moves them:

  A trumpet solo sways, gleaming, in the air. Under it the man and woman turn and soar. The woman rests upon his arm, leaning back, at one with him in their now weightless flight. The little while it lasts, he does not know where he is.

  14

  One day maybe forty years ago my father told Elton Penn, "I almost did something once that I would have been awfully sorry for."

  Elton told Henry and me not long afterward. We had been at work and were resting, as it happened, in the shade of some locust trees beside the tobacco barn that had been built of our share of the materials salvaged from the lead mine. Henry and I were grown boys then, eligible to be told things that Elton found it lonely to know by himself.

  "I wonder what he meant," Elton said. "I couldn't ask him."

  The two of them had been in my father's car, driving through the fields, looking at the condition of everything and talking, as they often did. My father, for some reason, reached over and opened the glove compartment. When he did so, Elton saw a small nickel-plated.32 revolver lying among the papers and other things my father kept there.

  "What are you carrying that for, Wheeler?" Elton asked.

  I no longer rem
ember the reason. Probably he was on the lookout for stray dogs. He had sheep in those days, and dogs were always a worry.

  Elton asked him if he had bought the pistol in fear that he might need to defend himself. We all knew that my father had once defended a man in a murder trial, at the end of which the acquitted defendant had been shot and killed by the victim's brother. Elton wanted to hear about that. But my father only shook his head and said that once he had almost done something he would have been sorry for.

  Sitting under the locusts, we tried to think what it might have been. We decided, with the barn there to remind us, that it must have had something to do with Carp Harmon, though we did not know for sure.

  Of course, we did not know at all. I don't remember that any of us ever brought up the subject again, though we were all much interested in my father and we talked about him interminably.

  He fascinated us, I think, because he was so completely alive and passionate and intelligent, so precisely intent upon the things he loved, so eager to get work done, so fiercely demanding of us, and yet so tender toward us. We would be angry at him often enough, and yet he delighted us, and we were proud of him. Elton loved to mimic my father's way of driving up in his car in a hurry, rolling the window down, patting the accelerator with his foot while he talked to you, and then-bzzzt! - taking off again, sometimes in the midst of your answer to what he had just asked you. He could use the telephone the same way, hanging up the instant he found out what he had called to learn, leaving you talking to the dead receiver. But sometimes when you were out at work he would seem just to ease up out of nowhere; you would look up and there he would be, sitting in the car, watching you and smiling, glad to have found you, glad to be there with you. Wonderful conversations sometimes happened at those times.

  One day in the early spring Elton was disking ground a long way from the house. The day turned cold, and he had not worn enough clothes. Gradually the chill sank into him until his bones ached. And then, as he came to the end of one of his rounds, he saw my father driving up. Elton left the tractor and got into the car. My father turned up the heater and the two of them sat there and talked of the coming year while Elton quit shivering and got warm. Finally, having only a little left to do, Elton returned to the tractor and my father went on wherever he was going.

  In such wanderings and encounters, my father enacted his belonging to his country and his people. He could be as peremptory and harsh as a saw -we younger ones all had felt his edge -but he knew how to be a friend. One night when he was old, he named over to me all those of the dead who had been his friends. He said, "If they are there, Paradise is Paradise indeed."

  He had a horseman's back, like his father, and would often sit on a chair as if it were a stool. He was wide awake and on watch, as if he expected a fly ball to be hit to him at any moment. He rarely loitered or ambled. Until he began to fail, when he was well into his eighties, he moved with great energy, a certain lightness, and the resolution sometimes of a natural force.

  Even his gaiety was resolute. Or his gaiety came of a sort of freedom within his resolution. He was determined to do what he had to do; he would look for no escape; he was free. I always loved to watch him dress for the office, for often at that time he would be in a high good humor, dancing as he buttoned his shirt and knotted his tie, sometimes already wearing his hat before he put on his pants. He had things he wanted to do, and he could hardly wait.

  I sat many a time, waiting for him, in the outer office where Miss Julia sat, typing, at her desk. I would know he was coming when I heard the street door open suddenly and almost in the same moment slam shut, rattling the glass, and then I would hear his footsteps light and rapid on the stairs, for characteristically he would be running. At the top, there would be two hard footfalls to check his speed, and he would hit the door, turning the knob, and the door would open as by the force of an explosion in the hallway, admitting my father, who would say all in one sentence: "Hello Andy Miss Julia what did we do with that Buttermore file?"

  It would be the same when he came home: swift footfalls on the porch steps, three long strides across the porch followed by the implosion of the door -and there would be my father going full tilt to hang up his hat.

  One day not long after Carp Harmon had been released from the penitentiary, my mother heard that pattern of sounds when she should not have heard it: in the middle of the morning. Nobody but my father came into the house that way, and she went to see what had brought him home. All this she told me after he was dead.

  When she came into the front of the house, he was taking that little nickel-plated pistol from the top of the corner cupboard in the dining room.

  "What are you doing?" she said.

  It measures the strength of his love for her that he answered her straight. He said that he had seen Carp Harmon in town, and he was going to kill him.

  I know well the look that anger put into my father's eyes; I can guess the size of the job my mother had on her hands.

  She put herself in his way. She told him that killing Carp Harmon would not bring Uncle Andrew back. She told him he had more to think about than just Uncle Andrew. Or just himself. He had to think of his children, who would have to live with what he did.

  He had to think of her.

  It took her a long time, but she talked him out of it. He put the gun away.

  She had spoken the simple truth: He could not bring Uncle Andrew back; he could not make justice by his own hand, according to his own will. She knew he was almost defeated, fallen under the weight of mortality and affliction and his own inclination toward the evil that afflicted him; he was nearly lost. And she called him back to his life and to us.

  He told her one day that now he had nothing to live for.

  And then," she told me, "I let him have it. I felt for him as much as one human ever felt for another, but I let him have it. And it did good! "

  In that time of grief and discouragement and defeat -it comes clear to me now - all that my father was and would ever be depended on my mother. I can see how near he came to turning loose all that he held together, and how, in holding it together, with my mother's help, he preserved the possibility of our life here; he quieted himself, lived, stayed on, bore what he had to bear. With my mother's help, he kept alive in his life our lives as they would be.

  15

  In the summer that I turned ten, the summer of Uncle Andrew's death, all the tobacco and corn on the Crayton Place was grown in the same field in the middle of the farm. The field was divided in two by a road, just a dirt track, by which we went from the gate on one side to the gate on the other. To the left of the road, going back, was a long, broad ridge, sloping gently to the fences on either side. To the right of the road and on the far side of the ridge, the slope was broken by hollows and was somewhat steeper. The field was beautifully laid out, so that all the rows followed the contours of the ridge. This was particularly noticeable in that far right-hand corner where the plowlands were smaller and were divided by grassed drains. The design of the field would have been my father's work: a human form laid lovingly upon the natural conformation of the place.

  There came a morning when I stood in the dust of the road with a hoe in my hands, looking at the field, and was overcome by sudden comprehension of what was happening there. The corn was a little above kneehigh, the tobacco plants about the size of a man's hat, both crops green and flourishing. R. T. and I were hoeing the tobacco. I could see Jake Branch plowing corn with a riding cultivator drawn by a good pair of black, white-nosed mules named Jack and Pete. Somewhere beyond the ridgetop, Col Oaks was plowing tobacco with a single mule, old Red, and a walking plow. The air smelled of vegetation and stirred earth. Beside me, R. T. was filing his hoe. Standing there in the brilliance with my ears sticking out under the brim of my straw hat and my mouth probably hanging open (somebody was always telling me, "Shut your mouth, Andy!"), I saw how beautiful the field was, how beautiful our work was. And it came to me all in a feeling h
ow everything fitted together, the place and ourselves and the animals and the tools, and how the sky held us. I saw how sweetly we were enabled by the land and the animals and our few simple tools.

  My moment of vision cannot have lasted long. It ended, I imagine, when R. T. finished sharpening his hoe and nudged me with the file and handed it to me. It was a powerful moment, a powerful vision nonetheless. I have lived under its influence ever since.

  Its immediate result was that I became frantic to own a mule. I saw how, owning a mule, a boy could become a man, an economic entity, dignified and self sustaining, capable of lovely work. I fixed my mind on Pete, who was a little the tallest and a little the most stylish of the pair Jake Branch was working that day in the corn rows. My conversations with Uncle Andrew were all dominated by my obsessive importunings and proposals for the purchase of the mule. I wanted to buy him on credit, giving Uncle Andrew and my father my note for the full amount, and pay for him by my work-which, given my irregular employment at a quarter a day, would have taken quite a while.

  It was a boy's dream, sufficiently absurd, and yet the passion that attached to it I am still inclined to respect, for I still feel it. But Uncle Andrew thought my obsession was funny, when he did not think it a nuisance. This was my first inkling that, as much as I wanted to be like him, we were not alike. It was not a difference that I rationalized or made much of, but I remember that it troubled me; something in the way I was had set me apart from him, and I could not help but feel it. Though I know more fully now than then how much I loved him, and though I love him still, that is still a memory that troubles me.