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

  There was nobody in the kitchen; it was quiet; a cloth was spread over the dishes on the table; the afternoon sunlight came into the room through the open pantry door. I went through the back hall to the front of the house. When I came into the living room I was surprised to see Cousin Thelma there, dressed up. She was Grandma's sister's child, about my father's age, forty-five or so. She and my father were sitting in rocking chairs, talking quietly. I do not know where my grandmother was.

  When I opened the door my father and Cousin Thelma quit talking. Cousin Thelma smiled at me and said, "Hello, Andy, my sweet."

  My father smiled at me too, but he did not say anything. He stood, held out his hand to me, and I took it. He led me out into the hall and up the stairs.

  And I remember how terribly I did not want to go. I had come in out of the great free outdoor world of my childhood -the world in which, in my childish fantasies, I hoped someday to be a man. But my father, even more than my mother with her peach switch, was the messenger of another world, in which, as I unwillingly knew, I was already involved in expectation and obligation, difficulty and sorrow. It was as if I knew this even from my father's smile, from the very touch of his hand. Later I would understand how surely even then he had begun to lead me to some of the world's truest pleasures, but I was far from such understanding then.

  We went back to the room over the dining room. My father shut the door soundlessly and sat down on the bed. I stood in front of him. He was still holding my hand, as though it were something he had picked up and forgotten to put down.

  `Andy," he said, "Uncle Andrew was badly hurt this afternoon. A fellow shot him. I want you to understand. It may be he won't be able to live."

  He was looking straight at me, and I saw something in his eyes I never had seen there before: fear-fear and grief. For what I felt then I had, and have, no name. It was something like embarrassment, as if I had blundered into knowledge that was forbidden to small boys. I knew the disturbance my father had felt in imparting it to me; this made me feel that something was required of me, and I did not know what. That Uncle Andrew was a man who could be shot had not occurred to me before, but I could not say that.

  What I said sounded to me as odd and inane, probably, as anything else I might have said: "Where did he get shot?"

  "Down at Stoneport."

  "I mean where did he get hit?"

  "Once above the belt and once below." And my father touched his own belly in the places of Uncle Andrew's wounds. Now, when I remember, it sometimes seems to me that he touched those places on my own belly-certainly, in the years to come, I would touch them myself-and perhaps he did. "Here," he said, "and here."

  "Did you see him?"

  "Yes. I've been to the hospital, and I saw him."

  "What did he say?" I was trying, I think, to call him back, not from death, but from strangeness, the terrible distinction of his hurt, into which he was now withdrawn.

  "He said a fellow shot him."

  And I did then have at least the glimpse of a vision of Uncle Andrew lying on a bed, saying such words to my father who stood beside him.

  What more we said and how we left that room I do not remember.

  Now I know that my father led me away to keep me, in my first knowledge of what had happened, away from Grandma in her first knowledge of it -as if to reduce grief by dividing it. Also I think he was moved by a hopeless instinct to protect me, to shield me from the very thing he had to tell me, before which he was himself helpless and unprotected.

  Somehow I got out of the house again. As I stepped around the corner of the back porch, Jarrat Coulter and Dick Watson drove up to the barn lot gate in Cousin Jarrat's scratched and dusty car. They had been to town to get Grandpa's broken hay rope spliced; there was hay to be put up the next day.

  I ran to greet them. Both of them were my friends, and I was happy to see them. I needed something ordinary to happen.

  They were looking out at me, smiling. Ordinarily Cousin Jarrat would have said, "Andy, how about opening the gate, old bud?"

  But I violated my own wish for the ordinary by stepping up on the running board and announcing, "Uncle Andrew got shot."

  They had already heard-! could see that they had - but in their confusion they pretended that they had not.

  Dick said nothing, and Cousin Jarrat said, "Aw! Is that a fact? Well!"

  And then the day seemed to collapse around me into what it had become. There was no place where what had happened had not happened.

  Later, I remember, I was standing in the little pantry off the kitchen, watching my grandmother at work. In the pantry was the table covered by a broken marble dresser-top where she rolled out the dough for biscuits or pie crusts, and so she must have been making biscuits or a pie, though it is not clear to me why she should have been doing that at such a time. I suppose that, in her trouble, she had needed to put herself to work. Perhaps she thought she was distracting or comforting me. She knew at least how I loved to watch her at work there, especially when she made pies: rolling out the dough for the bottom crust and pressing it into the pan, pouring in the filling, crisscrossing the long strips of dough over the top, and then holding the pan on the fingertips of her left hand while she stroked a knife around the edge, cutting off the overhanging bits of dough.

  The sun, getting low, shone in at the one window of the pantry, and everything it touched gleamed a rich reddish gold. I stood at her elbow, as I had done many times, and watched and we talked, about what I cannot imagine. My father must have been gone for some time. Cousin Thelma, if she was still there, was in the living room. My grandfather had not returned.

  And then my other grandfather, Mat Feltner, rapped at the kitchen door and came in. He had come, he said, to take me home. I remember him and Grandma smiling, speaking pleasantly, looking down at me.

  I followed my grandfather out to his car. We got in and started down toward Hargrave. We had gone maybe two miles when Granddaddy, who had driven so far in silence, laid his hand on my knee, as he would do sometimes, and said, "Hon, your uncle Andrew is dead. He died about five o'clock."

  I did not reply, and he said no more. He was a comforting man to be with. Perhaps that was enough.

  The sun was down by the time we got to Hargrave. Granddaddy pulled up in front of our house, and I got out. Where he went then, I do not know.

  Henry and our friends Tim and Bubby Kentfield and Noah Burk were standing in the front yard. They gathered around me.

  "Uncle Andrew got killed," Henry said.

  I said I knew it. They were all looking at me, solemn-faced and excited at the same time.

  "I know it," I said. "Granddaddy told me."

  There we were, all of us together as we often were, and yet changed, and none of us knew what to do.

  "Well. What are we going to do?" Henry said.

  "The man that killed him's name's Carp Harmon," Noah Burk said. "He shot him with a.38 pistol."

  "Carp Harmon," I said.

  "They got him in the jail right now"

  I went on into the house - looking, I suppose, for something that was the same as before. But neither of my parents was in the house. Nor were my sisters. The kitchen was full of women who had come to help or bring food. They were putting things away, sort of taking over, the way they would do.

  "Hello, Andy hon," they said. They gave me hugs. They were treating me like somebody special, which made them seem strange. And their presence in the house without at least my mother there made it seem strange.

  Miss Iris Flynn said, "Honey, I loved your uncle Andrew. We'll miss him, won't we?" She bit her underlip and looked away.

  Some of the others said things too. It was a little as though they wanted to ensure that their love would last by telling it to somebody young.

  I wanted to be able to think of something proper to say. It came to me that if I had been a grown man I probably could have thought of something. I would have comforted them.

  "Well, good-bye," I said.
"I reckon I'm going outdoors." And I went out.

  "Come on," Henry said. He was the youngest one of us, but nobody held back to argue. We all went out to the street and started down into town.

  I don't know where any of our grown-ups were. They were somewhere else, struck down or disappeared. The streets were empty. It was late in the evening, a weekday, and everybody was at home, eating supper maybe, or getting ready for bed, or sitting on porches or in backyards, cooling off. But to us, to me at least, it seemed that the life of the town had drawn back and hushed in wonder and sorrow that Uncle Andrew was dead. It was as if the people withdrew and hid themselves in deference to us boys who used to devil Uncle Andrew to take us swimming, which he had sometimes done. In the warm, slowly dimming twilight, nothing was abroad in the town except the pigeons clapping their wings about the courthouse tower and our little band walking bunched together to the jail. Nobody saw us. It seems to me that, for the time being, not even a car passed. The river flowed solemnly by as if strictly minding its own business.

  The jail adjoined the back of the courthouse, its tall stone-barred facade set back a little behind an iron fence. When we got there we just stopped and looked at it, as though at that moment an immense reality, that we would not be done with for a long time, first laid hold on us. Uncle Andrew had been killed. Somewhere inside the jail, only a few feet from us, was the man who had killed him. For a long time there was nothing to be done but stand there in the large silence and the failing light, and know and know the thing we knew.

  And then, filling his eight-year-old voice with a bravado that astonished me and perhaps astonished him, Henry called out at the front of the jail and its padlocked iron door: "Carp Harmon, you son of a bitch, come out of there!"

  3

  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.

  4

  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.