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

  At about that time his drinking seems to have become a problem again. My father, who could not rest in the presence of a problem -who in fact was possessed by visions of solutions - decided that Uncle Andrew should come home and farm. Borrowing the money, my father bought two farms, one that we continued to call the Mack Crayton Place about five miles from Hargrave, and another, the Will Bower Place, adjoining Grandma and Grandpa Catlett's place nearer to Port William. Uncle Andrew, according to the plan they made, would look after the farms while my father concentrated on his law practice. My father sent Uncle Andrew enough money to buy a 1940 Chevrolet, and Uncle Andrew and Aunt Judith came home. Uncle Andrew was then forty-five years old, five years older than my father.

  That homecoming gave me a new calling and a new career. Uncle Andrew and Aunt Judith rented a small apartment in a house belonging to an old doctor in Hargrave. Uncle Andrew began his daily trips to the farms, and I began wanting to go with him. I was six years old, and going with him became virtually the ruling purpose of my life. When I was not in school or under some parental bondage, I was likely to be with him. On the days I went with him, the phone would ring at our house before anybody was up. I would run down the stairs, put the receiver to my ear, and Uncle Andrew's voice would say, "Come around, baby."

  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."

  "Yes, we do. Mother said if you went, we could go."

  "Suppose you drown."

  "She thinks you won't let us drown."

  "The hell I won't!"

  "Well, are you coming?"

  "Go on, now, damn it! Get out of here! Go do something else."

  He would fold his hands and shut his eyes, the picture of hope defeated.

  Sometimes he would be quiet and sad-seeming. Always at those times he sang the same song:

  Was there, somewhere, a woman he missed, or was he mindful that he was getting older, or did he just like the song? He had a good voice, and he sang well.

  For fifty years and more I have been asking myself, What was he? What manner of a man? For I have never been sure. There are things that I remember, things that I have heard, and things that I am able (a little) to imagine. But what he was seems always to be disappearing a step or two beyond my thoughts.

  He was, for one thing, a man of extraordinary good looks. He had style, not as people of fashion have it (though he had the style of fashion when he wanted it), but as, for example, certain horses have it: a selfawareness so complete as to be almost perfectly unconscious, realized in acts rather than thoughts. He wore his clothes with that kind of style. He looked as good in work clothes, I thought, as he did dressed up. Clothes did not matter much to me, and yet I remember being proud to be with him when he was dressed up-in a light summer suit, say, and a straw boater-for I thought he looked better than anybody. He was a big man, six feet two inches tall and weighing a hundred and eighty pounds. He had a handsome, large-featured face with a certain fineness or sensitivity that suggested possibilities in him that he mainly ignored. His eyes, as Grandma loved to say, were "hazel," and they were very expressive, as responsive to thought as to sight. He loved ribaldry, raillery, impudence. He spoke at times a kind of poetry of vulgarity.

  And yet there was something dark or troubled in him also, as though he foresaw his fate; I felt it even then. I have a memory of him with a certain set to his mouth and distance in his eyes, an expression of difficult acceptance, as if he were resigned to being himself, as if perhaps he saw what it would lead to. His silences, though never long, were sometimes solemn and preoccupied. When he was still in his twenties, his hair had begun to turn gray.

  For another thing, he was as wild, probably, as any human I have ever known. He was a man, I think, who was responsive mainly to impulses: desire, affection, amusement, self abandon, sometimes anger.

  When he felt good, he would be laughing, joking, mocking, mimicking, singing, mouthing a whole repertory of subverbal noises. He would say-and as Yeager Stump later told me, he would do-anything he thought of. He would lounge, grinning, in his easy chair and talk outrageously, as if merely curious to hear what he might say.

  I was in the third grade when the teachers at our school asked the students to ask their fathers to volunteer to build some seesaws on the playground. Henry and 1, knowing our father would not spare the time, brought the matter before Uncle Andrew.

  "Well, college," he said, "I'll take it under consideration. Tell all the women teachers to line up out by the road, and I'll drive by and look 'em over. It might be I could give 'em a little lift."

  He had, I am sure, no intention of helping with the seesaws; he never had been interested in a school. But Henry, who was in the second grade, dutifully relayed the message to his teacher. I remember well the difficulty of hearing Henry's teacher repeat to my teacher Uncle Andrew's instructions. As I perfectly understood, our teachers' outrage was not necessarily contingent upon Henry's indiscretion; Uncle Andrew would have delivered his suggestion in person if the circumstances had been different and it had occurred to him to do so.

  At times he seemed to be all energy, intolerant of restraint, unpredictable. His presence, for so small a boy as I was, was like that of some large male animal who might behave as expected one moment and the next do something completely unforeseen and astonishing.

  One morning we went to the Bower Place only to find Charlie Branch stalled for want of a mowing machine part. We started back to Hargrave to get the part, Uncle Andrew driving complacently along at the wartime speed limit, and I chinning the dashboard as usual. We got to a place where the road went down through a shallow cut with steep banks on both sides, and all of a sudden Chumpy and Grov
er Corvin stepped into the road in front of us. Chumpy and Grover were just big teenage boys then, but they were already known as outlaws and bullies; a lot of people were afraid of them. They wanted a ride, and by stepping into the road they meant to force Uncle Andrew to stop. What he did was clap the accelerator to the floor and drive straight at them. His response was as instantaneous and all-out as that of a kicking horse. He ran them out of the road and up the bank, cutting away at the last split second. We drove on as before. He did not say a word.

  5

  While Uncle Andrew farmed and did whatever else he did, Aunt Judith and her mother busied themselves with the care and maintenance of the Hargrave upper crust. Aunt Judith's mother had been born a Hargrave, a descendant of the Hargrave for whom the town was named, and so Aunt Judith was virtually a Hargrave herself. By blood she was only a quarter Hargrave, but by disposition and indoctrination she was 100 percent, as her mother expected and perhaps required. The two of them belonged to the tightly drawn little circle (almost a knot) of the female scions of the first families of Hargrave - a complex cousinship that preserved and commended itself in an endless succession of afternoon bridge parties. At these functions everybody was "cud'n" somebody: Cud'n Anne, Cud'n Nancy, Cud'n Charlotte, Cud'n Phoebe, and so on. Theirs was an exclusive small enclosure that one could not enter or leave except by birth and death. My mother, for example, was excluded for the original sin of having been born in Port William - an exclusion which I believe she understood as an escape.