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

  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 p
layed 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.

  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 shad
ow 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.