The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 63

  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!”

  Chapter 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 g
ood 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.

  Chapter 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.

  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 a
t 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 or Jake 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.”