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

  By the time I was born into it, the history of that place had become old. The sign of its age was much forgetfulness. Much had happened to us there that we did not remember. We had suffered and rejoiced there more than we knew. I acquired experiences there that never had happened to me at all. All my life I have recalled a sort of dream image of a man putting on his coat at the back door, speaking over his shoulder to a woman inside the house. A freed slave going away? One of our family going west? Or simply somebody going to the field? I cannot see his face; I do not know.

  I had known, it seemed to me always, that when Grandpa was "just a little bit of a baby laying up yonder in the bed," some soldiers had come at night and taken his father. They were a small band of Union horsemen who had come to "recruit" my great-grandfather, who would have been in his early forties at the time. They did this, I suppose, with a pleasant sense of justice, because he owned a few slaves and for that and other reasons would not have been sympathetic to their cause. Forcing him to mount behind one of them, they carried him to their encampment on the top of the next hill. Still in her nightgown and barefooted, my greatgrandmother, Lizzie, followed them. By force of argument or character or both, she "made them give him back." According to the story as I heard it, Lizzie "ran after them," and so in my mind, as if from my own birth, I have had the image of that distraught and determined woman running up the dark road.

  And I have had in mind always the fire that burned the old house when Grandpa was six. It is a pod of fierce light that opens greatly in the dark. In that light Grandpa is a small boy suddenly filled with terrible knowledge. He stands holding his saddle, his most precious possession, which he has retrieved from under his bed. They bring to him a small Negro girl, the cook's daughter, a year younger than he. She is hysterical, wanting to run back into the burning house. And they tell him, "Hold her! Hold her tight!" And he holds her, while the grown-ups continue their effort to save things from the house, and then finally give up and watch it burn.

  The new house had grown old too by the time I knew it, and had about it memories and reminders and intimations of unremembered things. The house itself was tall and finely outlined. Its high-ceilinged rooms, cool in summer, were lovely when filled with morning light. But its furnishings were meager and rather graceless. The best room, the parlor, in which we sat only on the most special occasions, contained an upright piano with a stool, a matching sofa and easy chair covered with rose and beige brocade, a glass-fronted bookcase, a small table, and two or three more chairs, not necessarily comfortable. The other rather formal room was the dining room, likewise seldom used. It was a north room, cool in summer, cold in winter, heated, like the parlor, only by a fireplace. I liked to go into that room for its strangeness and its cold smells of cloves and brown sugar.

  The kitchen, living room, and three bedrooms upstairs-the rooms that were to varying degrees lived in -were furnished with not much of an eye for decoration or harmony. The furniture was inherited or haphazardly bought or come by; nearly all of it was old and well worn, some of it damaged or much repaired. The rugs were threadbare in spots, and where the travel was heaviest the finish was worn off the kitchen linoleum. It was a house that for a long time had been occupied by people struggling to hold themselves in place, who had not had much time for comfort or the means for luxuries. I understood this only much later; then it was merely familiar. The house had had a telephone for a good many years and electricity for four or five, but nothing else had changed, and it seemed somehow surprised by these amenities. It still had no running water. We used the privy down in a corner of the backyard, and carried water in buckets from the well.

  There were a few framed photographs on the living room wallpictures of Uncle Andrew and my father, and of us children. There was also a small tintype of Grandpa when he was a young boy; his mother had had to whip him, he said, to make him sit still for it. Upstairs there were larger photographic portraits of Uncle Andrew and my father as children, and of my great-grandfathers Catlett and Wheeler. Grandma's decorations consisted mainly of a few crocheted doilies and table scarves. Her yearning for nice things was revealed by her attachment to ornamented candy boxes with hinged lids; the few of these that she had received she kept and filled with photographs, letters, and the pretty greeting cards that came on holidays. The most beautiful thing in the house, I thought, was a sampler made by my mother. I read it often, fascinated by the close rhymes. It said:

  HOURS FLY

  FLOWERS DIE

  NEW DAYS

  NEW WAYS

  PASS BY

  LOVE STAYS

  Between us, Grandma and I carried on the best we could the old kitchen economy of milk cow and hen flock and garden. I helped her care for the hens, and I did the milking and sometimes the churning.

  To amuse myself while I milked the cows I would sometimes take aim at the flies that lit on the rim of the bucket and squirt them down into the foam. Grandma, seeing them in the strainer, would say, "Lord, the flies! Did anybody ever see the like!"

  When I churned, sitting on the back porch with the stone churn between my knees, I could make buttermilk fly up through the dasher hole and hit the ceiling. And then Grandma would say, "Well, if you ain't the limit!"

  When I would catch a nice mess of little sunfish at the pond, or a turtle, or anything wild and good to eat, she would say, "Well, did you ever!"

  One bright day after rain, when I had waded along the risen branch picking raspberries with Elton Penn, who wore a pair of gum boots and was going directly ahead as usual, Grandma ignored the cap full of berries I held out to her and looked at my sopping shoes and pants legs. `Andy Catlett, I reckon you haven't got a lick of sense!"

  I loved to stay with her, partly because she spoiled me, partly because she left me pretty free to live the life available in that place, which was the life I wanted. In the long summer mornings and afternoons I went alone on foot or horseback among the fields and woods and ponds and streams. Or I swam or quested about with Fred Brightleaf. Or I worked, if I could and if allowed, with the Brightleafs or Elton Penn orJake Branch.

  At mealtimes, and while we went about our chores, and at night, Grandma and I talked. Mainly she talked; I questioned and listened. She talked of things that had happened and of things that had been said, things that she remembered and things that she remembered that other people had remembered. At night it was best. After the supper dishes were put away, the long light and heat of the day now past, we would darken the house and go out to sit on the front porch. Or if the breeze was better out in the yard we would carry chairs out and sit at the foot of a big old cedar tree that stood there then. While the lightning bugs carried their little winking lamps up out of the grass, and the katydids sang in the late summer foliage, and heat lightning shimmered on the horizon, we sat invisible to each other, just two voices talking, until bedtime.

  She told of the roads and distances of the old days, of the time when the little patch of woods by Dick Watson's house had been part of a bigger woods that went on and on. She told of slavery times, when my great-grandmother, resting after dinner in the room over the kitchen, heard Molly, the cook, tell the cat, "Old Lizzie's asleep now, and I'm going to beat the hell out of you." She told of the end of slavery, when all the slaves went away, and Molly returned and was sent away. "You have your freedom now," Lizzie told her, "and you must go."

  She told and retold, because I wanted to hear, of the night the soldiers came, and of the burning house.

  She talked of Grandpa. There had been serious estrangements and difficulties between them, for both of them were strong-willed people, and they had not always willed the same things. But now in his absence that we both felt, she took pleasure in remembering him in his youth and his pride. She said, "He was the finest-looking man on the back of a horse that ever I saw." She said he was a beautiful whistler. She had loved to hear him, off somewhere in the distance, calling his cattle. She knew what hard times and failures and disappointments had cost him,
and she sorrowed for him as she sorrowed for herself when she had been young and proud, paying the same costs. There had been times when they had barely made it.

  As a young wife she had lived with her mother-in-law, about whom I never heard her complain, and she remembered much that Lizzie had remembered: what the cook had said to the cat, for example, or an exchange of letters between Lizzie and her brother, James. James, Grandma said, was elected to the state legislature. When he was to be sworn in, he invited Lizzie to attend the ceremony. She wrote back, "I have nothing suitable to wear." And James replied, "Wear the simplest thing you have, and let your manners correspond."

  One of my favorite people in Grandma's stories was Grandpa's older brother, Will, indolent and vagrant, careless and fearless, a comedian drunk or sober, a disappointment and an aggravation to everybody, and yet dear.

  "Will," Grandma asked him once, "were you ever in love with Sally Skaggs?"

  "Yes, Dorie," he said, "I loved her a little once."

  It was Uncle Will who cut off Uncle Andrew's long golden curls "to turn him into a boy," and broke Grandma's heart.

  She told also, troubled and yet amused, of her own younger brother, Leonidas, whom we all called "Uncle Peach," who would get drunk and say to her, "Sing'Yellow Rose o' Texas' to me, madam."

  And it was Uncle Peach who had allowed Uncle Andrew to fall into the fire when he had just begun to walk, leaving what I thought a most attractive set of small scars across the backs of the fingers of Uncle Andrew's right hand.

  Grandma recalled a Negro farmhand, Uncle Mint Wade, who argued, "You will read in the Bible whereupon it say, 'The bottom rail shall be the rider.' "

  And she remembered Uncle Eb Markman, who pronounced, "The world is squar' and got four cawners to it."

  From her reading she had culled a few phrases that she liked to repeat. It pleased her to speak of sleep as "nature's sweet restorer." Her speech had touches of self-conscious elegance that she used in tribute. Of dancing she would say, "It's a lovely thing, stepping to the music."

  Our most frequent and fearful topic was the weather. Both of us were afraid of storms, which seemed to be uncommonly frequent in those days. Grandma would tell about storms that she remembered, and we would discuss the problem of where to be safe in case of a windstorm.

  Before a thunderstorm, she would put a pillow over the telephone, theorizing that the feathers made good insulation and would prevent the lightning from coming into the house along the wire. And having affixed the pillow to the wall so that it covered the phone, she would always quote Uncle Will: "I believed that too, Dorie, till I saw lightning strike a goose."

  When a cold spell would come late in the spring, causing us to feel that some fundamental disorder was at hand, she would quote from a source I have never found: "The time will come when we'll not know the winter from the summer but by the budding of the trees." And though that time has never come, I believed then that it would come, and I believe it still.

  Like many country people of her time, she did not have a very secure belief in progress. She believed that hard times did not go away forever, but returned. She had known hard times, and she did not forget them. There had been a winter, when my father was about seven years old, when Grandpa's tobacco crop had not brought enough to pay the commission on its own sale. Grandma could not have forgotten that if she had lived a thousand years. My father's lifelong devotion to the cause of the small farmers of our part of the country dates from that memory, and it holds its power still over Henry and me.

  It seemed to have gone by Uncle Andrew without touching him. Uncle Andrew was sometimes burdened and was sometimes a burden to himself, but he also had the gift of taking things lightly. Grandma would quote, with disapproval and with a laugh, his reply to Grandpa, who was worrying about a field infested with wild onions: "The cows'll eat 'em, and I don't have to sleep with the cows."

  Grandma was thirteen when her mother died. Her father never remarried. She and her sisters grew up keeping house for themselves and their father and attempting with less than success to give a proper upbringing to Uncle Peach. For Grandma and her sisters, somehow, a mark of respectability and even gentility had been set. They cherished the schooling they got from the Bird's Branch School and McGuffey's Eclectic Readers, one through eight. All her life Grandma had struggled and aspired, and her ambition had been confronted and affronted at every turn by the likes of Uncle Will and Uncle Peach and Uncle Andrew, too wayward to be approved, too close and dear to be denied.

  Uncle Andrew and Uncle Will and Uncle Peach passed and returned in her thoughts and her talk like orbiting planets. They divided her mind; they troubled her without end. She could see plainly what a relief it would have been if she could have talked some sense into their heads and straightened them out. It would have been a relief too if she could have waved them away and forgotten them. In fact, she could do neither. They were incorrigible, and they were her own. In their various ways and styles, they had worried and vexed and grieved her "nearly into the grave," as she would sometimes say. And they also charmed and amused and moved her. They were not correctable because of the way they were; they were not dismissable because of the way she was. She loved them not even in spite of the way they were, but just because she did. With them she enacted, as many mothers have done, and many fathers too, the parable of the lost sheep, who is to be sought and brought back without end, brought back into mind and into love without end, death no deterrent, futility no bar.

  And so she suffered. She looked upon the human condition, I think, as not satisfactory -as unacceptable, notwithstanding that we are in it whether we accept it or not. She was a professed Christian and loved her little weatherboarded church, but I think that it was not easy, and may have been impossible, for her to make peace with our experience of mortality and error, of owning what we cannot correct or save, of losing what we love.

  Grandma was fiercely, fiercely loyal to her own, and just as fiercely exclusive in electing her own. Within the small circle of her own, she was capable of profound charity; outside it, she could be relentless and unforgiving. And the boundary was not impermeable. Sometimes Uncle Andrew, for one, had been safely inside it, and sometimes he had been outside. When you were outside, as I knew from my own experience, her anger was direct and her tongue sharp.

  Her term of execration was "Hmh!" which she could deliver as con- cussively as a blow and in tones varying from polite disbelief (for the benefit of guests) to absolute rejection. Her term of contempt was "Psht!" With it she could slice you off like the top of a radish.

  Uncle Andrew had crossed the boundary into and out of her good graces many times. The nights of those years after his death, as we sat and talked, she was forever picking apart the divergent strands of her feeling for him. She would be pleased or amused or appalled, or amused and appalled both at once. And always she grieved.

  When he was little, with that head covered with golden curls that she could not forget, he was beautiful. He could sing like an angel. And yet he was difficult and mischievous and never still. From the womb, virtually, he lived always a little beyond anyone's anticipation. Even before he could walk, she would have to restrain him by pinning his dresstail under the leg of the bed. He had hardly learned to walk when he flung her good blue pitcher onto the flagstones by the porch step. When he was old enough to receive as a gift his own little hatchet, he chopped one of the rungs out of the banister. She would say regretfully and a little proudly that after he started to school he had become a good fighter. Proudly and a little doubtfully she would say that there never had been anything like the way he could dance.

  When he was ready for college, Grandma and Grandpa sent him to the University of Kentucky in a blue blazer- as handsome a young man, they thought, as they had ever laid eyes on - and to do so they spent all they had; Grandpa went without underwear that winter. When he went to Lexington to see his son, he looked everywhere and could not find him, for Uncle Andrew's adventures had begun. His f
ame as a dancer apparently began during his brief stay at the university.

  Grandpa failed in Uncle Andrew, as he succeeded in my father, and it was a bitter failure. Except for the energy that both of them possessed in abundance, Grandpa and Uncle Andrew were as unlike as a tree and a bird. Grandpa could not tolerate, he could not understand, Uncle Andrew's waste of daylight. For him, Andrew was the name of whatever was careless. "Sit up!" he used to say to me as I went by on the pony. "You ride like your Uncle Andrew." It was not that Uncle Andrew rode badly but that he rode carelessly, his mind elsewhere, and Grandpa believed, and said, that "a man ought to keep his mind on his business"- he meant busy-ness, whatever you were doing. Uncle Andrew was Grandma's failure too, of course. It was a mutual property, that failure; it bound them in mutual suffering and even mutual sympathy, and yet I think it stood between them like a heap of thorns. I imagine that their ways of regret were different. Perhaps Grandpa only saw what had happened and named it and bore it, whereas Grandma saw before her always the beautiful child and forgave and hoped. Perhaps. I do not know.

  When Grandma and I looked through her collection of photographs that had come with letters from various family members, we would come to a picture of several men in army uniforms squatting in a circle, shooting craps. One of them unmistakably was Uncle Andrew, who had sent the picture, and she would always say "Hmh!" and she would laugh. The laugh seemed both to acknowledge her embarrassment and confess her delight. She delighted in him though he had grieved her nearly into the grave.

  He was on her mind forever, and as the evening wore on toward bedtime she would begin again to grieve for him. And always as we approached her grief, we were divided. My loss was nothing like hers. My loss had occurred within the terms of my childhood; it was answered, beyond anything I felt or willed, by my youth and unbidden happiness and all the time I had to live. Her loss would be unrelieved to the end of her life, never mind that she would live on until I was grown and married; her loss was what she had lived to at last and would not live beyond. I could feel that she had come to loss beyond life, unfathomable and inconsolable, as dimensionless as the dark that surrounded the old house and filled it as we talked.