When he got home from the war, still recovering from his wound, he knew his life was a gift, not so probable as he had once thought, and yet unquestionable as that of any tree, not to be hoarded or clutched at, not to be undervalued or too much prized, for there were many days now lost back in time when he could have died as easily and unremarkably as a fly. It was a life now simply to be lived, accepting hardships and pleasures, joys and griefs equally as they came.
* * *
His time in the war had been a different and a separate time, his life then a different life. The memory of it remained always with him, or always near, and yet that time lay behind him, intact and separate as an island in the sea, divided from the time before and the time after.
Returning home from the war, he returned to memory. He returned to the time of his own life that he felt to be continuous from long before his birth until long past his death. He came back to the old place and its constant reminding, awakening memories and memories of memories as he walked in and across the tracks of those who had preceded him. He knew then how his own comings and goings were woven into the invisible fabric of the land’s history and its human life.
He was accompanied again, at work and in his thoughts forever after, by people he had always known: his brother, Mart, with whom he lived on in their parents’ house, batching, after their parents were gone; his sister, Sudie, and her husband, Pascal Sowers, who were neighbors; the Coulter brothers, Jarrat and Burley; Jarrat’s son Nathan and Nathan’s wife, Hannah; and then Burley’s son, Danny Branch, and Lyda, Danny’s wife; and Elton Penn and his wife, Mary. They were a membership, as Burley liked to call it, a mere gathering, not held together by power and organization like the army, but by kinship, friendship, history, memory, kindness, and affection—who were apt to be working together, in various combinations, according to need, and even, always, according to pleasure.
And then, after Andy Catlett’s homecoming and settlement near Port William in 1965, because of Andy’s cousinship to the Coulters and his friendships from his boyhood with the Penns and the Rowanberrys, Andy and his family became members of the membership and took part in the work-swapping and the old, long knowing in common.
Between Art and Andy there grew, within the larger membership, a sort of kinship, founded upon Art’s long memory and his knowledge of old ways, and upon their mutual affection for the Port William countryside in all of its times, seasons, and weathers. They would often be together, at work or at rest, Art talking, Andy listening and asking. Their best times were Sunday mornings or afternoons, when they would travel together on foot or horseback or with a team and wagon, moving at large, sometimes at random, wherever their interest took them. Or they would trace out the now-pathless way, around the hill and up a hollow supposed to be haunted, that the young Rowanberrys had walked to school. Or they would follow the sunken track, long disused, that led from the log house on the ridge down into the river valley where it met the road to town. Or they would pick out other disused ways connecting old landmarks. As they went along, Art’s parents and grandparents and other old ones he remembered, or they remembered, would appear in his mind, and he would tell about them: how his grandpaw would tell you a big tale and you could hear him laugh a mile; how old man Will Keith, a saw-logger, who worked a big horse and a little one, would take hold of the little horse’s singletree to help him on a hard pull; how Art’s own father, Early Rowanberry, never rode uphill behind a team even when the wagon was empty. By then Art’s distant travels were long past. On his and Andy’s Sunday journeys, having no place far to go, they were never in a hurry. It was never too early or too late to stop and talk. And when Andy needed help, if Art knew it, he would be there. “Do you need anything I got?”
After so many days, so many miles, so many remindings, so much remembering and telling, Andy understood how precisely placed and populated Art’s mind was, how like it was to a sort of timeless crossroads where the living and the dead met and recognized one another and passed on their ways, and how rare it was, how singular and once-for-all. When Art would be gone at last from this world, Port William would have no such mind, would be known in no such way, ever again.
Andy Catlett, under the same mortal terms of once for all, has kept Art’s mind alive in his own. Some of Art’s memories Andy remembers. As he follows and crosses Art’s old footings over the land, adding his own passages to the unseen web of the land’s history, some of those old ones, who were summoned by reminding into Art’s mind, still again and again will appear in Andy’s.
And so it is into Andy’s thought, into his imagining, that Art has come walking up the hill on that bitter March day thirty years ago. Andy now is an old man, remembering an old man, once his elder and his teacher, with whom he is finally of an age.
Art was wearing a winter jacket, which in its youth had closed with a zipper down the front, but which, the zipper failing, he had overhauled with a set of large buttons and buttonholes, strongly but not finely sewn.
There may have been a time, Andy thinks, when Art was skilled at such work. From his time in the army and before, he had been used to doing for himself whatever he needed done. His hands, hard-used and now arthritic, had become awkward at needlework, and yet he had continued to mend his clothes, pleasing himself both by his thrift and by the durability of his work. When the legs of his coveralls were worn and torn past mending, he lopped off the bottom half, hemmed up the top half, and thus made a light jacket that lasted several more years. When he needed a rope, he braided a perfectly adequate one with salvaged baler twine. He thus maintained a greater intimacy between himself and the things he wore and used, was more all-of-a-piece, than anybody else Andy ever knew.
As he climbed the hill, still keeping to the graveled track, old Preacher still walking behind with his head and tail down, Art watched the creek valley close on his right as the river valley opened on his left. As the country widened around him he breathed larger breaths. And the higher he went, the flatter the horizon looked, in contrast to the alternation of hill and hollow in the view from the creek bottom. He reached a place where he could look out and down over the tops of the bare trees instead of through them. He stopped again then and took in the whole visible length of the larger valley, from the gray, still-winterish slope that closed it a couple of miles upstream to the low rampart, blue with distance, that lay across it down toward the mouth of the river.
He turned presently and went on, the wind pushing him. Soon the track leveled, and he and the old dog were walking along the crest of the ridge. He was walking—as Andy, on his walks with him, had from time to time realized—both through the place and through his consciousness of the presence and the past of it, his recognition of its marks and signs, as his movement through it altered the aspect of it.
He and time were moving at about the same pace. He was neither hurried by it nor hurrying to catch it, his thoughts coming whole as he thought them, with nothing left out or left over. If he seemed to be getting ahead of his thoughts, he stopped and waited.
He was passing a high point out to his left above the river valley. In a certain place out there were what he had known for many years to be the graves of people who lived and were forgotten long before the time they might have been called Indians. He knew what the graves were because, back before the war, on a similar height of ground above Willow Run, a professor from Lexington had come and carefully dug up some graves of the same kind. Art went to see them while they were open, with the remains of skeletons lying in them. That taught him what to look for, and he found these on his own place. The giveaway was flagstones edged up in the shape of a box, hard to see if you didn’t know what you were looking for. He rarely spoke of them, and he showed them to nobody. He told Andy about them, indicating with a look and a nod about where they were, but he never showed him. He rarely went near them himself, so as to leave them undisturbed, to leave no track or mark to expose them to indifference or dishonor. Looking at those opened graves, as Andy knew
, Art had felt both awe and shame: so long a sleep pried in upon, so old a secret finally told.
The place of the graves now was behind him. They passed from his thought. But he was presently reminded of them again because he was looking into the opening of the Katy’s Branch valley where, somewhere in the old woods, all of Burley Coulter that could die lay in a grave formed on the pattern of those ancient ones. This was the sort of thing the elders of Port William were apt to know without knowing quite how they knew it. But Art, with the rest of the old membership, had been in Wheeler and Henry Catlett’s law office down in Hargrave the day Danny Branch, Burley’s son, returned from somewhere, nobody ever said where, after Burley’s disappearance from a Louisville hospital where he had been lying unwakable, kept alive by machines. Though nobody told where Danny had been, in Port William, where people didn’t have much that was “their own business,” everybody who cared to know knew. And Art knew Danny’s mind, as he had known Burley’s.
Old Preacher, who still had been walking behind Art, suddenly became young again, bawling and flinging gravel behind him as simultaneously a fox squirrel sprang from the grass, flying his tail like a flag, and just ahead of the dog leapt to the trunk of a fair-sized hickory at the edge of the woods. Art heard the scramble of claws on bark. He followed the dog down through the sloping pasture to the tree.
Preacher, who was a coon hound in fair standing, had a sideline of squirrel hunting that he liked to indulge, to keep in practice maybe for worthier game. He reared against the tree and covered the whole visible world with chop-mouth cries of extreme excitement and longing.
“That’s a squirrel,” Art told him. “It ain’t a bear.”
He felt reflexively for the .22 pistol that he often carried with him on such trips, and then realized with a small pang of regret that the pistol was still hanging in its shoulder holster from its nail by the kitchen door. But he did anyhow carefully study the tree, and he found the squirrel lying very still along a branch high up. Preacher stood looking expectantly from the squirrel to Art and back again. His expression appeared to turn indignant when he understood that Art was not going to shoot the squirrel.
“Well, I’m sorry, old dog,” Art said. “I know it ain’t right to disappoint you.”
But all the same he was glad he had forgot the pistol. Though he would gladly have cooked and eaten the squirrel, he discovered, as he more often had done as he had grown older, that he did not want to kill it.
He said to the squirrel, “I reckon you’re having a lucky day.” And then he said, “I reckon every day you’ve had so far has been lucky.”
Preacher, born again to the life of a hunting dog with important business in the woods, turned and trotted off downhill among the trees. And that was the last Art saw of him until he turned up again at suppertime.
During the little while of Preacher’s excitement and then his indignation, that particular slope of the ridge seemed to exist only in reference to the episode of the squirrel. But then the sound of the wind settled back upon it as a kind of quiet. Art looked about and took notice of where he was.
The whole Rowanberry place lay in his mind, less like a map than like a book, its times stratified upon it like pages. He remembered the seasons, crops, and events of the years he had known, of which almost always he remembered the numbers. And the living pages of his memory, as if blown or thumbed open, showed past days as they were, as perhaps they are.
In 1937, in the summer after the big flood, they grew a crop of tobacco on the slope above the hickory where Preacher had treed the squirrel. The summer of 1936, as if to require in justice the terrible flood of the next January, had been terribly dry. The country had been dying of thirst day after day and week after week. All the hard-won product of the farm had amounted almost to nothing. By the spring of 1937, the Rowanberrys seemed to have made it through by luck, if luck was what they wanted to call it. That was the time when Art’s father began telling people who asked how he was, “Here by being careful.”
But in the late winter and early spring, as people then did, as they had to do, Early Rowanberry and his four sons—Art, Mart, Jink, and Stob—cut the trees from the slope where Art would be standing and remembering in the cold March wind forty-four years later. They dragged off the logs and poles, burnt the brush, plowed and worked the soil, piled the rocks, and in a wet spell in late May, set out by hand the tobacco crop that would have to do for both that year and the year before.
The growing season of 1937 gave them enough rain, and they made a good crop. Art, as if standing and looking in both present and past, saw it in all its stages, from the fragile, white-stemmed plants of the setting-out to the broad, gold-ripe leaves at harvest.
The four sons and their father had kept faith with it, doing the hard handwork of it, through the whole summer. An old man already as they saw him and in fact getting to be old, but never forgetting the hard year before and other hard ones before that, their father drove them into the work, setting a never-slackening pace in the tobacco patch and everywhere else. As if in self-defense, the sons cherished every drink of water, every bite of food, every hour of sleep in fact and in anticipation, and they made the most of everything that was funny.
Just one time, in the midst of a breathless afternoon in July, Jink, who was the hardest of them in his thoughts, cried out, “God damn, old man, where the hell’s the fire!” It would have been a cry of defiance if Early Rowanberry had been defiable. He might as well have been deaf. He went on. The three brothers went on. Jink himself went on. His outcry hung in the air behind them like the call of some utterly solitary animal.
And then it was getting on toward the noon of a day late in August. By then half the crop had been cut and safely housed in the barns. They had been cutting all morning, going hard, all of them by then moved by the one urgent need to save from the weather, from the possible hailstorm always on their minds, the crop by so much effort finally made. Half an hour earlier Sudie, the brothers’ one sister, had brought a cooked dinner in two cloth-covered baskets and had left it in the barn farther back on the ridge. They quit cutting when they saw her pass and began loading a sled with cut tobacco to take with them when they went to the barn to eat.
They were letting Stob, the youngest, be the teamster, driving the horses and the sled as the others loaded. The tobacco they were loading had been cut the morning before and was well wilted. They put on a big load. Their father said, “All right, boys, let’s go eat,” and Stob spoke to the team.
Standing on the hillside a little behind the sled, Art saw it all as he still would see it when he thought of it in all the years that followed. Stob was sixteen that summer, a well-grown big stout boy who hadn’t yet thought everything he needed to think. When he started for the barn he ought to have got on the uphill side of the load. But he stayed on its downhill side, practically under it, walking beside it with the lines in his hands. Maybe all four of the others were ready to tell him, but they never got a chance. All of a sudden the uphill runner slid up onto the ridge of a row, the ground steepened a little under the downhill runner, and the load started over. Stob, who was then stronger than he was smart and too proud of his strength, didn’t stop the horses and run out of the way as he should have done, but just threw his shoulder against the load as if to prop it and kept driving. He pretty soon found out how strong he actually was, for the load, the hundreds of pounds of it, pushed him to the ground and piled on top him. The old team stopped and stood unflustered as if what had happened had happened before. The four men were already hurrying.
They unburied Stob, and Art would remember with a kind of wonder how deliberately they went at it. They righted the sled and loaded it again as, carefully, not to mistreat the tobacco, but quickly enough, they delivered Stob back again to the daylight. When finally he rolled over and stood up, as if getting out of bed, he was wetter with sweat than before and red in the face and wild-eyed, his straw hat crushed on the ground and his hair more or less on end.
And Stob said, as if Art ought to have known, “I was thinking the air was getting mighty scarce down under there!”
Even their father laughed. At every tobacco harvest after that, down through the years, they would tell the story. And they would laugh.
In the wind, in the gray, cold light, Art went back to the ridgetop and the road. His thoughts returned to his amusement at Preacher. He had given a good deal of study to the old dog’s character, and the story of the squirrel would stay on his mind. He told Andy about it, and about other events of that journey, for it had been a good one, a few days later. “I reckon he don’t have much time for a man without a pistol.”
He went on back the ridge, the road passing in front of the old log house, now a ruin, the doors and windows gaping, the hearths long ago dug up by descendants of a family of slaves who had once belonged to Art’s family. Those descendants, Rowanberrys themselves since freedom, believed that during the Civil War money and other valuables had been buried under a stone of one of the hearths. Art and Mart told them to dig away, perfectly assured that no Rowanberry had ever owned anything greatly worth either burying or digging up. As they expected, the digging was motivated entirely by superstition, but since then the hearthstones had remained overturned onto the puncheons of the floors. The chimneys too had begun to crumble. All of the old making that remained intact were the cellar and the well. For a long time two apple trees had lived on at the edge of what had been the garden, still bearing good early apples that Art and Mart came up to pick every year. But life finally had departed from the trees as it had from the house.
A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership Page 23