The PEN O. Henry Prize Stories 2012

by Laura Furman

  His father, whom he knew familiarly, but also by reputation as Wheeler Catlett the lawyer, who had his law practice and other duties to attend to, had never been able to wean himself from farming—if he had ever tried to do so. As Grandpa Catlett got older, Wheeler had assumed increasing responsibility for the home place. And also, in partnership with his brother Andrew, he had acquired two other farms, which he carried on alone after Andrew’s death in 1944.

  Because he was a lawyer by profession, but a farmer by upbringing and by calling, Wheeler always had farming on his mind. He went to the farms before and after his day at the office, on Saturdays, on Sunday afternoons, and he would sometimes take a day off from the office to work with the cattle or the sheep, or to break a team or two of young mules. Or he would be up long before daylight, waking his sons to help, to meet a trucker at one of the farms to load a load of spring lambs, or of hogs, or, late in the fall, the year’s crop of finished steers, for the trip to the Bourbon Stockyards in Louisville.

  And so the first, the most continuous, and the dearest fabric of Andy’s consciousness was provided by the home place, its life and work and the creatures, human and not-human, tame and not-tame, who lived there. And the home place belonged to the countryside around Port William and Port William itself, which was the native country of both his father’s and his mother’s families.

  The home place, his father’s home place, was about four miles, by road, from Port William. On one of the far corners of Port William stood the old house where his mother was born and grew up. At the houses of their Grandma and Grandpa Catlett and of their Granny and Granddaddy Feltner, Andy and his brother Henry were as freely welcome and as much at home as they were in the house of their parents down at Hargrave, the county seat. But for Andy, the Catlett home place was the focus of his consciousness and affection because, of the three places, it was the most creaturely, the quietest, undisturbed by the comings and goings of even so small a center of trade as Port William. And it was at the home place that he was most free.

  As he looks back across many years from his old age to his childhood, it seems to him that there was a time, from when he was eight or nine years old until he was fourteen, when he experienced intervals of a freedom that was almost absolute. This freedom came to him mostly in the neighborhood of the home place, mostly when he would be alone. Sometimes, when he was with his brother Henry and their friend Fred Brightleaf, they would be sufficiently free, by default of the watchfulness of their elders. They were capable then of exploits beyond the powers of a single boy. But sometimes they would get at cross-purposes, and would squander their freedom in arguments over what to do with it. Alone, Andy was free sometimes even of his own plans and intentions.

  Grandpa and Grandma Catlett were the older of Andy’s grandparents. He was freest at their place, maybe, because he got over the ground faster than they did, but also because they were not much inclined to worry about him. When he was with them he sometimes tried their patience, but he liked their company and their talk. Their memories went back almost to the Civil War, to a time long before the internal combustion engine, when the atmosphere of the Port William country would be pierced only occasionally by a steam whistle. For most of their lives the country had been powered almost entirely by the bodily strength of people and of horses and mules, and the people had been dependent for their lives mostly on the country and on their own knowledge and skills.

  Without intending to do so, Andy learned much from watching his Catlett grandparents and from listening to them. From his grandpa he gathered knowledge of land husbandry, and of the proper conformation and good management of livestock. These were things that Grandpa Catlett passionately knew, and he enforced them in his grandson’s mind by his naked contempt for anybody ignorant of them. From his grandma he became familiar with the economy of the household: the keeping and care of the old house, the uses and reuses of all the things that could be saved, and all the arts and refinements by which food made its passage from the ground to the plate.

  From the house and barns and other outbuildings clustered on the hilltop, he passed beyond the supervision of his grandparents into the open fields on the ridges, or down into the woods on the steeper land along the creeks. On these travels he would often be alone, on foot or riding Beauty the pony. Sometimes he carried a cane fishing pole and a can of worms to the pond in the back field or to the holes along the creeks, coming home on his lucky days with strings of small perch or catfish that his grandma fried in batter. He might swim in the pond, which he was not supposed to do, or spend a long time watching the tumble bugs rolling their dung balls along the cow paths. He loved the mown fields and the croplands open to the sky. Even more, he loved the woods, where it seemed to him that every life was secret, including his own. Of the secret lives of the woods and the tall grasses he did not learn much, for he lacked the patience to sit still. But the place itself he learned so well that when he went to bed at night, then and for the rest of his life, he could see it all in his mind. In thought he could follow the paths and the wagon tracks. In thought he could walk over it and see how it looked from every height of the ground.

  And there were hours and days when he hung about the men at their work, to watch, to listen, hoping to be given some bit of real work to do, sometimes proving able actually to help, but more likely than not told to watch himself or get out of the way, or he would be assigned to some drudgery that the men preferred to avoid: go to the spring or well, for instance, to bring back a fresh jug of water. But sometimes when he begged to drive a team, they would hand him the lines and then watch to see that he drove correctly and kept out of danger. And so he learned to do what he was capable of doing, and he imagined himself grown big and strong enough to cut swiftly and accurately with an ax, or to lift great forkfuls of hay onto the loading wagon, or to unload corn into the crib, the metal ringing as the mounded ears flew off the scoop.

  As the men worked they talked, and their talk was wonderful. They told jokes and stories, some of which were full of grownup knowledge. Andy especially liked the talk of Rufus Brightleaf, who had a poetical and profane answer for everything.

  One day, coming upon Rufus working alone, Andy asked, “Where’s Jess?”

  And Rufus replied without stopping or looking up, “He went to shit and the hogs eat him.”

  Or sometimes, when they had had a good day at work and he was feeling fine, Rufus would sing one of the songs of his extensive repertory. He would sing to the tune of “The Great Speckled Bird,” raising his voice over the rattle of chains and wheels, maybe, as he drove a wagon home to the barn:

  Did you ever see Sally make wor-ter?

  She could pee such a beau-ti-ful stream.

  She could pee for a rod and a quar-ter,

  And you couldn’t see her a-ass for the steam.

  And he spoke of doctors who treated certain troublesome swellings with hairy poultices that never failed, healings that to Andy seemed veiled in a mystery almost biblical.

  But rowdy as Rufus was, as he enjoyed being and was gifted to be, he was also a man perhaps of many small regrets and certainly of one great sorrow. His great sorrow was for his son whose death in a logging accident Rufus had witnessed, knowing on the instant that there was “not a thing I could do, not a thing.” He had told Andy of this, as old Andy supposes, because he needed to speak of it to somebody, because he and the boy Andy were friends, and the boy was a listener. Knowing this, Andy was aware also that there were other hard things to know that came to Rufus’s mind, causing a look to pass like a shadow over his face.

  They were artists, the Brightleaf brothers, their work in all its stages beautiful to see. Like artists of other kinds, and like a considerable number of their neighbors in that country at that time, they held before themselves an ideal of perfection that every year they approached and every year inevitably failed and yet attempted again the next year, year after year.

  They were of the kind known as “tobacco men,” a titl
e not bestowed upon every grower of tobacco, but only upon the most select, the best. In those days, just after the war when cigarettes had been standard equipment for the men fighting overseas, long before the proof of the unhealthfulness of tobacco, and tobacco’s consequent decline in public favor and in quality, the premium at sale time was absolutely upon excellence.

  The crop itself was in every way exceptional. It was intricately and endlessly demanding in the ways it was cultivated, handled, and prepared for market. In the time before tractors and chemicals, the tobacco crop was made by the work of mules and men and, when needed, women, the man-hours far exceeding the mule-hours. All crops then, of course, were dependent on such work, but tobacco was unique in the intensity, skill, and length of the work it required. Its production then, as Andy Catlett now thinks, looking back, involved higher standards and a greater passion for excellence than any other practice of agriculture, excepting only that of the better livestock breeders.

  For the Burley tobacco of these parts, the crop year lasted from early spring, when the plant beds were burnt and sowed, until late winter, when at last the crop of the summer before would have been stripped, tied into “hands” according to grade, compacted in presses, loaded, hauled to market, and sold. The requirement for informed attention, care, judgment, and work was unremitting. Some of the work would be more or less solitary. But especially at the times of transplanting, harvesting, and stripping, crew work was necessary, and the crew was supplied by family members and hired help, both men and women, and by exchanges of work with neighbors. At these times the difficulty of the work was relieved, in some measure even compensated, by the sort of talk that people do for pleasure, the telling of jokes and stories, and by dinners at noon that were daily banquets, the food bountiful in variety and quantity, capably prepared, and joyfully eaten. Many a wife from then received and deserved the highest praise: “As good a cook as ever I ate after.”

  Jess and Rufus Brightleaf, and Jess preeminently, had a high reputation throughout that part of the country. They put their characterizing marks upon their crops at every stage. Their finished work on the warehouse floor would be recognized on sight by any bystanders who knew what to look for.

  Often when Andy would be riding with his father through the fields, Wheeler would stop the car at some point of vantage to watch Jess Brightleaf at work in a tobacco patch, for Jess was a man worth watching. At his work he moved carefully, thoughtfully, with authority, and yet swiftly and gracefully, surrounded by his own work well done.

  And always, a moment or two before putting the car into motion again, Wheeler would say quietly, “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Andy would say. For it was in fact beautiful, and unforgettably so.

  That was a good time for farmers. During the war and for several years after, farmers received prices that were something like just. And this, in expectation, brightened the mood of the work.

  From their first year as tenants on the home place in 1939 until their last in 1948, Jess Brightleaf and his wife, by their work and their thrift, saved ten thousand dollars with which they bought a farm of their own.

  II. IN THE OLD TIME

  In his latter years Andy Catlett has tried to use appropriate hesitation and care in speaking, in any way particularly personal, of the diminishment of the world. He dislikes hearing old men, including himself, begin sentences with such phrases as “In my day” or “When I was a boy.” But when he thinks of the freedom he enjoyed during the five or six years of his boyhood that were most active and carefree, he recognizes that he is setting up a standard of sorts by the measure of which the world must be seen to have diminished. It has diminished by the standard of a boy’s freedom, but that freedom has diminished necessarily in association with other diminishments, both social and material.

  His freedom then had little to do with home or school, but everything to do with a home landscape which was, as he can see now, an inhabited and a human landscape. On the farm of either set of his grandparents, he could walk within a quarter or half an hour from some spot in the woods where he imagined that no human had ever stood before to places where he knew he walked in the tracks of elders and companions, some of whom had died in his own time.

  He could walk as quickly, moreover, from solitude that had lasted as long as needed into the company of men and women at work, who were doing work that they did well and even liked, that they expected to continue to do for the rest of their lives, in a place or a part of the country that they did not expect to leave. They were leading lives that were capable and settled. This was mainly true even of Jess Brightleaf’s hired hand, Corky Dole, whom Jess paid off every Saturday night and bailed out of jail every Monday morning. They knew their work. They did not dither. It was a settled culture, and there was a certain freedom for a child in that alone.

  It was hardly a perfect place or time. Like any of the past, it was not a time that a person of good sense would consider “going back to.” But that time, to the end of the war and a while after in that part of the world, had certain qualities, certain goodnesses, that might have been cherished and enlarged, but instead were disvalued and discarded as of no worth.

  Its chief quality can be suggested by the absence from it of a vocabulary that in the last half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first would become dominant in the minds of nearly everybody. Nobody then and there was speaking of “alternatives” or “alternative lifestyles,” of “technology” or “technological progress,” of “mobility” or “upward mobility.” The life that Andy knew then in Port William and its neighborhood was not much given to apologizing for itself. People did not call themselves, even to themselves, “just a farmer” or “just a housewife.” It required talk of an infinitude of choices endlessly available to everybody, essentially sales talk, to embitter the work of husbandry and wifery, to suggest the possibility always elsewhere of something better, and to make people long to give up whatever they had for the promise of something they might have—at whatever cost, at whatever loss. You might of course have heard somebody wonder toward the end of a long, hard, hot day of work, “You reckon you’ll ever get anywhere without changing jobs?” But that was weariness and wit such as might come from anybody at any work in the midst of the hardest of it. You might have heard the same self-critical humor from somebody who had danced or coon-hunted half the night before a hard workday. Andy has no record of this time except his memory, but he does not remember that anybody who spoke so of “changing jobs” ever spoke of the job he wanted to change to.

  Rather than alternative jobs or lives, the ordinary talk in barns or at row ends ran to the best remembered or imagined versions of things that were familiar: harvest dinners, capable mules or horses or hounds or bird dogs, days or nights of hunting or fishing, good crop years and crops, good days and good hands. Or they told jokes or stories in which there was an implicit recognition and acceptance of the human lot.

  Such settled and decided people are parts of the world, as the unresting, never-satisfied seekers of something better can never be. The boy who wandered away alone into a new world newly discovered by himself could return to a familiar world communally known by people he knew who were at work or at rest in it. And in both worlds he was free. He was free not only to ramble at will and at large when he was beyond family supervision or had not been put to work, but he was free also in the company of Dick Watson, the Brightleafs, and any other grownups, who treated him as a child only when he was in the way, in danger, or in need of correction. Otherwise, they made no exceptions. They spoke to him as they spoke to one another, as a familiar.

  Home to him, then, was a home countryside, one place with the limits of one place but limitlessly self-revealing and interesting, limitlessly to be known and loved. It was precisely in that limitlessness that he was free, a limitlessness inherent in the nature, the “genius,” of the one place, free then of the litter of alternatives.

  This was a freedom undoubt
edly more apparent and available to a boy than to a man. But Andy would remember it. It would be the enabling condition and the incentive of his choice finally to leave off his wanderings and come home, to make his own life indistinguishable from the life of his place. And this was his choice, by the terms and standards of his time, to become “odd,” as one of his most reticent old friends told him at last that he had chosen to be.

  But the young Andy Catlett was free in another way that he did not know when he was young, that he has learned in all the time he has spent in growing old. In those years he thinks of now as the years of his freedom he was free of a fear that has since grown greater in every year he has lived. He was free of the fear of the human destruction of the world, a freedom that no child will again enjoy for generations to come, if ever again.

  If Andy’s regret for the loss of the old creaturely world of Port William in his childhood were only nostalgic or sentimental, then it would be merely a private feeling, properly to be ended by his death. His regret is considerable and worth talking about because it is applied to real losses, tangible and significant, some of which are measurable: the loss of the economic integrity and neighborly collaboration of rural communities, the loss of independent livelihoods, the loss of topsoil, the toxicity of air and water, the destruction by mining of whole mountains, the destruction of land and water ecosystems—so much destruction in the interests of machines, chemicals, and fuels to replace the people who have been displaced, by the same interests, from the home places of the world.