He walked, as before, the left side of the road, not meaning to ask for rides. But as on the afternoon before, there was little traffic. He had met two cars going down toward Hargrave and had been passed by only one coming up.
Where the road began to rise toward Port William up on the ridge, a lesser road branched off to the left and ran along the floor of the valley. As Art reached this intersection, he heard a truck engine backfiring, coming down the hill, and then the truck came into sight and he recognized it. It was an old green International driven, as he expected and soon saw, by an old man wearing a trucker’s cap and smoking a pipe. The truck was loaded with fat hogs, heading for the packing plant at Jefferson. As he went by, the old man waved to Art and Art waved back.
“Sam Hanks,” he thought. “I have been gone over three years and have traveled a many a thousand miles over land and ocean, and in all that time and all them miles the first man I have seen that I have always known is Sam Hanks.”
He tried to think what person he had seen last when he was leaving, but he could not remember. He took the lesser road and, after perhaps half a mile, turned into a road still narrower, only a pair of graveled wheel tracks. A little later, when the trees were fully leaved, this would be almost a burrow, tunneling along between the creek and the hillside under the overarching trees, but now the leaves were small and the sun cast the shadows of the branches in a close network onto the gravel.
Soon he was walking below the high-water line. He could see it clearly marked on the slope to his right: a line above which the fallen leaves of the year before were still bright and below which they were darkened by their long steeping in the flood. The slope under the trees was strewn with drift, and here and there a drift log was lodged in the branches high above his head. In the shadow of the flood the spring was late, the buds of the trees just opening, the white flowers of twinleaf and bloodroot just beginning to bloom. It was almost as if he were walking under water, so abrupt and vivid was the difference above and below the line that marked the crest of the flood. But somewhere high in the sunlit branches a redbird sang over and over in a clear, pealing voice, “Even so, even so.”
And there was nothing around him that Art did not know. He knew the place in all the successions of the year: from the little blooms that came in the earliest spring to the fallen red leaves of October, from the songs of the nesting birds to the anxious wintering of the little things that left their tracks in snow, from the first furrow to the last load of the harvest.
Where the creek turned away from the road the valley suddenly widened and opened. The road still held up on the hillside among the trees, permitting him to see, through the intervening branches, the broad field that lay across the bottom. He could see that plowing had been started; a long straight-sided strip had been back-furrowed out across the field, from the foot of the slope below the road to the trees that lined the creek bank. And then he saw, going away from him, almost out to the end of the strip, two mule teams with two plowmen walking in furrows behind them. The plowmen’s heads were bent to their work, their hands riding easy on the handles of the plows. Some distance behind the second plowman was a little boy, also walking in the furrow and carrying a tin can; from time to time he bent and picked something up from the freshly turned earth and dropped it into the can. Walking behind the boy was a large hound. The first plowman was Art’s father, the second his brother Mart. The boy was Art’s sister’s son, Roy Lee, who had been two years old when Art left and was now five. The hound was probably Old Bawler who made it a part of his business to be always at work. Roy Lee was collecting fishing worms, and Art looked at the creek and saw, in an open place at the top of the bank, three willow poles stuck into the ground, their lines in the water.
The first of the teams reached the end of the plowland, and Art heard his father’s voice clear and quiet: “Gee, boys.” And then Mart’s team finished their furrow, and Mart said, “Gee, Sally.” They went around the headland and started back.
Art stood as if still in his absence, as if looking out of his absence at them, who did not know he was there, and he had to shake his head. He had to shake his head twice to persuade himself that he did not hear, from somewhere off in the distance, the heavy footsteps of artillery rounds striding toward them.
He pressed down the barbed wire at the side of the road, straddled over it, and went down through the trees, stopping at the foot of the slope. They came toward him along the edge of the plowland, cutting it two furrows wider. Soon he could hear the soft footfalls of the mules, the trace ends jingling, the creaking of the doubletrees. Present to himself, still absent to them, he watched them come.
At the end of the furrow his father called, “Gee!” and leaned his plow over so that it could ride around the headland on the share and right handle. And then he saw Art. “Well now!” he said, as if only to himself. “Whoa!” he said to the mules. And again: “Well now!” He came over to Art and put out his hand and Art gave him his.
Art saw that there were tears in his father’s eyes, and he grinned and said, “ Howdy.”
Early Rowanberry stepped back and looked at his son and said again, “Well now!”
Mart came around onto the headland then and stopped his team. He and Art shook hands, grinning at each other.
“You reckon your foot’ll still fit in a furrow?”
Art nodded. “I reckon it still will.”
“Well, here’s somebody you don’t hardly know,” Mart said, gesturing toward Roy Lee, “and who don’t know you at all, I’ll bet. Do you know who this fellow is, Roy Lee?”
Roy Lee probably did not know, though he knew he had an uncle who was a soldier. He knew about soldiers—he knew they fought in a war far away—and here was a great, tall, fine soldier in a soldier suit with shining buttons, and the shoes on his feet were shining. Roy Lee felt something akin to awe and something akin to love and something akin to fear. He could not have been more cleanly removed from ordinary life if tongs had reached down from the sky and lifted him into another world. He shook his head and looked down at his bare right foot.
Mart laughed. “This here’s your Uncle Art. You know about Uncle Art.” To Art he said, “He’s talked enough about you. He’s been looking out the road to see if you was coming.”
Art looked up the creek and across it at the house and outbuildings and barn. He looked at the half-plowed field on the valley floor with the wooded hillsides around it and the blinding blue sky over it. He looked again and again at his father and his young nephew and his brother. They stood up in their lives around him now in such a way that he could not imagine their deaths.
Early Rowanberry looked at his son, now and then reaching out to grasp his shoulder or his arm, as if to feel through the cloth of the uniform the flesh and bone of the man inside. “Well now!” he said again, and again, “Well now!”
Art reached down and picked up a handful of earth from the furrow nearest him. “You’re plowing it just a little wet, ain’t you?”
“Well, we’ve had a wet time,” Mart said. “We felt like we had to go ahead. Maybe we’ll get another hard frost. We could yet.”
Art said, “Well, I reckon we might.”
And then he heard his father’s voice riding up in his throat as he had never heard it, and he saw that his father had turned to the boy and was speaking to him:
“Honey, run yonder to the house. Tell your granny to set on another plate. For we have our own that was gone and has come again.”
IV
Fidelity
Lyda had not slept, and she knew that Danny had not either. It was close to midnight. They had turned out the light two hours earlier, and since then they had lain side by side, not moving, not touching, disturbed beyond the power to think by the thought of the old man who was lying slack and still in the mechanical room, in the merciless light, with a tube in his nose and a tube needled into his arm and a tube draining his bladder into a plastic bag that hung beneath the
bed. The old man had not answered to his name, “Uncle Burley.” He did not, in fact, appear to belong to his name at all, for his eyes were shut, he breathed with the help of a machine, and an unearthly pallor shone on his forehead and temples. His hands did not move. From time to time, unable to look any longer at him or at the strange, resistant objects around him in the room, they looked at each other, and their eyes met in confusion, as if they had come to the wrong place.
They had gone after supper to the hospital in Louisville to enact again the strange rite of offering themselves where they could not be received. They were brought back as if by mere habit into the presence of a life that had once included them and now did not, for it was a life that, so far as they could see, no longer included even itself. And so they stood around the image on the bed and waited for whatever completion would let them go.
There were four of them: Nathan Coulter, Burley’s nephew, who might as well have been his son; Danny Branch, his son in fact, who had until recent years passed more or less as his nephew and who called him “ Uncle Burley” like the others; and there were Nathan’s wife, Hannah, and Lyda, Danny’s wife, who might as well have been his daughters.
After a while, Hannah rested her purse on the bed, and opened it, and took out a handkerchief with which she touched the corners of her eyes. She put the handkerchief back into her purse and slowly shut the clasp, watching her hands with care as if she were sewing. And then she looked up at Nathan with a look that acknowledged everything, and Nathan turned and went out, and the others followed.
All through the latter part of the summer Burley had been, as he said himself, “as no-account as a cut cat.” But he had stayed with them, helping as he could, through the tobacco harvest, and they were glad to have him with them, to listen to his stories, and to work around him when he got in their way. He had begun to lose the use of himself, his body only falteringly answerable to his will. He blamed it on arthritis. “There’s a whole family of them Ritis boys,” he would say, “and that Arthur’s the meanest one of the bunch.” But the problem was not arthritis. Burley was only saying what he knew that other old men had said before him; he was too inexperienced in illness himself to guess what might be wrong with him.
They had a fence to build before corn gathering, and they kept him with them at that. “We’ll need you to line the posts,” they told him. But by then they could not keep him awake. They would find him asleep wherever they left him, in his chair at home, or in the cab of a pickup, or hunched in his old hunting coat against an end post or the trunk of a tree. One day, laying a hand on Burley’s shoulder to wake him, Danny felt what his eyes had already told him but what he had forborne to know with his hand: that where muscle had once piled and rounded under the cloth, there was now little more than hide and bone.
“We’ve got to do something for him,” Danny said then, partly because Lyda had been saying it insistently to him.
Nathan stared straight at him as only Nathan could do. “What?”
“Take him to the doctor, I reckon. He’s going to die.”
“Damn right. He’s eighty-two years old, and he’s sick.”
They were getting ready to go in to dinner, facing each other across the bed of Danny’s pickup where they had come to put their tools. Burley, who had not responded to the gentle shake that Danny had given him, was still asleep in the cab.
Nathan lifted over the side of the truck a bucket containing staples and pliers and a hammer, and then, as he would not ordinarily have done, he pitched in his axe.
“He’s never been to a doctor since I’ve known him. He said he wouldn’t go. You going to knock him in the head before you take him?”
“We’ll just take him.”
Nathan stood a moment with his head down. When he looked up again, he said, “Well.”
So they took him. They took him because they wanted to do more for him than they could do, and they could think of nothing else. Nathan held out the longest, and he gave in only because he was uncertain.
“Are you—are we—just going to let him die like an old animal?” Hannah asked.
And Nathan, resistant and grouchy in his discomfort, said, “An old animal is maybe what he wants to die like.”
“But don’t we need to help him?”
“Yes. And we don’t know what to do, and we’re not going to know until after we’ve done it. Whatever it is. What better can we wish him than to die in his sleep out at work with us or under a tree somewhere?”
“Oh,” Hannah said, “if only he already had!”
Nathan and Danny took him to the doctor in Nathan’s pickup, Nathan’s being more presentable and dependable than Danny’s, which anyhow had their fencing tools in it. The doctor pronounced Burley “a very sick man”; he wanted him admitted to the hospital. And so, the doctor having called ahead, with Burley asleep between them Danny and Nathan took him on to Louisville, submitted to the long interrogation required for admission, saw him undressed and gowned and put to bed by a jolly nurse, and left him. As they were going out, he said, “Boys, why don’t you all wait for me yonder by the gate. I’ve got just this one last round to make, and then we’ll all go in together.” They did not know from what field or what year he was talking.
Burley was too weak for surgery, the doctor told them the next day. It would be necessary to build up his strength. In the meantime tests would be performed. Danny and Lyda, Nathan and Hannah stood with the doctor in the corridor outside Burley’s room. The doctor held his glasses in one hand and a clipboard in the other. “We hope to have him on his feet again very soon,” he said.
And that day, when he was awake, Burley was plainly disoriented and talking out of his head—“saying some things,” as Nathan later told Wheeler Catlett, “that he never thought of before and some that nobody ever thought of before.” He was no longer in his right mind, they thought, because he was no longer in his right place. When they could bring him home again, he would be himself.
Those who loved him came to see him: Hannah and Nathan, Lyda and Danny, Jack Penn, Andy and Flora Catlett, Arthur and Martin Rowanberry, Wheeler and his other son and law partner, Henry, and their wives. They sat or stood around Burley’s bed, reconstructing their membership around him in that place that hummed, in the lapses of their talk, with the sounds of many engines. Burley knew them all, was pleased to have them there with him, and appeared to understand where he was and what was happening. But in the course of his talk with them, he spoke also to their dead, whom he seemed to see standing with them. Or he would raise his hand and ask them to listen to the hounds that had been running day and night in the bottom on the other side of the river. Once he said, “It’s right outlandish what we’ve got started in this country, big political vats and tubs on every roost.”
And then, in the midst of the building of strength and the testing, Burley slipped away toward death. But the people of the hospital did not call it dying; they called it a coma. They spoke of curing him. They spoke of his recovery.
A coma, the doctor explained, was certainly not beyond expectation. It was not hopeless, he said. They must wait and see.
And they said little in reply, for what he knew was not what they knew, and his hope was not theirs.
“Well, then,” Nathan said to the doctor, “we’ll wait and see.”
Burley remained attached to the devices of breathing and feeding and voiding, and he did not wake up. The doctor stood before them again, explaining confidently and with many large words, that Mr. Coulter soon would be well, that there were yet other measures that could be taken, that they should not give up hope, that there were places well-equipped to care for patients in Mr. Coulter’s condition, that they should not worry. And then he said that if he and his colleagues could not help Mr. Coulter, they could at least make him comfortable. He spoke fluently from within the bright orderly enclosure of his explanation, like a man in a glass booth. And Nathan and Hannah, Danny and Lyda stood looking in at him
from the larger, looser, darker order of their merely human love.
When they returned on yet another visit and found the old body still as it had been, a mere passive addition to the complicated machines that kept it minimally alive, they saw finally that in their attempt to help they had not helped but only complicated his disease beyond their power to help. And they thought with regret of the time when the thing that was wrong with him had been simply unknown, and there had been only it and him and him and them in the place they had known together. Loving him, wanting to help him, they had given him over to “the best of modern medical care”—which meant, as they now saw, that they had abandoned him.
If Lyda was wakeful, then, it was because she, like the others, was shaken by the remorse of a kind of treason.
Lyda must have dozed finally, because she did not hear Danny get up. When she opened her eyes, the light was on, and he was standing at the foot of the bed, buttoning his shirt. The clock on the dresser said a quarter after twelve.
“What are you doing?”
“Go back to sleep, Lyda. I’m going to get him.”
She did not ask who. She said “Good,” which made him look at her, but he did not say more.
And she did not ask. He suited her, and moreover she was used to him. He was the kind, and it was not a strange kind to her, who might leave the bed in the middle of the night if he heard his hounds treed somewhere and not come back for hours. Like Burley, Danny belonged half to the woods. Lyda knew this and it did not disturb her, for he also belonged to her, in the woods as at home.
He finished dressing, turned the light off, and went out. She heard him in Burley’s room and then in the kitchen. She heard the scrape of the latch pin at the smokehouse door. He was being quiet; she would not have heard him if she had not listened carefully. But then the hounds complained aloud when he shut them in a stall in the barn.
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