“We ought to have a tree,” Henry said.
“A Christmas tree?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“They’re very expensive. Do you think you can afford it?”
“Certainly I can afford it. I’m not so poor that I can’t buy a tree if I please.”
“Well, it would be nice to have a tree, but I don’t think you ought to buy one.”
“Nonsense. Go out and buy one tomorrow. You’ll have to get some lights and ornaments for it too.”
She closed her book, which was the third one of several that she had decided to read in a program of self-improvement in several areas. Rolling over and sitting up on the sofa, she glared at his back with a kind of sulky resentment.
“I was going to buy one Saturday as a surprise,” she said, “but I see that you’re bound to spoil it.”
“Why wait until Saturday?”
“Because I’m being paid Saturday, that’s why. I was going to buy the tree as a surprise with my own money.”
“What the devil do you mean? Are you actually working somewhere?”
“That follows, doesn’t it? If I’m being paid, I must be working. Sometimes I think you like to be purposely obtuse.”
“Never mind abusing me. I’m not in the mood for it. Where are you working, if you don’t mind saying?”
“I’m working downstairs in the bookshop.”
“For old Adolph Brennan?”
“Yes. I went down to talk with him and to explain our arrangement, that I’m staying with you for a while, because I thought he had a right to know, being the landlord and all, and after talking with him and explaining the arrangement, I asked him if he needed any help during the Christmas rush, and he said it happened that he did, though I can’t say I’ve noticed any particular rush. I guess there aren’t many people who give secondhand books as Christmas presents. Anyhow, what I intended, really, was to work for nothing in return for being allowed to stay here, but he insisted on paying me a little besides. He’s a very sweet old man.”
“You say you explained our arrangement?”
“Yes. I wanted it clearly understood, and I thought it was only fair.”
“Exactly how clear do you suppose his understanding is? It seems to me that the reasonable implications of the arrangement would seem to be very different from the truth.”
“Well, it’s not my fault if he jumps to wrong conclusions. The important thing is, he was kind and considerate and felt that it was our business entirely, just as the Greek did.”
“I’ll say one thing for you. You’re certainly building up quite a reputation for me in the neighborhood.”
“You shouldn’t be so egotistical. You imagine that everyone is paying attention to what you do, but it’s very doubtful, in my opinion, that anyone cares in the least. Besides, writers are supposed to be rather immoral. It’s expected of them.”
“Is that so? It’s interesting to know that you’ve suddenly become an authority on writers.”
“Are you beginning to feel quarrelsome? You sound like it. I only wanted to surprise you with a Christmas tree that I paid for with my own money, and now you’re behaving as if I’d done something wrong. I think it’s very small of you, if you want to know the truth. It’s rather depressing, you know, when everything you do turns out to be wrong.”
“I didn’t mean that at all, and you know it. I wouldn’t think of depriving you of the right to buy a Christmas tree with your own money. I suppose it’s only fair that you should contribute something now and then. We’ll decorate the tree together Saturday night.”
“I’d like that. Really I would. It’s been a long time since I’ve helped to decorate a Christmas tree. Perhaps it hasn’t been so long, actually, but it seems like a long time, so much has happened since, and so it comes to the same thing.”
“You’re right there. Something may seem a long time ago when it really hasn’t been so long at all. It’s a kind of perspective. When I was a boy, we had an evergreen tree in the front yard. Every year, a week before Christmas exactly, we strung colored bulbs in the tree and lit them every night until Christmas was past. It wasn’t too many years ago, but it seems forever.”
“Were you actually a boy once?”
“Of course I was a boy. Do you think I was born a man?”
“It’s crazy, I know, but it seems to me that you must surely have been born the instant we met. You must have been born in one instant and have walked instantly afterward into the Greek’s for a cup of coffee…”
* * * *
He had often had, as a matter of fact, the same queer notion about himself. Not that he had, specifically, been born full-grown outside the Greek’s on the night of reference, but that he had been born suddenly in various places at various times, and that everything he remembered before that time and place, whenever and wherever it was in a particular instance, was somehow something that had happened to someone else. Now, standing at the window and watching the soldier’s bell rise and fall in largo tempo, he began to think of the past, the way from another time to this time, and it seemed to him, as it always did when he tried to review the pattern of his life, that the pattern had color and richness and variety and sense in two places at two times, and these places and times were signified by three people he had loved, of whom one was dead and the other two, so far as he was now concerned, might as well have been.
There was, in the first time and the first place, his Uncle Andy Harper. There was also an Aunt Edna, Uncle Andy’s wife, but she was never in Henry’s mind more than a kind of shadow of Uncle Andy, existing only because he did and having in recollection only the substance she borrowed from him.
Uncle Andy was a tall man, lean and tough as a wolf, with a long nose projecting downward from between a pair of the softest, most dream-obsessed eyes it was possible to imagine, and many folk thought that his eyes were his most remarkable feature, but these were the folk who had never become familiar with the touch of his hands. His hands were very large, with long thick fingers, padded on the palm side with the thick callus of hard work, and you would naturally have thought, looking at them, that their touch would be heavy, inadvertently brutal, but this was not so. The touch of the hands was as light and as gentle as the most delicate touch of the white hands of a fine lady, and it had the effect of a minor miracle, an impossible effect of its observable cause.
Henry first became aware of the light, miraculous touch of the heavy hands at the age of five when he was ill of influenza, and this was less than a year after the deaths of his father and mother in an accident on a highway six hundred miles away, when he had come to live with Uncle Andy and Aunt Edna on their farm about a hundred miles southwest of Kansas City, Missouri. He had wakened from a feverish sleep with the feeling that his fever was being drawn from his forehead by the soft magic of cool fingers, and he had thought at first that it was his mother who was sitting beside his bed, but it had turned out to be Uncle Andy. From that moment he had understood his uncle’s vast depth of gentleness, and he had always afterward loved his uncle completely and quietly, with unspoken devotion, which was the only kind of love Uncle Andy wanted or would accept.
Uncle Andy was a puzzle to his neighbors and the despair of his wife, and this was because he declared himself to be an agnostic and maintained his position against all persuasion and prophecies of divine retribution. Enlightenment had its limitations in the area in which they lived, in the time they lived there, and it was not understood how a man could be so good, as measured by his faithfulness to his wife and his attention to his proper affairs, and at once so contaminated by the devil, as measured by his adherence to the devil’s gospel. The truth of the matter was, Uncle Andy’s formal education had ended at the eighth grade, but he had continued to read widely in a random sort of way, taking what he could find anywhere he could fi
nd it, and after an early experience with Colonel Bob Ingersoll, he had come, in the twenties, under the influence of Clarence Darrow and H. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis, and the greatest of these, because of a communication of gentle pessimism, was Darrow. One of the rare times Uncle Andy had become very angry, which was long before Henry’s time, was when a Baptist minister from Fort Scott had tried to argue that William Jennings Bryan, who had just died of gluttony, had been specifically spared by God just long enough to confound the greatest agnostic of his day at the famous Scopes trial in Tennessee. Uncle Andy had pointed out that God had used damned poor judgment in his choice of counsel, since Darrow had made a bigger monkey of Bryan than Scopes had tried to make of man’s ancestor.
The years on the farm were good years for Henry, although they later became, in the recollection of them after he had gone away, obscured and unreal with incredible rapidity by events that came between him and them. One of the things Henry learned, which was knowledge that filled him with adolescent sadness, was that Uncle Andy, in spite of being a successful farmer with no problems at the bank, considered himself a failure. He was not a failure, of course, but he considered himself one because he had been unable to do what he wanted most to do, which was to set down on paper some of the things he had seen and thought and felt and done, and he would not even allow himself the consolation of thinking that he might have been able to do so if only he had a better chance.
“The test of a Milton is that he act like a Milton,” he said to Henry one summer night on the screened-in back porch off the kitchen. “I read that somewhere. I think it was Mencken wrote it. Anyhow, it’s true. If I had it in me to do what I want to do, I’d do it, but I haven’t got it. It’s a great sadness, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”
So it was from Uncle Andy that Henry acquired his curiosity and his reading habits and, later, his need and hunger to express himself. He read voraciously, as Uncle Andy had, and for years without discrimination. Dickens and Charles Alden Seltzer were equally acceptable to him, and if he recognized the superiority of the one, it did not prevent him from enjoying the other, and when he eventually encountered the massive, indiscriminate hunger and thirst and bellowing of Thomas Wolfe, it was like a revelation of divine despair. By that time, he was wanting to write stories himself, and he began to try. It was much more difficult than he had imagined, and it seemed to him unbelievable that it could require so much time and effort to fill a single page of lined paper with words that had never before been set down in the sense and order he gave to them.
In spite of his wide reading and his hunger, which was more emotional than mental, he was no better than a mediocre student at the high school in town. This was not because of inability, but rather because of a stubborn resistance to any kind of direction that was contrary to his natural interests. He read, but he read mostly the things he wanted to read, conceding only enough attention to assignments to get him by without disgrace and without distinction. Literature he loved, and history he accepted, but mathematics and science were barely tolerated. Finally, in due time, he graduated and received his diploma, and in the summer following his graduation Uncle Andy died, and was gone from the earth, and the earth was changed.
The morning of the day of that summer, Henry was up early, and the hours ahead of him seemed bright and clear and filled with the certainty of quiet and rich experience. After breakfast, he was standing behind the bam, looking off beyond the fields and pasture to the stand of timber along the creek, when Uncle Andy drove around the barn on the tractor.
“Where you going, Uncle Andy?” Henry said.
“Down to the far field at the southwest corner of the property,” Uncle Andy said. “It’s been lying there fallow since plowing, and I intend to disc it.”
“Where’s the disc?”
“It’s already down there. I’ve only got to drive the tractor down and hook on. You like to come along?”
“Well, not unless you really need me.”
“I don’t need you, but you’re welcome to come along for the ride. You got a loafing day planned out?”
“I didn’t plan to do much. I thought I’d go down to the creek.”
“You want to take the car and go into town?”
“No. Just down to the creek.”
“You go ahead and do what you like. I’ll be back around noon for dinner.”
“Okay, Uncle Andy. See you later.”
This was almost exactly what was said, and the reason Henry remembered it so clearly, the small talk that didn’t amount to anything, was because it was the last conversation he and Uncle Andy ever had, and it came back to him word for word afterward with all the importance and enormous significance of being the last of something there would ever be. For quite a while he felt guilty, as if he had somehow deserted Uncle Andy just when he was needed most, but he knew, really, that it probably wouldn’t have made any difference if he had gone, because he almost certainly wouldn’t have been in any position to prevent what happened, it surely happened so fast. Anyhow, that was later, and this summer Saturday morning he went on down across the fields and pasture to the creek, and he spent the morning down there, lying under the trees and watching the dark water and thinking about what he would do with the rest of his life and wondering if he could ever become a writer, as he wished, or if he would finally have to do something else instead.
He got back to the house a little before noon, and Uncle Andy wasn’t there, and he still wasn’t there by one o’clock. He and Aunt Edna had planned to go into town for the afternoon, and Aunt Edna was frantic with worry, because Uncle Andy wasn’t the kind of man to forget a plan or to go deliberately back on one. Finally, to satisfy Aunt Edna, Henry went all the way across the farm to the southwest corner, the fallow field, and he found the tractor stalled against a post at one end of the field, and Uncle Andy lying back in the field on the plowed earth. The disc had gone over him, and the only thing that later helped a little in the memory of it was the assurance of the doctor that Uncle Andy had clearly suffered a heart attack, which had caused him to fall off the seat of the tractor, and that it was probable he hadn’t ever felt what happened to him.
After Uncle Andy was buried and gone for good, except the little of him that could be remembered, Aunt Edna asked Henry if he was interested in working the farm for a livelihood, and he said he wasn’t, so Aunt Edna let it on shares to a good man with a wife and two sons. She moved into a cottage in town, and Henry went up to the state university on a shoestring in September, and it was there and then that he met the other two of the three people he had loved most. One was a boy, and the other was a girl, and he met the girl through the boy, whom he met first.
Going to the university on a shoestring the way he was, there wasn’t any question of social fraternities, anything that cost extra money, and he found a room in a widow’s house that was down the hill a few blocks from the campus. There were four rooms for men students on the second floor of the house, a community bath at the end of the hall, and Henry’s room was the smallest of the four, overlooking the shingled roof of the front porch. One night of the first week of his residence, he was lying on the bed in the room with his text on World Civilization spread open under his eyes, but he wasn’t having much luck in reading his assignment because he was feeing pretty low and wondering if, after all, he shouldn’t have chosen to work the farm. The door to the hall was open, and after a while someone stopped in the doorway and leaned against the jamb. Looking up, Henry saw a thin young man with a dark, ugly face under a thatch of unruly, brown hair.
“You Harper?” the young man said.
He asked the question as if there were no more than the slightest chance for an affirmative answer. At the same time he gave the impression of caring very little if the answer was affirmative or not.
“That’s right,” Henry said.
“Mine’s Brewster. H
owie Brewster. I live down the hall.”
Howie Brewster came on into the room, and Henry got off the bed and shook hands. The hand that gripped his was surprisingly strong in spite of a suggestion of limpness in the way it was offered. Immediately afterward, without an invitation, Howie Brewster sat down on the bed and took a half-pint of whiskey out of the inside pocket of his coat.
“Have a drink,” he said.
Henry shook his head. “No, thanks.”
“What’s the matter? You one of old Bunsen’s goddamn heroes?”
“I don’t even know who old Bunsen is, and I’m no hero.”
“Honest to God? You don’t know who Bunsen is?”
“I said I don’t. Who is he?”
“Football coach. I thought you might be one of his hired hands. You look like it, if you don’t mind my saying so. You’re big enough. You got good shoulders. I should have known you weren’t, though. If you were, you wouldn’t be living in Mrs. Murphy’s goddamn Poor House. They take better care of the heroes. How come you are living here, by the way? Can’t you afford anything better?”
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