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 or Jake 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 min
d; 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 concussively 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 fame 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.
He was on my mind forever too, as I now see. But I was a child; for me, every day was new. I lived beyond my loss even as I suffered it, and without any particular sympathy for myself. And what I have grown into is not sympathy for myself as I was but sympathy for Grandma and Grandpa as they were. I see how time had brought them, once, their years of strength and hope, energy to look forward and build and dream, as we must; and I see how Uncle Andrew took all they had vested in him, their precious one life and time given over in helpless love and hope into the one life and time that he possessed, and how he carried it away on the high flood of his recklessness, his willingness to do whatever he thought of.
I see now what perhaps I have known for a long time that I would see, if I looked: He was a child who wanted only to be free, as I myself had been free back at the pond that afternoon of his death. He was a big, supremely willful child whom Grandma and Grandpa and Aunt Judith could not confine, and who could be balked by no requirement or demand. And yet, hating confinement, he had been confined—in a hapless marriage, in bad jobs, sometimes in self-reproach, and finally in a grave with which he had made no terms. He had been confined because he had confined himself, as only he could have done, because he was the way he was and would not change, or could not. It was knowledge of his confinement, I think, that so surrounded us with pain and made us grieve so long.
When bedtime came, I would go up the stairs first and get into my bed in the little back hall, leaving the door open to the room where Grandma slept. I would hear her stirring in the rooms below, setting things to rights, making sure she had forgotten nothing. Assuming perhaps that I was asleep, she would have begun to talk aloud to herself. “Mm-hmh!” she would say as she shut a door or lowered a sash, “Mm-hmh !” as she turned off the lights.
And then I would hear her coming slowly up the stairs, the banister creaking under her hand as though now, alone with her thoughts, she bore the whole accumulated weight of time and loss. As she came up, she would be saying to herself always the same thing: “Oh, my poor boy! Oh, my poor, poor boy!”
I would hear her muttering still as she went about her room, preparing for bed: “May God have mercy on my poor boy!”
And then it would be dark. And then it would be morning.
Chapter 10
THE TIME had to come, of course, when what I knew no longer satisfied me. I had been told almost nothing about the circumstances of U
ncle Andrew’s murder, I had asked nothing, and yet I wanted to know. That death had remained in the forefront of my mind, as I knew it had in my grandmother’s and my father’s and Aunt Judith’s. I knew too that for other people it had receded and diminished as it had mingled with other concerns. I could not have asked those whom my questions would have pained the most. With others, the subject did not come up. I did not want my curiosity about it to be known.
But finally when I was maybe in my last year of high school, I became conscious that there were such things as court records. The county court clerk at that time was Charlie Hardy, as dear a friend, I suppose, as my father had; they bird-hunted together. I made up my mind to ask Mr. Hardy to show me the records of Carp Harmon’s trial, expecting to see transcripts of the lawyers’ arguments and the testimony of witnesses; I imagined that there would be a great pile of papers that I could sit down somewhere and read, and at last know everything I wanted to know.
I watched for a time when Mr. Hardy was in his office alone. I did not want anybody but him to hear my request. Above all, I did not want my father to know what I was doing. What I intended to do was unbandage a wound. It was in part my own wound, but I felt it was my father’s more than mine, and maybe I had no right to know more than he had told me. Though I was determined to see those papers, I was also more than a little ashamed.
“Son, I’ll show you,” Mr. Hardy said when I finally walked in and asked him. “I’ll show you what there is, I’ll show you, son, but there ain’t much.”
Already I was sorry I had come, for I saw that he knew exactly what I wanted and that he too was thinking of my father. Spitting fragments of tobacco bitten from the cold stump of his cigar, he climbed a ladder up a large wall of file boxes ranked on shelves, selected one of the boxes, and brought it to me.
“See,” he said, “there’s not a hell of a lot here that would be of interest to you, son.” He showed me the warrant for Carp Harmon’s arrest, his indictment, several pleadings, all technical documents no more informative than they were required to be.
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 68