Unable now to put it off any longer, I went to the office of the Weekly Express and searched out the account of Carp Harmon’s trial. According to the article I had already seen, the trial had been set for the September term, but I found that it had been moved to the January term because in September the jurymen had needed to be at home, harvesting their tobacco. In January the jury heard the case and gave their verdict. Carp Harmon received his sentence of two years in the penitentiary. The article in the Weekly Express seems meant only to explain the brevity of the sentence. These are the relevant paragraphs:
“During their lunch hour, according to Harmon, Catlett made a remark to Harmon’s daughter and Harmon knocked him down. Catlett apologized. Later in the afternoon Harmon went to the scene of work where Catlett and his helpers were and he shot Catlett when Catlett reached for a 2 × 4, following some words between them.
“Harmon testified that he went back to the scene of work to nail a covering over a well. He said Catlett told him to get off the premises along with a remark about his daughter, whom he included in the order to stay away. Harmon said that he fired when Catlett reached for the piece of timber.
“When questioned as to why he had a gun on his person, Harmon said he had been told that someone had run his trotlines.”
The jury obviously believed the story of the “remark” to Carp Harmon’s daughter—as did the reporter for the Weekly Express. If it was a lie, it was the work of a good liar, who could make his story both plausible and consonant with Uncle Andrew’s character, which would have been pretty generally known.
The Weekly Express writer evidently had believed the story also when it was told six months earlier at the examining trial. What seems significantly different between the two accounts is the appearance in the second of the two-by-four, which was not mentioned in the first.
If the story of the “remark” is true, and if it is true that Carp Harmon’s lawyer later admitted that he had told a lie, then the lie may have been this business of the two-by-four, for it is the only reported detail that would have supported an argument of self-defense.
At any rate, I now had learned the basis of the story about the well cover that I had heard when I was a child.
Why, as I got older, did I not ask my father for his version of these events? Now that he is dead, it is easy to wish that I had asked. And yet I know why I did not. I did not want to live again in the great pain I had felt in the old house that night when he had wept so helplessly with Grandma and Grandpa. I did not want to be with him in the presence of that pain where only it and we existed. If I were to speak to his ghost, perhaps I still could not bring myself to ask. When I am a ghost myself, perhaps we will talk of it.
Chapter 12
IF YOU go toward Stoneport from the high ground instead of along the river, you go at first through a country of excellent broad ridges, farmland greatly respected for its depth and warmth. And then the upland becomes more broken, the ridges narrower, the hollows steeper, the soil thin and rocky. The road to the lead mine turns off one of the ridges and follows a creek bed, usually dry in summer, down into a narrow, wooded hollow. Much of that country is now wooded and has been so for a long time. The farming on those slopes was done in clearings that moved about in place and time as the trees were succeeded by crops, which were succeeded after a short time by a new growth of trees. Now, after its inevitable diminishment by such cropping, the land has been almost entirely given back to the trees.
After it has brought you down nearly to Stoneport on the river, the road passes the site of the old lead mine, which lies off to the right on the far side of the creek. There is still a weedy clearing, originally a hole in the woods to accommodate a hole in the ground. The clearing has remained open because the floor of the hollow has been leveled and covered with tailings from the mine. A squatter has recently lived there in an old bus, which is now abandoned and surrounded by weeds and junk. The main building of the mine, which housed its heavy machinery, was up on the slope. Its foundation, now bare and weathered, straddles the creek, which was used to bear away some of the waste from the extraction of the ore. Behind it, the deep well that Carp Harmon was so anxious to protect is still without a cover; the surface of the water, twenty feet down, is covered with a floating crust of plastic jugs and bottles. Some-body has tried to “improve” the spring of good water down by the road by digging a deep trench into it with a backhoe. The nature of the place seems more insulted by the ordinary acts and artifacts of the present than by the mining of half a century ago.
I went there once with my father when he and Uncle Andrew and the others were in the process of buying the buildings, and I had never been back. I did not even know how to get there until R.T. Purlin went there with me on a hot August afternoon not long after I had hunted up the story of Carp Harmon’s trial in the Weekly Express.
We pulled off the road, now blacktopped but still just a narrow track coming down through the trees. While we walked over the valley floor and then climbed up over the old foundations into the returning woods, R.T. gave me the story again as the place brought it back to mind.
“Andrew parked his car yonder where you left your truck. Just pulled in off of the road, the way he did every day. Him and Jake went there to get the top off of Andrew’s jug on their way to the spring. That fellow stepped out of the bushes must have been right there. Maybe he had stood there a little while, watching them.”
He pointed into the air over the foundation of the main building. “Me and Col, we never seen him. We was way up maybe thirty feet in the framework of that building—big timbers!—tearing it down. And we heard the shots: Bam! Bam!
“I said, ‘What the hell was that?’
“And Col said, ‘I think that guy has shot Andrew.’
“And down we come.”
“Did Uncle Andrew say anything after he was shot?”
“Naw. He went to hurting then. He never said anything.”
“And Carp Harmon threatened Jake and ran off ?”
“He run right back down the road,” R.T. said, and he acted out Carp Harmon’s flight, running and then stopping to look back, running and looking back.
“And then you all loaded Uncle Andrew into the car and started for the hospital.”
“Yeah.”
“And you drove?”
“I was the only one that could drive. Jake and Col didn’t know how. Andrew had let me drive around a little on the farm. I never had drove on the road. I done pretty good that day till we got up to the top of the lane and onto the blacktop and I started trying to go fast. I had a hard time then to keep in the road. And Andrew was just kicking the car to pieces. We was lucky to make it.”
What a ride that must have been for a sixteen-year-old boy who could barely drive, was badly frightened, and who loved the hurt man kicking in pain! In only a few seconds they had been carried from their ordinary work into a moment impossible to be ready for: Uncle Andrew fallen, holding his belly with bloody fingers, Carp Harmon’s footsteps going away down the gravel road, nothing now in sight or memory that was quite believable, Uncle Andrew’s car sitting there without a driver.
It started to come to me. I began to imagine it, as I knew my father had done, time and again, seeing it as it must have happened and as he could not help seeing it.
And now I too saw them there. I knew how it had been, as if this imagining had suddenly descended to me from my father. I saw them as they lifted Uncle Andrew and got him into the car and as Jake and Col got in, leaving the driver’s seat empty.
I heard R.T., not just excited but scared now as well: “Who’s going to drive?”
I heard Jake—helpless, angry, bewildered, in a hurry, and yet necessarily resigned: “You are, I reckon.”
I saw the black car lurch backward into the road, and then lurch forward, gravel flying from under its wheels as it started up the hill.
And all this happened while I was swimming in the pond, for the moment safe.
&
nbsp; R.T. and I loitered around the place a while longer, trying without success to find a rock that R.T. could identify positively as lead ore. He was sure that there had been many such rocks lying around when they had been working down there, but we could find none. Giving up at last, we got into my pickup and started on down toward Stoneport, less than half a mile away.
“And you say Uncle Andrew didn’t make a pass at Carp Harmon’s daughter?”
“Nawsir. He never,” R.T. said. “It was me that girl was talking to.
“I’ll show you,” he said. We were coming into Stoneport, just a few houses and other buildings scattered around a white weatherboarded church. R.T. showed me the small house where Carp Harmon had lived. He showed me the empty place where fifty years ago had stood the store belonging to P.R. Gadwell. He showed me the place on the roadside opposite where Uncle Andrew had parked his car under the trees.
“I was sitting in the car,” R.T. said, “and the girl was leaning against it, talking to me. That fellow could stand in his yard and look right down the road at Andrew’s car and see her there. That’s how it all got started.”
It is a wide street, the view unobstructed from the yard of the house that was Carp Harmon’s down to Uncle Andrew’s parking spot, a distance of three or four hundred feet. And so R.T.’s version of the story had the plausibility of a true line of sight. It could have happened the way he told it. He could have been himself the bait of a trap that had caught Uncle Andrew.
And yet R.T.’s memory, as I knew by then, was not safe from his imagination. He had told me, on two different days, both that he had and that he had not seen Carp Harmon as he came up the road before the shooting. And on that very day he had told me two versions of his and Col Oaks’s hearing the shots; in the first version, R.T. had said, “What the hell was that?” and in the second, Col Oaks had said it. If he had seen the shooting, which he must have done if he had seen Carp Harmon’s approach and had tried to warn Uncle Andrew, he apparently had found it too painful to remember. I don’t think that these were falsehoods in the usual sense but rather that R.T., in brooding over the story for so many years, had imagined it from shifting points of view, had imagined what he had not seen, had seen what he had not remembered. There is no assurance that he had not imagined also things that had not happened.
If Uncle Andrew had not, in fact, made the “remark” to Carp Harmon’s daughter, then why did both P.R. Gadwell and Jake Branch testify that Uncle Andrew apologized to Harmon?
The defense lawyer’s story, true or untrue, depended for credibility on the general knowledge of Uncle Andrew’s character. I was not the only one who assumed that if he had thought of it, Uncle Andrew would have openly propositioned a girl in a public place. According to that story, as I suppose the jury heard it, a man who lives by impulse invites his own destruction; if he is destroyed as a result of one of his impulsive acts, then a kind of justice has been done. Character is fate, and Carp Harmon was no more than the virtually innocent agent of the appointed fate.
If that story is false, if it was R.T. the girl was talking to, then Uncle Andrew’s fate had nothing to do with his character and everything to do with chance and the character of Carp Harmon.
But R.T. told me something else that I cannot forget, though perhaps it leads nowhere. He said he had heard that Carp Harmon had been wanting to kill somebody for a long time. “People down there shied him,” R.T. said. “He’d been carrying his pistol hid under a rag in the bottom of a ten-quart bucket. He wanted to kill somebody and make a big name for himself. He thought he could kill an outsider and lie his way out of it—which is about what he done.”
This story has the standing merely of gossip, but some gossip is true, and Carp Harmon would hardly have been the first of his kind who went about with a hidden gun, looking for somebody to kill. If the piece of gossip is true, then the other explanations are not explanations but merely excuses. But a man looking for somebody to kill can presumably find reasons and candidates everywhere, the human race being what it is. If Carp Harmon was in fact such a man, then why did he choose Uncle Andrew, who was not even the only available outsider?
Well, I know too that Carp Harmon was a widower, raising his daughter by himself, undoubtedly afraid for her and afraid for that considerable part of his own self-respect that was at her disposal. And he believed, as he told the court, that somebody was running his trotlines; he was prepared to shoot whoever it was. He was exceptional in none of this—neither in his fear nor in his suspicion nor in his violence.
Nor in his carelessness. Murder, I suppose, is the ultimate carelessness. But Carp Harmon’s seems to have been a fearful carelessness, the carelessness of a man who fears that he is small or that he is being held in contempt. And in Uncle Andrew, at least before their violent encounter in Gadwell’s store, he saw a man who must have seemed fearlessly careless, a man completely unabashed, carrying on as he pleased without regard to the possibility that somebody might mind. To a man fearing to be held in contempt, Uncle Andrew would have appeared to be the very holder-in-contempt he had been expecting, whose every gesture identified him as a lifter of skirts and trotlines, a man insufferably sure of himself.
If that is true, then I return again to the thought that Uncle Andrew’s character was his fate, and Carp Harmon the agent of it.
But if murder is the ultimate carelessness, it is also the ultimate oversimplifier. It is the paramount act (there are others) by which we reduce a human being to the dimension of one thought. I knew the utterly reckless and fearless, unasking and unanswering Andrew Catlett that Carp Harmon saw. But if Uncle Andrew sometimes possessed a sort of invulnerability of exuberance and regardlessness, he was no longer regardless when he apologized to Carp Harmon. Then he had become pathetic, because, as events would soon prove, it was too late. Carp Harmon cannot have known the quietness and the look by which I knew that Uncle Andrew sometimes bore his life and fate as suffering. Carp Harmon cannot have known, as I know, that for Uncle Andrew there was always a time or a timelessness after (and before) the fact when he wanted to be a better man—if for nothing else, for me.
And all along I have had to wonder what difference I might have made if Uncle Andrew had let me go to Stoneport with him, as I wanted to. Might my presence somehow have unlocked the pattern of the events of that day? Might a small boy, just by being there, have altered the behavior of two reckless men by the tiny shift that might have been needed to change all our lives? Might it be that Uncle Andrew’s great mistake was so small a thing as ignoring my advice that I should be taken along? Who can know? Who can know even that the difference, if it had been made, would have been for the better? It might be that if I had gone I would merely have witnessed the shooting. In which case I would not have needed to ask certain questions.
Finally grief has no case to make. All its questions reach beyond the world. And now I am done. The questions remain; the asking is finished. This gathering of fifty-year-old memories, those few brown and brittle pages of newsprint, all those years stand between me and the actual event as irremediably as the end of the world.
Finally you must believe as your heart instructs. If you are a gossip or a cynic or an apostle of realism, you believe the worst you can imagine. If you follow the other way, accepting the bonds of faith and affection, you believe the best you can imagine in the face of the evidence. And so at last, like R.T., I must believe as I imagine and as I therefore choose. I choose not to argue with the story of the “remark” to Carp Harmon’s daughter, because it seems both likely and unlikely, and now it makes no difference. I choose not to believe the argument of self-defense; why would even a reckless man with only a two-by-four attack a man with a pistol? I choose to believe that Uncle Andrew said, “Don’t shoot me,” for it is too plain and sad to be a lie.
And so at last I can imagine it as it might have been.
It is early in the afternoon. The sun is still shining nearly straight down into the tight little valley where Uncle An
drew, Jake Branch, Col Oaks, and R.T. Purlin are dismantling the framework of the main building of the lead mine. The two younger men are at work high up on the heavy timbers, which they are prying loose and letting fall. Uncle Andrew and Jake stand back as the timbers drop, and then move them out of the way and begin pulling out the nails. It is strenuous, dirty, and dangerous work (Uncle Andrew was right not to let me come along). In the small clearing there are stacks of timbers, sorted according to dimension, and piles of corrugated tin. The sun strikes all surfaces with relentless brilliance. Metal objects, including the tools the men are using, if laid down for long, become painful to pick up. There is no breeze; the air is humid, heavy, and still.
Uncle Andrew’s sleeves are rolled above his elbows. His arms are shining with sweat and flecked with dirt. His shirt is soaked. And yet he wears his soiled and rumpled clothing and his narrow-brimmed straw hat with a kind of style. He is quick to take part in the talk that comes and goes or to pick up a joke; otherwise his face resumes the expression it has when he is enduring what must be endured. The noontime events down at the store have remained with him. He was knocked down (with an unopened quart can of oil, R.T. said), and he apologized. These facts lie in his belly like something indigestible. What has been done needs undoing, and cannot be undone. As many times before, it is not the present that surprises him but the past, the present slipped away into irrevocability. As many times before, he would like to turn away, find an opening, get out. He feels his own history crowding him, as near to him in that heat as his clinging shirt, as his flesh itself. He feels the weight of the history of flesh. He feels tired. He thinks, “I am already forty-nine years old.” He has not drunk since they returned to work, and he is thirsty.
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 70