A World Lost: A Novel (Port William) (11 page)

Dick and Aunt Sarah Jane's two-room house at the edge of the woods,
down the hill from the barns, was a part of the Home Place, but it was
also a place unto itself, with its own garden and henhouse and woodpile.
Aunt Sarah Jane did not work "out." She kept house and gardened and
cared for a small flock of chickens and foraged in the fields and woods and
sewed and mended and read her Bible. In the mornings and the evenings
and in odd times spared from the farmwork, Dick kept their house supplied with water and milk, meat and firewood. I remember their pleasure
in all the items of their small abundance: buckets of milk from Dick's cow,
cured joints and middlings from their hogs, vegetables from Aunt Sarah
Jane's garden, the herbs and greens and mushrooms she gathered on her
walks.

In those years when I could not be with Uncle Andrew, I loved almost
as much to be with Dick, though the two of them could hardly have been less alike. Dick was as gentle and quiet as Uncle Andrew was brash and
uproarious. And whereas Uncle Andrew's great aim in life was to "get out
among'em," Dick, when I knew him, anyhow, was mostly content to stay
put. With Uncle Andrew, you were always on a trajectory that was going
to take you back to the road and on to someplace else. With Dick, when
he wasn't behind a team or on horseback, you traveled on foot, going not
away but deeper in. Dick could sit still. He could sit on his rock doorstep
after supper, smoke his pipe, and talk slowly and thoughtfully until bedtime. In my memories of Uncle Andrew, I am often behind him or off to
the side, watching him, feeding my curiosity as to what manner of man
he was. In my memories of Dick Watson, I am often beside him, holding
his hand. From Dick I learned that the countryside was inhabited not just
by things we ordinarily see but also by things we ordinarily do not see -
such as foxes. That it was haunted by old memories I already knew.

Foxhunting with Dick, he on my grandfather's mare and I on Beauty
the pony, I first came into the presence of the countryside at night, and
learned to think of it as the hunters knew it, and learned there were foxes
abroad in it who knew it as no human ever would. There would be an
occasional dog fox, Dick said, who would venture up almost to the yard
fence to invite the hounds to run, and who, when the hounds accepted
the challenge, knew how to baffle them by running in a creek or along
the top of a rock fence. I had from Dick a vision of a brilliant fox running
gaily through the dark over the ridges and along the hollows, followed by
hounds in beautiful outcry, and this to me was a sort of doctrineless mystery and grace.

But what I remember most, and most gratefully, is Dick's own presence, for he was a man fully present in the place and its yearly round of
work that connected hayfield and grainfield and feed barn and hog lot,
woods and woodpile and the wood box behind the kitchen stove, well
and water trough. When the work was to be done, he was there to do it.
He did it well and without haste; when it was done he took his ease and
did not complain. Years later, when I was looking for the way home, his
was one of the minds that guided me.

After he and then Grandpa were dead, the farm, in spite of my father's
long caring for it, lacked a coherence that it had had before. It needed not
just attention and work but lives that made it a world and lived from it.

For several years after those deaths, I stayed with Grandma for months at
a time. She started coming to Hargrave to spend the winters in a room at
the Broadfield Hotel. And then on a Saturday morning in March or April,
with spring bright in the air, Elton Penn would come with his truck, and
we would load Grandma's spool bed, her comfortable rocker, her clothes
and linens, and take her home.

I would move in then to stay with her until she returned to town late
the following fall. For me, this was freedom, more freedom probably
than I was entitled to, but not more than I wanted and even needed. At
Grandma's, I was the man of the house. I had as my own room the little
hallway behind Grandma's bedroom, and I had, as it seemed to me, the
whole country to range in, on foot or horseback, beyond sight or call of
any grown-up. For grown-up company, when I wanted it, I had Grandma,
and after 1945 Elton and Mary Penn on the Beechum Place, and Jess and
Rufus Brightleaf and their wives. For a playmate, I had Fred Brightleaf.
When my father took me or sent me to work for Jake Branch, I had the
company of that large and various household. Hargrave, when I returned
to it, took some getting used to. I decided to stay out of it if I could.

To get to school, I rode the bus or hitchhiked down to Hargrave in the
morning and back again in the afternoon. I attended school by requirement only. I did not think of it when I was not in it. I did not establish a
great reputation as a student.

Once Grandma and I had moved in, we revived the old house around
us. I thought it a great adventure to build a fire again in the kitchen range
and to help Grandma get together the makings of our first meal. On the
colder mornings we would get up and hurry down to the kitchen to
renew the fire. Charmed by the elemental pleasure of needing to be
warm and then getting warm, I watched the day grow bright outside the
windows while Grandma cooked our breakfast. As we ate, the sun came
up beyond the still-living oak snag at the corner of the woods.

This was a homecoming for me as much as for Grandma. I had lived
there with my parents during my first two years. I had come newborn to
that house. It was the first house of my memory and consciousness.
Sleeping there in my crib beside my parents' bed, I had dreamed the sounds of the wind that drew its long breaths over the house at night.
And I remembered waking there as if to a world entirely new, to see the
sun shining on the wet grass and the white barns.

By the time I was born into it, the history of that place had become
old. The sign of its age was much forgetfulness. Much had happened to
us there that we did not remember. We had suffered and rejoiced there
more than we knew. I acquired experiences there that never had happened to me at all. All my life I have recalled a sort of dream image of a
man putting on his coat at the back door, speaking over his shoulder to a
woman inside the house. A freed slave going away? One of our family
going west? Or simply somebody going to the field? I cannot see his face;
I do not know.

I had known, it seemed to me always, that when Grandpa was "just a
little bit of a baby laying up yonder in the bed," some soldiers had come
at night and taken his father. They were a small band of Union horsemen
who had come to "recruit" my great-grandfather, who would have been
in his early forties at the time. They did this, I suppose, with a pleasant
sense of justice, because he owned a few slaves and for that and other
reasons would not have been sympathetic to their cause. Forcing him to
mount behind one of them, they carried him to their encampment on
the top of the next hill. Still in her nightgown and barefooted, my greatgrandmother, Lizzie, followed them. By force of argument or character
or both, she "made them give him back." According to the story as I
heard it, Lizzie "ran after them," and so in my mind, as if from my own
birth, I have had the image of that distraught and determined woman
running up the dark road.

And I have had in mind always the fire that burned the old house when
Grandpa was six. It is a pod of fierce light that opens greatly in the dark.
In that light Grandpa is a small boy suddenly filled with terrible knowledge. He stands holding his saddle, his most precious possession, which
he has retrieved from under his bed. They bring to him a small Negro
girl, the cook's daughter, a year younger than he. She is hysterical, wanting to run back into the burning house. And they tell him, "Hold her!
Hold her tight!" And he holds her, while the grown-ups continue their
effort to save things from the house, and then finally give up and watch it
burn.

The new house had grown old too by the time I knew it, and had
about it memories and reminders and intimations of unremembered
things. The house itself was tall and finely outlined. Its high-ceilinged
rooms, cool in summer, were lovely when filled with morning light. But
its furnishings were meager and rather graceless. The best room, the parlor, in which we sat only on the most special occasions, contained an upright piano with a stool, a matching sofa and easy chair covered with rose
and beige brocade, a glass-fronted bookcase, a small table, and two or
three more chairs, not necessarily comfortable. The other rather formal
room was the dining room, likewise seldom used. It was a north room,
cool in summer, cold in winter, heated, like the parlor, only by a fireplace. I liked to go into that room for its strangeness and its cold smells
of cloves and brown sugar.

The kitchen, living room, and three bedrooms upstairs-the rooms
that were to varying degrees lived in -were furnished with not much of
an eye for decoration or harmony. The furniture was inherited or haphazardly bought or come by; nearly all of it was old and well worn, some
of it damaged or much repaired. The rugs were threadbare in spots, and
where the travel was heaviest the finish was worn off the kitchen linoleum. It was a house that for a long time had been occupied by people
struggling to hold themselves in place, who had not had much time for
comfort or the means for luxuries. I understood this only much later;
then it was merely familiar. The house had had a telephone for a good
many years and electricity for four or five, but nothing else had changed,
and it seemed somehow surprised by these amenities. It still had no running water. We used the privy down in a corner of the backyard, and carried water in buckets from the well.

There were a few framed photographs on the living room wallpictures of Uncle Andrew and my father, and of us children. There was
also a small tintype of Grandpa when he was a young boy; his mother
had had to whip him, he said, to make him sit still for it. Upstairs there
were larger photographic portraits of Uncle Andrew and my father as
children, and of my great-grandfathers Catlett and Wheeler. Grandma's
decorations consisted mainly of a few crocheted doilies and table
scarves. Her yearning for nice things was revealed by her attachment to
ornamented candy boxes with hinged lids; the few of these that she had
received she kept and filled with photographs, letters, and the pretty greeting cards that came on holidays. The most beautiful thing in the
house, I thought, was a sampler made by my mother. I read it often, fascinated by the close rhymes. It said:

HOURS FLY

FLOWERS DIE

NEW DAYS

NEW WAYS

PASS BY

LOVE STAYS

Between us, Grandma and I carried on the best we could the old
kitchen economy of milk cow and hen flock and garden. I helped her
care for the hens, and I did the milking and sometimes the churning.

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 orJake 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.