A World Lost: A Novel (Port William) (13 page)

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.

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 Uncle
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.

"I thought there would be a record of what was said at the trial."

"Naw, son," he said. "Nawsir, son, no such record was ever made.
What was said at that trial is a long time gone."

He explained that there had been no appeal. There would have been
a transcript only if there had been an appeal. By then I was relieved that
there was no record. Mr. Hardy was putting the papers back into their
box. "Nawsir, son, that record you want to see, it never did exist." He
removed the cigar from his mouth, spat toward the wastebasket, and
then looked at me. "Son," he said, "I'm sorry."

And still we both were embarrassed, for even though the record I
sought did not exist, the fact remained that Charlie Hardy knew what
had happened at that trial. I knew he could imagine my saying, "Well,
Mr. Hardy, why don't you tell me what happened?" And I knew - I know
much more certainly now - that he would have given years off his life to
be spared the question.

"Well, thank you, Mr. Hardy," I said.

'Any time, son," he said. 'Any time." He waved to me with the hand
holding the cigar as if I were already out of the building and across the
street. "By God, son, come back! Any time!"

But as time went on I did learn some things. Things that I did not know
to ask for came to me on their own.

One day after the ewes were sheared, when Elton Penn and Henry and I hauled the bagged wool to market, we ran into Yeager Stump. Something was said about dancing. Maybe Elton mentioned that Henry and I
were going to a dance, or had been to one; maybe he was complaining,
as he sometimes did, joking, but only half joking, that when we danced
late into the night we were no account in the daytime. Whatever was
said, it reminded Mr. Stump of Uncle Andrew.

"Boys," he said, and there was laughter in his eyes though he did not
laugh aloud, "I've seen your uncle Andrew too drunk to walk, but I never
saw him too drunk to dance."

Later it was Mr. Stump, leaning to talk to me through a car window,
his eyes filled with that same quiet, reminiscent, almost tender unuttered
laughter, who told me two little bits of Uncle Andrew's poetry. "Your
uncle Andrew said that when he was with a woman and that old extremity came to him, every hair in his bee-hind was a jew's harp playing a different tune." Mr. Stump's voice recovered exactly Uncle Andrew's jazzy
intonation. "He said a big covey of quail flew out his bunghole one bird
at a time."

And then Mr. Stump did laugh aloud, briefly. He clapped his hand onto
the metal windowsill and straightened up. "Well, he was something.
There never was another one like him."

When I went away to Lexington to the university, forty years after
Uncle Andrew's failed expedition there, I continued my checking account
at the Independent Farmers Bank at Port William. A number of times
when I wrote out a check for a woman salesclerk, the lady would look at
my signature and the name of the town, and she would say -it was
invariably the same sentence -"I knew an Andrew Catlett once."

"He was my uncle," I would say.

And then she would say, "He was such a dancer!" Or "Oh, how that man
could dance!" Or "I just loved to dance with him! He was so handsome."

They always spoke of him as a dancer. They always smiled in remembering him. Speaking of him, they always sounded younger than they
were, and a little dreamy.

One day in Lexington I cashed a check at Scoop Rawl's Ice Cream Parlor. Scoop himself was at the cash register. He looked at my signature.
"Andrew Catlett," he said. "Port William. I knew an Andrew Catlett from
down there."

"Yessir," I said. "He was my uncle."

He looked at me over his glasses. "Your uncle. God almighty, we had
some times!"

I said, "Yessir," hoping he would say more, and he did, a little. He had
known Uncle Andrew, apparently, not during his brief visit to Lexington
as a student, but after his marriage, when he was traveling for a distillery.

'Andrew had a girl he called Sweetie Pie. He'd squall for her when he
was drunk and you could hear him half a mile: 'Sweetie Pie! "'

I knew how he sounded. I could hear that raucous mating call rising
in the midst of the late-night fracas and hilarity of some Lexington blind
tiger as Uncle Andrew hooked cute little Sweetie Pie with his right arm
and pulled her into his lap. During my college years also I encountered a
woman who had lived near us in Hargrave when I was a child. She had
been beautiful when she was young and had been married to an old man.
Uncle Andrew, she told me, laughing, had said to her, "When that old
son of a bitch is dead, I'm going to stomp on his grave until he's in there
good and tight, and then I'm going to get straight into bed with you."

She told me too of the midnight when Uncle Andrew and his cronies
in their mating plumage, transcendently drunk, burst into Momma-pie's
bedroom, and Uncle Andrew snapped on the light. "Wake up, Mommapie! We've bred all the women, cows, yo sheep, mares, and mare mules
-and now, by God, we're going to breed you!"

In spite of Yeager Stump's later claim that they did whatever they
thought of, I do not believe that this actually happened; if it had, Uncle
Andrew's moments of retrospective self-knowledge and regret would
have forbidden him to talk about it, but it was a story that was known
because he had told it.

I can imagine a night of hilarity, Uncle Andrew and Buster Simms and
Yeager Stump out among 'em, women and whiskey on hand, Uncle
Andrew talking, the others laughing and egging him on. He is conjuring
up the most outrageous scene he can think of he and his buddies crowding into that chastely fragrant room like a nightmare, the sudden light
revealing Momma-pie in her nightcap, sans teeth, sitting up in bed, clutching the bedclothes to her bosom. I can imagine the tale repeated and
improved at every opportunity as if it had actually happened, the work of
alcoholic incandescence and a refined sense of impropriety.

But I know too that Mr. Stump was right: A lot of the things they thought of, they did. Their taste in women ran simply to the available;
their pleasures were restricted only by the possible. In his times of breaking out, which apparently were the times he lived for, Uncle Andrew
granted an uncomplicated obedience to impulses that men of faith and
loyalty like my father struggle against all their lives. Men who obey those
impulses surely invite their own destruction, and I think there were
moments when Uncle Andrew knew this.

But obviously not all are destroyed. Yeager Stump, for one, enjoyed
life far beyond the conventional three score years and ten. Even at the
end, when he was housebound, he continued to enjoy life. Miss Iris Flynn,
devoted as always, kept him supplied with good bourbon. On one of her
visits, she handed him the anticipated bottle and exclaimed about its
lately increased cost. "Yes," said Mr. Stump, "maybe they'll finally charge
what it's worth."

Whether or not Uncle Andrew invited the destruction he in fact
received is at least a disturbed question, and perhaps an unanswerable
one. But I did not even know it was a question until one day -I was
grown by then - I said point-blank to Elton Penn: "Why did Carp Harmon kill Uncle Andrew?"

Probably Elton was no more comfortable with my curiosity than Mr.
Hardy had been, but he gave me a straight answer. "Well, the way I heard
it, your Uncle Andrew propositioned Harmon's daughter there in the
store where the ones that were tearing down those buildings would go
for lunch."

It was not as though Elton and I were two people merely interested in
the pursuit of truth; we both knew the hardship that that story would
have presented to my family. We did not pursue the subject further, partly
because of the pain that surrounded it, partly because I thought the
explanation credible and had no more questions to ask. I believed that if
he had thought of doing so, Uncle Andrew would have propositioned
Carp Harmon's daughter in the store, devil take the witnesses. He would
have done it because he thought of doing it and because he enjoyed the
outrageousness of it and because he relished the self-abandonment of it.
From there, I supposed, the story had gone on to its conclusion according to the logic of anger.