A World Lost: A Novel (Port William) (14 page)

The year following my grandmother Catlett's death, I returned with my
wife and baby daughter to live through the summer in the old house.
Grandma's things were still there, put away in their places, just as she had
left them, and it fell to me to dispose of them. Because she had known no
extravagance in her life, she had saved everything salvageable: string,
pieces of cloth, buttons and buckles, canceled checks and notes, bits of
paper covered with now meaningless computations and lists, letters and
cards, clippings from newspapers - anything that, within the terms
and hopes of her life, had seemed valuable or potentially useful or in
some way dear.

Among all else she saved were twenty or so letters from Uncle Andrew.
Most of these were written on the stationery of hotels in southern
states, mostly in South Carolina. All of them show a wish to be a good
son, and I have no doubt that this was a wish that he felt genuinely enough
when he felt it; I do not think that he felt it all the time. The letters always
intend to assure Grandma and Grandpa that he is doing better, or is now
all right, or has resolved to lead a cleaner life. He clearly did not like the
thought that they were worried about him. And yet there are, even in
this small and perhaps selective sheaf that Grandma saved, too many letters of that sort. It is impossible not to suspect that he was trying, as if by
incantation, to lay to rest the more obvious consequences of failings that
he could not help, or that he did not much want to help. It is almost as
if he felt that if he could just stop Grandma and Grandpa, especially
Grandma, from worrying, there would be nothing to worry about.

And yet they are troubled letters, and they are troubling. One of them
in particular has occupied all alone a large place in my mind since I first
read it. It was written a few months after I was born and given his name.
According to the letter, he has been "out"- certainly out of a job and
perhaps also drunk. But now, he says, "While not making any money
am better off than I was, some, and believe in six months will be much
better. First want to tell you and ask that you not worry one bit." He is
evidently ready to begin work as a salesman for a liquor company. His
associates, he says, are "the cleanest bunch of men you ever saw," and
they do not drink. But if Grandma wishes, he will try to get another kind
of job, which he does not believe would be hard for him to do. He thanks the family for their kindness and consideration of his feelings while he
was "out." My mother in particular, he says, has been sweet and thoughtful. They all have shown him such love and affection that he could do
nothing that would hurt them or shake their confidence.

And then he writes the sentence-troubled, tender, hopeful, and, as I
know, hopeless-that binds me to him closer than my name: And little
Andrew, bless his heart-if for nothing else, I would be a man for him."

After I found the letters and read them and put them away again, I
assumed that I knew as much about Uncle Andrew as I was ever going to
know. I continued to remember him and to think and wonder about him,
but I asked no more questions.

And then, thirty years later, after my father died, I found among his
papers his file of bills, receipts, and other documents having to do with
the settlement of Uncle Andrew's estate. Folded up in that file was a copy
of the Hargrave Weekly Express, giving an account of the examining trial
of Carp Harmon. Why I had not thought before to examine the back
issues of the Weekly Express I am not sure; I had believed the little I had
heard, and perhaps that had satisfied me, but perhaps I also had felt that
the truth about Uncle Andrew's death, as long as my father was alive,
was his belonging, not mine.

But now, that paper having come to me from my father's very hands,
which had folded it and put it away so long ago, I opened it and read the
article as eagerly, I think, as I have ever read anything. Much of the article
deals with technicalities, but two paragraphs are given to the story of the
murder:

V. R. Gadwell, merchant at Stoneport, testified that Catlett and a
group of workers at the lead mine, where buildings were being dismantled, came to the store for lunch and soft drinks. He said Harmon's
daughter came in the store and gave her father some change. Gadwell
then heard a noise and next saw Catlett getting up after being knocked down by Harmon. Harmon had hit him with an oilcan. He said he heard
Catlett apologizing to Harmon, stating he did not know the girl was his
daughter. Gadwell said he got Catlett and the other men out of the store
but Harmon remained 10 or 15 minutes.

"Jake Branch of near Hargrave, who was assisting Catlett in the dismantling job, said he was 3 or 4 feet from Catlett when the accused hit
him with the oilcan. He testified that the group went back to their work
and about an hour had elapsed when Harmon suddenly came up to
Catlett and said he was going to kill him and pulled a gun. He stated Catlett pleaded that it was 'my mistake' and 'don't shoot me.' Branch said
Harmon fired two shots and the workmen rushed Catlett to the hospital.

"R. T. Purlin, 16-year-old stepson of Branch, with the group at the
mine, said he yelled to Catlett when he saw Harmon slipping through
the weeds but believes Catlett did not hear him."

R. T. Purlin, older than I by six years, had been a hero to Henry and
me when we were boys, working and playing together on the Crayton
Place, for even at the age of fourteen he was already in body a grown
man with an arm like one of Homer's spear throwers, and he never tired
of entertaining us with feats of strength. He had a truly clear and generous heart and was never condescending in his friendship to us smaller
boys. R. T. was the last living witness to Uncle Andrew's murder. I had
not seen him in a long time.

When I called him up and asked if I could come and talk with him, he
said, "Yessir! You come right on over here."

The old house that R. T. was living in had no front porch, but a wide
back porch ran the length of the ell. Good hounds were chained to their
houses under the trees out back.

R. T. came out onto the porch to meet me. "What you been doing
all these years?" He talked loudly, like his mother, and had her turns of
speech, sounding both like her and like himself.

We went in and sat down at the table in the kitchen where his wife was
at work. I complimented his dogs, and we talked a little about coon hunting. R. T. spoke of a tree so full of coons that when their eyes shone back
in the beam of his light, the tree looked like a Christmas tree.

We remembered things that had happened on the Crayton Place in the old days. We spoke of his brothers and sisters, whole and half, and of his
stepsisters, Jake Branch's daughters by his first wife, and we named and
remembered Minnie's six brothers and all the hands who at one time or
another had worked for Jake. We spoke of Grandpa Catlett's saddle
mare, old Rose, and of Tige and Red, Jake Branch's good team of mules.

Finally I spoke the question I had come to ask: "What happened down
there at the lead mine when Carp Harmon shot Uncle Andrew?"

It was hot, R. T. said, when they went back to work in the afternoon,
and they were hard at it - all four of them, he and Col Oaks, one of Jake's
sons-in-law, Jake himself, and Uncle Andrew. There was a spring of fine
cold water down near the road, and after a while Uncle Andrew said,
"Jake, let's go get us a drink and leave it with the boys for a while."

The two of them went down to where Uncle Andrew had left his car,
just pulled in off the road, to get the top off Uncle Andrew's thermos jug
to use as a drinking cup. And then R. T. saw Carp Harmon coming up the
road. He ran from one tree or bush to another, trying to stay hidden.
When he got near the men at the car, he shot Uncle Andrew, threatened
Jake, and ran away down the road again, stopping now and then to look
back, R. T. said, "like a sheep-killing dog."

I asked if Uncle Andrew had given some insult to Carp Harmon's
daughter when they were down at the store.

R. T. said emphatically, "Nawsir! Andrew never said nothing to that
girl."

On my way home, I stopped to see my mother. She was sitting in her
chair, reading, as she usually is when I come by in the afternoon. And as
usual she did not hear me until I rapped loudly on the door of the room
where she was sitting. I always expect her to be frightened when I do
that, but she never is, being far more reconciled to the unexpected than I
am. And so she instructs me.

She looked up, smiled, and said, "Hello! Come in!"

I came in and sat down on the end of the sofa nearest her chair.

"Well, where have you been?"

"I've been to see R. T Purlin."

"Oh, R. T!" she said. "What for?"

"To talk," I said.

And then, surprising myself, broaching the issue with her for the first
time in my life, I said, "R. T. says that Uncle Andrew didn't say anything
sexual at all to Carp Harmon's daughter."

That I could have introduced this subject so abruptly made me aware
that we were speaking of Uncle Andrew's death in my father's absence,
in the absence of his grief, free of it at last, as I know we both believed
that my father was now at last free of it.

"No," my mother said. "He didn't."

The whole business of the sexual insult to the girl, she said, was the
defense attorney's lie. Years later, in fact, somebody had told my father
that the defense attorney had admitted to the lie. He said that he did not
blame my father for disliking him, for he had made the story up.

Thus, suddenly, I was involved in a way I had not expected to be. If the
story of the proposition to Carp Harmon's daughter was a lie, then I was
implicated in the lie, because for many years I had believed it. But I needed
to consider also the possibility that it was not true that the defense attorney had lied. If his story was true and our people had falsely denied it, I
assumed that this would not have been a deliberate or malicious lie but
one that came about simply because those who loved Uncle Andrew,
including R. T., could not bear to believe otherwise. And if this belief in
Uncle Andrew's innocence was a lie, then I was implicated there also,
for I was grateful for whatever comfort it had given to those who had
believed it.