A World Lost: A Novel (Port William) (18 page)

My father could be gentle to the point of tenderness, but he was not
invariably so. In certain moods, he had a way of landing on you like a
hawk on a rabbit. He could be wondrously impatient; whatever needed
doing he wanted already done by the time he thought of it, which would
have been going some. Or he could be fiercely put out because you did
not already know whatever he was trying to teach you. Sometimes this
amused Elton-he enjoyed mimicking my father in such moods-but
he suffered from it too, and so I could expect a certain amount of sympathy from him.

One day when I was angry at my father and needed somebody to
complain to, I found Elton out by his garden, sharpening bean poles. He
was kneeling on the ground in front of a small chopping block. He would
take a pole from the pile on his left, stand it on the block, point it with
three or four light licks of his hatchet, and lay it in the pile on his right.
I sat down, not offering to help, and began my complaint. Elton listened
to me, working steadily with his head down. For a long time he said
nothing.

Finally he said, "Well, you've got responsibilities, you know, that he's
trying to get you ready for."

I had known for a while what my answer to that would be, and I liked
the way it was going to sound: "My responsibilities can go to hell."

Elton stopped with the hatchet still in the air and looked at me with a
look that seemed to originate somewhere way back in his head. He
started to grin.

He said, "You don't know tumblebug language, do you?"

"No," I said.

He was wearing a leather glove on his right hand and he pulled it off.
He held up two fingers in a V to represent the tumblebug's feelers. He
wiggled the right-hand finger: "Roll it to the right!" He wiggled the lefthand finger: "Roll it to the left!" He wiggled both fingers: "Stop that
shit!"

He wiggled both fingers at me with that look in his eyes and grinned,
and the grin kept getting bigger.

I did not stop it that day, of course, for I had a long way still to go to be
a grown man; sometimes I see that I have not altogether stopped it yet.
But I had received the sign I was looking for.

I remember a later day - I was in college by then - when I went to my
father's office to tell him of a certain very rough hill farm I wanted to buy
in partnership with Elton Penn. It was a cool, bright day at the end of
summer, the tobacco crop was in the barn, and Elton and I had been on
the back of his place, disking the harvested field and drilling it in wheat.

We finished early in the afternoon, and dipped the last of the unplanted
seed out of the drill. The Markman Place, adjoining Elton's at the back,
had been put up for sale, and we stood leaning on the drill box in the satisfaction of the field replanted and safe for the winter, wondering who
the buyer would be. The farm had been owned by an old couple, like
many others, whose children had grown up and scattered to the towns.
The husband had died on the place a good many years ago, and then, that
spring, the wife had died at a nursing home down at Hargrave. Who the
new owner would be was a mystery that troubled Elton, for it was
unlikely that anybody would buy such a farm -small and off the road
and now run down - as a place to live.

He stood silently looking over the fence a moment, and then he said,
"Let's go over there and look at it."

And so we did. We climbed over the fence and started across a weedy
field toward the house and outbuildings. Beyond the line fence the ridges
grew narrower and dropped away toward the wooded hollows. Since the
onset of Amster Markman's last illness, the farm had been cropped by a
neighbor and otherwise unused. Briars and sumacs and young sassafras trees had begun to colonize in patches the pasture we were walking
through.

We jumped a rabbit, and Elton mimed a shot, snapping an imaginary
gun to his shoulder. I knew his mood. He was feeling free and excited; the
most anxious stage of the year's work was behind him.

We went first to the house and walked around it, through the overgrown yard, to the front porch. We had in mind to look in through the
windows-at least I did-but when we had climbed the steps we went
no further. Miss Gladys Markman's ruffled curtains were still hanging in
the windows. The porch swing still swung from its rusty hooks.

At the edge of the porch we stood and looked out past the sugar
maple in the yard and over the tops of the trees on the bluff into the
Bird's Branch valley. You could not help but imagine Gladys and Amster
Markman, old and alone, sitting there in the cool of the evening.

"It's a fine place for a house," Elton said.

"It is," I said, moved by possibility.

'And it's a good house, too," Elton said. "It's been kept up. Nothing
wrong with it at all." He looked at me and grinned, knowing that I had a
girl I was serious about down at Hargrave.

We went on around the other side of the house and drew a drink from
the well by the kitchen door. Elton stood with his hand still on the pump
handle, looking at the weed-covered garden plot and the lots out by the
barns. "Nobody going out to milk here this evening," he said.

The old tobacco barn was twisted and leaning as though about to collapse under the weight of its roof. The small feed barn was still straight,
square, level, and plumb; we went in through the half-open door. The
field we had walked across had been unscarred beneath the weed growth,
and now we saw that Amster Markman had planted flagstones edge-up
beneath the stall partitions and thus kept the manure from rotting the
wood.

"He was a good farmer," Elton said. "He had that name."

There were stalls for four horses on one side of the driveway. On the
other side there was a little feed room and two large pens, one with tie
chains and troughs for five cows. A set of old harness still hung from pegs
in front of two of the stalls. All the doors had neat wooden latches. There
was still hay in the loft.

When we stepped out again into the daylight, Elton said, "Let's you
and me buy this old place and set it to rights."

He was watching me, grinning again, to see how the thought would
hit me. Remembering it now, I cannot be sure how serious he was. It was
at least a thought that he could not resist thinking. And he was grinning,
I suppose, because he knew that I could not resist it either.

"But how would I get the money?" I said.

"I don't know." He was still looking at me, grinning, poking in his shirt
pocket for his cigarettes. "Maybe Wheeler would help you. You ought to
ask him."

The possibility then seemed to descend upon us and envelop us, like a
sudden change of weather. It changed everything: our minds, the day,
the place.

We went into the careening tobacco barn.

"The framing and innards are all sound," Elton said. "It could be
straightened up."

We spent a quarter of an hour dreaming aloud of what could be done.
And then we walked in the other ridgetop fields, down into the woods,
and back up by the lane that went out to the road.

"Here's a place where a young fellow could get started and go on,"
Elton said.

I knew it was. The thought of it had already gone all through me. It
aches in me yet, though the Markman Place never became a real farm
again and the house was vandalized and finally burned by hunters.

By the time we crossed the line fence again we knew the layout of the
place, and we had thought of a way to farm it.

And so, late that afternoon, I climbed up the sounding well of my father's
office stairs, the noises of the street shut out behind me so that I rose up
within the sound of my own steps. At the top of the stairs I took the two
further steps to the office door and opened it into the waiting room, now
empty, where Miss Julia Vye's typewriter sat beneath its gray cover. The
room was full of the level-lying late sunlight that entered through the
back windows. I shut the door quietly and took another couple of steps
to see if my father was at his desk.

He had already swiveled his chair around. He was smiling. He said,
"Come in, Andy."

He was in one of his beautiful times. I knew of the times when he
would quietly enter the shade where his cattle were resting, and sit down.
I knew too that he loved the seldom-occurring times late in the afternoons when he sat on at his desk after the office had emptied, when he
could be as quiet as the room, ordering his thoughts. It was a time when
time seemed to have stopped and his work itself was at rest.

Sometimes when I interrupted him at work in the press of a day's
events, he could be short enough, but now he welcomed me into his ease.

"Sit down. I'm glad to see you."

He positioned a chair for me and I sat down. He laid his writing pad on
top of one of the neat stacks of books and papers on his desk. He screwed
the top back onto his fountain pen, took off his glasses and rubbed his
eyes, and then he looked at me.

"What have you got on your mind?"

I told him. Though I guessed that he already knew the Markman Place,
I described it to him as Elton and I had seen it, walking over it. I told him
the possibilities we had seen.

My father's attention, when he freely turned it to you, was a benevolent atmosphere. His hearing was the native element of my tale. He knew
what I had seen; he had imagined such restorations as I had imagined;
he had felt my excitement and my longing. The possibility I was trying
to find voice for-an old place renewed and carried on-had kept him
a farmer, though he was also a lawyer; it had sent him into endless
struggles. Now, having lived to the age he was then and past it, and thinking of my own children, I know how stirred he was, listening to me, for
he was hearing his own passion uttered to him by his son.

And yet he talked me out of it.

"Wait," he said. "You've got more directions in you than you know"

He wanted me to be free for a while longer. Perhaps he felt free to
keep me free because he saw that I was already securely bound; my wish
of that day would not leave me, though I had yet to drift far from it and
return. In talking me out of my hope, he accorded it a gentleness that
enabled me to keep it always.