That Distant Land, page 11
But as the forests were cut down and the wild bounty of the country diminished and the soil of the slopes fled away beneath the axes and jumper plows of generation after generation of Hamples, the family’s life became ever more marginal. They kept a milk cow or two, a team of mules, meat hogs, and poultry. They raised a patch of corn and a little shirttail crop of tobacco. They kept the garden. They hunted and fished and trapped, dug roots and stripped bark, gathered the wild potherbs and fruit. From the corn that they and their animals did not eat, they distilled a palatable and potent whiskey, of which they sold as much as they did not drink. And yet their life declined until they were reduced to dependence on daywork for their neighbors, who did not need much help. And yet the Hamples persevered, and even provided a sort of hearty and bitter amusement to themselves. Delbert, Nightlife’s father, as an old man became famous for his boast, often repeated in the store at Goforth or in the bank at Port William: “I started out with damn near nothing, and I have multiplied it by hard work until I am going to end up with damn near what I started out with.”
But the Hamples were known, too, for their handiness. The neighborhood liked to boast of them that they could “make anything or fix anything.” They seemed to be born, virtually every one of them, with an uncanny mastery of tools and materials. When weak vision got bred into the line-which it did fairly early—it apparently made little difference, for Hample hands were so adept that they seemed to possess a second sight in their very fingertips. As industrial farm machinery entered the country and became more complicated, the Hamples in a way came into their own. None of them ever had the enterprise to open a proper shop, but their neighbors were forever bringing them something to fix.
Large families of Hamples had been raised in their snug hollow with its two slopes facing one another across the rocky notch of the branch, for the Hample men, whatever the condition of their fields, were fertile, and they married fertile women. As soon as they got big enough to leave or to marry, the Hample generations scattered like seeds from an opened pod. Always, until now, somebody would be left to start the cycle again. But after his father died, Nightlife stayed at home with his mother; he did not marry, and nobody thought he ever would. Even as a Hample, Nightlife was an oddity, and nobody could quite account for him. He had inherited the mechanical gifts of the Hamples; people said that he could do anything with his hands. And yet he seemed also to have been endowed with an ineptitude that was all his own. For instance, when he was about ten years old he contrived a jew’s harp out of an old clock spring and a piece of walnut; it was a marvel of cunning artistry, as everybody affirmed, but when he attempted to play it, it very nearly cut off his tongue. He was a Hample, plain enough, but it was as though when he was a baby his mechanically minded siblings had taken him apart and lost some of the pieces, which they then replaced with just whatever they found lying around. Nightlife lacked almost entirely the rough sense of humor that had accompanied other Hamples into and out of this world. And in addition to the capability of becoming drunk, which all Hample men before him had had in varying degrees, Nightlife had the capability of becoming crazy. His mind, which contained the lighted countryside of Katy’s Branch and Cotman Ridge, had a leak in it somewhere, some little hole through which now and again would pour the whole darkness of the darkest night—so that instead of walking in the country he knew and among his kinfolks and neighbors, he would be afoot in a limitless and undivided universe, completely dark, inhabited only by himself. From there he would want to call out for rescue, and that was when nobody could tell what he was going to do next, and perhaps he could not tell either.
Or that was what it looked like to Tol, who had thought much about it. And that was what Nightlife himself looked like that morning when Tol followed him down into the woods—he looked like somebody who didn’t know where in all the world he was, who didn’t know anybody else was there to see him, much less follow along after him.
Tol followed him nevertheless, and yet he did so with a sense of foregone conclusion. He had too much courtesy, if he had not had too much sense, to believe for sure that Nightlife would die by his own hand that day, or even soon, if ever. But he believed that he would die somehow sometime, and that when he did die, the name and the prospects of the Hamples would depart forever from what until then would be known as the Hample Place.
In assuming that the history and the future of the Hamples in their native hollow would end with Nightlife, Tol was right. Fifty years later, on a Sunday ramble with Elton Penn and the Rowanberry brothers and Burley Coulter, I walked up the branch through what once had been the Hample Place. It was early April. The spring work had started. When Elton and I drove down to the Rowanberry Place after dinner that day, the Rowanberrys said they were stiff and sore and needed to walk. So we climbed up through the woods onto the Coulter Ridge where we ran into Burley, who had nothing better to do, he said, than to go with us. There were five of us then, not hurrying or going anyplace in particular; we were just walking along and looking at the season and the weather, talking of whatever the places we came to reminded us of.
We walked down the hollow the Coulters call Stepstone, past the old barn that stands there, and on down to the Katy’s Branch road. We followed the road up Katy’s Branch a little beyond Goforth, and then we crossed the branch and went up into the woods along the hollow that divided the Hample Place. By then the Hample Place, the Tol Proudfoot Place, the Cotman Place, and others had all been dissolved into one large property that belonged to a Louisville doctor, who had bought it for a weekend retreat and then lost interest in it. Now, except for the best of the ridges, which were rented and farmed badly, the land was neither farmed nor lived on. Every building on it was ruining or already ruined, and the good hillside pastures were covered with young trees—which Burley Coulter said was all right with him.
“It’s a damned shame, anyhow,” said Elton, who did not want to forgive the neglect.
“Well, a fellow looking for something better, he don’t want to stay in a place like this,” Art Rowanberry said.
“Was that doctor looking for something better when he bought it?” Mart said.
“I reckon he thought he already had something better.”
“Well,” Mart said, laughing a little to refuse the argument with his brother, “anyhow, I reckon the more trees, the more coons.”
They were all hunters. All the country around us was thickly crisscrossed with the nighttime passages of their hunts. They had worked over it, too, and as boys had played over it. They knew it by day and by night, and knew something about every scrap of it. As we came up by Goforth Church, the long-abandoned store building, and the site of the vanished schoolhouse, and then passed the Goforth Hill road that went up alongside the Proudfoot Place, they began to tell stories about Tol Proudfoot, quoting the things he had said that nobody who had known him ever forgot. And then when we started up along the Hample branch, they told about the time Nightlife threw his fit, and about Tol and the others following him through the woods.
“What kind of farmers were the Hamples?” I asked.
And Art Rowanberry said, “Oh, they growed a very good winter crop.”
The Hample Place, when we got to it, no longer looked like anybody’s place. The woods, which had started to return after Delbert Hample’s death, had now completely overgrown it. The young trees had grown big enough to have begun to shade out the undergrowth. The barn and other outbuildings were gone without a trace. The house had slowly weathered away beneath its tin roof, which with its gables intact had sunk down onto the collapsed walls. Only the rock chimney stood, its corners still as straight as on the day they were laid. We peered under one of the fallen gables and looked straight into a buzzard’s nest containing one fuzzy white chick and one unhatched egg.
We had come as far as we wanted to go, and we rested there a while before we started back. It was a pleasant place, sheltered, opening to the west, so that the sun would have warmed it on winter afternoons. The north slope above the house would have been good land once, and now with the woods thriving on it again, you could imagine how it once might have evoked a vision of home in whatever landless, wandering Hample had first come—though his and his descendants’ attempt to farm there could only have proved it no place to farm. Their way of farming, in fact, had destroyed maybe forever the possibility of farming there. And so you felt that the trees had returned as a kind of justice. They had only drawn back and paused a moment while a futile human experiment had been tried and suffered in that place, and had failed at last as it was bound to do.
As we were leaving, we wandered past the fallen house and across the old garden spot to the branch. And then we saw that the chimney was not the only thing left standing, for there in the middle of the streambed stood a cylinder of laid rock that once had lined the Hamples’ well, and now it stood free like another chimney, turned wrong side out, where the stream had cut the earth from around it.
And so the Hamples had come and gone and left their ruin. And now the trees had returned. The trees on the little shelf where the garden had been were tall young tulip poplars that lifted their opening buds into the still light and air of that evening with such an unassuming calm that you could almost believe they had been there always.
Art Rowanberry, I remember, stood looking at them a long time. And then, turning to go, he said, “Well, old Nightlife didn’t have to leave this world for want of wood, I don’t reckon.”
And so Tol was right. The Hamples did die out on the Hample Place. But they did not die out of the community. There are still plenty of Hamples, on Cotman Ridge and elsewhere, to this day.
Tol had just begun to wonder when Sam was going to show up when Sam showed up. Tol raised his hand to him, and Sam nodded. In silence then they picked their way along together, Sam walking behind Tol. Between themselves and Nightlife, they kept a sort of room of visibility, the size of which varied according to the density of the foliage. They meant to stay separate from Nightlife by the full breadth of that room. When the foliage thickened, they drew closer to Nightlife to keep him in sight. Where the trees were old and there was not much undergrowth, they slowed down and let him get farther ahead.
After a while Nightlife came to a pile of rocks that had been carried from some long-abandoned corn or tobacco patch, and he sat down, laying the gun across his lap. He appeared now to be carrying the gun as if it were some mere hand tool, not recognizing what it was, just as he appeared to grant no recognition to himself or to where he was. When he stopped and sat down, Tol and Sam stood still. When he got up and started on again, they followed.
After a while Braymer Hardy was there behind Sam. And not long after that, when Tol again looked back, Walter Cotman and Tom Hardy were there. Tol stopped them then, and beckoned them close. He was older than the oldest of them by twenty years; he could have been father to them all, and they came obediently into whispering distance.
“Boys,” he said, “ain’t no use in us walking lined up so that old gun could hit us all with one shot. Kind of fan out. We’ll keep him in sight better that way.”
They fanned out as he said. And now the room of sight that had been defined only by a diameter was given a circumference as well. As they moved along, they continued to draw closer together or move farther apart, according to visibility. In that moving room that at once divided and held them together the only clarity was their intent not to let Nightlife be further divided from them.
They moved along with him wherever he moved. He went, still, pretty much level along the face of the slope, into the draws and out around the points, through old woods and through thicket, across pastures and tobacco patches, but mostly in the woods. Sometimes he would stop or sit down, and then they would wait, and when he went ahead they would go with him. That Nightlife was not himself, that he had become merely the vehicle of something he suffered that they had not suffered, they could tell by the way he moved and carried himself, the way he looked always straight ahead and always at the ground. He moved like a man in the concentration of urgent bodily pain, though they knew his pain was not of the body. Maybe he was not going to kill himself, they thought. Maybe he just needed something he did not have, had never had, did not know how to ask for, and maybe did not know the name of. But they knew also that Old Fetcher was an influential weapon. It was not a squirrel rifle—not a gun with which you could confidently undertake to shoot yourself just a little. If you picked up Old Fetcher, declaring that you might as well shoot yourself, then they knew as surely as if they held it in their own hands, you couldn’t put that gun down again without deciding not to shoot yourself.
It was a long time since morning now, and the day was getting hot. In the woods it was still and close. All five of them had sweated through their shirts. And still they moved along with Nightlife, and still they formed their rough and ever-shifting semicircle at the limit of sight. They were squirrel hunters and they knew how to move unobtrusively and quietly in the woods. In the spell of Nightlife’s silence and their own, strangeness came over them, as if they had died and come back in another time. Everything familiar had become strange. What they saw around them now seemed no longer to be what they knew and had always known, but seemed only to remind them of a time when they had known those things. They were following a man whom it had never occurred to them to follow before, who now had become central to their lives, and who perhaps was trying to find his way out of this world.
By noon they had come all the way down the Katy’s Branch valley and turned into the valley of the river, still keeping along the mostly wooded face of the bluff, high up. Now they were conscious of the bigger space and larger light; down through openings among the treetops they could see the river itself bending across the valley floor between its two parallel rows of trees, leaving the wide bottomlands first on one side and then the other. They could see the cornfields and houses and farm buildings in the bottoms on down into the blue distance halfway to Hargrave. Off somewhere on the far side of the river they heard a dinner bell.
And now they were aware also of the world going on, unaware of them and their extraordinary worry and purpose. It seemed unaccountable to them that they should know so well where they were when nobody else in all the world had any idea.
Presently they came to a deep crease in the face of the slope, worn there over the millennia by a steep wet-weather stream known as Squire’s Branch. And here instead of turning into the hollow in order to keep on the level as he had been doing, Nightlife slanted down into the dry bed of the branch and then turned straight down toward the river, stair-stepping down the tumbled rocks of the streambed. The others followed in their half-circle, with Tol in the center and the others fanned out on either side.
They stayed in the wooded hollow, but as the slopes gentled they could see open pasture off through the trees first on the left and then also on the right. And then they could see a little tobacco patch on the left. From time to time, the foliage opening, they could see the little store at Squire’s Landing and the house on the slope above it where Uncle Othy and Aunt Cordie Dagget lived and farmed a little and fished a little and kept the store and the landing and kept an eye on the comings and goings of the neighborhood.
When Uncle Othy and Aunt Cordie’s house came full into sight, Nightlife climbed out of the streambed onto the open slope. And then he walked down across Uncle Othy’s cow pasture, through the yard gate, across the yard, up onto the back porch, and through the kitchen door without so much as a knock.
Tol stopped at the edge of the woods and the others came up beside him.
“What now?” Walter Cotman said.
Tol uttered a sound that was partly a laugh and partly a grunt. What he should have done was all too clear to him now, and to the rest of them, too. He should have sent Sam Hanks and Tom Hardy, who were on that side of the branch, to Uncle Othy’s ahead of Nightlife. But it had not occurred to him that Nightlife, who earlier had avoided him and Sam and who had spent the whole morning skulking along in the woods by himself, would think of going right into somebody’s house. Tol had his lower lip between his teeth.
“Well, what are we going to do?” Braymer Hardy said.
“Boy, there ain’t nothing to do. We can’t go barging into Aunt Cordie’s kitchen ourselves. He’s the only one that’s got a gun. And if we had guns they wouldn’t do us any good, unless we wanted to shoot somebody or get shot, which I reckon we don’t.”
“So I reckon we’re going to wait,” Walter Cotman said. And he sat down.
The others seemed to consider sitting down also for they would not have minded a rest, but nobody but Walter did so. Nor could they stay where they were. Watching the house always, they eased gradually down into the yard. They did not go closer to the house than the yard gate for fear of inciting Nightlife to some damage they feared without naming. The worst they could imagine now had as good a license to happen as the best, and there was nothing at the moment that they could do. They did not go to the shade for the same reason that they did not sit down: it would not have been right. All the morning, it seemed to them, they had been walking the rim of the world, a narrow, shadowy, steeply sloping margin between life and death, and this imposed a strict propriety on them all. But from where they stood even with the kitchen windows open, they could not tell what was happening inside.
They weren’t going to know what was happening inside until after the story was over and Uncle Othy told Sam Hanks and Sam told Tol and Tol told the others at church on Sunday morning.
Uncle Othy and Aunt Cordie were eating dinner. It was fried catfish. The others knew that much; they could smell it out in the yard. It smelled better than they wanted it to, for they were hungry
“Do you want some cornbread, Othy?” Aunt Cordie said.
And then the screen door opened and here came Nightlife right into the kitchen with that old gun cradled in the crook of his left arm and looking like he was trying hard to remember something that he only barely remembered forgetting. They had not heard him until he put hand to the door and the spring sang.
