How It Went, page 15
And so Elton came to the Beechum place with something of a reputation and was so far explained, but to a further extent he came unexplained—as, to a further extent, probably all of us do. His father had been a hard, capable worker, and a renowned teamster who, as Braymer told it, “when he was saw-logging in the woods, could make one horse stand and the other one pull, and never touch a line.” But Elton was only nine years old when his father died, and so what he got from his father must have come partly by example and some instruction, partly from what he overheard. He told me once of his father’s precaution against harness galls when he was working his horses hard in hot weather: “When he stopped to let them rest, he would raise their collars and piss on their shoulders.” This was a practice well known and often followed by the oldtime teamsters. It is another testimony to his father’s horsemanship. But mostly Elton’s inheritance from his father was within him when he was born.
Though Elton blamed his mother for the encroachment of her too-soon-married second husband, he also spoke of her with carefully weighed respect. His gift for management—for rightly ordering his workdays and his work, his place and the seasons—certainly might have come from her. He remembered a dry year, probably 1930, when their garden did not make. When its failure was clear and complete, his mother made one trip to the store, bought all the canned goods she perfectly knew they would need until the next year’s garden, and she never went back to the store. When Elton was still a dependent boy, she bought him a pair of brown cotton gloves at the start of every winter. If he lost them, he got no more. If he kept them, she would mend and patch them endlessly to make them last until spring, and he remembered his pride in the beautiful care she gave to her stitches.
“He don’t come from nothing,” Braymer told my father. “But nothing is pret’ near what he’ll bring with him. He’s got a good enough pair of horses and a milk cow—paid for, I think—some chickens, a few tools. And I’d say he’s married to a right good girl.”
“That’s something,” my father said. “Enough, maybe.”
“Enough for a start,” Braymer said. “There’ll be more. That old place he’s started out on don’t amount to much. It’s held him back. Put him on a good farm—put him on that old Beechum place that’s been looked after—it’ll be something to see.”
It was something to see. Elton came to the Beechum place with Mary, his wife, with the few animals, tools, and household furnishings they had managed so far to own, with his intelligence and talent, his athlete’s grace and dexterity at his work, but also, and above all, the passion with which he used his gifts, his so far cooped-up desire to farm, his quickness in possessing everything he learned, his delight in the use of his mind.
The Beechum place, in a way, set him free. It gave him scope, room to reach out with his mind and his hands to see how much he could do of what might be done. In the first year and often enough in the years that followed, he worked in a kind of elation. In that first spring, once he had made his own beginning at the beginning of the crop year, he began to leave behind him the visible marks and signs by which he would be known. Everywhere he worked he made order. Task by task, piece by piece, he began to recover the Beechum place from the inattention that had come upon it in Old Jack’s waning years. It seemed to turn back toward life. It seemed to come again into sight and to be seen. It began to look, as Elton himself said, “like somebody lives here.”
My father saw that this was so. He told Braymer, “You were right about him.”
And Braymer said, “Wheeler, you don’t need to tell that to me.”
My grandfather Catlett, watching from across the road, saw that it was as Braymer had said it would be. Old Jack saw it. Eventually, so did I. And so, from watching Elton, from working for him as a hired hand, finally from working with him as his neighbor and friend, I came, like Braymer Hardy, to know a good one when I saw one.
We arrive here in this world having forgotten where we came from, though something of a memory seems to remain: a whisper, a distant shine like that of a house window at night on the far side of the valley, perhaps what some have called “the inner light,” to guide us when finally we have been jolted awake. And so we don’t come from nothing. But once here we don’t know where we are. At first I learned the world as a book written, completed the day before my birth, not to be changed by another penstroke. And then I saw that some I knew were departing from it, never to return, and new strangers were arriving. The newcomers, if they stayed, would learn more or less of where they were. And then, in time, they too would depart, taking with them the sum of all they had learned, leaving behind them maybe a few who would remember them, and then the rememberers too would go and be gone. I see in this the order of things, nothing to complain about. I have been here long enough to watch the whole turn of the wheel. I see that we are passing through this world like a river of water flowing through a river of earth. A far cry from a written book, the world—to extend my desperate metaphor—is a book ceaselessly being written, and not in a human language. This too has not been submitted to our judgment, and it is not for us to regret. To give thanks seems truly to be the right response, for as we come and go we learn something of love, the gift and the giving of it, and this appears to lay a worth upon us, if we want it, if we accept it, to give us standing hereafter.
That is the heart speaking in the heart’s language, and out of a mystery so vast that order and chance may be reconciled within it. Because, for all we surely know, we come into our times and places as much at random as leaves falling, it is remarkable, as I look back, that Elton seems to have stepped at the age of twenty-five into vacancies in the story of our home country that had been devised for him, for which he had been predestined and prepared. As he entered into his life on the Beechum place, as if according to nature so that probably none of us saw it happening, he became Old Jack’s appointed son and successor, my grandfather Catlett’s neighbor and student, my father’s student and friend, my friend and teacher. He went among us in his way of always paying attention, learning us, making of us and for us and to us a sense that, without him, we could not have made for ourselves. His sense of us gave us a sort of historical coherence, in which of course he himself was included.
As everybody saw soon enough, Mary was the “right good girl” Braymer had said she was. She was to the end of his days the help meet for him that Elton would always need. She made him the only household and home that ever was securely his. And she loved him. When necessary, she worked beside him in the field. She often cooked dinner, by herself, for a dozen hands and then, as soon as she had done the dishes, went to work with the crew she had fed. And I remember her avowal of Elton’s advantage in the bad weather of the seasons and his moods: “He had me.”
Young as they were, so distinguished as they were by their orphan marriage, the notoriety and the hurt of it, Elton and Mary seemed to make a sort of refuge of my Catlett grandparents, to whom they endeared themselves by being young and well-mannered and glad to help. In the afternoons, when she was caught up in her work, Mary often would walk across the fields to visit with my grandmother, from whom she took comfort and learned a lot and borrowed books, and whom she called “Grandma,” as I did. And often in the evenings Mary and Elton would drive over in their car, a mudstained and hard-used black coupe, to sit and talk until bedtime.
Elton, who was eager to prove himself and was watchful for any advantage, had not been long on the Beechum place before he bought a secondhand tractor, large for the time, with cleated iron wheels. His purpose was to add some custom work for neighbors to his own work at home. Because the tractor was equipped with lights, he could do a good deal of the extra work at night. His only head-on confrontation with my grandfather came when he drove the tractor into the barn lot at our home place early one morning, intending only to take what really was a reasonable shortcut to a neighboring farm where he was going to work. But the tractor’s loud exhaust brought my grandfather out of the barn with his cane in the air. “Nawsir! Nawsir! Get that God damned thing out of here!”
Elton killed the engine. “How’re you this morning, Mr. Catlett!”
“I don’t want that thing on this place!” The old man’s voice was shaking. “It’s got no business here! It don’t belong here!”
“Yessir!” Elton said. “I pretty well know what you mean.” In fact, and all of a sudden, he pretty well did know. He had felt his heart touched by my grandfather’s passion. He sat on his high seat, looking down at my grandpa, who seemed to have come rushing out of a time before that time, and who stood with his cane still raised as if to kill the tractor by striking it on one of its vital parts, and whose eyes shone with a hard blue light. And Elton felt himself, to his surprise, on the verge of a radical beginning he was not altogether glad of. He did still love and was proud of the horses that for a while he would still be using—his seasoned team, Prince and Dan, and the green-broke three-year-old he called Dobbin—and he knew Marce Catlett’s reputation as a mule man and a teamster. But the morning light was still brightening and he was on his way to work. Also he was amused, in fact delighted. He had been smiling when he spoke, and he was still smiling, because the circumstances asked him to do so, also because he could not stop.
“Uncle Marce,” he said, giving him the customary honor of his old age, “I was hoping you wouldn’t mind if I drive across your place to get to Mr. Simms’s. That’ll get me to work a little quicker.”
“Simms’s! You got no work at home?”
“Plenty. But I’m pretty well caught up over there. I’m going to do some plowing for Mr. Simms. Some other people too. I’d like mighty well to get ahold of some money.”
“Money! What do you need with money?”
“Well, I wouldn’t mind having some, but it’s the fellow over at the bank that’s needing it.” He was not going to say that he had got the loan to pay for the tractor.
“You owe money at the bank, boy?”
“Yessir. Mr. Wheeler Catlett has stood behind me for a loan. I want to get it paid.”
Elton knew he had been coming to judgment. He would remember that my grandfather’s eyes had become thoughtful instead of angry, though they kept a hard glitter. He was still looking at Elton, the cane still raised but apparently forgotten.
“Yes!” he said. “Pay if off! Stay out of debt if you can. It’ll ruin you. I know what I’m talking about.”
He turned a little aside then, as if only to let himself think, and for a while neither of them spoke.
“I’ve lived here all my life. Or mighty near all of it. Most of it under the burden of owed money. A time was I asked too much of my place. I made some mistakes. I’ve mended it back the best I could. I’d hate to see it trampled by that thing, with debt driving it.”
Elton said not a word. He had heard his fear speaking.
“But mainly I’ve treated it right. You can look at it and see what you think.”
And then an ache of understanding startled Elton’s heart. It seemed to him that he became older.
“Mr. Catlett,” he said. They were looking at each other then, and Elton’s voice and my grandfather’s had come into accord. “I have looked. And I know what to think.”
“We were sounding alike,” Elton would say when he told this story, which he loved and told many times, to me, to my brother, to anybody listening—and of course always to himself, to test his understanding.
“Boy,” my grandfather said, “you had your shoes on before daylight,” and this was merely a statement.
“Yessir.”
“And it’ll likely be dark again before you pull ’em off.”
“I expect it will.”
Some more thinking then was done, and Elton waited.
“You were aiming to drive through here to get over to Simms’s.”
“Yessir.”
“To break ground for old man Simms.”
“Yessir.”
“To get money to pay to the bank.”
“Yessir.”
“And when you go through my gates, you’ll fasten ’em behind you.”
“Yessir, Mr. Catlett, I will.”
And then, while the tractor’s steering wheel itched under Elton’s right hand, my grandfather looked into him at a place, Elton said, where everything he had ever done “was written in writing.”
When my grandfather was satisfied with his reading, he appeared to remember the cane, which he had lowered and now raised again and this time waved in a kind of salute.
“Son, you’re all right. You’re a good one. Drive on.”
After that, and during the time, almost a year, they were allowed to live and speak as neighbors, you might say that Elton made an effort to memorize my grandfather. To an extent that was significant certainly for me, he succeeded. He was a good student of character, who had always paid close attention to his elders. He had watched Braymer Hardy, for instance, as carefully as Braymer had watched him. He had made no big thing of his watching, but he saw that Braymer was, in his entirely unpresuming way, a superior man. Just by keeping interested, Elton had picked up the character, the feeling, the tone or the tune, of Braymer’s way of being in the world. So he did with my grandfather, whom he often quoted to me. Sometimes this would be a handing on of advice: “See, laugh, and say nothing”—by which my grandfather refused standing to what he thought unworthy. Sometimes, just for his delight in it, Elton would repeat: “Son, you’re all right. You’re a good one. Drive on.” He did not mimic my grandfather, but he did deliver rightly the gravity and tone and emphasis of my grandfather’s sayings as they would be brought to mind. When in remembrance and commendation he would repeat to me, “Ay God, son, I know what a man can do in a day,” the tone of his voice would tell me how, in my grandfather’s understanding, that knowledge could be both exultant and tragic. To a man eager and strong a day is an invitation, but the day passes, and in passing it sets upon his mind and his hands its intractable limit.
And so Elton was able to convey to me my grandfather himself as I remembered him. But he also gave me a competent appraisal and sense of my grandfather’s worth, the tone or tune of his experience of this world, that I could not have received for myself when I was a boy. I am more completely my grandfather’s grandson than I would have been had Elton not so carefully known us.
In the same way, he completed my sonship to my father. That was because he and my father, in a way that was crucial to them both, completed each other. The two of them knew nobody, had no friend, as much in love with farming, so unendingly interested in it, so eager to talk about it, as they were. They spent countless Sunday afternoons driving in my father’s car over their farms, slowly, contemplatively, often stopping, looking at the crops, the pastures, and the livestock, noticing qualities, likenesses and differences, also just keeping company with each other, remembering things, telling stories, laughing. Of all that our land produced in those days, their greatest love and interest went to the pastures and the grazing animals. The sight of good cattle or good sheep on good pasture could stop them even from talking. I know this because from my boyhood until I was more or less one of them, I would be sitting in the back seat, listening. That conversation that they carried on in my father’s sequence of scratched and scarred Chevrolets, considering the variety of its subjects and the ardor and care with which they were discussed, was the best part of my education, and the part I loved best because none of us thought it “educational.” Only long into the absence of those friends have I thought how badly I have sometimes reduced them by calling them my teachers. Each of them at times did deliberately and pointedly teach me. But mostly they taught me by example and by the good chance that made me their overhearer, at times when they thought of me only when I was needed to open a gate.
My father thought Elton “the best manager of work” he had ever known and gave full respect to his mind. Elton, who was an equal partner in their friendship, nevertheless studied my father with full appreciation of the rarity he happened to be in his place and time. One day when my father was showing his cattle to a prospective buyer, Elton rode along in the back seat, in my role as observer, auditor, and gate-opener. The cattle were scattered somewhat widely, and as my father drove his car among them, Elton said, he never approached one of them from a slant or angle that did not show it to advantage. “He was thinking,” Elton said to me, whose mind was still young and wandering, “all the time.”
He told me some things also that I would never have heard from my father. They went, just the two of them, on a bird-hunting trip down south, I forget where. On their way home in the dark of an evening, my father was driving fast, and they were intently talking. They came upon a curve in the road that was too sharp for their speed, as my father saw too late. It was a left-hand curve. On the right-hand side of the road, just at the start of the curve, a farm gate was standing wide open. Braking carefully and still talking, my father drove through the gate into what the headlights revealed to be a fairly level pasture. He had done a lot of what we now call “off-road driving.” He often had avoided getting stuck in unpaved places, and seldom, but often enough, had got stuck. And so he felt equal to the present emergency, made perfectly confident by so much imperfect experience. Without slowing down more than enough, exactly preserving the needed momentum, still talking, he made a long, gentle loop out into the pasture, drove once more through the gate and back again onto the road. They had been talking about the right time to sow red clover. When he first had applied his brakes, my father was remembering one of the half a dozen old farmers he had prized as clients because they knew so much. Mr. Buttermore. Like Elton, I had heard my father speak of Mr. Buttermore.
“Mr. Buttermore,” my father said, “always sowed red clover in November.”
