How It Went, page 4
The woods floor was covered with flowers, and the tree leaves were just coming out. Andy’s eyes were quick in those days, and he could see everything that was happening among the little branches at the top of the woods. He saw after a while, by some motion it made way up in a white oak and not far from the leafy globe of its nest, a young gray squirrel that, except for its tail, appeared to be no bigger than a chipmunk.
The squirrel was just loitering about, in no hurry, and Andy studied it carefully. The thought of catching and having something so beautiful, so small, so cunningly made, possessed him at once and entirely. He wanted it as much as he had ever wanted anything in his life. He knew perfectly that he could not catch a mature squirrel. But this one being so young and inexperienced, he thought he had half a chance.
The tree was one of the original inhabitants of the place. It had contained a fair sawlog in the time of Boone and the Long Hunters. By now it was far too big to be embraced and shinned up by a boy, or a man either, and its first limb was unthinkably high. But well up the slope from the old tree was a young hickory whose first branch Andy could shinny up to, and whose top reached well into the lower branches of the oak. Andy was probably a better than average climber, and he had spent a fair portion of his life in trees. He was small for his age, and was secure on branches too flimsy for a bigger boy.
He went up the hickory and then into the heavy lower limbs of the oak. The climbing was harder after that. Sometimes he could step from one thick limb to another up the trunk. Sometimes he had to make his way out to the smaller branches of one limb, from there into the smaller branches of the one above, and from there back to the trunk again. Finally he was in the top of the tree, a hundred or so feet from the ground. Just above him was the little squirrel, more beautiful, more perfect, up close than it had looked from the ground. The fur of its back and sides was gray, but to think “gray” was not enough. When he looked at it steadily and long, as his desire bade him to do, a wreath of light and color seemed to surround it. The fur of its underside was immaculately white. Its finest features were its large, dark eyes bright with intelligence and the graceful plume of its tail as long as its body.
Andy knew with a sort of anticipatory ache in the insides of his hands and fingers what it would feel like to catch and hold this lovely creature and look as closely at it as he wished. He climbed silently, and slowly from one handhold and foothold to another, up and out the little branches that held him springily and strongly until he was within an easy arm’s reach of the squirrel. He reached his hand almost unmovingly out until it seemed almost to touch the squirrel. His hand seemed to him to offer a tenderness so welcoming that the squirrel might give itself into his grasp. Instead, it leapt, he felt, almost from his fingertips suddenly and easily to another branch. It did not go far, but the small branch it was now on belonged to a different limb from the one Andy was on. And so he had to go back to the trunk and start again. As he climbed he watched the squirrel with a curiosity as palpable and pressing as hunger.
About the same thing happened a second time. The almost-catchable little squirrel waited, watching Andy with a curiosity of its own, until it was almost caught. This time it ran a little farther out on its limb and leapt onto a branch of another tree, another oak. Now Andy had to climb a long way down to find a limb that crossed to the second tree, make his way out to limbs still affording handholds and footholds, limber enough to lean under his weight until he could catch a limb as strong in the other tree, swing over, go to the trunk of that tree and up and out to the highest branches, where again he almost caught the squirrel.
That was the way it happened so many times he lost count. It was as if he were being led by the hand with which each time he reached out. It was as if his hand itself incarnated his desire, and it foreknew or forefelt the squirrel’s shapeliness and warmth, the breath and pulse of the life of it. And the squirrel seemed to wait, watching with interest, imaginably even with amusement, taking its rest, while Andy laboriously made his approach, and then at the last second, without apparent fear, seemingly at its leisure, leaping beyond reach, never far, but always too far to be easily approached again. In fact, Andy and the squirrel must have been at about the same stage of their respective lives: undoubting, ignorant, fearless, curious, happy in the secret altitudes of the treetops and the little branches, neither of them at all intimidated by the blank blue sky above the highest branches, the outer boundary of both their lives.
It was a time out of time, when time was suspended in constant presence, without past or future. It began to move again only when the squirrel finally leapt to the snag of a dead tree and disappeared into an old woodpecker hole.
And then it was late in the day, past sundown, and Andy was still high up among the tall trees. He had not thought of getting back to the ground for a long time, and from where he had got to he was a long time finding a way. The trunks were too large to grip securely and were limbless from too high up. He finally made his way to a grapevine, and slid down it slowly to ease the friction on his hands and legs. When he stood finally on the ground again, it seemed at first to rock a little as if he had stepped down into a boat. He was sweating, his hands and arms and legs bark-burnt and stinging, and he was a long way from home. He recovered his fishing pole, now divested of its old charm, and started home.
When the screen door slammed behind him and he stepped into the back porch, his grandma opened the kitchen door.
“Where,” she said, drawing the word out, “on God’s green earth have you been?”
“Fishing,” he said, which was true as far as it went.
But he was late. He was too late. It was getting dark. In coming back so late he had betrayed not only her trust but his own best justification for staying out there in the free country with her and not in town.
“Oh,” he said, “I’ll go milk right now. I’ll hurry. I won’t be long.”
She said, “I did it.”
So: While he had been up in the treetops with the squirrel, unknowing the time of day, she, she alone, had done the evening chores and milked the cow. She said no more. She left him, as she would have put it, to stew in his own juice, which he did. He would not forget again. He would not forget the way he had learned his lesson.
Nor would he forget for the rest of his life his happiness of that afternoon. What would stay with him would not be his frustration, his failure to catch the squirrel, but the beauty of it and its aerial life, and of his aerial life while he tried to catch it among the small, supple branches that sprang with his weight as if almost but not quite he might have leapt from one to another like the squirrel, almost but not quite flying.
He had not wondered how, if he had caught the squirrel, he would have made his way back to the ground. It would take him several days to get around to thinking of that. The heights of that afternoon he had achieved as a quadruped. From where he had got to he could not have climbed down with his two feet and only one hand while in the other holding the squirrel. If he had caught it, he would have had to let it go.
One of Us
(1950)
Grover Gibbs in his day and strength was no doubt the head philosopher-king of Port William. His only competitor for that “position,” as Mr. Milo Settle called it, would have been Burley Coulter. But during Burley’s often absences, for reasons known and unknown, from the Port William conversation, Grover would be faithfully present and presiding. He had not been elected, and he had no power. He presided by his presence, the excellence of his own talk and telling, and his insatiable relish of the wondrous world of Port William and its never-failing supply of stories worth telling. His preference in subject matter, hardly rare among the philosophers, ran in general to the funny and in particular to the ridiculous.
Port William’s most productive source of the ridiculous was the prepotent tribe of Berlews, who, through several generations, had brought forth a succession of acts and exploits always surpassing the expectations of their most astute observers and historians. But there was also the even larger tribe of what Grover called the Ridiculers, whose entirely democratic membership extended to all who were qualified, including prominently himself.
It had been he, after all, who to make a drinking hole for his cows in a frozen pond, and not quite sober, had stood on the designated square of ice while he chopped all around it with his axe—a story that would have remained untold had he not told it.
And it was Grover who in all innocence, one night in Jayber Crow’s barber shop, suggested to the young man known as Woger Woberts, for his pronunciation of his name, that he and his wife, Sassy, needed to get started on some children—to receive, as if by divine intervention, Woger’s thereafter famous reply: “Ain’t no use plantin’ ’em one night and wootin’ ’em up the next.”
Grover received this and other such offerings as gifts to be thanked for, rightly appraised, and gathered into memory as provision against times of need. It may be that he presided over the dialogues of Port William also because of the remarkable character of expectation in his face, his eyes always alight with watching, his lips pressed lightly and firmly together as if in readiness to laugh and in readiness to restrain his laughter. And yet there was something more in his countenance that I saw only after I had grown fully into my own inheritance of the membership of Port William and the shared knowledge that made us friends after the fashion of a younger man with an older one. I could see in his eyes and his demeanor then the presence of a knowledge, far from laughter, of this world’s loves and losses that I suppose he had revealed fully, and then perhaps inadvertently, only to Beulah, his wife. There was in his face, anyhow, a power that informed anybody who needed to know that he was not a superficial or a simple man.
Because he was not a superficial or a simple man, his assessment of the various Ridiculers and their doings seemed to consist at once of judgment, amusement, and forgiveness. Likewise, though in different degrees, there was a forbearance and a considering sort of decorum among most of the Port William men who gathered and talked in front of the stores in the summer shades or around the wintertime stoves. The town’s never-resting amusement at itself was always reined back somewhat scrupulously short of either condemnation or glee. They were well known to themselves and one another, as they knew themselves they knew that they were known, and each knew how he and each of the others stood in the ranks of the Ridiculers. I once heard Grover say, after a burst of perhaps too much merriment at the expense of one of the Ridiculers, “Well. He’s one of us.”
By the grace of such knowledge, they responded with full appreciation, but also with a thoughtful complexity of reserve, when Laz Berlew, working as a carpenter’s hired man in the very midst of the conversation and commerce of Port William, having sawed rapidly through a board, remarked with a knowing shake of his head to the inevitable audience: “I always like to cut my boards good and short. If you cut ’em too short, you can always splice ’em. If you cut ’em too long, ain’t much you can do about it.”
They granted a similarly circumspect delight to Cocky Berlew, who, on the occasion of the birth of his first child, beckoned the doctor aside to tell him, “Anything you want to know, you ask me. She ain’t got no education”—and again when, on his reappearance in town after the birth of his eleventh child, they asked him, “Well, was it a boy or a girl?” and he replied, “I dog if I heard ’em say.”
Not probably the funniest story that Grover knew, but the one he most enjoyed telling, involved two Ridiculers, and it took place, not in the intimate neighborhood of Port William, but just outside its farthest verge, down on the river road about halfway to Hargrave.
At that in-between place, fifty or sixty years ago, there was a small house just a few steps off the road with the woods grown up all around it. At some time long ago that house must have had the brightness and fragrance of new lumber, but nobody living could remember it new. Now it was far gone in the direction of the ground beneath it. As if in preparation for the fate of all natural things, the boards and battens of its outer walls had achieved about the color of the topsoil of the woods. A strong wind way back in the past had caused it to lean, as some might have said, somewhat alarmingly away from its chimney so that the chimney and the peak of the gable on that side were parted by maybe two feet. It had a number of patches, scraps of wood or tin, scabbed on to the surfaces of the boards. A small pane of one of its mullioned windows had been replaced by what appeared to be a wadded fragment of an old quilt.
In and about the middle of the last century this house was inhabited by two men whose average age, Grover said, was somewhere between thirty and sixty. Before they had happened upon so civilized a dwelling, also according to Grover, they had been living way off up Woodcockers Branch in a big hollow sycamore. To the ever-observant talkers up in Port William they were known as the Squatly brothers. They looked enough alike to be brothers, whether they were or not. Their appearance seemed, in that era, to be as unchanging as that of the house, and to harmonize, as you might say, with that of the house. Their clothes were similarly tattered and crudely patched. Their hair and whiskers appeared to have grown to a length of ideal dishevelment and then to have given up.
In times of good weather the two Squatlys were usually to be seen sitting side by side in a porch swing that swung from a front porch roof so near to collapse that Burley Coulter had seen fit, he said, to purchase life insurance policies on the occupants. In a more enlightened time such as the present, the Squatly brothers would be thought to live below “the poverty line.” But of any need they may have had they gave no visible sign. They did not even look at the road. To those of us who passed from Port William on the way to Hargrave and from Hargrave on the way back to Port William, they appeared to be merely permanent. They clearly were Ridiculers but not of the kind normally produced in Port William.
Because we now have progressed so far from the “post-war world,” and from memories of the still fully living Port William of that time, I must interrupt my story here to supply some facts of history.
A Packard, once upon a time, was a luxury automobile, a superior sort of outer garment, meant to recommend its wearer to the Heavenly Host. This vehicle was known in Port William mainly by reputation, but Port William knew its reputation very well. That is the primary fact.
A related fact is that in the years of his life from the time he began stepping out until his children grew up and left home, leaving it emptied of all but himself and Beulah, and he began to drive used pickup trucks, Grover Gibbs owned a succession of used cars still more or less usable, each of which, as a joke partly on himself, partly on anybody dumb enough to ask, he called “a small Packard.”
A further fact is that in those bygone days, advertisements in various comic books and magazines offered the opportunity to send off a coupon, which would make the applicant a salesman of such portable articles of commerce as magazine subscriptions, garden seed, curative soaps, salves, and ointments. These offers, I believe, were aimed mostly at boys, who would not, as suggested, become rich, but who would likely be able to embarrass family members and neighbors into purchases individually trifling that might gather into untrifling profits. I myself spent several weeks selling magazine subscriptions in order to win the most valuable of the offered prizes: a “projector,” consisting of a bright red tin box, a mirror, a lens, and a light bulb, which would enlarge upon a wall anything of a certain size that you wanted to “project.” Because perhaps of its redness in its photograph, I thought it the most desirable thing I had ever desired. The thing itself, after thirty minutes, had about the charm of an empty bottle. Other boys, more charitably motivated and less gullible, peddled Cloverine Salve, a remedy commonly present in the households of grandparents.
And so there came a rainy morning when Grover Gibbs was on his way, in the small Packard of the moment, down the river road to Hargrave to take a mess of roasting ears to his landlady, the imperious and always somewhat amusing rich widow Mrs. Charlotte Riggins La Vere, but also to see whoever might be seen in the hallways of the courthouse and other places of leisure, and to wonder at whatever wonders might be revealed.
Since just before daylight, little showers had come and gone, as if the sky were making up its mind finally to rain in earnest. When Grover had left home it had rained just enough to excuse him for taking the day off. But when he had got well down the road, as if to grant him a full justification, the sky got serious and sent down upon him and all the surrounding river valley a cloudburst backed by a hard wind. “All of a sudden,” he would say later, “I couldn’t see from home plate to first base.” He reined the small Packard to a proper crawl, straining to keep sight of the road.
Before long, at first ghostly and then solidly in the strife and fume of the downpour, there appeared one of the Squatly brothers, walking. His head was drawn down between his shoulders, leaving just enough of it stuck out to wear the old felt hat whose waterlogged brim appeared to have flapped down over his eyes. “I don’t reckon he could see hardly any farther than his feet,” Grover said. “And there he all of a sudden was right in front of me, and not much off to the side either. If I’d been one of these hot young bucks, driving the way they do, I’d have run right over him.”
