That Distant Land, page 40
This sudden shift of his attention is so familiar to him as almost to have been expected, for in its fundamental structure, its loyalties and preoccupations, Wheeler’s mind has changed as little in forty years as his office. If change happens, it happens; Wheeler can recognize a change when he sees one, but change is not on his program. Difference is. His business, indoors and out, has been the making of differences. And not the least of these has been this shift that he is about to make again from office to farm.
But for a moment longer he allows himself to be held at the window by the almost solemn stillness of the square and the business streets of the little town, considering again the increasing number of empty buildings, the empty spaces where buildings have been burned or torn down and not replaced, hating again the hopeless expenditure of its decay.
And now, directly across from his office door, a pickup truck eases in to the curb; two men and a woman get out. Wheeler recognizes his cousin, Burley Coulter, Burley’s nephew Nathan, and Hannah, Nathan’s wife. The three come together at the rear of the truck, the woman between the two men, and start across the street.
“What are they doing here?” Wheeler wonders. And then from their direction he understands that they have come to see him. He smiles, glad of it, and presently he hears their footsteps on the stairs.
The footsteps ascend slowly, for Burley is past seventy now and, though still vigorous, no longer nimble.
Wheeler goes through the outer office, where his secretary’s typewriter sits hooded on its desk, and meets them in the dim hallway at the top of the stairs, reaching his hand to them as they come up.
“Hello, Hannah. Go right on in there in the office, honey. How're you, Nathan? Hello, Burley.”
“How you making it, Wheeler?” Burley says in his hearty way, as if speaking to him perhaps across a wide creek. “I told them you’d be here.”
“You were right,” Wheeler says, glad to feel his presence justified by that expectation. It is as though he has been waiting for them. Burley’s hand is hard and dry, its grip quick on his own. And then Wheeler lays his hand on the shoulder of the older man, pressing him toward the door, and follows him through into the greater light of the windowed rooms.
In his office he positions chairs for them in a close arc facing his chair. “Sit down. I’m glad to see you.”
They take chairs and he returns to his own. He is glad to see them, and yet seeing them here, where they regard him with a certain unaccustomed deference, is awkward for him. He sees them often, Burley and Nathan especially, but rarely indoors, and today they have made a formal occasion of their visit by dressing up. Hannah is wearing a gray suit, and looks lovely in it, not to Wheeler’s surprise, for she is still a beautiful woman, her beauty now less what she has than what she is. Nathan is wearing a plaid shirt, slacks, and a suede jacket. Burley, true to custom, has put on his newest work clothes, tan pants and shirt, starched and ironed to creases stiff as wire, the shirt buttoned at the throat but without a tie, a dark, coarse wool sweater, which he has now unbuttoned, and he holds on his lap, as delicately as if it is made of eggshell, his Sunday hat. Only the hat looks the worse for wear, but any hat of Burley’s will look the worse for wear two hours after he has put it on; the delicacy of his hold on it now, Wheeler knows, is a formality that will not last, a sign of his uneasiness within his own sense of the place and the occasion. In his square-cut, blunt hand, so demanding or quieting upon hound or mule or the shoulder of another man, he holds the hat so that it touches without weight the creased cloth of his pants.
“Kind of dreary out, Wheeler,” he says.
“Yes. It is, Burley. Or it looks dreary since it clouded up. I haven’t been out. I was going out, though, pretty soon.”
“Well, we won’t keep you very long.”
But Wheeler didn’t mean to be hinting, and to make up for it, though he knows they have come on business, he says, “You’re caught up in your work, I reckon.”
Nathan laughs and shakes his head. “No.”
“None of us, these times, will live to be caught up,” Burley says. “We finished gathering corn yesterday. Monday morning, I reckon, we’ll take a load of calves to the market. After that we’ll be in the stripping room.”
But Burley is waiting, Wheeler sees, for permission to begin his business. “Well,” he says, “what have you got on your mind?”
“Wheeler,” Burley says, “I want you to write my will.”
“You do?” Wheeler is surprised and embarrassed. One does not normally write a person’s will point-blank in the presence of his heirs. For Burley to bequeath his farm to Nathan right under Nathan’s nose strikes Wheeler as a public intimacy of a sort. He is amazed to hear himself ask, “What for?”
“Well, Wheeler, I’m old enough to die, ain’t I?”
Wheeler grins. “You always have been.” He leans back in his chair as if to make the occasion more ordinary than he can feel it becoming. “Well then, Nathan, you and Hannah should let Burley and me talk this over alone.”
“But Hannah and Nathan ain’t in it, Wheeler. They ain’t going to be in it.”
Wheeler sits up. He says, “Oh,” though that is not what he meant to say. And then, deliberately, he says, “Then who is in it?”
“Danny Branch.”
“Danny.” Though he was determined not to be, Wheeler is again surprised. The springs of his chair sing as he leans slowly back. For a long moment he and Burley sit and look at each other, Burley smiling, Wheeler frowning and staring as if Burley is surrounded by a mist.
“Danny? You’re going to leave your daddy’s place, Dave Coulter’s place, old George Coulter’s place, to Danny Branch?”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
“He’s my boy, Wheeler. My son.”
“Who said he is?”
“Well, Wheeler, for one, I did. I just said it.”
“Do you have any proof?”
Burley has not perceptibly moved, but his thumb and middle finger, which at first pinched just the brim of his hat, have now worked their way to the base of the crown, the brim rolled in his hand. “I ain’t looking for proof, Wheeler. Don’t want any. It’s done too late for proof. If there’s a mistake in this, it has been my life, or a whole lot of it.”
“Did Kate Helen say he was yours?”
Burley shakes his head, not going to answer that one. “Now Wheeler, I know you know the talk that has said he was my boy, my son, ever since he was born.”
Wheeler does know it. He has known it all along. But it is irregular knowledge, irregularly known. He does not want to know it, or to admit that he knows it. “Talk’s talk,” he says. “Talk will be talk. To hell with talk. What we’re dealing with now is the future of a good farm and the family that belongs to it, or ought to.”
“Yes indeed.”
“I don’t think you ought to take a step like this, Burley, until you know for sure.”
“I know all I want to know, more than I need to know.”
Wheeler says, “Well . . . ,” ready to say that he, anyhow, can think of several questions he would like to know the answers to, but Burley raises the hand with the hat in it and stops him.
“It finally don’t have anything to do with anything, Wheeler, except just honesty. If he’s my boy, I’ve got to treat him like he is.”
“But you do treat him like he is, and you have. You gave him half his upbringing, or three-quarters. Right up to Kate Helen’s death you saw that he raised a crop and went to school and had what he needed. You’ve taken him to live with you, him and Lyda and their children, and you’ve . . .” Wheeler stops, realizing that he is saying nothing that all four of them do not already know.
“But now it’s time to go beyond all that. Now I have to say that what belongs to me will belong to him, so he can belong to what I belong to. If he’s my boy, I owe that to him free and clear.”
“Suppose he’s not.”
“Suppose he is.”
Wheeler is slouched low in his chair now, in the attitude, nearly, of a man asleep, except that his fingers are splayed out stiffly where they hang over the ends of his chair arms, and his eyes are widened, set on Burley in a look that would scour off rust. It is not a look easily met.
But Burley is looking back at him, still smiling, confidently and just a little indulgently smiling, having thought beyond where they have got to so far.
“It’s wayward, Wheeler. I knowed you’d say what you’ve said. Or anyhow think it. I know it seems wayward to you. But wayward is the way it is. And always has been. The way a place in this world is passed on in time is not regular or plain, Wheeler. It goes pretty close to accidental. But how else could it go? Neither a deed or a will, no writing at all, can tell you much about it. Even when it looks regular and plain, you know that somewhere it has been chancy, and just slipped by. All I see that I’m certain of is that it has got to be turned loose—loose is the way it is—to who knows what. I can say in a will, and I’m going to, that I leave it to Danny, but I don’t know how it’s going to him, if it will, or past him, or what it’s coming to, or what will come to it. I’m just the one whose time has come to turn it loose.”
Now it seems that they are no longer looking at each other, but at a cloud between them, a difference, that they have never before come so close to making or admitting. Whatever there may have been of lawyer and client in this conversation is long gone now, and Wheeler feels and regrets that departure, for he knows that something dark and unwieldy has impinged upon them, that they will not get past except by going through.
It is Burley’s word wayward that names the difference that they are going to have to reckon with. Wheeler’s mind makes one final, despairing swerve toward the field where his cattle are grazing. For a moment he sees it as he knows it will look now in the wind of late November, in the gray light under the swift clouds. And then he lets it go.
Wayward—a word that Burley says easily. If the things of this world are wayward, then he will say so, and love them as they are. But as his friends all know, it is hard to be a friend of Wheeler’s and settle for things as they are. You will be lucky if he will let you settle for the possible, the faults of which he can tell you. The wayward is possible, but there must be a better way than wayward. Wheeler can remember Burley’s grandfather, George Washington Coulter. He wrote his father’s, Dave Coulter’s, will here in this very room. He does not remember not knowing Burley, whom he has accompanied as younger kinsman, onlooker, and friend through all his transformations, from the wildness of his young years, through his years of devotion in kinship and friendship, to his succession as presiding elder of a company of friends that includes Wheeler himself. It has a pattern clear enough, that life, and yet, as Wheeler has long known without exactly admitting, it is a clear pattern that includes the unclear, the wayward. The wayward and the dark.
Almost as suddenly as his mind abandons its vision of the daylit field, Wheeler recalls Burley as a night hunter. Back in his own boyhood and young manhood, he used to go hunting with Burley, and so he knows the utter simplicity of Burley’s entrances into the woods. He gets out of his car at the yard gate and walks across the dark yard and back porch to the kitchen door, to find Burley waiting for him. “Here you are! I was about to go ahead.”
Burley is at the door, ready to go, his Smith and Wesson twenty-two in its shoulder holster, hat and coat already on. He pulls on his overshoes, takes his lantern from its nail and lights it, steps off the porch, calls the dogs, and walks down over the brow of the hill. Within two hundred steps they are enclosed in the woods along the river bluff, the damp of the night cold on their faces. Along that margin of steep wild ground between the ridges and the gentler slopes lower down, where the woods has stood unmolested from before memory, they walk in the swaying room of yellow lantern light, their huge tapering shadows leaping from tree to tree beside them. And soon, from off in the dark, beyond time, the voice of a hound opens.
It was another world they went to. Wheeler, as often as he went, always went as a stranger and a guest. Or so it seemed to him, as it seemed to him that Burley went always as a native, his entrance into the wild darkness always a homecoming.
One night when they have made a fire and sat down to wait while the dogs make sense of a cold trail, Burley goes to sleep, lying on his back on a pile of rocks, the driest bed available, and wakes an hour later, intently listening. “Dinah’s treed. Let’s go.”
Sometimes Nathan would be with them or Nathan’s brother, Tom, before he went to the war and was killed, or, rarely, Old Jack Beechum or, later, Elton Penn, and nearly always the brothers, Arthur and Martin Rowanberry.
On a moonless, starless night, late, in the quiet after a kill, the dogs lying on the leaves around them, they realize that they are lost. Intent upon a course flagged through the dark by the hounds’ cries, they have neglected the landmarks. Now they stand around the lanterns under a beech in a little draw on a steep, wooded hillside, debating which way they may have come. Below them they can hear water running, but they cannot be sure in which branch.
“Naw,” Arthur Rowanberry says to his brother, “we come by that little barn on the Merchant place and down through the locust thicket.”
“Yes, and then we went up the Stillhouse Run, that’s what we all know, but how many hollers did we pass before we turned up this one?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
That is what it keeps coming back to and they all laugh. The debate is being conducted partly for pleasure, for they are not much lost, but they are tired now and would rather not risk finding themselves by going in the wrong direction.
Finally Burley, who has said nothing, but has stood outside the light, looking and thinking, says, “I know where we are.”
And they all turn to him.
“Where?”
“Where?”
“Right here.”
Though Wheeler is now long past any yen he ever had to roam the woods at night, he knows that Burley is still a hunter, and, with Danny Branch and the Rowanberrys, still a breeder of hounds. At Burley’s house at this moment, probably asleep in their stall in the barn, there is a blue-tick hound named Rock, another much older one named Sputnik, and a bitch by the name of Queen. And now Wheeler’s son, Andy, is apt to be in the company of the hunters on the thawing or the rainy winter nights, and that is the way Wheeler has learned some of the things he knows.
He knows, he has always known, that as often as he has hunted with companions, Burley has hunted alone. The thought of Burley solitary in the woods at night has beguiled Wheeler’s imagination and held it, more strongly perhaps than anything else outside the reach of his own life. For he knows—or from his own memory and from hearsay he is able to infer—that at those times Burley has passed over into a freedom that is old and, because it is strenuous and solitary, also rare. Those solitary hunts of his have always begun by chance or impulse. He may be out of the house already when they begin—on his way afoot to visit a neighbor after supper, maybe, followed by the dogs, who pick up a trail, and he is off. Or he will wake in the night, hearing his dogs treed away on the bluff below his house or in a thicketed slue hollow in the river bottom, and he will get up and go to them, leaving the warm bed, and so begin a route through the dark that may not bring him home again until the sun is up. Or the fever, as he calls it, will hit him while he is eating supper, and he will go, pausing only to strap on the pistol, light the lantern, and stick into the game pocket of his canvas hunting coat an apple or two, a handful of cold biscuits, perhaps a half-pint “against the chill.” They start almost accidentally, these hunts, and they proceed according to the ways of coon and hound, or if the hunting is slow, according to the curiosity of a night traveler over his dark-estranged homeland. If he goes past their house, he may call to the Rowanberrys to join him or at least turn loose their dogs. In his young manhood, before responsibilities began to call him home, these solitary hunts might carry him away two days and nights, across long stretches of the country and back again, ignoring the roads except to cross them, not seen by a human eye, as though in the dark traverses of his own silence he walked again the country as it was before Finley and the Boones, at home in it time out of time.
He has been a man of two loves, not always compatible: of the dark woods, and of the daylit membership of kin and friends and households that has cohered in one of its lineages through nearly a century of living memory, and surely longer, around Ben Feltner, and then Jack Beechum, and then Mat Feltner, and then Burley’s brother, Jarrat, and now around himself. So Wheeler has known him. But it has made him more complex than Wheeler knows, or knows yet, that double love. He has never learned anything until he has had to—as he willingly says, as perhaps is so—but he has had to learn a good deal.
For Wheeler, behind this neatly, somewhat uncomfortably dressed Burley Coulter here in his office, there stands another and yet another: the Burley of the barns and fields of all their lives and of his own loyally kept place and household, and then the Burley of the nighttime woods and the wayward ways through the dark.
In Wheeler’s mind the symbol of Burley’s readiness to take to the woods at nightfall is the tan canvas hunting coat—or, he must suppose, the succession of them, though he does not remember seeing Burley in a new one—that he has worn through all the winters that Wheeler has known him, on all occasions except funerals, tobacco or livestock sales, or trips to Hargrave on business, such as this. The coat, as Wheeler remembers it, is always so worn that it seems more a creature than an artifact, ripped, frazzled, crudely patched, short a button or two, black at the edges. As a farmer, Burley seems, or has come to seem, constant enough, and yet, even as such, to Wheeler he has something of the aspect of a visitor from the dark and the wild—human, friendly to humans, but apt to disappear into the woods.
