That Distant Land, page 41
If Burley has walked the marginal daylight of their world, crossing often between the open fields and the dark woods, faithful to the wayward routes that alone can join them, Wheeler’s fidelity has been given to the human homesteads and neighborhoods and the known ways that preserve them. Through dark time and bad history, he has been keeper of the names that bear hope of light to the human clearings, and an orderly handing down. He is a preserver and defender of the dead, the more so, the more passionately so, as his acquaintance among the dead has increased, and as he has better understood the dangers to their living heirs. How, as a man of law, could he have been otherwise, or less? How, thinking of his own children and grandchildren, could he not insist on an orderly passage of these frail human parcels through time?
It is not as though he is unacquainted with the wayward. He has, God knows, spent his life trying to straighten it out. The wayward is a possible way—because, for lack of a better, it has had to be. But a better way is thinkable, is imaginable, and Wheeler, against all evidence and all odds, is an advocate of the better way. To plead the possibility of the merely possible, losing in the process all right to insist on the desirability of what would be better, is finally to lose even the possible—or so, in one way or another, Wheeler has argued time and again, and against opponents of larger repute than Burley Coulter. If he is set now to do battle with his friend, his purpose is not entirely self-defense, though it is that.
He does not forget—it has been a long time since he has been able to forget——that he is making his stand in the middle of a dying town in the midst of a wasting country, from which many have departed and much has been sent away, a land wasting and dying for want of the human names and knowledge that could give it life. It has been a comfort to Wheeler to think that the Coulter Place, past Burley’s death, would live on under that name, belonging first to Nathan, whom Wheeler loves as he loves Burley, and then to one of Nathan’s boys. That is what he longs for, that passing on of the land, in the clear, from love to love, and it is in grief for that loss that he is opposing Burley. But this grief has touched and waked up a larger one. How many times in the last twenty years has Wheeler risen to speak, to realize that the speech he has prepared is a defense of the dead and the absent, and he is pleading with strangers for a hope that, he is afraid, has no chance?
“It was wayward when it come to me,” Burley is saying. “Looked like to me I was there, born there and not someplace else, just by accident. I never took to it by nature the way Jarrat did, the way Nathan here, I think, has. I just turned up here, take it or leave it. I might have gone somewhere else when I got mustered out in 1919, but I come back, and looked like I was in the habit of staying, so I stayed. I thought of leaving, but the times was hard and Pap needed me—or needed somebody better, to tell the truth—and I stayed. I stayed to help bring up Tom and Nathan after their mother died. And then Pap died and Mam was old, and I stayed on with her. And when she died I stayed on and done my part with Jarrat; the boys was gone then, and he needed me. And somehow or other along the way, I began to stay because I wanted to. I wanted to be with Jarrat, and Nathan and Hannah here, and Mat and you and the others. And somewhere or other I realized that being here was the life I had because I’d never had another one any place else, and never would have.
“And that was all right, and is, and is going to be. But it looks like a bunch of intentions made out of accidents. I think of a night now Wheeler—I lie awake. I’ve thought this over and over, from one end to the other, and I can’t see that the way it has been is in line with what anybody planned or the way anybody thought it ought to be.”
“But they did plan. They hoped. They started hoping and planning as soon as they got here—way back yonder.”
“It missed. Or they did. Partly, they were planning and hoping about what they’d just finished stealing from the ones who had it before, and were already quarreling over themselves. You know it. And partly they were wrong. How could they be right about what hadn’t happened? And partly it was wayward.”
“But what if they hadn’t planned and hoped—the ones that did anyhow—the good ones.”
“Then we wouldn’t know how far it missed, or how far we did, or what we missed. I ain’t disowning them old ones, Wheeler.”
“But now it’s your time to plan and hope and carry it on. That we missed doesn’t make any difference.”
“No. That time’s gone for me now, and I’ve missed probably as bad as the worst of the others. Now it’s my time to turn it loose. You’re talking to an old man, Wheeler, damn it!”
“Well, you’re talking to an old man too, damn it, but I’ve still got some plans and hopes! I still know what would be best for my place!”
“I know the same as you, Wheeler. I know what would be best for my place too—somebody to live on it and care about it and do the work. And I know what it would look like if somebody did. But I come here today to turn it loose. And I’ve got good reason to do it.”
“You’ve got a better reason than you’ve told me?”
Burley has been sitting upright on his chair as if it were a stool. Now he sags back, and for a moment sits staring at Wheeler without paying any particular attention to him, as if he doesn’t notice or it doesn’t matter that Wheeler is staring back at him. Arid then he says, “Cleanse thou me from secret faults.”
“What?”
“Cleanse thou me from secret faults.” As always when he quotes Scripture, Burley is grinning, unwilling, as Wheeler knows, to be entirely serious about any part of it that he can understand, even though, once he has understood it, he may be entirely willing to act on it.
Recognizing the passage now, Wheeler grins too, and then laughs and says what otherwise he would not say, “Well, Burley, mighty few of your faults have been secret.”
And that is pretty much a fact. Burley Coulter’s faults have been public entertainment in the town and neighborhood of Port William ever since he was a boy, most of his transgressions having been committed flagrantly in the public eye, and those that were not, if they had any conceivable public interest, having been duly recounted to the public by Burley Coulter himself. His escapades have now, by retelling, worn themselves as deeply into that countryside as its backroads.
Wheeler himself has loved to tell the story of Burley’s exit from the back door of Grover Gibbs’s house, having paid his compliments to Beulah Gibbs, as Grover returned unexpectedly through the front door. Carrying his clothes in his arms through a night black as the inside of a gourd, Burley ran through the stock pond behind the barn, and then, heading downhill into the woods, got behind a big calf who was going slower than he was, whereupon, according to him, he cried, “Calf, get out of the way! Let somebody run that knows how!”
“All that’s past,” Wheeler says. “Whatever was wrong in it can be forgiven in the regular way. When the psalmist said ‘thou,’ he didn’t mean anybody in Port William or Hargrave. That account’s not to be settled here.”
“But some of it is.” Burley’s smile is now gone altogether. “Listen, Wheeler. I didn’t come to take up a lot of your time, but we’ve done got this started now. I’m not telling you what you need to know to be my lawyer. I’m telling you what you need to know to be my friend. If a lawyer was all I wanted, I reckon I wouldn’t have to hire a friend.”
“You’re not hiring a friend. You have one. Go on.”
“Well, Kate Helen was an accommodating woman, too accommodating some would say, but she was good to me, Wheeler. We had what passed with me then for some good times. When I look back at them now, they still pass with me for good, though they come up with more results than I expected. I ain’t going to go back on them, or on her, though I’m sorry, Lord knows, for some of the results.”
There is a tenderness in Burley’s voice now that Wheeler did not expect, that confesses more than he is yet prepared to understand, but it gives Kate Helen a standing, a presence, there in the room, one among them now, who will not lightly be dismissed. And Wheeler is carried back to a day in his own life when he passed along the lane in front of Kate Helen’s house, and saw her sitting on the porch in a rocking chair, barefooted, a guitar forgotten on her lap, a red ribbon in her hair. He has never forgotten. And the Kate Helen who attends them now, in Wheeler’s mind as perhaps in Burley’s, is Kate Helen as she was then—a woman, as Burley used to say, who could take up a lot of room in a man’s mind. In Wheeler’s opposition to Burley there is no uncertainty as to what Burley saw when he looked at Kate Helen; Wheeler saw too, and he remembers. But now she has come back to him with something added to her: all that was said or implied in the gentleness with which Burley spoke of her. If she is with them now, Burley is now with them as her protector, and there are some things that Wheeler might have said about her that he is not going to say, and will never say again. He feels under his breastbone the first pain of a change.
But he turns to Nathan. “Is this what you want? If it wasn’t to be Danny Branch’s, it would be yours—your children’s.” He is holding out against what he sees he will have to give in to, still determinedly doubting what he knows he is going to have to believe, and his voice has the edge of challenge in it. He will not settle easily for the truth just because it happens to be the truth. He wants a truth he can like, and they are not surprised.
As his way is, Nathan has been sitting without moving, staring down at the toe of his shoe, as if he is shy perhaps, and now he makes only the small movement that brings his gaze up to meet Wheeler’s. It is the look of a man utterly resolved to mean what he says, and Wheeler feels the force of it.
“I know what Uncle Burley wants, Wheeler, and it’s all right. And I aim to stick to Danny.”
Burley passes his hand through the air, the hat still in it, but forgotten now; it is just along for the ride. “I’ve not asked that of him, Wheeler. I don’t ask anything. If Nathan sticks to Danny after I’m dead, that’ll be fine, but my ghost won’t trouble him if he don’t.”
Wheeler turns to look at Hannah, knowing what to expect, but his eyes tax her nevertheless, making it difficult.
“Yes,” she says, nodding once and smiling at him, being as nice to him as she can be, though he can sense how much she is forbearing. “It’s what we all want. It’s best.” And without looking away from Wheeler, she reaches for Burley’s left hand, and drawing it over into her lap holds it in both of her own. To Wheeler’s surprise then, her eyes suddenly fill with tears.
And then his own do. He looks down at his hands. “Well.”
“Wheeler,” Burley says, “Nathan and Hannah are going to have enough land, and their children too—”
“What if they weren’t?”
“—and Danny’s a good boy, a good young man.”
“What if he wasn’t?”
“There’s no use in coming with them what-ifs, Wheeler. I ain’t responsible for them. They dried up and blowed away long years ago. What if I had been a better man?
“If Nathan needed what I’ve got, I’d have to think of that. He don’t. Besides what he has got on his own, he’s his daddy’s heir, and in the right way. You might say that he has come, as far as he has got anyhow, by the main road, the way you have, Wheeler, and has been regular. I haven’t been regular. I’ve come by a kind of back path—through the woods, you might say, and along the blulffs. Whatever I’ve come to, I’ve mostly got there too late, and mostly by surprise.
“I don’t say everybody has to be regular. Being out of regular may be all right—I liked it mostly. It may be in your nature. Maybe it’s even useful in a way. But it finally gets to be a question of what you can recommend. I never recommended to Jarrat’s boys or Danny or your boys that they ought to be careless with anything, or get limber-legged and lay out all night in a hayrick. Your way has been different from mine, but by my way I’ve come here where you are, and now I’ve got to know it and act like it. I know you can’t make the irregular regular, but when you have rambled out of sight, you have got to come back into the clear and show yourself.”
“Wait now,” Wheeler says. “I didn’t—”
But Burley raises his hand and silences him. It is as if they recognize only now a change that has been established for some time: Burley has quietly, without gesture, assumed the role of the oldest man—the first time he has ever done this with Wheeler—and has begun to speak for Wheeler’s sake as well as his own.
“I know how you think it ought to be, Wheeler. I think the same as you. I even thought once that the way things ought to be was pretty much the way they were. I thought things would go on here always the way they had been. The old ones would die when their time came, and the young ones would learn and come on. And the crops would be put out and got in, and the stock looked after, and things took care of. I thought, even, that the longer it went on the better it would get. People would learn; they would see what had been done wrong, and they would make it right.
“And then, about the end of the last world war, I reckon, I seen it go wayward. Probably it had been wayward all along. But it got more wayward then, and I seen it then. They began to go and not come back—or a lot more did than had before. And now look at how many are gone—the old ones dead and gone that won’t ever be replaced, the mold they were made in done throwed away, and the young ones dead in wars or killed in damned automobiles, or gone off to college and made too smart ever to come back, or gone off to easy money and bright lights and ain’t going to work in the sun ever again if they can help it. I see them come back here to funerals—people who belong here, or did once, looking down into coffins at people they don’t have anything left in common with except a name. They come from another world. They might as well come from that outer space the governments are wanting to get to now.
“When I think of a night, Wheeler, my mind sometimes slants off into that outer space, and I’m sorry the ones that knowed about it ever brought it up—all them lonesome stars and things up there so far apart. And they tell about these little atoms and the other little pieces that things are made out of, all whirling and jiggling around and not touching, as if a man could reach his hand right through himself. I know they know those things to blow them up.
“I lay my hand on me and quiet me down. And I say to myself that all that separateness, outside and inside, that don’t matter. It’s not here and not there. Then I think of all the good people I’ve known, not as good as they could have been, much less ought to have been, none of them, but good for the good that was in them along with the rest—Mam and Pap and Old Jack, and Aunt Dorie and Uncle Marce, and Mat and Mrs. Feltner, and Jarrat and Tom and Kate Helen, all of them dead, and you three here and the others still living. And I think of this country around here, not purely good either, but good enough for us, better than we deserve. And I think of what I’ve done here, all of it, all I’m glad I did, and all I wish had been done different or better, but wasn’t.”
“You’re saying you’re sorry for what you’ve done wrong? And by what you’re proposing to do now you hope to make it right?”
“No! God damn it, Wheeler—excuse me, Hannah —no! What is done is done forever. I know that. I’m saying that the ones who have been here have been the way they were, and the ones of us who are here now are the way we are, and to know that is the only chance we’ve got, dead and living, to be here together. I ain’t saying we don’t have to know what we ought to have been and ought to be, but we oughtn’t to let that stand between us. That ain’t the way we are. The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t. What has been here, not what ought to have been, is what I have to claim. I have to be what I’ve been, and own up to it, no secret faults. Because before long I’m going to have to look the Old Marster in the face, and when He says, ‘Burley Coulter?’ I hope to say ‘Yes, Sir. Such as I am, that’s me.’”
And now he leans forward and, the hat brim clenched in the outer three fingers of his right hand, hooks his forefinger into Wheeler’s vest. He does not pull, but only holds, as gently as possible given the hand’s forthrightness and the rigor in the crook of the old finger.
“And, Wheeler, one thing I am is the man who cared about Kate Helen Branch—all her life, you might say.”
“You loved her,” Wheeler says.
“That’s right.”
“You were a husband to her—in all but name.”
“That’s right.”
“And you’re her widower—in all but name.”
“That’s right.”
Burley unhooks his finger and leans back. He is smiling again.
And finally the direction of this meeting declares itself to Wheeler. What Burley is performing, asking him to assist in, too late but nonetheless necessarily, is a kind of wedding between himself and Kate Helen Branch. It is the secrecy of that all-but-marriage of his that has been his great fault, for its secrecy prevented its being taken seriously; perhaps even by himself, and denied it a proper standing in the world.
“And so that secret fault you’ve been talking about—that didn’t have anything to do with the things we’ve always known.”
“No.”
“It was secret love.”
“That’s right. In a way I don’t think I even knowed it myself, Wheeler. Anyhow, not for a long time. Not till too late.”
Wheeler is smiling too now, asking and listening, helping him along. “Why didn’t you clear all this up any sooner?”
“I’ve never learned anything until I had to, Wheeler. That’s the kind of head I’ve got.”
“And you’ve been learning this a long time?”
“Years and years. Pret’ near all my life I’ve been figuring out where I am and what I’m responsible for—and, as I said, pret’ near always too slow and too late. Some things haven’t got my attention until they knocked me in the head.”
