That Distant Land, page 42
“But you and Kate Helen were involved in this friendly connection for a long time. She must not have minded.”
“That had a lot to do with it. We were friends, and she didn’t mind—or didn’t seem to.”
Burley crosses his arms over his lap, going ahead now on his own.
“You know the little paper-sided house in Thad Spellman’s thicket field that she and her mother moved into after her daddy died—there by the creek at the foot of the hill. I could get there from town you might say by gravity, and at first that was usually how I got there.
“This is how it went. I want you to know.
“On Saturday night I’d walk to Port William and loaf around in one place and another a few hours, visiting, maybe shoot a game or two of pool. And after while I’d get me a pint from Alice Whodat and stroll out across the ridge, drinking along the way, listening to the sounds and looking all around at whatever there was light enough to see—free as a bird, as they say, and, as far as I can remember, nothing on my mind at all. Sometimes if the night was warm and dry, I’d sit down somewhere and sing a while. None of the real things that have happened to me had happened then. My head might as well have been a cabbage, except I could eat and drink with it. And after while I’d tumble down through the woods and the bushes to Kate Helen’s house.
“And maybe the first real thing that ever happened to me was that I started going down there because I liked to. I liked Kate Helen. I liked to sit and jaw with old Mrs. Branch. Sometimes I would go there in broad daylight, just to visit, if you know what I mean, and we would sit and talk and laugh. Part of it, I guess, was what you said. Kate Helen didn’t mind. Or up to a point she didn’t, however far that was. She liked me and her mother did too. And they wasn’t at me all the time—which for a while I thought was pretty low class of them, I will admit.
“They were poor, of course, which anybody could see, and so it come about that whenever I went there I would gather up a few groceries, things I knew they needed, and bring them along, or if we’d killed hogs I’d bring a middling or a sack or two of sausage. And I’d always try to save out a head or two for them. The old woman was a great one to make souse, and made the best, too, that ever I ate. And then I got so I’d help them make a garden. And then in the winter I took to getting up their firewood. They needed those things to be done, and I was the only soul they had to do them. I liked being of use to them better than anything.
“But oftentimes, I’d go there just to sit a while and visit. We’d talk, maybe pop some corn. Sometimes we’d play and sing a little.”
Wheeler might never have remembered it again. He had forgot that he remembered. But now in thought he comes again down through the steep fields along the side of the little creek valley. He is hunting, supposedly, his shotgun lying in the crook of his arm, and busily quartering the slope ahead of him is his good English setter by the name of Romney; but the weather is dry, they have found no birds, and, submitting to the charm of the warm, bright, still afternoon, he has ceased to pay attention to the dog. He has idled down along the fall of the valley, pausing to look, watching the little fields and the patches of woodland open ahead of him with the intense, pleased curiosity that idleness on such an afternoon can sometimes allow. And now, climbing over a rock fence at the edge of a strip of woodland into a pasture, he pauses again, and hears in the distance a few muted, dispersed notes that it takes him a minute or two to recognize as human singing.
The curve of the slope presently brings him around to where he can see the square of tin roof within the square of yard and garden within the close network of leafless thicket overgrowing Thad Spellman’s abandoned field. And now the voices are carried clearly up to him, rising and braiding themselves together over the sweet pacing of a fiddle and guitar:
Oh, he taught me to love him and called me his flower,
A blossom to cheer him through life’s dreary hour,
But now he has gone and left me alone,
The wildflowers to weep, the wild birds to mourn.
Wheeler knows who they are. Burley he has heard play before at a dance or two, a little embarrassedly “filling a gap” in a band, and has even heard him sing, though only emblematic scraps of songs sung out raucously at work. Now he realizes that Burley is better at both than he thought, though in both playing and singing his manner is straightforward and declarative, almost a speaking in support of the melody, which is carried by Kate Helen. It is Kate Helen’s voice that takes Wheeler by surprise—by a kind of shock, in fact; he expected nothing like it—for it is so pure, and so feelingly intelligent in its singing of the words.
They finish the song and laugh at the end of it and speak a little, words that he cannot hear, and begin another—and another and another. The dog finally comes back and lies down at Wheeler’s feet, and still he stands and listens—until it comes to him that they play and sing so well because they believe that nobody is listening. He turns away then, embarrassed for himself, and makes his way back up the long hollow onto the upland and to his father’s place again, the country remaining bemused around him in the hovering late warmth and light, and the two voices seeming to stay with him a long part of the way, as if they too hung and hovered in the air:
I’ll dance and I’ll sing and my heart shall be gay. . . .
“My lord,” he thinks, “that was forty years ago!”
It was forty years ago almost to the day, he thinks, and remembering the clarity of that voice lifted into the bright air that carried it away, he says, “And Kate Helen never did say anything? Never did suggest maybe that you two ought to get married?”
“Fact is, she never did. And you’ll wonder why, Wheeler, and I can’t tell you. I could give you some guesses, I’ve thought about it enough. But as for knowing, I don’t. I don’t know, and won’t ever.”
“She thought you were a lucky catch any way she could get you,” Hannah says to him, patting his hand. It is something Wheeler can tell that she has said to him before. And then she says, more seriously, “She thought you were better than she deserved. So did her mother, I’ll bet.”
“Well, I wasn’t. But whatever her reason was, not to know it is wrong. It’s the very thing that’s wrong.”
They pause at that failure, allowing it its being. And then Burley speaks on, describing his long odd-times domestic companionship with Kate Helen. He tells of Danny’s birth: “I purely did not think of that ahead of time, Wheeler. It was a plumb surprise. And yet it tickled me.” He tells of the death of old Mrs. Branch; and of how, as Danny grew, time and usage grew on him and Kate Helen; how he depended on her and was dependable, took her and was taken for granted, liking the world too well as it was, “laying aside wars and such,” to think how it might be improved, usually, until after his chance to improve it had gone by; how in time she became sick and died; how at her death, seeing it all then, he would have liked to have been openly and formally her mourner, but, faithful to appearances, he had shown himself only an interested bystander, acting a great deal more like himself than he felt. Behind appearances, he paid the doctor, paid the hospital, paid the undertaker, bought a lot in the cemetery; he saw to everything; as Wheeler knew pretty well at the time, and attributed to guilt of conscience—as quietly as he has done for the others who have been his declared dependents.
Danny, grown by then, was still living with his mother at the time of her death.
“You just as well come on, now,” Burley said, “and live with me.” For then he saw it the way it should have been—though he let Danny go on calling him “Uncle Burley,” as he acknowledges now to Wheeler, and is shaken once by a silent laugh.
“Well, now that Mammy’s gone, I want to get married.”
“Well, bring the gal. I got a big house.”
As though he has now finally lived in his own life up to that time when Danny came to live with Burley, Wheeler admits him into his mind. Or, anyhow, Danny Branch now turns up in Wheeler’s mind, admitted or not, put there by the words of his would-be lawful father, after the failure of all events so far to put him there, and his face now takes its place among the faces that belong there.
Danny, Wheeler would bet, is not as smart as Burley, but he does look like him in a way; he has Burley’s way of looking at you and grinning and nodding his head once before saying what he has to say—a fact that Wheeler now allows to underwrite Burley’s supposition and his intent. He allows Burley’s argument to make sense—not all the sense there is, but enough.
And so with Wheeler’s consent Danny comes into their membership and also is one there with them, Wheeler already supposing that Nathan will not be the only one who will stick to Danny, and looking forward to the possibility of his own usefulness to that young man.
As often, the defeat of his better judgment has left him only with a job to do, a job that he can do, and he feels a sudden infusion of good humor. If Danny is Burley’s son and heir, and if that is less than might have been hoped, it is what they are left with, what they have, and Wheeler will be as glad as the rest of them to make the most of it.
He feels preparing in himself the friendship for Danny Branch that these three, after all, have come to ask him for—and which, all three know, probably better than Wheeler, will be a gift and a blessing to the younger man, and also undoubtedly something of a burden, for once Wheeler has Danny on his mind he will be full of advice for him that Danny will not easily ignore.
As soon as he has a chance, Wheeler thinks, he will stop by for a visit with Burley and Danny and Lyda and the little ones. He would like, for one thing, to see if there is any resemblance to Burley or the other Coulters showing up in Danny’s children.
“So,” he says. “You just want to leave everything to Danny. That won’t take but a few words. I’ll get it typed up first thing Monday morning, and you can come in and sign it.” He smiles at Hannah and Nathan. “You all can come with him and be witnesses.”
He leans back in his chair, having, as he thinks, brought the meeting to an end. He is ready for them to go, ready to go himself. He allows the wind and the gray sky back into mind.
Burley is busy restoring the shape of his hat, as though he might be about to put it on, but he does not. He looks up at Wheeler again and studies him a moment before he speaks.
“Wheeler, do you know why we’ve been friends?”
“I’ve thought so,” Wheeler says. He has thought so because of that company of friends to which they both belong, which has been so largely the pleasure and meaning of both their lives. “But why?”
“Because we ain’t brothers.”
“What are you talking about?” Wheeler says.
But he is afraid he knows, and his discomfort is apparent to them all. Nathan and Hannah obviously feel it too, and are as surprised as he is.
“If we’d been brothers, you wouldn’t have put up with me. Or anyhow you partly wouldn’t have, because a lot of my doings haven’t been your kind of doings. As it was, they could be tolerable or even funny to you because they wasn’t done close enough to you to matter. You could laugh.”
Wheeler sits forward now, comfortless, straight up in his chair, openly bearing the difficulty he knows it is useless to hide. Though this has never occurred to him before, because nobody has said it to him before, he knows with a seizure of conviction that Burley is right. He knows they all know, and again under his breastbone he feels the pain of a change that he thought completed, but is not completed yet. A great cavity has opened at the heart of a friendship, a membership, that not only they here in the office and the others who are living but men and women now dead belong to, going far back, dear as life. Dearer. It is a cavity larger than all they know, a cavity that somebody—their silence so testifies—is going to have to step into, or all will be lost.
If things were going slower, if he had the presence of mind he had even a minute ago, Wheeler would pray for the strength to step into it, for the knowledge to step into it. As it is, he does not know how. He sits as if paralyzed in his loss, without a word to his name, as if suddenly pushed stark naked into a courtroom, history and attainment stripped from him, become as a little child.
But Burley is smiling, and not with the vengeful pleasure that Wheeler feared, but with understanding. He knows that what he has given Wheeler is pain, his to give, but Wheeler’s own. He sees.
“Wheeler, if we’re going to get this will made out, not to mention all else we’ve got to do while there’s breath in us, I think you’ve got to forgive me as if I was a brother to you.” He laughs, asserting for the last time the seniority now indisputably his, and casting it aside. “And I reckon I’ve got to forgive you for taking so long to do it.”
He has spoken out of that cavity, out of that dark abyss.
It is as if some deep dividing valley has been stepped across. There can be no further tarrying, no turning back. To Wheeler, it seems that all their lives have begun again—lives dead, living, yet to be. As if feeling himself simply carried forward by that change, for another moment yet he does not move.
And then he reaches out and grips Burley’s shoulder, recognizing almost by surprise, with relief, the familiar flesh and bone. “Burley, it’s all right.”
And Burley lays his own hand on Wheeler’s shoulder. “Thank you, Wheeler. Shore it is.”
Wheeler’s vision is obscured by a lens of quivering light. When it steadies and clears, his sight has changed. Now, it seems to him, he is looking through or past his idea of Burley, and can see him at last, the fine, clear, calm, generous, amused eyes looking back at him out of the old face.
And Hannah, smiling again too, though she has averted her eyes, is digging in her purse for her handkerchief. “Well!” she says.
The office is crowded now with all that they have loved, the living remembered, the dead brought back to mind, and a gentle, forceless light seems to have come with them. There in the plain, penumbral old room, that light gathers the four of them into its shadowless embrace. For a time without speaking they sit together in it.
Wheeler stands looking down into the street over the top of the reversed painted legend: WHEELER CATLETT & SON, ATTORNEYS-AT-LAW. The day remains as it was, the intensity of the clouded light the same. Except that the towboat is gone now, the world seems hardly to have moved, the smoke from the power plant still tainting the sky.
In a little while Wheeler will leave the office and leave town. The room he stands in is driven out of his mind by the thought of the raw, free wind over the open fields. But he does not go yet. He thinks of the fields, how all we know of them lies over them, taking their shape, for a little while, like a fall of snow.
He watches Burley and Hannah and Nathan walk back to their truck, waiting for their departure to complete itself before he will begin his own.
Are You All Right? (1973)
The spring work had started, and I needed a long night’s rest, or that was my opinion, and I was about to go to bed, but then the telephone rang. It was Elton. He had been getting ready for bed, too, I think, and it had occurred to him then that he was worried.
“Andy, when did you see the Rowanberrys?”
I knew what he had on his mind. The river was in flood. The backwater was over the bottoms, and Art and Mart would not be able to get out except by boat or on foot.
“Not since the river came up.”
“Well, neither have I. And their phone’s out. Mary, when did Mart call up here?”
I heard Mary telling him, “Monday night,” and then, “It was Monday night,” Elton said to me. “I’ve tried to call every day since, and I can’t get anybody. That’s four days.”
“Well, surely they’re all right”
“Well, that’s what Mary and I have been saying. Surely they are. They’ve been taking care of themselves a long time. But, then, you never know.”
“The thing is, we don’t know.”
We knew what we were doing, and both of us were a little embarrassed about it. The Rowanberry Place had carried that name since the first deeds were recorded in the log cabin that was the first courthouse at Hargrave. Rowanberrys had been taking care of themselves there for the better part of two hundred years. We knew that Arthur and Martin Rowanberry required as little worrying about as anybody alive. But now, in venturing to worry about them, we had put them, so to speak, under the sign of mortality. They were, after all, the last of the Rowanberrys, and they were getting old. We were uneasy in being divided from them by the risen water and out of touch. It caused us to think of things that could happen.
Elton said, “It’s not hard, you know, to think of things that could happen.”
“Well,” I said, “do you think we’d better go see about them?”
He laughed. “Well, we’ve thought, haven’t we? I guess we’d better go.”
“All right. I’ll meet you at the mailbox.”
I hung up and went to get my cap and jacket.
“Nobody’s heard from Art and Mart for four days,” I said to Flora. “Their phone’s out.”
“And you and Elton are going to see about them,” Flora said. She had been eavesdropping.
“I guess we are.”
Flora was inclined to be amused at the way Elton and I imagined the worst. She did not imagine the worst. She just dealt with mortality as it happened.
I picked up a flashlight as I went out the door, but it was not much needed. The moon was big, bright enough to put out most of the stars. I walked out to the mailbox and made myself comfortable, leaning against it. Elton and I had obliged ourselves to worry about the Rowanberrys, but I was glad all the same for the excuse to be out. The night was still, the country all silvery with moonlight, inlaid with bottomless shadows, and the air shimmered with the trilling of peepers from every stream and pond margin for miles, one full-throated sound filling the ears so that it seemed impossible that you could hear anything else.
And yet I heard Elton’s pickup while it was still a long way off, and then light glowed in the air, and then I could see his headlights. He turned into the lane and stopped and pushed the door open for me. I made room for myself among a bundle of empty feed sacks, two buckets, and a chain saw.
