How It Went, page 7
If Billy told his story well, and he did tell it very well, that may have owed a good deal to the excellence of his audience. As Billy laid out the details just as he had done when he told the story to himself, and as the details accumulated, Burley’s delight increased and he stopped laughing quietly only to laugh out loud.
When the story had been told, Burley sat up, thought a while, gazing into the fire, and from time to time laughed again to himself.
And then he said, “Well!”
In another little while he said, “Well, you knew the great man by face and name. Did he know you?”
“I never showed him my face. I had some sense.”
“A little, I reckon. But you had as much as you needed, and you used it.”
“Maybe I had even a little bit more than I used.”
Burley ignored that. He said, “Hang on a minute. If I’ve figured this right, I’m now the fourth person in all creation that knows this story.”
“Well, till I told you, I never told it, and I doubt if they ever did. Now don’t you tell anybody else.”
“You ain’t got a thing to worry about. I ain’t going to tell a soul but your daddy.”
They both laughed then, for they knew equally that to tell Grover would be to tell Port William. He could have held such a story just about as long as he could hold his breath. And Billy was comfortable enough with that. He was too happy with Burley’s pleasure in the story to want to deny it to others. He was a two-minded boy but purely and truly generous.
Billy never told the story again. He never needed to. It would be told from then on mainly by Grover and Burley. They were acknowledged story-tellers, long practiced, and as they told it they adhered to the outline of Billy’s recital to Burley in the nighttime woods, but they added ever more artistry to the details.
“He done it, she done it, they done it,” said Grover, who loved grammar mainly for its comedy. “They got entirely incorporated. Yes in-deedy.”
“They never even shook hands,” Burley said. “They got right into business with their hats on.”
“Aw yeah,” Grover said, “they went straight to the hemale and the shemale, conjugating that old verb to who’d a thought it.”
“When that misfortunate lady heard them branches crack and saw that young brush pile coming down,” Burley said, “her eyes popped out to where they looked at each other with some concern.”
For a while after he told Burley and Burley told Grover, every time Billy heard the men laughing, he fairly reliably would know why. His story was again being brought to mind, either by being told or by being alluded to. For of course the story belonged richly and complexly to Port William, pertaining about equally to its geography and its history. It was a part of its self-knowledge. It meant in Port William what it could not mean, and far more than it could mean, in any other place on earth. The ones who told it and the ones who heard it knew the abandoned field and the brushy fencerow at the lower end of Bird’s Branch. They knew the Blue Hole and the big briar patch. They knew Billy Gibbs, the boy he had been and was. They knew the nature and character of box elders. They had kept the stories of a greedy and miserly, eccentric and amusing family known around Port William as Leverses, who down at Hargrave were a family of greedy aristocrats know as La Veres. The tellers and hearers of the story understood in an ever-renewing instant the entire signification of their vision of the august Forrest La Vere conjugating the commonplace old verb upon an extracted back seat in a weedfield. Thus, for the men, the story was a way of knowing what they knew, and a way of teaching the boys. And of course the story made its way from the gathering places of the men into the kitchens and bedrooms round about and came to belong also to the Port William housewives and big girls.
From the night in the winter of 1938 when Billy set it free, his story was one of Port William’s ways of knowing itself, but only for a few years. And then came the great tearing apart of the war and what followed. A new time came, different from any that had been before. Then, as the elders made their way one by one to their settled places in the graveyard, too many of the young became known to Port William mainly by their absence. Tom Coulter and Virgil Feltner and others perished in the war. The war promoted Billy Gibbs from tree-climbing to flying. He went into the air as a member of the crew of a B-17, and flew at last safely back to the ground with maybe a story or two he was not so eager to tell. And then he went to college, and from there, as his mother put it, “into a suit and into business.” That was the defining story then, of Port William and thousands of places like it. It was the story of the young people, changed by the change of times, who by the war’s end or the mid-century had found their way to city jobs and salaries or high wages, and who returned after that only to visit a bedside in a nursing home, at a loss for something to say, or to bury the dead.
I heard the story of The Great Interruption only a few times in the years after the war. It was becoming less and less a property of its old community in time and place. Grover Gibbs and Burley Coulter, remarkably, had ceased to tell it. I think it had begun to make them sad. Port William by then was losing its own stories, which were being replaced by the entertainment industry, and so it was coming to know itself only as a “no-place” adrift in a country dismemoried and without landmarks.
Finally if Billy’s old story were to be told, it would have to stand alone, bereft of the old knowing-in-common that once enriched it. It would be heard then as little more than a joke on the subject of what we have learned to call “sex,” a biologic function dissociated from everything but itself. If one of the professionally successful descendants of the place as it once was were to tell it, say, at a cocktail party, it would be understood as an exhibit of the behavior of rural Kentuckians, laughable in all their ways, from which the teller had earned much credit by escaping.
Of the five children of Grover and Beulah Gibbs—Billy, Althie, Nance, Sissy, and Stanley—only Althie stayed close enough to accompany her parents and watch over them and share her life with them as long as they lived.
One day in the year or so between Burley’s death and his own, Grover and I were sitting and talking on the tailgate of his old pickup truck. Grover had been kind to me ever since I was little. He was one of my own dwindling company of elders, and I loved to talk with him. We were talking, as we often did, of the changes that even I, younger than Grover by nearly forty years, had witnessed in Port William and the country around. We were telling of course the story, clearly ongoing and with no foreseeable end, of the departure of the people and the coming of the machines.
I said, “And the pore old ground is going to suffer for it.”
Grover faced things by preference with a grin or a laugh that would be honest enough, for he had faithfully observed and relished the funniness of the world. But he could give you a straight look sometimes that made you shiver.
“Andy,” he said. “Honey, I know you know. The hurts ain’t all just only to the ground.”
How It Went
(1979–1994–2002)
(1979)
This comes from Andy Catlett’s memory of a day back when Pascal Sowers and the Rowanberry brothers, Arthur and Martin, were still alive, and they and all the younger ones still were strong. They were a neighborhood then, a company of kin and friends, none of whom ever worked at any hard task alone. In other times or on other days, various Coulters, Branches, and Penns might have been with them. Their heavy work in the barns or fields or woods brought together always their many hands, which lightened the work, and also their several minds from which they made, among their other necessities, much conversation, which also lightened the work.
They completed one another, not by proposing any such thing, as a marriage might, but merely by caring about one another and by being available when needed. From each of them Andy learned things good to know that he would not otherwise have known. When he lost his right hand to a corn picker in the fall of 1974, it was those others who made him whole in his changed life by conceding no difference to his loss, and by helping him, without his asking, when he needed help.
When they worked together, their work always rose above necessity. However hard or hot or uncomfortable it was, it was also a pleasure.
Not long ago, running into Pascal’s son Tommy at town, Andy asked him a question he’d had on his mind:
“Tommy, what was the last year I helped you cut tobacco?”
“I don’t know,” Tommy said. “I can’t tell you right off. But you know I miss them old times.”
Andy misses them too, and his thoughts go back to them in wonder that such a settled companionship could ever have existed in the time past of a time present when Port William and its countryside are populated more and more by newcomers and strangers, mobile homes and modular homes. In the town, among the few old ones who are left, the question most often asked is “Who was that?” and the oftenest answer is “I don’t know.” Now in the onetime neighborhood of Port William neighbors may not even know one another, let alone gather their hands and minds together to lighten work.
It was a morning in midsummer, already hot, and they were unloading hay into one of the small tin-sided sheds that Pascal had built in his pastures for handiness in feeding his cattle in the wintertime. Mart Rowanberry and Andy’s boy, Marcie, who was then about seventeen, were handing the bales off the wagon. Art and Tommy and Andy were ricking the bales in the shed at the end where they had stopped the wagon, and Pascal, who was in a bad mood, was ricking at the other end by himself.
Nobody knew why Pascal was in a bad mood, but he plainly was. His mood plainly was one in which he did not want to get in anybody’s way and did not want anybody to get in his way. And his mood was having an influence. Since they had begun the unloading nobody had said a word.
Their silence became socially awkward. Finally, perhaps to bring forth a resumption of good manners, Mart said, “Well, I reckon you all heard about that smart fellow down at Ellville can scratch his ass with his big toe.”
The silence then resumed. It continued until Marcie, with the ostentation of patience by which a grown boy indulges his elders, said, “All right. I give up. How can that smart fellow at Ellville scratch his ass with his big toe?”
“Well,” Mart said, “he got his thumb caught in some kind of a grinder. It was all mangled up to where they had to cut it off. And then they cut off his big toe and made him a thumb out of it.”
Mart’s explanation seemed to end the story. Nobody could think of another question. Nobody could think of another story that Mart’s story reminded him of. Nobody spoke again. They went on unloading the wagon and building the rick in the shed, working then in the sort of approximate rhythm that establishes itself at such times.
Until, sounding unhappy that he could not forbear a comment, Pascal from his distance said, “He’d better be glad they didn’t cut his dick off and make him a thumb out of it.”
Nobody wanted to interfere with Pascal’s bad mood. He had expressed one of the universal hopes of an age of medical miracles, but that was not all. He clearly had cast several aspersions, but nobody knew for sure which way they had flown or where they had lit. And so until that load was off nobody spoke again. But whenever any two of the rest of them looked at each other, there would be a grin, a look, or a snort, and already they were thinking carefully back over the details, preparing the story of that morning as they were going to tell it.
(1994)
Finally they dwindled until one hot, bright late August afternoon only four of them were at work in the tobacco harvest on the Sowers place: Pascal’s wife, Sudie, who was the Rowanberry brothers’ much younger sister, Tommy Sowers’s wife, Daphne, known as Daph, Tommy, and Andy. The Rowanberry brothers by then were dead, and Pascal had got too old to be capable of more than the piddling helps he occasionally offered.
They were housing a load of tobacco they had just brought in from the patch. The two women, turn about, were handing the sticks of tobacco—five stalks “speared” onto every four-foot stick—off the wagon to Andy. Andy, walking a long board between the wagon bed and an upended barrel, was handing the sticks up to Tommy. Tommy, who was standing in the tiers, was hanging the tobacco, the sticks and stalks of it carefully spaced, between the two tier poles at his feet and the two at shoulder height, where it would hang until it was cured. Pascal was seated on an upturned bucket against one of the posts along the driveway. From there he could watch both the work going on in the barn and, out the big open doorway, the vehicles that passed now and then along the road. He was not missing much. That year he was eighty years old and Andy was sixty, which made them, as they often noted, a hundred and forty years old. Tommy and Daph’s granddaughter, Birdie, a pretty little girl two years old, for the moment entirely cooperative, was playing in the dust of the barn floor, variously talking and singing to herself.
The work of the four able-bodied grownups had been done by them and by others, dead and remembered, dead and forgotten, in years going back long before the coming of the tractor that had drawn the present load into the barn, and this year their work was carrying them through one of the last tobacco crops that would be grown on the Sower place. Though they did not yet know it, Pascal’s last years would coincide with the last years of the tobacco program, which for sixty years had secured a measure of prosperity for farm couples such as Pascal and Sudie, Tommy and Daph. But for now, as if entranced by the old motions that they repeated over and over again, or like dancers carried by the familiar rhythm of an old song, they worked without speaking.
When this load was off, they would be on the downslope of the afternoon. They would pass the water jug then and gather round while Tommy would slice a water melon, as somebody in that family had done at that time of day in the tobacco harvest going back, at least to Sudie’s grandfather, laying the green, white, and red slices, rind-side down, along the edge of the wagon bed for them to salt and eat. For perhaps half an hour then they would eat, rest, and talk, gathering strength and pleasure to ease them through to the day’s end.
But the wagon was only half unloaded when the little girl quit her play and came running to the wagon, calling to her mother and making motions of urgency. She had something to say that needed to be whispered. Daph caught her lifted hands, swung her up onto the wagon, and leaned down to her. Birdie tiptoed and whispered.
“Oh,” Daph said. “Good girl. Just go outside anywhere. It’ll be all right.”
Lifted down, Birdie ran not far beyond the doorway.
“Andy,” Daph said. “Look.”
And then they all looked as Birdie pushed down her shorts and, standing, peed a gracefully arching glistening stream, her own invention, of which she was proud.
There were laughs of appreciation and congratulation called out by the two women to Birdie, who was still in some need of such encouragement.
And Pascal, who still was sitting on his bucket, took off his hat, rubbed meditatively his bald head, and put his hat back on.
“Yeah,” he said. “I used to go with an old gal could do that.”
(2002)
There was nothing simple about Pascal Sowers. Like most farmers of his generation in that country, starting in childhood, he had done a lot of the hard handwork that, by commentators and experts who have never done it, is said to be “mind-numbing.” But Pascal’s mind, like that of many a farmer of his kind and time, was lively and capable. He was good at his work. He had studied closely a number of the people he knew or had known. He knew good stories and told them well.
Like the Rowanberrys, he spoke the language he was born to, that his parents were born to. Nothing he said, nothing in the way he spoke, had been learned from the radio or television. What does it mean, his friend Andy Catlett asks, when one speaks a language that is not public, that is shared and is so intended, but is not public? Partly it meant that Pascal lived a life entirely his own, not a life recommended by others, not a life advertised and sold.
In the presence of strangers or people with whom he was uncomfortable, he said little. He took himself seriously enough, and he did not wish to be taken lightly. If among his familiars he often said bluntly things that were astonishing or outrageous, that was partly to indulge and enjoy his aptitude for such eloquence. But partly also it was his way of brushing aside something serious that he had thought of and preferred not to say.
Or so Andy has come to think, after knowing Pascal for soon-to-be seventy years, and after thinking about him with particular tenderness and care since he and the others parted with Pascal, who finally was without a comment, at his grave on the hill at Port William.
The fact, anyhow, that Andy has had to keep returning to, circling about, and considering, is that Pascal was not an eagerly self-revealing man. If you wanted to know Pascal, beyond the often unignorable things he said or pointedly did not say, you needed to study carefully the originally swampy small river-bottom farm that he and Sudie bought in the forties, made over, carefully farmed, paid for, and modestly prospered on. To know his fairness and his gratitude you had to hear him in his bluntest way of speech giving credit, never to himself, but to Sudie for all he owed to her. To take the temperature of his heart, you had to notice his hospitality to stray cats and his attention to the personalities of dogs. His affection would be revealed by favors that he would do unexpectedly, disowning them as he did them, ignoring thanks.
One day when Andy came out of the bank in Port William and was crossing the road to his pickup, he was headed off by Pascal, who was carrying one of the devices known as “come-alongs,” needful for lifting or pulling. It was a new one.
“You got a come-along?” Pascal asked.
