How It Went, page 9
He has supposed, he has pretty well known, that some of his neighbors in Port William and the country around had thought, when he and Flora bought the place and settled in it, that they would not last there very long, for it was too inconvenient, too far from the midst of things, too poor. And so Andy has delighted a little in numbering, as disproof and as proof, the decades of their inhabitance: the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s. And now they have lived there more than half a century, long past the doubts and the doubters that they would last. Now it is beyond doubt or question their place, and they have become its people. They have given their lives into it, and it has given them a life such as they could have had in no other place.
Of all his kindred Andy has become the oldest. He is one of the last who remembers Old Port William, as he now calls it, as it was when it and the country around it were still intact, at one with its own memory and knowledge of itself, in the years before V-J Day and the industrializing of land and people that followed. He is one of the last of the still-living who was born directly into the influence of the best men of his grandfather Catlett’s generation, who confidently, despite their struggles, assigned paramount value to the good-tending of their fields, to a good day’s work with the fundamental handtools, to the stance and character of a good mule—the inheritance that, because he grew to welcome it, has made Andy so far out of place in the present world.
Surprised to find that he has grown as old as his grandfathers, who once seemed to him to have been old forever, he sometimes mistakes his shadow on the ground for that of Marcellus Catlett, his grandfather, whom he was born barely in time to know, or that of Wheeler Catlett, his father, whom he knew first as a man young in middle age and finally as a man incoherent and old. Their grandson and son, he has come at last into brotherhood with them.
Of all the old crew of friends and neighbors with whom he traded work and shared life, who accompanied him and eased his way, Andy is the last of the older ones still living. Of that about-gone association the only younger ones still at hand are his and Flora’s children and Lyda and Danny Branch’s.
Danny was the last, so far, to go. In the absence of the others, and not so often needed by the younger ones, he and Andy had been often at work together in their old age. “Piddling” they called it, for they never hurried and when they got tired they quit, but also it was work and they did it well. They had worked together since they were young. They knew what to expect from each other. They knew, as Danny said, where to get, and that was where they got. Danny knew, for instance, and maybe before Andy knew, when Andy was going to need a second hand. They worked sometimes, Andy thought, as a singular creature with one mind, three hands, and four legs.
Danny was sick a while. And then at breakfast time one morning, answering a somewhat deferential knocking on the front door, Andy was surprised to see Fount and Coulter Branch standing somewhat back from the door in the middle of the porch, formal and uncomfortable. They had never before in their lives come to his front door. Always all of them had followed the old usage: The familiars of a household went to the back door. But now the world had changed. It would have to be begun again. Fount and Coulter had come for that.
As Andy stood in the open door, the brothers looked at him and did not say anything—because, as Andy saw, they were not able to say anything.
And so he spoke for them. “Well, boys. Has he made it safe away?”
And then Fount cleared his throat, and swallowed, and cleared his throat again. “Andy, we was wondering, if maybe you wouldn’t mind, if you wouldn’t mind saying a few words for him.”
They reached for his hand and shook it and went away.
And so Andy stood behind the lectern at the funeral home and spoke of Danny, of the history and company that they both had belonged to, of the work that they had done together, of the love that made them neighbors and friends, and of the rules of that love that they knew and obeyed so freely, that were so nearly inborn in them, as never to need to be spoken. Andy spoke the rules: “When your neighbor needs help, go help. When neighbors work together, nobody’s done until everybody’s done.” Looking at the younger ones, his and Danny’s, who now were looking back at him, he spoke the names of the old membership, dead and living, into whose company the younger ones had been born. He spoke of their enduring, their sweat, and their laughter. “This is your history,” he said. “This is who you are, as long as you are here and willing. If you are willing, this is yours to inherit and carry on.”
Having outlived so many and so much that will not be known again in this world, Andy has come to feel in body and mind sudden afflictions of sorrow for the loss of people, places, and times. He has passed the watershed in his life when he began losing old friends faster than he made new ones. Now he is far better acquainted in the graveyard on the hill at Port William than in the living town—than in the living country, in fact, and the rest of the world. And so he is diminished and so he lives on, his mind more and more enriched by the company of immortals who inhabit it. He is often given to the thought of subtraction, of what has been given, what taken, what remains. He is no longer surprised, when he is alone, to hear himself speak aloud a prayer of gratitude or blessing.
And yet by their absence his old companions have in a way come closer to him than they were when they were alive. They seem to involve themselves intimately in his life as he goes on living it. His thoughts now often seem to come to him in their words and voices.
On a certain kind of warm summer evening with a steady breeze from the west, Elton Penn will say to him again, as Elton said to him when he was a boy, “Do you feel how soft the air is? It’s going to rain.”
Or sometimes, when he is looking with satisfaction at his steep pastures now healed and “haired over” with grass, he will hear his father say, “This land responds to good treatment.”
Or when in the apparently unbreakable habit of the years of his strength Andy catches himself working too fast, Mart Rowanberry will say, as he said to him once with a certain condescension in the overeagerness of his youth: “You aiming to keep that up all day?”
Or he will remember sometimes in the evening, when the weariness of the day and of his years has come upon him, his grandpa Catlett speaking in one sentence the tragedy and triumph of his knowledge: “Ay God, I know what a man can do in a day.”
Or he will hear again his granddaddy Feltner on occasions more than enough: “What can’t be helped must be endured.”
Or when, as sometimes happens, he is listening to somebody who has started talking and can’t stop, he recalls the judgment of Art Rowanberry: “I reckon he must be a right smart fellow, but whatever he knows he learnt it from hisself.”
As he thinks back over his kinships and friendships, of those he has loved and who have loved him, and of the once worn out and broken farm that he has cared for, that has responded to his care with health and beauty, he is able to think well enough of himself. But he still has his wits too, and his memory, and he is often enough reminded of his acts of thoughtlessness and selfishness, more in his youth than now, but also now, and he will hear his grandmother Feltner: “Listen to me. Your granny expects better of you.” And so she taught him, as he flinched from her gaze, to expect better of himself. And so he is grateful to think of forgiveness and of the persons in high places who recommended it.
From Elton Penn’s early death until the deaths as they came of all the older ones, Andy and his children, the Rowanberrys, the Sowerses, the Coulters, and the Branches would often be at work or at rest together. They knew one another well. They talked for hundreds of hours. And now it seems remarkable how little they spoke of public issues. They talked of course of the weather and their work, of things they remembered. They told jokes and stories. They told of other seasons in other years when they were doing what they were doing again. They told stories that all of them were in, that all of them already knew, that they had told and heard and laughed at and revised and told again any number of times. They told and wondered at bits of local gossip. They spoke of the life histories, commented upon the characters, and filled out the pedigrees of remarkable people they had known. Rarely they would lapse into journalism and tell of something they had read in the paper or heard on the news. Almost never did they speak of politics. Strengthened and sufficed maybe by the small events by which their world had lived, they spared one another the mention of the great events that were putting it to death.
Andy can remember now only one distinctly political utterance from a member of their old crew in all of those years. This was at one of the annual Rowanberry family reunions. They had gathered that year in a hickory grove in a corner of a bottomland field belonging to Pascal and Sudie Rowanberry Sowers. There was a sizeable crowd of them: at-home Rowanberrys, Rowanberrys come home for the occasion, Rowanberrys-by-marriage, honorary Rowanberrys, and some self-appointed Rowanberrys who came bearing in pots, kettles, and baskets, as dutifully as the others, their contributions to the feast.
Andy was sitting on a bench among several of the men who had come from away, all of whom had originated within the familiar reach and compass of Port William, but who bore now something of the estrangement of distance and of other places. A little to Andy’s surprise, they began to speak of the recent disgrace of an eminent politician. Pascal, who was standing with one shoulder propped against a tree more or less in front of the bench, seemed to be withdrawn under the brim of his hat as he could sometimes seem to be, but Andy knew that he was listening. The talk of the great politician’s downfall gradually brought one of the talkers under pressure to confess that he had voted for him, and another to say modestly that he had not.
Pascal then lifted his head so that his countenance emerged from the shadow of his hat. He said, “I’m not going to tell you who I voted for. But I’ll tell you this much. I’ll never vote for that son of a bitch again.”
Ill-fitted as he has always been to the present age of the world, much more ill-fitted to it as he has come to be, Andy is yet in part and inextricably its creature, captured and held to it even by his contrariness against it, drawn too much left or right by the toxic simplifications of its politics, too much subject to the seductions of its economy. Often enough he knows he has spent money he knew he should have kept. Often enough he has been tempted to buy something he knew he did not need, only by a second thought separating himself from the dog-trained “consumers” who obediently pay too much for whatever is new. He knows that among that multitude he would disappear from the ghosts he most needs to remain known by. He rescues himself by vigilance and fear. And then invariably he will hear Danny Branch’s admonition to Reuben, his temporarily youthful and extravagant son: “Sweetheart, I told you. And you’re going to learn. Don’t let the sons of bitches get ahold of your money.”
Often enough in his remembering he will be delighted. He will laugh. And his laughter will be complicated by respect for the completeness and the stature that come only to the dead, and by the knowledge of loss, and by grief.
II.
Outliving your friends, hardly a pleasure, is in its way a matter not overly complicated. Time brings the losses and, if you stay in time, it removes the shock or surprise, gathers the new absences into the structures of ordinary days, and carries you past. But Andy also has begun to outlive his fences, and in the present age of the world that is a complication.
He had missed by a lifetime or more the age of the rock fences. When he was born some of them were still in use, but they were frost-heaved and crumbling. Nobody anymore had the skill or the time to mend them. They were being replaced by wire, the tumbled rocks left lying or cast into piles out of the way or knapped into road gravel. And so as he grew up he learned to fence with wire.
After he and Flora settled on the Harford place he renewed all the old fences and added more, sometimes with help but often alone. And then as the years passed he had repaired and then rebuilt the fences that he had built. But then he had been still in his strength, and for a long time when he needed help, he had his friends or his children to help him.
But now in his old age he still knows of course how to build a fence, but he is without the all-day strength and stamina to do it. And the generation of Port William men who knew either how to build a fence or how to help is by now as decrepit as he is or dead and gone. Of all the ones Andy knows the only one he could freely call on who could build a fence is Marcie, his son. But Marcie has his own farm and his own shortage of help. Though he is nearby and watchful and capable and always ready to help when needed, and often does help, Andy doesn’t want to ask him to take on a big job. He feels a greater reluctance to call on any of the Branches. He knows that if he asked they would feel obligated and would come whether it suited them or not.
And so when he had spliced and re-tightened and stobbed up a lengthy stretch of old barbed wire to about its and his own limit, he started asking around for somebody else he could hire to rebuild it. A friend of his gave him the name of a friend of his, who gave him the name of Shad, short for Shadrock, Harbison.
Shad Harbison was an entrepreneur from down about Ellville who farmed some, carpentered some, did about anything anybody wanted done, including fence-building, and had a crew and the equipment to do the job. Andy called Mr. Harbison on the phone and told him what he needed. Would he be interested?
“Sure would,” Mr. Harbison said. “I’ll be there at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning. Now where you live?”
Andy told him, and told him how to find the place.
At eleven o’clock the next morning Mr. Harbison’s pickup truck was in the driveway in front of Andy’s house. Andy would not have been surprised if he had been late or had never showed up, but he was on time to the minute. Andy thanked him for his punctuality, and from then to the end of their association he would have no further reason to thank him. Mr. Harbison politely tooted his horn. They introduced themselves and shook hands.
Mr. Harbison, without unduly noticing the absence of Andy’s right hand, had given him his own left hand. “Call me Shad.”
“All right. And I’m Andy.”
They walked the fence together, Andy showing Shad where it started and where it ended. Andy pointed to the old wood posts that were still sound, and to the ones that would have to be replaced. They took note of the considerable amount of brush and the several trees that would have to be removed before the old fence could be taken out and the new one built. They looked and Shad nodded at the half a dozen young oak and walnut trees that were not to be cut. Andy told Shad he wanted the bushes and the tree limbs laid in neat piles, butt ends together, handy to pick up. The old wire should be rolled up and the rolls put into piles. Andy described the fence he wanted: five strands of barbed wire, spaced so as to turn sheep. There was to be one new corner post, and Andy said how he wanted it braced.
Shad took it all in comprehendingly and with approval:
“Aw yeah. I see.”
“Yessir, I see what you mean.”
“Why sure. It won’t be no problem.”
They came to an understanding on the price. Too much, Andy thought, but he had expected that. He had made up his mind not to mind.
“Get the wire and everything else you need at Mel Hundley’s in Port William. He’ll know to look for you, and he’ll charge me for what you get.”
Shad then figured up and, taking a notebook and pencil from a shirt pocket, made a list of the materials he thought he would need. He read the list to Andy and looked at him.
“All right,” Andy said.
And then, prompted by a committee of his ghosts, he said, looking Shad in the eye, “I’m asking you to do this because I think you’ll do it right. I hate a damned mess, and I believe you do.”
“Aw, I’m with you there. It ain’t a bit more trouble to do it right than it is to do it wrong.”
They shook hands.
“Tuesday week,” said Shad. “Early.”
“I’ll be looking for you.”
On Tuesday, not early, a large powerful red pickup truck with a large metal toolbox behind the cab came rumbling up the lane and into the driveway. The truck was pulling a large trailer of the kind known as a “lowboy” upon which was riding a large red tractor.
A large, soft-looking, somewhat sleepy young man got out of the cab and turned to look at Andy.
Andy was grinning to cover his displeasure at the looks of the young man. “If you’re looking for Andy Catlett, I’m him.” He stuck out his only hand.
Deciding what to do with it occupied the young man for an awkward moment, and then another, and then, turning his right hand approximately upside down, he allowed Andy to shake it.
“I’m Nub,” the young man said.
“Are you Shad Harbison’s son?”
“Well I reckon!” Nub said, implying that this should have been obvious.
By then an assortment of three other men had emerged from the cab. Had the surplus flesh of Nub been distributed evenly among them, they would have been much improved. They were lean with the leanness of wear and tear, of four or five Saturday nights a week for too many weeks. There was not a full set of teeth or a matched pair of eyes among them.
Andy put his hand in his pocket. “Fellows, I’m Andy Catlett.”
“I’m Junior,” said the first.
“I’m Junior,” said the second, who clearly had looked forward to Andy’s surprise at the coincidence.
“Twins!” Andy said, and the Juniors got a laugh out of that.
The third neither laughed nor smiled. He said, “Clay.”
Andy turned back to Nub. “Where’s your dad?”
“Bringing the wire and stuff.”
They unloaded the tractor and Andy showed Nub where to leave the trailer. Then with Andy opening the gates and pointing the way, Nub driving the truck and Clay the tractor, they went up the hill to start work.
Andy had a prejudice against heavy machinery. When a big truck or tractor came onto his place, his prejudice was a sort of loose ache somewhere inside him or in the air around him. He had anticipated the truck and the tractor and was reconciled, but he had allowed himself to believe that they would be accompanied by a competent human.
