Elton says, “What did you do last night, Andy?”
“I stayed at home.”
“You run out of girls?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you need to find one that’s not too smart, old pup.”
Henry says, “Duh, kiss me, old pup.”
And Andy says, “Shut. Up.”
Henry makes his hands quiver. “Sometimes. He causeth me. To tremble.”
“I told you.”
“He giveth me. Trembolosis. Of the lower. Bowell.”
Elton is enjoying this, but he knows he won’t enjoy it long. “I’ll causeth you to tremble in a minute. Both of you shut up.”
He sings with raucous sorrow two lines of “Blue Eyes” as a comment on Andy’s girl-lessness, and gives a long raucous squall as a comment on yodeling. They laugh and go on up the lane, happy, the old truck creaking and rattling, the day brightening.
Andy can see the three of them jolting along over the bumps of the road — no blacktop on it then — overgrown with trees, a tunnel. It is as though he is standing in the air, watching, and at the same time an unseen fourth person in the cab. And he is moved with tenderness toward them and with love for them.
They come to the bright field, the stand of alfalfa nearly perfect on it, and Elton stops beside the two tractors where they left them the evening before. They fill the gas tanks and check the oil. They make the necessary small repairs on the mowing machines and grease them.
Elton says, “All right. You’re ready to go. Be careful. If the hay you cut day before yesterday is dry enough by ten-thirty or eleven o’clock, Henry, you quit mowing and hitch to the rake. I’ll be back to get you at dinnertime.”
And then, looking up at Henry, who is standing on the truck bed, looking down at him, he says, “Get off of there now, damn it, and get started.”
Henry takes three steps and does a handspring off the truck bed and lands standing up in front of Elton, who has to grin in spite of himself. “I wonder,” he says. “Sometimes I wonder.”
That was an island in time, between the horse and mule teams and the larger, more expensive machines that came later. They were not going to live again in a time like that.
The Harford Place appealed to Elton and touched his imagination, and he made them see it as he saw it.
“Listen,” he said to Andy once — they had brought sandwiches with them that day and were eating in the shade by the spring — “do you see what this old place is? The right man could do something here. It’s been worked half to death and mistreated every way, but there’s good in it yet.” He gestured up toward the house and barn. “That’s still a sound, straight old house. The barn’s not much, but it could be put right and made into something.”
He had been thinking about it all morning, Andy knew, studying it as it was, foreseeing it as it might be, and now was telling him about it, because, though Elton knew that he would never make it over himself, he wanted somebody to do it.
“Listen, Andy,” he said, “if you could find the right girl, a little smarter than you, and willing to work and take care of things, here’s where you could get started and amount to something. Put some sheep here. A few cows. I’d help you, and the rest of them would, we’d neighbor with each other and get along.”
And so Andy had the old place in mind, as it was and as it might be made, long before it ever occurred to him that he might be the one to live there and attempt to make it as it might be.
For that to happen required, in fact, the right girl, but also many miles, many happenings, and several years.
And it required trust. He sees it now. What he and Flora have made of the Harford Place has depended all on trust. They have not made it what it might be — how many lives will it require for that? — but they have made it far more than it was when they came to it. In twelve years they have given it a use and a life; a beauty has come to it that is its answer to their love for it and their work; and it has given them a life that belonged to them even before they knew they wanted it. And all has depended on trust. How could he have forgotten? How could he have failed to understand?
His life has never rested on anything he has known beforehand — none of it. He chose it before he knew it, and again afterwards. And then he failed his trust and his choice, and now has chosen again, again on trust. He has made again the choice he has made before, as blindly as before. How could he have thought that it would be different? How could he have imagined that he might ever know enough to choose? As Flora seems to have known and never doubted, as he sees, one cannot know enough to trust. To trust is simply to give oneself; the giving is for the future, for which there is no evidence. And once given, the self cannot be taken back, whatever the evidence.
He sees again the long room, the librarian at her desk, tall shelves of books all around the walls, the double row of heavy oak tables with shaded lamps — a place where two ways met. He sees as from the penumbra above the shelf tops the eight students at the table in the farthest corner of the room: Flora, Hal Jimson, Ted Callahan, Norm Leatherwood, himself, and three others. They are most of Professor Barton Jones’s class in the history of the American Revolution. Professor Jones, known beyond his own earshot as Black Bart, is legendary for his freshman history classes, which terrorize even those freshmen who do not take them. The eight at the table are not freshmen, and they are not terrified; but the midterm examination is approaching, and they are properly intimidated. Professor Jones regards the teaching and learning of American history as a matter of desperate emergency. Day after day he has stood in his classroom in his portentous bulk, glowering upon them, thumbing his text with his great thumb, or beating with a pointer for emphasis upon a blackboard perfectly blank. That he loves the people he is teaching about, or some of them, only a little on the critical side of idolatry, and that he is capable of the most generous kindness to those whom he is teaching, they all know. And yet they are intimidated. For they know too the simple ferocity with which he regards their least proclivity to misunderstand or forget. They have been trying to make fluent their understanding of the development and the influence of the mind of Thomas Jefferson. They know that they are going to have to deal convincingly with that on the midterm, and again on the final.
It is late. The room is almost empty. The quiet in the room has begun to communicate with the quiet of the dark trees outside. One by one, Black Bart’s little clutch of students disperses, having attained either confidence or resignation. Now only Andy and Flora remain, Andy at the foot of the table and Flora two chairs away. With each departure it has become harder for Andy to think about Thomas Jefferson, and now he is not thinking about Thomas Jefferson at all. He is thinking about Flora, who is still at work, bent over her book and notebook. Andy is not at work, though he is pretending to be. He is looking at his book and thinking about Flora, from time to time raising his eyes over the top of the book to look at her, to see if external reality lives up to the image in his mind, realizing, each time with a clench in his chest very like pain, that it does. For a college girl of the time, she is plainly dressed: a gray skirt, a white blouse with little buttons, open at the throat, a black unbuttoned cardigan. Except for perhaps a touch of lipstick, she wears no makeup, and needs none, and no jewelry, and needs none. Above her preoccupied face, her dark curls are rejoicing on their own.
He can see nothing wrong with her. She has closed entirely the little assayer’s office that he runs in his mind. She seems perfect to him, and there is something about her, something beyond her looks, something that he calls “something about her,” that has unsteadied whatever square yard of ground or floor he happens to be walking or standing on.
Such joy and pain are in him to be so near her, alone with her, permitted to look at her, that he can hardly breathe. It seems to him that apart from her he can no longer breathe. It seems to him that if he does not speak to her he will stop breathing. If he speaks, he knows, everything is going to change, into what he does not know.
&nb
sp; He says, hardly above a whisper, his heart crowding so into his throat, “Flora, do you want to come here for just a while?”
She smiles and looks up at him with a look that she will give him again, amused a little, perhaps, but not surprised; it is a look that suggests to him, in his alarm, that she never has been surprised in her life.
He cannot deny her. Her eyes as they were then are on him now, and as they were when he saw them last, hurt and angry, full of tears. He cannot meet her eyes. It has been a long time since that night when she first looked at him, her face open to him, her eyes unguarded. It has been twenty years. He knows their duality in those years, the imperfection of them both, the grief and longing of their imperfection. And yet it is her justice that he feels now. He cannot meet her eyes that give his eyes such pain he cannot raise or open them. He has been wrong. His anger, his loneliness, his selfish grief, all have been wrong. That she, entrusted to him, should ever have wept because of him is his sorrow and his wrong. He sits with his head down, his eyes burning, such fire of shame covering him that he can hardly hold himself in his seat.
He knows she is right. He must have her forgiveness. He must forgive himself. He must forgive the world and his own suffering in it.
Have mercy upon me, O God, after thy great goodness; according to the multitude of thy mercies do away mine offences.
He must have his own forgiveness and hers and the children’s, and the forgiveness of everyone and every thing from which he has withheld himself.
Thou shalt make me hear of joy and gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.
Now she comes to him again. He can see her again: a bride, dressed all in white, as innocent as himself of the great power they were putting on, frightened and smiling — a gift to him such as he did not know, such as would not be known until the death that they would promise to meet together had been met, and so perhaps never to be known in this world.
The way is open to him now. Thanks, as if not his own, shower down upon him.
“Are you all right?”
It is the young woman in the seat next to him, who to his astonishment is patting his arm.
“Yes. I’ve been all right before, and I’m all right now.”
7. The Hilltop
Returned from the sky, his shadow attached to him again, Andy unlocks the door of his old pickup, slides the suitcase in across the seat, and climbs again into the aura of his workdays: the combined essences of horse sweat, man sweat, sweated leather, manure, grease and oil, dirt. He opens the windows to let out the trapped hot air, starts the engine, which roars loudly through its leaky muffler, drives to the booth, pays the girl in the glass enclosure, and heads for the interstate, hurrying again, but being careful.
He passes through the swoop of the entrance ramp, and is at once hurtling along in four lanes of roaring traffic that seems to have been speeding there forever. He speeds along with it, being careful, eternity gaping all around him. He drives like a messenger entrusted with a message that at all costs he must deliver. The message, it seems, is only himself. When he arrives he will have some things to say, he will have to say some things, but he does not yet know what.
But he is not trying to think of words now. He is thinking about being careful, the bright crustaceans speeding all around him along the road, each enclosing its tender pulp of flesh, creatures of mud and light, each precious beyond telling for reasons never to be known to the others, already dead to one another in mutual indifference. If one of those particles erred in its flight, then an appalling innovation would occur, an entrance to another world mauled through the very air and light. He is praying to remain in time until what he owes is paid.
The eight lanes of the interstate become six and then four. The traffic thins. The city is behind him now, except for the road itself that is the city’s hardened effluent, passing through its long gouge without respect for what was there before it or for what is now alongside it. The road reminds him, as it always has before, of the power of words far removed from what they mean. For the road is a word, conceived elsewhere and laid across the country in the wound prepared for it: a word made concrete and thrust among us.
He knows that he is not yet beyond the spell of the unpeopled language that emanates from conference rooms and classrooms and laboratories and offices and electronic receivers, day after day, all across the land, the deserted speech of a statistical greed, summoning intelligence and materials out of the land to turn them into blights, justifying by an unearthly accounting and speech what decency would never have considered in the first place. There is no place that is not within reach of it and under threat of it. That speech is in Port William too, coming out of the walls of the houses, saying that all is well, all is better than ever, while the life of the place itself frets and fritters away.
By the time Andy and Flora returned from Chicago, the Port William schoolhouse had become a “rest home,” where the old, the useless, the helpless, and the unwanted sat like monuments, gaping into the other-worldly light of a television set. There, within two years of their return, Jarrat Coulter lay like a man carved on a tomb, only breathing, a forlorn contraption living on fluids needled into his veins. Andy would go from time to time, as the others did, and stand by his bed and gaze upon his wasting body, the derelict hands lying useless on the sheet. All of them went from time to time, duty bound, to stand beside him and watch him breathe indomitably on, and leave and never speak, to be troubled afterwards by what — whatever it was — they had not said.
Only Burley had the courage or the grace to make what seemed a visit. He did not stand by Jarrat and look. He went in and sat down as though invited to do so, and put his hat on his lap. And he talked. He talked without embarrassment either at his brother’s silence or at the presence of anybody else who might be there. He spoke into the silence where Port William’s children had studied and played, and into Jarrat’s silence. Sometimes, he would tell things that nobody on earth but Jarrat would have understood, if Jarrat was understanding them.
After he had said whatever Jarrat might be interested in hearing, he would get up and put on his hat. “Well, I’ve got to go. But I’ll be back.” He would lay his hand that was still brown and hard on his brother’s pale, softening one. “Don’t worry. You don’t have to worry about a thing. Just rest and be easy in your mind.”
In the river valley Andy takes the slower Port William road, and the pickup begins to move with a different motion, approaching the shape of the country. It moves now more nearly as eyes or feet might move, curving along the bases of the hills, not like a pencil point along the edge of a ruler. And Andy’s body begins to live again in the familiar sways and pressures of his approach to home. His own place becomes palpable to him. Those he loves, living and dead, are no longer mere thoughts or memories, but presences, approachable and near.
He turns up Katy’s Branch, going ever slower now, following the road up along the creek in the shade of the overarching trees. He comes to his mailbox and turns into his own lane up Harford Run, the road hardly even a cut now but just a double track leveled along the valley side under the trees.
Now they are coming to him again, those who have brought him here and who remain — not in memory, but near to memory, in the place itself and in his flesh, ready always to be remembered — so that the place, the present life of it, resonates within time and within times, as it could not do if time were all that it is living in.
Now Mat runs up the bank toward Margaret, who is running to meet him with her arms open; they meet and hold each other at last.
Wheeler, standing on the bottom step of the coach as it sways and slows finally to a standstill at the station at Smallwood, puts his hand into his father’s hand and steps down.
Andy pushes open the door of the old house, and steps in behind Flora. They stop and stand looking at the wallpaper hanging in droops and scrolls, at the broken windowpane, at the phoebe’s nest on the mantelpiece, and Flora says, “Oh, good!�
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When he has driven up the slope in front of the house, and back alongside the house into the barn lot, and stopped the pickup in front of the barn, Andy switches off the engine, and sits still while the five-and-a-half-hour, two-thousand-mile uproar of his approach loosens from him and begins to withdraw like a long swarm of bees. When it has gone away, and the evening quiet of the place has returned to it and to him, he opens the door and gets out. An old black and white Border collie who has been standing beside the truck, waiting for him, now walks up and lifts his head under Andy’s hand.
“You here all by yourself?”
The dog wags his tail appreciatively, and Andy strokes his head.
“Where is everybody?”
The evening chores, he sees, are done. The two jersey cows are loafing in the shade by the spring, their udders slack, and Flora’s car is gone. He can hear the somnolent drumming of a woodpecker off in the woods, and from somewhere on the hillside above the barn the bleating of a sheep.
He takes his suitcase out of the cab and walks to the house and across the back porch, through the screen door, and into the kitchen, a pretty room, bright and quiet. He loves this quiet and he stands still in it, breathing it in. There is a note to him on the table; after looking at it for a minute or two, he goes over and reads it:You’re back?
Mart called. They have lots of beans.
We’ve gone to pick and visit.
Love,
F.
With her note in his hand, standing in her place, in her absence, he feels the strong quietness with which she has cared for him and waited for him all through his grief and his anger. He feels her justice, her great dignity in her suffering of him. He feels around him a blessedness that he has lived in, in his anger, and did not know. He is walking now, from room to room, breathing in the smell of the life that the two of them have made, and that she has kept. He walks from room to room, entering each as for the first time, leaving it as if forever. And he is saying over and over to himself, “I am blessed. I am blessed.”
Remembering Page 11
