New Stories From the South 2010: The Year's Best

by Amy Hempel

  But I turned back towards the lawn, towards the sweltering greenness of our neighborhood, sweat trickling down the backs of my outstretched thighs. I bit my lip. I remembered the currents of warm water, Peter’s mouth against my ear. The silvery darkness outspread around us, endless, like an untold secret.

  Ashleigh Pedersen recently earned her MFA from the University of Pittsburgh. She currently lives in Austin, Texas, where she writes, works, swims, and soaks up all the outstanding dive bar honky tonk.

  When I was a kid my family spent a week or two each summer on a beach off the coast of South Carolina, not far from the Georgia border. After a ten-hour haul in a crowded, brown, wood-paneled minivan, we turned onto a narrow two-lane road that stretched beneath a canopy of live oaks, their branches ashy with Spanish moss. I have felt fond of these trees my whole life. It was recalling the image of them, I think, that first sent me heading toward “Small and Heavy World.”

  Wendell Berry

  A BURDEN

  (from The Oxford American)

  Me and Teddy Roosyvelt, we rode through hair, shit, blood, and corruption up to here.” Uncle Peach used the stick he was whittling to mark a level about an inch above his nostrils.

  “You did not,” Wheeler said, but all the same he was laughing. He was seven years old, and sometimes just looking at Uncle Peach made him laugh.

  “The hell you did!” said Andrew, who was Wheeler’s brother and five years older, because to Uncle Peach he could say anything he wanted to and he did. Andrew, as Wheeler understood, was practicing to be a grown-up. An ambitionless boy would not say “the hell you did,” even to Uncle Peach.

  The boys supposed, because everybody else appeared to suppose, that Uncle Peach had been somewhere in the Army during the war with Spain. But they knew from their own observation that Uncle Peach’s shotgun, “Old Deadeye,” was an instrument of mercy to all creatures that ran or flew as well as to some that were sitting still.

  The three of them, the two boys and their Uncle Peach, who was their mother’s baby brother, were sitting in the shade of the tall cedar tree in front of the house. Uncle Peach was whittling a small cedar stick, releasing a fragrance. His knife was sharp, and he was making the shavings fine for fear he would use up the stick and have to go look for another. One of his rules for living was “Never stand up when you can set down,” and he often quoted himself.

  None of the three of them wanted to get up, for the day was already hot, and the shade of the old tree was a happiness. It was all the happier for being a threatened happiness. A sort of suspense hung over them and over that whole moment among the old trees and the patches of shade in the long yard. Maybe that was why Wheeler never forgot it. They had not seen the boys’ father since breakfast. They did not know how come he had forgotten them. They knew only that if Marce Catlett came back from wherever he was and found them sitting there, they would all three be at work before they could say scat.

  “Yeees saaah,” Uncle Peach said, drawing out the words as if to make them last as long as his stick, “them was rough times, which was why we was called the Rough Riders. Hair, shit, blood, and corruption up to the horses’ bits, and you needed a high-headed horse to get through it atall. When it was all over and we was heroes, Teddy says to me, ‘Leonidas, looks like one of us is pret’ near bound to be the presi-dent of the United States, and if it’s all the same to you, I’d just as soon it would be me.’ And I says, ‘Why, Teddy, by all means! Go to it!’”

  “The hell you did!” Andrew said again. “You couldn’t tell the truth if it shit on your hat.”

  And that made Wheeler laugh so much he had to lie down in the grass.

  At the age of seven, Wheeler was already aware that his loyalty was divided between his father and Uncle Peach, and he felt the strain. He loved Uncle Peach because he was funny and was interesting in the manner of a man who would do or say about anything he thought of, and because Uncle Peach loved him back and treated him as an equal and was always kind to him. Uncle Peach’s trade was carpentry, which he was more or less good at, more or less worked at, and more or less made a living from. When he made more than a living from it, sooner or later he spent the surplus on whiskey and what he called “hoottootin’” in Hargrave or Louisville or wherever he could get to before he got down and had to be fetched home.

  Uncle Peach was, in fact, a drunk, which at the age of seven Wheeler pretty well knew and easily forgave. Once, thinking to change his life after a near-lethal celebration of the heroism he had shared with by-then President Roosevelt, Uncle Peach had gone so far as to emigrate to Oklahoma, and had persevered there for one year that he ever afterward referred to as “my years in the Territory.” While there he had been adopted into a tribe of Indians, he said, with whom he had lived and hunted and fought, and about this Wheeler had decided to have some doubts. Uncle Peach called Indians Eenjins. His Eenjin name was “See-we-no-ho,” meaning in English “Friend of Great Chief.” Though Wheeler suspected that Uncle Peach was just storying, he could nevertheless in his mind’s eye see Uncle Peach all feathered and painted, riding his Indian pony named “Wa-su-ho-ha,” which in English was “Runs Like Scared Rabbit.” Uncle Peach loved to tell how he had hunted buffalo with his Eenjin brothers, how well he had ridden, how accurately he had shot with his bow.

  And Andrew would say, “You got enough damn wind in you to blow up an onion sack.”

  Uncle Peach had about him the ease of a man who had never come hard up against anything. All his life he had been drifting. All his life he had followed the inclination of flowing water toward the easiest way, and the lowest. Wheeler may always have known this, for he was an alert boy who could pick knowledge out of the air without asking. And with a boy’s love for even the appearance of freedom, he loved Uncle Peach for his drifting.

  He loved his father, as eventually he knew, for precisely the opposite reason. Marce Catlett was a man who lived within limits that he had accepted. He did not drift. Year after year, he had been hard up against the demands of farm and family, of weather and the economy. As a farmer in a world that mainly took farmers for granted, and gave them not a thought, he had known more hard times than good ones. In the fall of that year when Wheeler was seven, his father sold his tobacco crop for just enough to pay the commission on its sale.

  But he was not a one-crop farmer. His rule was “Sell something every week.” This, as Wheeler would come to know, meant economic diversity; it required a complex formal intelligence; it was good sense. Marce was a man driven to small economies, which his artistry made elegant. He once built a new feed barn exactly on the site of the old one, tearing down the old one, reusing its usable lumber as he built the new one, and his work mules never spent a night out of their own stalls. His precise fitting of force to work, his neat patches and splices, his quiet transactions with a saddle horse or a team of mules—Wheeler learned these things as a boy, and all the latter part of his life he thought and dreamed of them, as of precious possessions lost.

  As he grew in understanding, Wheeler more and more consciously chose his father over Uncle Peach. He chose, that is, his father’s example, not his life. When the time came for Wheeler to choose his work, there was not a living for him at home and he could not afford to buy a place, and so out of economic necessity he went to school and became a lawyer. And yet he never abandoned his inheritance from his father. Marce Catlett’s love of farming lived on in his son, as later it would live on in his grandsons. And all his life, Wheeler felt his father’s good ways aching in his bones. He remembered them in palpable detail and loved them, though in his own life he had given most of them up for others less palpable.

  Because after law school Wheeler did not go to any place offered him as “better,” but returned to set up his practice at home, he came into an inheritance that was desirable, but it was also complex and in some ways difficult. That he had deliberately made himself heir to his father’s example did not prevent him as well from inheriting Uncle Peach, as an amusem
ent but also as a responsibility and a burden.

  Uncle Peach, in fact, was amusing enough, He always had been—“in his way,” as his sister, Dorie Catlett, often felt called upon to add.

  As a boy, wanting to “do like the old mule” who drank directly from the water trough, he tried to drink buttermilk from a stone churn and got his head stuck. Dorie had to break the churn to get him loose.

  “Damn him, I would have left his head right where he put it,” Marce would say. He would be growling, also laughing.

  He would pause then, to allow her to say, “Yes, I reckon you would have let him drown.”

  And then Marce would say, “Something gone, nothing lost.”

  Once, exasperated by his daily resistance to washing and going to school, Dorie told her brother, “I ought to let you grow up in ignorance.”

  And he replied, “That’s it, Dorie! Let me grow up in ignorance.”

  As Wheeler would tell it much later, his Uncle Peach did grow up in ignorance. And even before he had finished growing up, he shifted from buttermilk to whiskey, which he drank, while it lasted, as freely as the old mule drank water. He seldom had enough money to make it last very long. “And that,” Dorie would say, “was his only good fortune, poor thing.”

  But his surpluses of money, seldom as they were, gave him a sort of fame. His reputation as a drinker far exceeded his reputation as a carpenter, and stories of his exploits were still told in Port William and Hargrave half a century after the beginning of television.

  One afternoon, Burley Coulter came upon Uncle Peach in front of a roadhouse down by Hargrave. Uncle Peach had evidently been drinking a lot of whiskey and evidently eating a lot of pickled food from the bar. He had just finished vomiting upon the body of a dead cat, at which he was now gazing in great astonishment.

  “Well, what’s the matter, old Peach?”

  “Why, Burley,” Uncle Peach said, “I remember them pigs’ feet and that baloney, but I got no recollection whatsoever of that cat.”

  Sometimes Uncle Peach found drunkenness to be hard work. Dancing to keep standing, he would pronounce solemnly, “Damn, I’m tard! My ass is draggin’ out my tracks.”

  Sometimes he found himself in a moral landscape difficult to get across: “I got a long way to go and a short time to get there in.”

  Wheeler’s own favorite story was about, so far as he knew, Uncle Peach’s only actual fight.

  Standing at the bar of a saloon in Louisville, Uncle Peach discovered, to his great disgust, that the man standing next to him was drunk.

  “If they’s anything I can’t stand,” Uncle Peach confided to the man, “it’s a damn drunk.”

  At which the man confided back to Uncle Peach: “You ain’t nothing but a damn drunk yourself.”

  Upon which Uncle Peach, grievously offended, took a swing. “It is generally understood,” Wheeler would say, “that when one man aims a violent blow at another, he had better hit him.”

  But Uncle Peach missed. Whereupon the previously offended flew at Uncle Peach and thrashed him not hardly enough to kill him, but thoroughly even so.

  When Wheeler came later to rescue Uncle Peach from the Stag Hotel—where he lay, bloodied, defiant, and unable to stand—Uncle Peach was already referring to his opponent, in what may have been a mere flaw of perception, as “them gentlemens.”

  “Them gentlemens sholy could fight. They sholy was science men.”

  When, after his adventures in Oklahoma, Uncle Peach had decided to become a carpenter and showed some inclination to settle down, Marce Catlett helped him to find and buy a place with a few acres for pasture, a garden, and a little tobacco crop over by Floyd’s Station. It was ten miles away, a distance that ought to have kept Uncle Peach “weaned,” as Marce conceived it, from Dorie. But when Uncle Peach was on the downslope of a binge and in need of help, he would show up, intending to stay until he wore his welcome out—and longer, if he could.

  On a certain night in Wheeler’s childhood, perhaps not long after their conversation under the cedar tree, Uncle Peach showed up and, to the immense happiness of Wheeler and Andrew, drank copiously from a pan of dirty dishwater, complaining all the while of the declining quality of Dorie’s soup. He proceeded to get sick, and then, shortly, to disappear. There must have been a passage of strict conversation between him and Marce at that time. Uncle Peach continued to show up now and again, but he never again showed up except sober.

  Wheeler inherited Uncle Peach from his mother, who had inherited him from her mother, who had died soon after his birth. Dorie had pretty much had the raising of him, and it was she who named him “Peach,” because it was handier than “Leonidas Polk” and because he was so pretty a little boy. That this Peach may have been a born failure did not mitigate Dorie’s sense that he was her failure. With exactly the love that “hopeth all things,” she did not give up on him.

  Marce, on the contrary, gave up on his brother-in-law as a condition of his tolerance of him. It was a tolerance that worked best at a distance. With Peach in view, it was limited. After Uncle Peach had met the limit, he was always sober when in view. For Peach Wheeler drunk there was no longer a place within Marce Catlett’s horizon.

  And so Wheeler Catlett inherited, along with Uncle Peach, two opposite attitudes toward him, and was never afterward free of either. As he grew into the necessary choice between his father and his uncle, and made the choice, Wheeler found that he had not merely chosen, but, by choosing his father, had acquired in addition his father’s indignation. Wheeler could at times look upon his uncle as an affront, as if Peach had, at conception or birth, decided to be a burden, specifically to his as-yet-unborn nephew.

  But as he grew in experience and self-knowledge, Wheeler also grew to recognize in himself a sort of replica of his mother’s love and compassion. He was never able quite to anticipate and prepare himself for the moment at which the apparition of Uncle Peach as nuisance would be replaced by the apparition of Uncle Peach as mortal sufferer. This change was not in Uncle Peach, who never changed except by becoming more and more as apparently he had been born to be. The change was in Wheeler. When the moment came, usually in the midst of some extremity of Uncle Peach’s drinking career, Wheeler would feel a sudden welling up of love, as if from his mother’s heart to his own, and then he would pity Uncle Peach and, against the entire weight of history and probability, wish him well. Sometimes after telling, and fully delighting in, one of his stories about Uncle Peach, Wheeler would fall silent, shake his head, and say, “Poor fellow.”

  Andrew, the firstborn son and elder brother, despite all his early practicing to be a grown-up, did not manage to grow much farther up than Uncle Peach. Andrew, as it turned out, did not inherit attitudes toward Uncle Peach so much as he inherited Uncle Peach’s failing. Andrew in his turn became a drinker, and he too would say or do about anything he thought of. He would do so finally to the limit of life itself, and so beyond. As Andrew’s course declared itself as more or less a reprise of Uncle Peach’s, that of course intensified and complicated the attitudes of the others in the family toward Uncle Peach. Their stories all are added finally into one story. They were bound together in a many-stranded braid beyond the power of any awl to pick apart.

  When Wheeler came home and started his law practice, he bought a car, because his practice involved distances that needed to be hurried over. But the automobile was a fate that, as it included distance, also included Uncle Peach. The automobile made almost nothing of the ten miles from the Catletts’ house to Uncle Peach’s. Because of the automobile, Dorie could more frequently go over to housekeep and help out when Uncle Peach was on one of his rough ascents into sobriety, when, she said, he needed her most.

  Uncle Peach most needed Wheeler when he was drunk and sick and helpless and broke and far from home. The automobile made this a reasonable need. No power that Wheeler had acquired in law school enabled him to argue against it, though he tried. Because he had the means of going, he had to go.

&nb
sp; If Uncle Peach had the money to get there, his favorite place of resort was a Louisville establishment that called itself the Stag Hotel. From the time of Wheeler’s purchase of the automobile until the time of Uncle Peach’s death, Wheeler, who would not in any circumstances have taken Uncle Peach to the Stag Hotel, went there many a time to bring him home.

  At the Stag Hotel and other places of refreshment, Uncle Peach would encounter commercial ladies of great attractiveness and charm. Sometimes when Wheeler would be bringing him home, and despite his pain and exhaustion, Uncle Peach would still be enchanted, and he would confide as much to Wheeler: “Oh, them eyes!” he would say. “Oh, them eyes!”

  Many a good and funny story came of Wheeler’s missions of mercy, and also many a story of real pain and suffering that moved Wheeler to real pity, and also many moments of utter exasperation at the waste of time and effort when Wheeler, half mocking himself and yet meaning every word, would cry out against “the damned Stag Hotel and every damned thing involved therein and pertaining thereto.” Or he would say of Uncle Peach indignantly, “He’s got barely enough sense to swallow.” And then he would laugh. “Burley Coulter told me he’d seen Uncle Peach drink all he could hold and then fill his mouth for later.” He would laugh. And then, affection and hopelessness and sorrow coming over him, he would shake his head and say, “Poor fellow.”

  In his turn, young Andy Catlett, namesake of his doomed Uncle Andrew, also inherited Uncle Peach, who was bequeathed to him by his grandmother’s lamentation and his father’s talk. From those sources, from trips with his father to see that their then-failing uncle was alive and had enough to eat, and from various elders who remembered with care and delight Uncle Peach’s sayings and doings, Andy gathered up a sort of legendry that belonged intimately to his childhood and would remain with him all his life.