The Long Home

by William Gay

  They fought all over the backyard pulling hair and cursing and falling over one another. Winer swung himself onto the top plate the better not to be mistaken for a participant. Hardin tried to yell them down, then he saw Wymer moved among them like dogs snapping at the heels of milling cattle, first with blackjacks then Hardin slipping on his Sunday knucks and wading in.

  When they subsided no one seemed to know what the fight had been about and they all went back inside to discuss it save one soldier sitting crying in the grass with his jaw hanging crazily. He sat there awhile by himself and then he got up and hobbled around the corner like a very old man. Winer went on back to work and after a while the old men came up from the branch laughing and seated themselves again.

  Leo Huggins sold throughout a three-country area what he described as waterless cookware. He canvassed the backroads in his old green Studebaker, sitting with housewives on their porches, beseeching, wheedling, his eyes black and glossy with whatever obsession bulged behind them, the present one being that this waterless cookware was the only thing of moment in all the world.

  He’d demonstrate it in the comfort of your own home. He’d have you invite the neighbors over and he would go into the kitchen and prepare and serve a meal in these marvelous pans. Many a husband came in hot and sweaty from the sawmill to find his yard clotted with cars and the house full of folks he hadn’t expected. Huggins’s Studebaker likely blocking the driveway. Huggins himself humming busily in the kitchen, his sleeves rolled up, supper on the stove. The wife sitting waiting with mounting apprehension, wondering how she had let herself be talked into this.

  So there were times when Huggins had to depart in haste, the meal left halfprepared, the pots and pans abandoned until another day when the husband was once again at work.

  “Your mama tell me you a wood butcher.”

  “I reckon.”

  “I reckon it’s all right if you can make any money at it,” Huggins said, then turned the conversation neatly to himself. “I never could make a livin at public work. Had to do what I could with my brains.”

  And your mouth, Winer thought, then immediately decided he wasn’t being fair, that he did not know Huggins well enough to criticize him and was not giving him a chance. Yet he caught himself staring at the big white hands that did not look as if they’d ever done an hour’s labor, the fingers soft and freckled as bleached sausages, the still upturned palms tender and virginal as a baby’s.

  Huggins fell to talking about himself. He liked this topic of conversation, figured the rest of the world was afflicted in a like manner. He had come up from nothing in Arkansas, he told Winer and his mother, from folks who never had nothing nor wanted nothing, folks in shotgun shacks with cracks in the floor so you could keep an eye on the chickens, and he figured if he was ever going to be anything he had to do it on his own hook. He had begun by selling fancy overpriced coaloil lamps to the colored folks in the underside of Little Rock, later taking on a line of bibles with Negro Jesuses.

  Winer sat only halflistening to this oral history. He had worked hard and his shoulders ached from nailing and he kept yawning. Weariness seemed to have crept up from his ankles and he could still hear and feel the rhythmic swing of the hammer in some dreamlike part of his mind. Amber Rose’s face drifted unbidden into his thoughts and would not leave. Huggins’s car was paid off free and clear, he learned, there was no man in all the world who could claim Huggins owned him a dime. Winer stared across the yard wishing himself elsewhere. The day was waning, the blue timberline across the field already an indecipherable stain, the sedge washed by broad swaths of failing light.

  The trio formed a curious tableau on the porch of the unlit house, teacher and disciples perhaps, the boy pretending to listen, the man preaching softly the arcane gospel of himself, speaking so earnestly he might have been imparting hidden knowledge of the workings of the world or spinning a web to draw them into some dadaistic conspiracy. The woman sat in her chair, still, unrocking, hands momentarily stayed from their darning. Her eyes were downcast to her lap, the yellow lids slick and veined with a delicate blue tracery of capillaries. She seemed rapt, transfixed, and Winer realized that he did not know her, felt a brief and bitter stab of regret that he had never tried to learn her. She was less real to him than the yellowing daguerreotypes of other strangers in her own picturebox.

  Hardin had square, boxlike hands with thick fingers and he kept the nail cut straight across almost into the quick. The nails were hornlike and scrupulously clean. He was forever paring them when he spoke with Winer.

  “Where did you get that knife?”

  “Lord. son, I don’t know. I had it I guess ten or twelve year.”

  “Let me see it a minute.”

  Hardin handed him the knife handle first.

  The grips were bone the color of oxblood. CASE, the trademark said. Winer sat for a time holding it. “This is my father’s knife,” he said.

  “Seems like I did find it somewheres.”

  A small, irregular W was filed into the base of the blade the way all tools were marked but Winer would have known it anyway. The knife was an integral part of the memory of his father, the knife and the black slouch hat and the cold, remote way the eyes had of looking at the world. But they had never looked at Winer that way. The knife was wound up with the way his father had glanced at him when he started to town or to the field to plow. Winer the child would be hesitant, uncertain whether he should go or stay. “Well are you comin or not?” his father would ask. “You know I can’t get nothin done without you to supervise.”

  He smelled the knife.

  “What’d you do that for?”

  Winer flushed. “I don’t know. He always had a plug of tobacco in the same pocket with the knife. The knife always had crumbled-up chewing tobacco inside it and it always smelled just like old Red Ox twist.”

  “I remember where I got that knife now. I hadn’t thought about it in years. It was a holler or two over across your line. Seems like kind of a cedar grove in there, where I reckon he’d been cuttin fencepost. The knife was layin on a sandbar down by a spring in the mouth of the holler. But it was like I said ten or twelve year ago and any smell of chewin tobacco would be long gone.”

  “I don’t know why I did that.”

  “Your pa lit out, didn’t he?”

  “I don’t know what happened to him I never did believe he lit out and I don’t believe it now.”

  “Well, folks is funny. I don’t care how close you think you know somebody, you don’t know what wheels is turnin in their head. Course you don’t remember but times was hard for folks back then. Times was tightern a banjo string. Lots of folks was on the road. He might’ve just throwed up his hands and said fuck it and lit out.”

  “No.”

  “Well. I ain’t tryin to tell you what to think about your own daddy. But seems to me me and you’s a lot alike.”

  No, Winer thought, still looking at the knife lying open in his hand. I am not like you. I’ll never be like you. I’m not like Oliver either but both of you want to tell me what do. What to think. Both of you are always sayin, I’m not tryin to tell you, but you’re tellin me just the same. I am like myself. If I am like anybody then I am like him.

  “My own daddy cut out on me in February of the year I was eight years old. This was in Cullman, Alabama. I never will forget it, not forget Christmas that year. They always told us Santy Clause and me and my sister used to go out and hunt for reindeer tracks. The ground was froze as hard as rock but we use to hunt anyway. Course they never was much, a apple, and a orange and a handful of penny candy. A few nuts. But this year they wadnt nothin in our socks. I wondered what the hell it was we’d done. I went out where Pa was standin in the yard. He was lookin off down the road though there wadnt nothin to see. Just what you see when you look down a road. After a while Pa noticed us and reached in his pocket and handed me a quarter. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Git yins some Santy Clause.’ That was when I was eight years old. B
efore I was nine he was long gone and we was livin with our aunt. She was sleepin with a sectionhand used to take a strop to us just to hear us yell.”

  Winer didn’t say anything.

  “Life is hard, Winer. You just got to get hard with it. It’s a blackjack game with life dealin and the dealer’s always got the edge. You see? You got to get your own edge. Because by God if you don’t there’ll always be somebody there lyin to you all your life and then handin you a greasy quarter and tellin you to buy some Santy Clause.”

  “What’ll you take for this knife? You found it.”

  “Hell, take it. You said it belonged to your pa.”

  “Well, you’ve had it all these years. Decide what you want for it and hold it out of my pay.”

  “Hell, no. If it means somethin to ye, take it on. Seems to me it’s a damn poor substitute for a pa but such as it is you’re welcome to it.”

  2

  Old woods here and deep. Here the earth was coppercolored with fallen needles and the air had the cool, astringent smell of cedar. An old wagonroad faded out somewhere in the grove then wound away toward home. The piled tops of dead cedars lay bleached and white and indestructible as bone.

  He had not been in these woods since he was a child. Time seemed to have stopped here. He halfwaited for the rattle of trace chains, the ring of the axe, the slow turning of wagon wheels against the earth. This used to be an old houseplace, his father had said. The year the tornado came through the storm just picked it up off the foundation rocks and carried it away, no one knew where.

  Here an old rusted stovepipe leached from the earth, there the remnants of a washtub, a few handmade bricks. On a level area of diminished brush the foundation stones themselves, profound, ageless, curious Stonehenge aligned to no known star.

  The spring was clotted with leaves. Kneeling there he cleaned them out with his hands, watched the slow swirl of clean water into it, the list of sand and silt. An old one-eyed crayfish pretending invisibility eyed him apprehensively from the clearing water, retreated beneath a stone. A fall wind drove the first leaves from the tree above him, he arose in a drifting storm of them. He drank here, he thought, his eyes scanning the sandbar. Where had the knife been? His father had been fond of the knife, it wasn’t like him to lose it, once he had lost it and searched for it for two entire days before it was found and his father had not been one for repeating mistakes.

  Winer dried his hands on the seat of his pants, walked on up the hollow. In its mouth he found wreckage he could not account for. Old rusted five-five gallon drums, purposeless shards of mauled metal. A cornucopia of gallon sorghum buckets. Broken glass jugs. He sat on a stump and stared at the refuse. A story resided here could he but decipher it. A jay scolded and then the woods were still and impenetrable again. He arose. He had never accepted before that his father was dead but he accepted it now.

  Winer watched his mother at work, her eyes close to the sewing in her lap. Her lids were veined and near lashless, the skin drawn tight and smooth over her cheekbones. She seemed oblivious to him, to anything save the cloth her needle moved in. Her mouth was pursed slightly in the expression of resigned disapproval with which she viewed the world. She is old, he thought suddenly, though he knew she was not. For a moment something in the calm placidity of the face reminded him of the old men in Long’s store or Hardin’s, the serene face of an old woman looking down on him long ago from the high cab of a cordwood truck and from an Olympus of years, a face quilted and wrinkled by time until its seemed ageless, something found in nature, an old walnut hull found in the woods. Who was she? Aunt, grandmother, surrogate mother? Whoever’s she was, she was never mine.

  I am your blood, he thought. Half of me is you and yet I know nothing about you. I fed at your breast and yet I draw more memory and knowledge from a lost pocketknife than all your years have showed me. Than all your reproach has taught me.

  And you know. Somewhere behind the placid mask you wear for a face the answer lies. You may not know it but it is there. Somewhere in the vaults of your memory, old stacked and yellowing newsprint. There must have been things said I did not hear, did not understand if I did. Or have you known all these years, I’ve never known your motives or your reasoning. Did you cut his throat while he slept, did a tinker with his pots and pans trouble your dreams even then? Did his forerunner appear to you in a vision long ago, were you just clearing a path for his coming? Or did Pa just walk off down a road, the way you walked off down a road in your head?

  “Did Pa ever fool any with whiskey?”

  She looked up sharply. “Do what?”

  “Did he ever make whiskey? Or sell it?”

  “Lord, no. What makes you ask that?”

  “I just got to wonderin.”

  “Well, I’d like to know what got you to wonderin any such as that. Has that lowdown Hardin been feedin you a mess of lies?”

  “No.”

  “Your pa never even drank. I never even knowed him to make a drink of whiskey but one time and that was at a dance before we got married. Your pa was funny turned. He kept to hisself and he never had the patience to put up with a bunch of drunks the way you’d have to do to fool with whiskey.”

  “You never talked much about him,” he said. “Why is that?”

  “He said it all when he pulled that door to behind him,” she told him.

  “Did you ever know Pa to make whiskey?”

  “Good God, no. Why? Are you thinkin about settin up and runnin Dallas Hardin out of business?”

  “No. I just got to wondering.”

  “Get you one of these pears,” Oliver said. He had his rocker in the shade of the pear tree and was peeling pears into an old blue enamel washpan. Yellow windfall pears lay all about in the sere grass and yellowjackets crawled all over them in an agony of gluttony. The air was rich and winey with the fragrance of the pears.

  “I found an old still back in there where the cedar grove is, over by King’s Branch. I just wondered who put it there.”

  “Well, I can’t tell you who it was but I can tell you who it wadnt. Not talkin agin your pa but he was downright intolerant about some things. Now, I don’t mind bootleggin myself, but whiskeymakin was one of the things he was down on, he was a hard worker and whiskeymakin just looked shiftless to him. Though there’s a world of hard work wound up in it as anyone who ever shouldered a hundred-pound sack of sugar through the woods could tell you.”

  “Whose would you say it was then?”

  “Well, when Dallas Hardin first come to this part of the country and didn’t have the money to buy the law the way he does now he used to make his own stuff stead of haulin in this here bonded like he does. He had a habit of settin up across Hovington’s lines on somebody else in case the revenuers found his rig.”

  The old man glanced up and something in Winer’s expression so startled him that it broke his train of thought and he was momentarily confused. For a second he was seeing the father’s eyes in the son’s face, cold, sleepylooking eyes.

  “No, now wait a minute,” Oliver said bemusedly as if he were talking to himself. “That ain’t it atall. My mind’s goin in my old age like the rest of me’s done gone. Old man Cater Loveless lived back in there and when that tornado come through it just blowed his house away. Now, he made whiskey, Cater did. That was fore your pa bought the land for the taxes on it.”

  “Then it must’ve been Loveless’ still?”

  Oliver looked up. The look was gone from the boy’s face. “Likely it was,” he agreed. He went back to peeling pears.

  The boy stood up. “Where’s your bucksaw? I thought I’d cut you up that big poplar the creek washed up.”

  “Boy, you don’t have to do that. Do you have to be doin somethin ever minute?”

  “It won’t take long till cold weather.”

  “No, I guess it won’t. It never is anymore. Or warm weather either for that matter. Seems like the older you get the faster the wheel rolls.”

  “Where’d you say
the saw was?”

  “It’s on the crib wall where it always is but I don’t see why you can’t find nothin to do but cut a old man’s wood. When I was your age I was workin twelve hours a day and runnin the women all night. Why ain’t you in town doin that?”

  Winer started off toward the barn.

  “Unless of course you’ve found somethin a little closer to home.”

  Winer stopped and turned and Oliver was grinning down into the pan of cutup pears as if something he saw there amused him. Winer went to the barn.

  “You get through we’ll sack you up some pears to take home,” the old man called.

  Weekdays were generally slow and nothing Pearl and Wymer couldn’t handle and Hardin had lots of unspecified business to take care of. When he left he told no soul where he was going or when he’d be back, just driving off in the Packard or saddling up the Morgan and riding off up the ridge out of sight into the woods. On the days when Hardin was gone Amber Rose would sit outside and watch Winer. There was something curiously tranquil about her. He never saw her read a book or sew or anything else to occupy her time, she would sit quiet and self-contained and so watchful he came to feel that he could discern the weight of her eyes, could tell the moment her attention fell on him. He remembered her on the schoolbus but she’d never talked then either and she had certainly not looked the way she looked now. He remembered her violet eyes and the coarse black hair but the rest of her had changed. She seemed to have grown up overnight, the way a flower opens up.

  He looked up from his homedrawn blueprint and she was standing before him holding a quart jar of peaches in her hands.

  “You reckon you can open this? Me nor Mama can’t.”

  Winer laid his pencil aside. “I might can.”

  She was standing reaching the jar down toward him. When he stood up they were standing very close together and looking down into her face he felt that the air had suddenly become charged with electricity. She met his eyes innocently as if she were unaware of it, perhaps she was. Her hair was parted in the middle so that it fell over both ears and onto she shoulders. Seen closer than he had ever seen it her skin was very clear. He could smell the warm, clean scent of her and the thought of Lipscomb leaning to the sunwashed glass made him dizzy.