A World Lost: A Novel (Port William)

by Wendell Berry

  He was on my mind forever too, as I now see. But I was a child; for me, every day was new. I lived beyond my loss even as I suffered it, and without any particular sympathy for myself. And what I have grown into is not sympathy for myself as I was but sympathy for Grandma and Grandpa as they were. I see how time had brought them, once, their years of strength and hope, energy to look forward and build and dream, as we must; and I see how Uncle Andrew took all they had vested in him, their precious one life and time given over in helpless love and hope into the one life and time that he possessed, and how he carried it away on the high flood of his recklessness, his willingness to do whatever he thought of.

  I see now what perhaps I have known for a long time that I would see, if I looked: He was a child who wanted only to be free, as I myself had been free back at the pond that afternoon of his death. He was a big, supremely willful child whom Grandma and Grandpa and Aunt Judith could not confine, and who could be balked by no requirement or demand. And yet, hating confinement, he had been confined - in a hapless marriage, in bad jobs, sometimes in self-reproach, and finally in a grave with which he had made no terms. He had been confined because he had confined himself, as only he could have done, because he was the way he was and would not change, or could not. It was knowledge of his confinement, I think, that so surrounded us with pain and made us grieve so long.

  When bedtime came, I would go up the stairs first and get into my bed in the little back hall, leaving the door open to the room where Grandma slept. I would hear her stirring in the rooms below, setting things to rights, making sure she had forgotten nothing. Assuming perhaps that I was asleep, she would have begun to talk aloud to herself. "Mm-hmh!" she would say as she shut a door or lowered a sash, "Mm-hmh!" as she turned off the lights.

  And then I would hear her coming slowly up the stairs, the banister creaking under her hand as though now, alone with her thoughts, she bore the whole accumulated weight of time and loss. As she came up, she would be saying to herself always the same thing: "Oh, my poor boy! Oh, my poor, poor boy!"

  I would hear her muttering still as she went about her room, preparing for bed: "May God have mercy on my poor boy!"

  And then it would be dark. And then it would be morning.

  10

  The time had to come, of course, when what I knew no longer satisfied me. I had been told almost nothing about the circumstances of Uncle Andrew's murder, I had asked nothing, and yet I wanted to know. That death had remained in the forefront of my mind, as I knew it had in my grandmother's and my father's and Aunt Judith's. I knew too that for other people it had receded and diminished as it had mingled with other concerns. I could not have asked those whom my questions would have pained the most. With others, the subject did not come up. I did not want my curiosity about it to be known.

  But finally when I was maybe in my last year of high school, I became conscious that there were such things as court records. The county court clerk at that time was Charlie Hardy, as dear a friend, I suppose, as my father had; they bird-hunted together. I made up my mind to ask Mr. Hardy to show me the records of Carp Harmon's trial, expecting to see transcripts of the lawyers' arguments and the testimony of witnesses; I imagined that there would be a great pile of papers that I could sit down somewhere and read, and at last know everything I wanted to know.

  I watched for a time when Mr. Hardy was in his office alone. I did not want anybody but him to hear my request. Above all, I did not want my father to know what I was doing. What I intended to do was unbandage a wound. It was in part my own wound, but I felt it was my father's more than mine, and maybe I had no right to know more than he had told me. Though I was determined to see those papers, I was also more than a little ashamed.

  "Son, I'll show you," Mr. Hardy said when I finally walked in and asked him. "I'll show you what there is, I'll show you, son, but there ain't much."

  Already I was sorry I had come, for I saw that he knew exactly what I wanted and that he too was thinking of my father. Spitting fragments of tobacco bitten from the cold stump of his cigar, he climbed a ladder up a large wall of file boxes ranked on shelves, selected one of the boxes, and brought it to me.

  "See," he said, "there's not a hell of a lot here that would be of interest to you, son." He showed me the warrant for Carp Harmon's arrest, his indictment, several pleadings, all technical documents no more informative than they were required to be.

  "I thought there would be a record of what was said at the trial."

  "Naw, son," he said. "Nawsir, son, no such record was ever made. What was said at that trial is a long time gone."

  He explained that there had been no appeal. There would have been a transcript only if there had been an appeal. By then I was relieved that there was no record. Mr. Hardy was putting the papers back into their box. "Nawsir, son, that record you want to see, it never did exist." He removed the cigar from his mouth, spat toward the wastebasket, and then looked at me. "Son," he said, "I'm sorry."

  And still we both were embarrassed, for even though the record I sought did not exist, the fact remained that Charlie Hardy knew what had happened at that trial. I knew he could imagine my saying, "Well, Mr. Hardy, why don't you tell me what happened?" And I knew - I know much more certainly now - that he would have given years off his life to be spared the question.

  "Well, thank you, Mr. Hardy," I said.

  'Any time, son," he said. 'Any time." He waved to me with the hand holding the cigar as if I were already out of the building and across the street. "By God, son, come back! Any time!"

  But as time went on I did learn some things. Things that I did not know to ask for came to me on their own.

  One day after the ewes were sheared, when Elton Penn and Henry and I hauled the bagged wool to market, we ran into Yeager Stump. Something was said about dancing. Maybe Elton mentioned that Henry and I were going to a dance, or had been to one; maybe he was complaining, as he sometimes did, joking, but only half joking, that when we danced late into the night we were no account in the daytime. Whatever was said, it reminded Mr. Stump of Uncle Andrew.

  "Boys," he said, and there was laughter in his eyes though he did not laugh aloud, "I've seen your uncle Andrew too drunk to walk, but I never saw him too drunk to dance."

  Later it was Mr. Stump, leaning to talk to me through a car window, his eyes filled with that same quiet, reminiscent, almost tender unuttered laughter, who told me two little bits of Uncle Andrew's poetry. "Your uncle Andrew said that when he was with a woman and that old extremity came to him, every hair in his bee-hind was a jew's harp playing a different tune." Mr. Stump's voice recovered exactly Uncle Andrew's jazzy intonation. "He said a big covey of quail flew out his bunghole one bird at a time."

  And then Mr. Stump did laugh aloud, briefly. He clapped his hand onto the metal windowsill and straightened up. "Well, he was something. There never was another one like him."

  When I went away to Lexington to the university, forty years after Uncle Andrew's failed expedition there, I continued my checking account at the Independent Farmers Bank at Port William. A number of times when I wrote out a check for a woman salesclerk, the lady would look at my signature and the name of the town, and she would say -it was invariably the same sentence -"I knew an Andrew Catlett once."

  "He was my uncle," I would say.

  And then she would say, "He was such a dancer!" Or "Oh, how that man could dance!" Or "I just loved to dance with him! He was so handsome."

  They always spoke of him as a dancer. They always smiled in remembering him. Speaking of him, they always sounded younger than they were, and a little dreamy.

  One day in Lexington I cashed a check at Scoop Rawl's Ice Cream Parlor. Scoop himself was at the cash register. He looked at my signature. "Andrew Catlett," he said. "Port William. I knew an Andrew Catlett from down there."

  "Yessir," I said. "He was my uncle."

  He looked at me over his glasses. "Your uncle. God almighty, we had some times!"

&n
bsp; I said, "Yessir," hoping he would say more, and he did, a little. He had known Uncle Andrew, apparently, not during his brief visit to Lexington as a student, but after his marriage, when he was traveling for a distillery.

  'Andrew had a girl he called Sweetie Pie. He'd squall for her when he was drunk and you could hear him half a mile: 'Sweetie Pie! "'

  I knew how he sounded. I could hear that raucous mating call rising in the midst of the late-night fracas and hilarity of some Lexington blind tiger as Uncle Andrew hooked cute little Sweetie Pie with his right arm and pulled her into his lap. During my college years also I encountered a woman who had lived near us in Hargrave when I was a child. She had been beautiful when she was young and had been married to an old man. Uncle Andrew, she told me, laughing, had said to her, "When that old son of a bitch is dead, I'm going to stomp on his grave until he's in there good and tight, and then I'm going to get straight into bed with you."

  She told me too of the midnight when Uncle Andrew and his cronies in their mating plumage, transcendently drunk, burst into Momma-pie's bedroom, and Uncle Andrew snapped on the light. "Wake up, Mommapie! We've bred all the women, cows, yo sheep, mares, and mare mules -and now, by God, we're going to breed you!"

  In spite of Yeager Stump's later claim that they did whatever they thought of, I do not believe that this actually happened; if it had, Uncle Andrew's moments of retrospective self-knowledge and regret would have forbidden him to talk about it, but it was a story that was known because he had told it.

  I can imagine a night of hilarity, Uncle Andrew and Buster Simms and Yeager Stump out among 'em, women and whiskey on hand, Uncle Andrew talking, the others laughing and egging him on. He is conjuring up the most outrageous scene he can think of he and his buddies crowding into that chastely fragrant room like a nightmare, the sudden light revealing Momma-pie in her nightcap, sans teeth, sitting up in bed, clutching the bedclothes to her bosom. I can imagine the tale repeated and improved at every opportunity as if it had actually happened, the work of alcoholic incandescence and a refined sense of impropriety.

  But I know too that Mr. Stump was right: A lot of the things they thought of, they did. Their taste in women ran simply to the available; their pleasures were restricted only by the possible. In his times of breaking out, which apparently were the times he lived for, Uncle Andrew granted an uncomplicated obedience to impulses that men of faith and loyalty like my father struggle against all their lives. Men who obey those impulses surely invite their own destruction, and I think there were moments when Uncle Andrew knew this.

  But obviously not all are destroyed. Yeager Stump, for one, enjoyed life far beyond the conventional three score years and ten. Even at the end, when he was housebound, he continued to enjoy life. Miss Iris Flynn, devoted as always, kept him supplied with good bourbon. On one of her visits, she handed him the anticipated bottle and exclaimed about its lately increased cost. "Yes," said Mr. Stump, "maybe they'll finally charge what it's worth."

  Whether or not Uncle Andrew invited the destruction he in fact received is at least a disturbed question, and perhaps an unanswerable one. But I did not even know it was a question until one day -I was grown by then - I said point-blank to Elton Penn: "Why did Carp Harmon kill Uncle Andrew?"

  Probably Elton was no more comfortable with my curiosity than Mr. Hardy had been, but he gave me a straight answer. "Well, the way I heard it, your Uncle Andrew propositioned Harmon's daughter there in the store where the ones that were tearing down those buildings would go for lunch."

  It was not as though Elton and I were two people merely interested in the pursuit of truth; we both knew the hardship that that story would have presented to my family. We did not pursue the subject further, partly because of the pain that surrounded it, partly because I thought the explanation credible and had no more questions to ask. I believed that if he had thought of doing so, Uncle Andrew would have propositioned Carp Harmon's daughter in the store, devil take the witnesses. He would have done it because he thought of doing it and because he enjoyed the outrageousness of it and because he relished the self-abandonment of it. From there, I supposed, the story had gone on to its conclusion according to the logic of anger.

  The year following my grandmother Catlett's death, I returned with my wife and baby daughter to live through the summer in the old house. Grandma's things were still there, put away in their places, just as she had left them, and it fell to me to dispose of them. Because she had known no extravagance in her life, she had saved everything salvageable: string, pieces of cloth, buttons and buckles, canceled checks and notes, bits of paper covered with now meaningless computations and lists, letters and cards, clippings from newspapers - anything that, within the terms and hopes of her life, had seemed valuable or potentially useful or in some way dear.

  Among all else she saved were twenty or so letters from Uncle Andrew. Most of these were written on the stationery of hotels in southern states, mostly in South Carolina. All of them show a wish to be a good son, and I have no doubt that this was a wish that he felt genuinely enough when he felt it; I do not think that he felt it all the time. The letters always intend to assure Grandma and Grandpa that he is doing better, or is now all right, or has resolved to lead a cleaner life. He clearly did not like the thought that they were worried about him. And yet there are, even in this small and perhaps selective sheaf that Grandma saved, too many letters of that sort. It is impossible not to suspect that he was trying, as if by incantation, to lay to rest the more obvious consequences of failings that he could not help, or that he did not much want to help. It is almost as if he felt that if he could just stop Grandma and Grandpa, especially Grandma, from worrying, there would be nothing to worry about.

  And yet they are troubled letters, and they are troubling. One of them in particular has occupied all alone a large place in my mind since I first read it. It was written a few months after I was born and given his name. According to the letter, he has been "out"- certainly out of a job and perhaps also drunk. But now, he says, "While not making any money am better off than I was, some, and believe in six months will be much better. First want to tell you and ask that you not worry one bit." He is evidently ready to begin work as a salesman for a liquor company. His associates, he says, are "the cleanest bunch of men you ever saw," and they do not drink. But if Grandma wishes, he will try to get another kind of job, which he does not believe would be hard for him to do. He thanks the family for their kindness and consideration of his feelings while he was "out." My mother in particular, he says, has been sweet and thoughtful. They all have shown him such love and affection that he could do nothing that would hurt them or shake their confidence.

  And then he writes the sentence-troubled, tender, hopeful, and, as I know, hopeless-that binds me to him closer than my name: And little Andrew, bless his heart-if for nothing else, I would be a man for him."

  11

  After I found the letters and read them and put them away again, I assumed that I knew as much about Uncle Andrew as I was ever going to know. I continued to remember him and to think and wonder about him, but I asked no more questions.

  And then, thirty years later, after my father died, I found among his papers his file of bills, receipts, and other documents having to do with the settlement of Uncle Andrew's estate. Folded up in that file was a copy of the Hargrave Weekly Express, giving an account of the examining trial of Carp Harmon. Why I had not thought before to examine the back issues of the Weekly Express I am not sure; I had believed the little I had heard, and perhaps that had satisfied me, but perhaps I also had felt that the truth about Uncle Andrew's death, as long as my father was alive, was his belonging, not mine.

  But now, that paper having come to me from my father's very hands, which had folded it and put it away so long ago, I opened it and read the article as eagerly, I think, as I have ever read anything. Much of the article deals with technicalities, but two paragraphs are given to the story of the murder:

  V. R. G
adwell, merchant at Stoneport, testified that Catlett and a group of workers at the lead mine, where buildings were being dismantled, came to the store for lunch and soft drinks. He said Harmon's daughter came in the store and gave her father some change. Gadwell then heard a noise and next saw Catlett getting up after being knocked down by Harmon. Harmon had hit him with an oilcan. He said he heard Catlett apologizing to Harmon, stating he did not know the girl was his daughter. Gadwell said he got Catlett and the other men out of the store but Harmon remained 10 or 15 minutes.

  "Jake Branch of near Hargrave, who was assisting Catlett in the dismantling job, said he was 3 or 4 feet from Catlett when the accused hit him with the oilcan. He testified that the group went back to their work and about an hour had elapsed when Harmon suddenly came up to Catlett and said he was going to kill him and pulled a gun. He stated Catlett pleaded that it was 'my mistake' and 'don't shoot me.' Branch said Harmon fired two shots and the workmen rushed Catlett to the hospital.

  "R. T. Purlin, 16-year-old stepson of Branch, with the group at the mine, said he yelled to Catlett when he saw Harmon slipping through the weeds but believes Catlett did not hear him."

  R. T. Purlin, older than I by six years, had been a hero to Henry and me when we were boys, working and playing together on the Crayton Place, for even at the age of fourteen he was already in body a grown man with an arm like one of Homer's spear throwers, and he never tired of entertaining us with feats of strength. He had a truly clear and generous heart and was never condescending in his friendship to us smaller boys. R. T. was the last living witness to Uncle Andrew's murder. I had not seen him in a long time.