Finally Bill Mixter would lower his head, lay his bow upon the strings, and draw out the first notes of a tune, and the others would come in behind him. The music, while it lasted, brought a new world into being. They would play some tunes they had learned off the radio, but their knowledge was far older than that and they played too the music that was native to the place, or that the people of the place were native to. Just the names of the tunes were a kind of music; they call back the music to my mind still, after so many years: “Sand Riffle,” “Last Gold Dollar,” “Billy in the Low Ground,” “Gate to Go Through,” and a lot of others. “A fiddle, now, is an atmospheric thing,” said Burley Coulter. The music was another element filling the room and pouring out through the cracks. When at last they’d had their fill and had gone away, the shop felt empty, the silence larger than before.
But you could not be where I was without experiencing many such transformations. One of your customers, one of your neighbors (let us say), is a man known to be more or less a fool, a big talker, and one day he comes into your shop and you have heard and you see that he is dying even as he is standing there looking at you, and you can see in his eyes that (whether or not he admits it) he knows it, and all of a sudden everything is changed. You seem no longer to be standing together in the center of time. Now you are on time’s edge, looking off into eternity. And this man, your foolish neighbor, your friend and brother, has shed somehow the laughter that has followed him through the world, and has assumed the dignity and the strangeness of a traveler departing forever.
The generation that was old and dying when I settled in Port William had memories that went back to the Civil War. And now my own generation, that calls back to the First World War, is old and dying. And gray hair is growing on heads that had just looked over tabletops at the time of World War II. I can see how we grow up like crops of wheat and are harvested and carried away.
But as the year warmed in 1937, I was a young man. I hardly knew what I knew, let alone what I was going to learn. In March, Burley Coulter brought his breaking plow in to the blacksmith shop and, in passing, plowed my garden. It broke beautifully. There was, as Burley said, nothing wrong with it. The dark soil rolled off the moldboard and fell to pieces. In the early mornings and late evenings, and in the intervals between customers, I brought to life the useful things Aunt Cordie had taught me and became a gardener. I worked and manured the ground, and on Good Friday planted potatoes, onions, peas, salad stuff, and set out some cabbage plants. It was lovely, then, to see the green things sprigging up in my long, straight rows. The garden took up nearly all the space between the shop and the privy out by the back fence, a hundred and fifty feet or so, and was only about eighteen feet wide. Depending on how I spaced them, I could have seven or eight rows.
I became a sort of garden fanatic, and I am not over it yet. You can take a few seed peas, dry and dead, and sow them in a little furrow, and they will sprout into a row of pea vines and bear more peas—it may not be a miracle, but that is a matter of opinion. When the days were lengthening and getting warmer and the sun was shining, I would be back in my garden all the time, working or just looking. When it was warm and I could leave the back door open, I could hear when anybody came into the shop, and I would go in, accomplish the necessary haircut or shave or conversation, and come back out again as soon as I was alone. I knew better than to expect a visible difference in an hour, but I looked anyhow.
Another new thing that happened to me after I came back to Port William was the feeling of loss. I began to live in my losses. When I was taken away from Squires Landing and put into The Good Shepherd, I think I was more or less taken away from my grief. I was just lifted up out of it, like a caught fish. The loss of all my life and all the places and people I had known I felt then as homesickness. After I got over my homesickness and learned in my fashion to live and get along at The Good Shepherd, I learned to think of myself as myself. The past was gone. I was unattached. I could put my whole life in a smallish cardboard box and carry it in my hand.
But when I recognized Burley Coulter on the water that morning and told him who I was, and he remembered me from that lost and gone and given-up old time and then introduced me to people as the boy Aunt Cordie and Uncle Othy took to raise—well, that changed me. After all those years of keeping myself aloof and alone, I began to feel tugs from the outside. I felt my life branching and forking out into the known world. In a way, I was almost sorry. It was as though I knew without exactly knowing, or felt, or smelled in the air, the already accomplished fact that nothing would ever be simple for me again. I never again would be able to put my life in a box and carry it away.
The place itself and its conversation surrounded me with remindings. Aunt Cordie and Uncle Othy and the Thripples and Put Woolfork and Dark Tom Cotman and Emmet Edge and Aunt Ellie and Uncle Ben Fewclothes—all the people of that early world I once thought would last forever, and then thought I had left forever—were always coming back to mind because of something I saw or heard. They would turn up in the conversation in my shop. They returned to my dreams. In my comings and goings I crossed their tracks, and my own earlier ones, many times a day, weaving an invisible web that was as real as the ground it was woven over, and as I went about I would feel my losses and my debts.
In those days I was always sticking money here and there for safe-keeping. I stuck Sam Hanks’s unrepayable five-dollar bill into a book where I would have it to use if I had to use it, but where as long as I might keep it I would always know it from any other five-dollar bill. I kept it to remind me that there are some accounts that cannot be settled.
With that in mind, I watched for the first warm Sunday morning. When it came, I left town early. I followed the road along the ridgetops, and down into the Katy’s Branch valley and up the other side, and then across the fields and down through the woods until I came to the open hillside above Squires Landing. Just at the woods’ edge, where I could look down at the house and the store and the other buildings, I found a good sitting place and leaned my back against a tree.
I sat there a long time. I looked at everything and remembered it, and let my memories come back and take place. I don’t believe I was exactly thinking; my mind was too crowded and too everywhere touched. What would come, came. The child I had been came and made his motions, out and about and around, down to the store, down to the garden, down to the barn, up to the house, up to the henhouse, across the river in Uncle Othy’s johnboat, up the river in the buggy, over to the Thripples, up to Port William on Sunday morning, down to the river to see the steamboats land and unload and load, up into the woods—weaving over the ground a web of ways, as present and as passing as the spiders’ webs in the grass that catch the dew early in the morning. All my steps had made the place a world and made me at home in it, and then I had gone, just as Aunt Cordie and Uncle Othy had been at home and then had gone.
And like a shadow within a shadow, the time before my time came to me. I was old enough by then to know and believe that the old had once been young. Once, Aunt Cordie had been Cordie Quail, a pretty girl. There had been a day when Uncle Othy and Aunt Cordie had come there, young, just married, to begin their life at the landing, to have their pleasures and to endure what had to be endured. There had been a time before they came, and a time before that. And always, from a time before anybody knew of time, the river had been there. From my sitting place where the woods stood up at the edge of the pasture, I could see the river, risen a little, swift and muddy from the spring rains, coming down the mile-long reach above the Willow Run bend, swerving through the bend and coming on down past the landing, carrying its load of drift. And I saw how all-of-a-piece it was, how never-ending—always coming, always there, always going.
When I was filled with knowledge and could not hold any more, I went back over the ridge and down to Katy’s Branch and up along the creek road to Goforth. I went to the site of my parents’ house—our house—now gone, and my father’s shop, gone, the place
overgrown with young box elders and elms and cedars and redbuds and all manner of weeds and vines. I pressed in amongst the tangle and stood by the still-standing chimney and thought, “This is my home itself, where I began.” I thought of my young parents, Iona and Luther. My few memories of that place came to me, and I felt the presence of memories I could not remember. I remembered so plainly that I could hear the sound of a hammer shaping metal on an anvil, the hammer blows muted at first on the heat-softened iron and then ringing clearer as it cooled and hardened.
The sunlight now lay over the valley perfectly still. I went over to the graveyard beside the church and found them under the old cedars: Uncle Othy and Aunt Cordie, Iona and Luther, and round about were Quails and Cotmans, Proudfoots and Thigpens, my mother’s and Aunt Cordie’s people. I am finding it a little hard to say that I felt them resting there, but I did. I felt their completeness as whatever they had been in the world.
I knew I had come there out of kindness, theirs and mine. The grief that came to me then was nothing like the grief I had felt for myself alone, at the end of my stay in Lexington. This grief had something in it of generosity, some nearness to joy. In a strange way it added to me what I had lost. I saw that, for me, this country would always be populated with presences and absences, presences of absences, the living and the dead. The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come.
12
The Gay Bird’s Heel
If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line—starting, say, in the Dark Wood of Error, and proceeding by logical steps through Hell and Purgatory and into Heaven. Or you could take the King’s Highway past appropriately named dangers, toils, and snares, and finally cross the River of Death and enter the Celestial City. But that is not the way I have done it, so far. I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circle or a doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order. The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have seen them only in looking back. Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I have deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led—make of that what you will.
I will call back now and lay in a row some passages of my early knowledge of Mattie Keith, who was to be Mattie Chatham.
I have mentioned my first memory of her, when she came giggling down past my shop with Thelma Settle and Althie Gibbs and they saw me and ran away. After that, I was aware of her. She would have been only fourteen years old, and I had no extraordinary affection for her in those days. But anybody who saw her then, I think, would have seen that she was a standout—a neat, bright, pretty, clear-spirited girl with all her feeling right there in her eyes—and would have hoped, as most of us do for things that are young and fine, that the world would treat her kindly.
From time to time I would see her pass the shop with Thelma or Althie or some of the other girls her age, as she was drawn more and more into the social life of the town’s young people. You could see that the other girls looked up to her and that she treated them generously and was in no way stuck-up. The girls would call out to her and she always answered with a good openhearted smile.
And then it came about that sometimes, and then often, when I would see her go by she would be walking with Troy Chatham, and he would be requiring her attention with his talk, which he always accompanied with gestures of his hands and eloquent facial expressions and much dancing and prancing about. He was in her grade, though about a year older, I think, and was as attractive in his way as she was in hers. He was handsome and as athletic as a fox. It was easy to know why she walked with him and listened to him and gave him her smile. They were about equally beautiful and they recognized each other. They had picked each other out.
It is a serious fault in a man to dislike a boy, but I have to confess that I never liked Troy Chatham. Even before he began keeping company with Mattie Keith, I disliked him, you might say, in his own right. He was the kind of boy who always assumes that people are watching him with admiration. He had reason for assuming so, but that in itself made me unwilling to give him the credit he expected. He was a show-off; with the other boys, he was a braggart and a bully. He was not making up for any felt inferiority, either. His faults, if he knew them, never laid heavy on his mind.
One Saturday morning Mattie came into the shop with Althie Gibbs to bring Althie’s four-year-old brother for a haircut. They were being very motherly and dutiful with the little boy. Because of that, maybe, both girls left behind the schoolbooks they had brought with them. I suppose they didn’t remember where they had left the books, because nobody thought to come back for them until Monday. I laid them on the backbar to have them out of the way.
When the shop had cleared that night and I was putting the place in order, I picked up one of the books to look at it. It was Mattie’s American history book, and various ones of her classmates had written things on the flyleaves and endpapers. Althie, for instance, had written:When you get married and have twins
Don’t call on me for safety pins.
Love from
your friend forever,
Althie Gibbs
But what most struck my notice was an inscription written in a flourishing hand smack in the middle of the front flyleaf by Troy Chatham. He had used up fully half the page, first by writing big and then by drawing a scalloped border around what he had written. It said:Remember me and bear in mind
That a gay bird’s heel sticks out behind.
You know who
I did know who, and in the way of the knowing bystander I took offense. Troy Chatham’s inscription was a claim; beyond anything it actually said, it announced that he felt entitled to a lot of room in the mind and life of Mattie Keith. It bothered me in particular that, having claimed her, he did not sign his name.
Where I found his name was in Mattie’s reader. On the flyleaf, in her hand, was written:If my love’s name you wish to see
Look on page 63.
On page sixty-three, the inscription said:But if there you fail to find
Look on page 109.
On the hundred-and-ninth page, in the same penciled script, she had written his name:Troy Lafayette Chatham
It seemed to me, as I looked at the three words of his name inscribed in pencil in her hand, that I could imagine the overturning, all-including love that such a girl could feel for such a boy. Though I believed she was mistaken, I felt the power and freshness and fragrance and the innocence of such love. And then I grew ashamed of my intrusion and put her books away.
I am reluctant to say that the die was already cast, but it was. (“You watch ’em,” Elton Penn used to say. “They don’t change much.”) Mattie remained all that she at first appeared to be, subtracting only freshness and innocence. Althie was (is) Mattie’s friend forever—the best of the Gibbses by far. She was a plain, strong-bodied, undaunted girl with green eyes full of intelligence and humor, who no sooner finished raising her younger sisters and brothers than she began a family of her own. And Troy Chatham had correctly named himself—a gay bird with a good bit more heel than he had in view.
When their class left Port William and entered the high school down at Hargrave, Troy became almost immediately a basketball prospect that everybody was watching, and after a year or two he became a star. And Mattie continued, I knew, to belong to him. As for his belonging to her, I had my doubts, and I was not the only one.
Mattie’s parents were Athey and Della Keith. They lived on a good,
large river-bottom farm in the bend between Sand Ripple and Katy’s Branch. If you looked northward from the Coulter ridges, you would be looking right across the Keith place. It had been the Keith place for generations. The upper end of the boundary crossed the Coulter Branch and took in a fine stand of timber on the upriver side. Della and Athey Keith had married late, and Mattie was their only child.
Athey was a regular customer of mine. He was a good farmer, a man who liked farming and liked his farm. You didn’t see him in town a lot. He didn’t much take to crowds. If the shop was full when he came in, he would have little to say and would leave as soon as he paid me. If he was the only customer—and I think he tried to come when the shop would be uncrowded—he would sometimes linger to talk. I got to know him; pretty soon we became friends. That he did not approve of Troy Chatham was not something he ever said, so far as I heard, in his life. I believe that he would not have said it, except, for a time, within the walls of his own house. Later, after a particular day, I am fairly certain that he never spoke of it again to anybody.
I knew of his disapproval not from anything that he said but from what, in certain circumstances, he did not say. If he was in the shop, for instance, and the talk turned to basketball and the prowess of Troy Chatham, Athey said simply nothing. He would not so much as look in the direction of the conversation. The Hargrave basketball team and Troy Chatham’s excellence as a player did not matter to Athey Keith. They were not the point. I knew that he had subtracted Troy Chatham’s talent as a basketball player from Troy Chatham, and had found not enough left over. I knew too that Della agreed with him. They didn’t tell me this. Nobody did. You don’t need to be told some things. You can sometimes tell more by a man’s silence and the set of his head than by what he says. By such signs you can tell, for instance, what he thinks of his wife; there is a kind of conversation about women and marriage that I never heard Athey take part in, ever. And you can tell what his wife thinks of him.