When the farm was handed on to him, one of the back fields was scarred by gullies. Working with a breaking plow and a slip scraper, Grandpa dug a pond in a swale of that field and used the extracted soil to fill the washes, and so he healed them. Driven by debt, he planted another field all to corn, plowing more than he knew he should, and it washed badly in a hard rain. He put it back in grass and never plowed it again, and he grieved to the end of his life over the hurt he had given it. And yet the farm, past all losses and griefs, called him to imagine it as good as it was, and better than it was.
He had been a man of notable hardiness and strength. A neighbor woman told me in her old age that she remembered him disking ground with a team of mules, wearing only a pair of pants. She was carrying water to her father on the adjoining farm. Grandpa called to her, “Sally Ann, when you bring your daddy another drink, would you bring me one?” Was he working a young team he could not leave? He was thirsty, anyhow, and he had not stopped to drink. He had come by then into responsibilities and lean times. He did not afford himself clothes he could do without.
Once he was leading a brood mare from home to the Forks of Elkhorn beyond Frankfort. He had arranged to breed the mare to a stallion at that place. She would have been a standardbred, not saddle broke, and he had set out to walk the forty or so miles, leading her. But she was not well broke even to lead, and she was wearing him out. Finally he stopped at a farm and borrowed a saddle, not doubting that if he could saddle her he could ride her. He saddled her, straddled her, and went his way. Presumably she was well broke by the end of the trip. This was told to my father, after Grandpa’s death, by the man who had loaned the saddle.
Late in his life, when he might have considered himself old, his teeth began to bother him. He got on his horse, rode the five miles to Smallwood on the railroad where Gib Holston, the atheist doctor, was then living. He told Doc Holston, “Pull ’em out! Ever’ damned one of ’em!” And Doc Holston did so, one after another. When all were pulled, Grandpa got on his horse again, rode home, and ate his supper. Teeth had become incidental to him, a bother gone, and he was toothless then until his death, which was still a long way off.
At some time before I came along he ceased entirely to wish to be anywhere but where he was. His mind belonged as entirely to the place as its rocks and trees. Grandma, though, remained always curious about distant places, treasuring the postcards she received from traveling friends and relatives. She went once to South Carolina to visit her eldest son, my Uncle Andrew, who was then working down there. She walked beside the ocean, and brought back a big seashell in which, holding it to my ear, I could hear the ocean for myself. She and some neighbors once made an excursion to the Cincinnati Zoo, from which her most persistent and delighted memory was of Uncle Eb Markman who, scouting ahead, had come rushing back in a state of near-death excitement: “They got a hippopotaymus!” She had gone also, with the ladies of the church, on a visit to Mammoth Cave, and had brought back as souvenirs from deep in the earth several crystalline rocks that she prized.
Grandpa was the creature, not only of his own place, but also pretty exclusively of its surface. His curiosity about the underground was fully satisfied at the depth of an end post hole. He did not aspire into the air beyond the height of a barn roof. On the only “trip” of his life, when my father coaxed him to the top of the overlook at Cumberland Gap, Grandpa took one look over the edge at the “view” and shrank backward—“like a dog,” said my father—and would not look again.
When I was a child I had not traveled as much even as Grandpa. For a long time I had not gone farther from home than Louisville. And so, like Grandma, I was enchanted by the thought of places I had not been. I could sit with her and be carried away by her collection of picture postcards. But I observed also Grandpa’s local travels on horseback, on some of which I rode with him behind his saddle, holding to his waist, or following along on Beauty the pony. Grandpa loved to eat, and sometimes it suited him to show up at a neighbor’s house at noon and get himself invited to dinner. He was perfectly convinced, at least by that stage of his life, that the highest compliment a man could pay a woman was to eat her cooking and praise it. Those fortunate women evidently thought so too, for they were kind to him. In hot weather he also would visit the good springs, which were scattered about the neighborhood, in order to know again the varying tastes that the cool waters bore up from the darkness.
Within the little world of the farm, Grandpa’s sense of the right kind and the right way was unshakeable. It amounted to a local propriety, complex and fierce, that determined his expectations of my brother, Henry, and me. He taught us, I think, much that we needed to know, but we didn’t learn it willingly or quickly. His standards were high, and his teaching, like our father’s, could be peremptory. If we backtalked him, he would say, “Shut your traps!” And if we were face to face with him, or in reach of his cane, we did shut our traps. When we were out of reach, we found ample room for impudence, also disobedience.
But there were forces from the greater world outside the farm that could shake him, and had, and did. The weather of course could shake him, but like all his kind he suffered the weather as a matter of fact. As large almost as the weather, and even less to be trusted, the money economy that limited the economy of the farm had shaken him for most of his life. That economy could not be suffered as a matter of fact, for it was less subject to expectation, more arbitrary, more surprising, than the weather. And entirely surprising to me, when finally it hit me, was the realization that the expectations of his grandchildren also had the power to shake him.
Christmas for our immediate family was a progress lasting several days, involving a big dinner, a Christmas tree, and presents at various houses, including the house of Granny and Granddaddy Feltner, my mother’s parents, and that of Grandma and Grandpa Catlett. Granny and Granddaddy Feltner’s house was a happy one. By various turns of fortune it had been a house less subject to economic hardship than that of the Catletts. But also, and unlike the Catletts, the Feltners were at one in their marriage. Their mutual consent to their life together had been generous. Christmas at the Feltners’ in my earliest years was a horn of plenty poured out, with no fear of emptying. In the parlor would be a beautiful Christmas tree that reached all the way to the ceiling, and presents would be heaped up among its lowest boughs. The table in the dining room would be stretched to its full length. It was Christmas to the limit of possibility.
And then there came a year when I saw beyond doubt that Christmas at Grandma and Grandpa Catlett’s was nothing like so fine. Their tree was small and spare, sitting, not in the parlor or the living room, but in the cold front hall, and with only a few presents under it. And I knew, as if I had seen her do it, that Grandma alone had fixed it there, and only for us children, according to an idea, not familiar or congenial to her, of what we children expected or would like. But what most touched me was the further realization that Grandpa had seen in my face, or in all our faces, some hint of judgment and disappointment. His attentiveness to us bore the tone of apology for what he felt was poor by a standard he did not know but nevertheless applied on our behalf.
They were growing old, he and Grandma, in their estrangement from each other and in a time that made them strange to themselves. Theirs was an afflicted marriage, and originally the affliction must have been sexual. In a time with little understanding of “birth control,” without a telephone or good roads, when a doctor might be hours away, pregnancy was something to fear. I know from enough that was said that Grandma learned by the hardest way to fear it. And so at the heart of their life together was a terrible paradox. They lived by the fertility of the world and the farm, but their own fertility had been “a cross to bear.”
“Your mammy said, ‘That’s all,’ and ay God I knew what she meant.”
Their marriage was unhappy, and that unhappiness was present in their house, just as happiness was present in the Feltner house. And yet the unhappiness of Grandma and
Grandpa’s house was not exclusive or unqualified. Love was in it also, however balked and disappointed, however much it had been a cause of the unhappiness. But above all the household embodied and was sustained by an agricultural order, resting upon the order of time and nature, that was at once demanding and consoling. Because this order was the order of the house, a child could be happy in it. But the time was coming, was already arriving, when that order would be disvalued and taken apart piece by piece.
I had come along just in time to glimpse the old order when it was still somewhat intact. I had played or idled in blacksmith shops while the smiths shod horses or mules, and built from raw iron and wood many of the simple farming tools still in use. I had gone along with the crews of neighbors as they followed the binder in the grainfields, gathering the bound sheaves into shocks, stopping to catch the young rabbits that ran from the still-standing wheat or barley. I had watched as they fed load after load of sheaves into the threshing machine and sacked and hauled away the grain. And I had been on hand when the sweated crews washed on the back porch and sat down to harvest meals equal to Christmas dinners, even in wartime with no sugar for the iced tea.
And then there came a threshing day when Grandma, old and ill and without help, was not up to the task of cooking for the crew, and my father could see that she was not. He had taken time off from his law office to splice out Grandpa, who also was not equal to the day.
“It’s all right,” my father said, comforting Grandma. “I’ll take care of it.”
And he did take care of it, for he was a man who refused to be at a loss, and he was capable. He went and bought a great pile of ground beef and sacks-full of packaged buns. He fired up the kitchen stove and, overpowering Grandma’s attempts to help, fried hamburgers enough, and more than enough, to feed the crew of hungry men and their retinue of hungry boys. It was adequate. It was even admirable, in its way, I could see that. But I could see also that something old and good was turning, or had turned, profoundly wrong. An old propriety had been offended. I could not have said this at the time, but I felt it, I felt it entirely. There was my father in the kitchen, cooking, not like any cook I had ever seen, but like himself, all concentration and haste, going at a big job that had to be done, nothing lovely about it. And there was the crew sitting down, not to a proper harvest meal, but to hamburgers that I knew they associated, as I did, with town life, with hamburger joints.
Grandma and Grandpa had achieved their threescore years and ten and more; their strength had become labor and sorrow. The life they had lived, the old season-governed life of the country, was passing away as they watched. No threshing machine or threshing crew would come to their place again, and there would be no more big strawstacks for a boy to climb up and slide down. The combines had arrived, their service to be purchased by mere money.
It must have been at about the same time that Grandpa’s “misery” began to come upon him in the night. I would be asleep in that little metal bed in the corner of Grandma’s bedroom upstairs when suddenly the whole house would fill with Grandpa’s crying out from his folding bed down in the living room. His cries were the sounds, unmistakably, of misery: “Ohhhh! Ohhhh! Ohhhh!”
Grandma would get up. In her nightgown, barefooted, she would go out into the hall and down the stairs, turning on lights as she went, for by then the electric line had come. The cries would continue a while, after a while they would stop, and after a further while Grandma would come back up the stairs to bed, turning the lights out as she came.
I said nothing, but I never ceased to wonder: What was his misery? And how was it eased?
Only many years later, when my father was getting old, and maybe I wanted to ask while there was time, I asked him, “What was the matter with Grandpa that would have made him cry out at night?”
And my father said only, “I don’t know.” If he did know, it was hard knowledge and he did not want to talk about it. But maybe, in fact, he did not know. For the first time I realized that I may have known my father’s parents in their old age better than he did.
Still later, my brother, Henry, told me that he too had heard those outcries in the night, and had said nothing. And we wondered, as we often have, at our silence, our mere acceptance as boys of events and conditions that to our adult minds would have seemed urgent. Apparently it never occurred to us that the world, or any detail of it, might have been different. To us, as boys, as if we too deferred to Old Marster, things were as they were. Grandpa was as he was.
What was his misery? That question has been one of the themes of my life, and for most of my life I had not a glimmer of an answer. But now maybe I do. Maybe I have aged at last into the knowledge I lacked before, for now I have heard in my own heart in the deep night that outcry of misery. “What is it?” I have asked myself. And I believe I know.
Time is said to flow like a river. I have said so myself, and perhaps it does. But time is a great mystery, not to be declared by one simile, or by several. It flows also like molten metal, cooling and solidifying even as it passes. The past is as it was. As it was it is forever. It cannot be changed, not by us, not by God. No doubt it is forgettable. We do surely forget some of it, and surely all of it in time will be forgotten. Maybe we can forgive ourselves, or be forgiven, for our wrongs that we remember, but they remain nonetheless wrong. This is the true rigor mortis, this rigidification of all that is past. Under the rule of time, the past is as it was.
And so Grandpa, reduced to himself alone in the darkness, dwelt upon wrongs done and forever undoable, of limits met and unsurpassed, of understanding come too late. His strength had become labor and sorrow, and from his bed lonely as a grave he cried out.
When I think now of his cries, I think also of the scientific braggadocio of human longevity, and of the selfishness, or the deficiency of experience, of those who wish to live forever in time. Did we, as some improbably would say, invent eternity? If so, we invented it because we needed it as the air we breathe. So for mercy. So for grace.
Grandpa’s misery, great as it surely was, belonged entirely to the darkness and to his sole self within it. When daylight returned, he was delivered out of the dark confinement of himself. After the night’s displacement, he became again a living soul, familiar to himself. His place, lighted, again laid before him its infinite promise and demand. And again he recognized it, anciently made and still being made, partly by him who had been made by it, who was still in his moment alive upon it. He ate his breakfast, went to the barn, saddled his horse, and rode out into the fields. Or, increasingly as he aged, he sat on an inverted bucket in the barn door and went to sleep again, secure in the light.
And yet the return of light was not what ended his nighttime misery. When he cried out Grandma heard him and got up and went to him. She was his opposite, the other side of his life, so prettily formed and so lost, that had attracted him and fended him away. But when she heard him in his misery, crying out, she went to him, and after a while he was quiet.
What did she do? I can only give my father’s answer: I don’t know. Having been carried back now all the way into the perfect darkness of ignorance, I can only form the vague outline of a wish.
I will begin by stepping back a little into the light of what I know. I know that Grandpa enjoyed a drink of whiskey. He especially enjoyed a drink, as I have been told, if he had not paid for it himself. He saw nothing wrong with it in terms of his own thirst for it, which was limited. He could stop. He did not need to drink it all, as a friend of mine once said of himself, just to get rid of it.
But Grandma—and this, I think, was another critical opposition—Grandma was a principled teetotaler. She belonged to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and by “temperance” she meant abstinence—not a drop, none. And for this she had substantial reasons: her brother whom we knew as Uncle Peach, Grandpa’s older brother Will, and my Uncle Andrew who was her own first born son—drinkers all, who could not stop, or who did not know when to stop, or who did n
ot want to stop. Uncle Peach, who managed to be an epical nuisance to everybody, including himself, capped his career one winter night with an impromptu nap in his front yard, from which several of his toes never woke.
I suppose, had she been less intelligent or less inclined to doubt, Grandma might have been fanatical on the subject of liquor. But she was no fanatic, and she could make do with what the world afforded. And so I can imagine her bringing the problem of Grandpa’s misery to Doc Holston, who by then had the house next door to my parents’ house in Hargrave.
To do this, she would have had to face the scandal of Doc’s boastful atheism. Doc was a small man who aspired to higher standing by looking down upon God. He would have been astonished to know that his blasphemy did not offend her nearly so much as his absurdity.
“Marce is having a terrible misery in the night. What can I do?”
“Does he have the misery in the daytime?”
“No.”
“Why, damn it to hell, woman, when he wakes up that way, give him a drink!”
“A drink?”
“Of whiskey, damn it! Put a little water in it. Sweeten it a little if you want to.”
And I can imagine her asking my father—who else could she have asked?—to get her a bottle of whiskey. She would have blushed.
He would have laughed. “An old white-ribboner like you? What do you want it for?”
Such impudence would have made her secretive. “In case I get a cold.”
So then I can see her, on the nights of Grandpa’s misery, going down the stairs and straight back to the kitchen, where she had hidden the bottle. For I know she would have hidden it. Grandpa, she said, could smell out candy and find it, no matter how well she hid it. But he could not have smelled whiskey in a stoppered bottle wiped clean, even though he would know she had hidden it somewhere.