“Come on, son. Time to go to work.”
I knew he wanted me to go with him, and I sort of wanted to, but I knew too that it was a bitter morning outside, and mostly I didn’t want to go. The weather made it lovely to imagine a whole morning snug in the house, listening to the sounds of housekeeping and cooking and the women talking.
“Well,” I said, “I think I’d rather just stay here.”
I have reason to believe that he would not have accepted that reply from my mother or Uncle Virgil when they were young. But I was different. I was his grandson, more my parents’ responsibility than his, and, after all, still a boy.
He just laughed a little to himself and said, “Well. All right.” I heard him go through the house and out the back door.
But it was not long until Granny came in. She said in her gentle way, “Andy, your granddaddy has some work that he needs you to help him with,” and I knew I had to go.
She had a promptitude of goodness that could be just fierce. She knew in an instant when I was dishonest or thoughtless or wrong. Much of my growing up, it seems to me now, was quietly required of me by her. She would correct me—“Listen to Granny. I expected something better from you”—and it would be as if in my mind a pawl had dropped into a notch; there was to be no going back.
I went and got my outdoor things, put them on, and went out the back door. It was cold, and to make things worse a few freezing raindrops were coming down in a slant along the raw wind. I walked through the chicken yard where a few of Granddaddy’s old hens were standing around with their tails drooped, looking miserable. They looked like I felt. I was full of reluctance and embarrassment and shrunken in my clothes from the cold. Where Granddaddy was I had no idea, for I had not asked. I went through the gate on the far end of the chicken yard and into the field behind the barn, listening all the time.
And then I heard Joe Banion speak in the driveway of the barn: “Come up.” And he came out, standing on a hay wagon drawn by his team of mules, old Mary and old Jim. “Whoa-ho!” he said when he saw me. “I reckon you just as well get on.”
“I reckon I just as well,” I said, and I got on.
Joe drove up to the tobacco barn on the highest part of the ridge. When we came even with the front of the barn Joe stopped the team again. “They inside,” he told me. I jumped down and he drove on.
I didn’t know who “they” would be, but when I went through the front door, standing wide open to let in the light, I saw that they were Granddaddy and Burley Coulter.
The Coulters, Burley and his brother, Jarrat, had housed tobacco in that barn, but now they had emptied it. What Granddaddy and Burley were doing that morning was preparing the barn for the lambing that was due to begin in just a few days. Because they had used the barn, this was partly the Coulters’ responsibility, and Burley had come to help. I was still feeling ashamed and a little odd because of my refusal, and so when I had stepped through the door I just stopped.
There was a large rick of baled alfalfa in one corner of the barn, put there to be handy to feed the lambing ewes. Granddaddy and Burley were building a low partition around it to keep the ewes from ruining it before they could eat it. Granddaddy was starting to nail up a board, and Burley was sorting through a stack of old lumber.
The first to notice me was Granddaddy. He said, “Hello, son.”
And then Burley turned to look and said, “Well! If it ain’t Andy!”
It was a moment not possible to forget. Tom Coulter, who not long ago had been killed in the fighting in Italy, was Burley’s nephew. Part of the blood that had been shed in that bad year of 1943 had been Tom Coulter’s. I had not seen Burley since the news of Tom’s death had come. I didn’t have grown-up manners, and I didn’t know what to say. When Burley spoke to me, it was as if he was not just greeting or welcoming me, but receiving me into his tenderness for Tom. It put a lump in my throat. He came over, taking off his right glove, and shook my hand.
He said, “How you making it, old boy?”
I just nodded, afraid if I said “Fine” I would cry.
Granddaddy said, “Andy, pick up the other end of this board, honey.”
I picked it up and held it while he nailed his end. And then he came over and nailed my end. We did the same with the next board. And so I was helping. All through the morning they kept finding ways for me to help. They let me belong there at work with them. They kept me busy. And I experienced a beautiful change that was still new to me then but is old and familiar now. I went from reluctance and dread to interest in what we were doing, and then to pleasure in it. I got warm.
We finished the barrier around the hay rick. We picked up everything that was out of place or in the way. We made the barn neat. Joe returned with a load of straw from the straw stack. And then we bedded the barn, carrying forkloads of straw from the wagon and shaking it out level and deep over the whole floor, replacing the old fragrance of tobacco with the new fragrance of clean straw. Granddaddy had some long panels that would be used, as soon as needed, to portion the barn between the ewes with lambs and those still to lamb. We repaired the panels and propped them against the walls where they would be handy. We unstacked the mangers and lined them up in a row down the center of the driveway. Along one wall we set up the four-by-four-foot lambing pens where the ewes with new lambs would be confined and watched over until the lambs were well-started and strong—“the maternity ward,” Granddaddy called it.
The men were letting me help sometimes even when I could see I was slowing them down. We transformed the barn from a tobacco barn recalling last summer’s crop to a sheep barn expecting next year’s lambs. In our work we could feel the new year coming, the days lengthening, the time of birth and growth returning, and this seemed to bring a happiness to everybody, in spite of the war and people’s griefs and fears. The last thing we did was clean up the stripping room. It would be a sort of hospital, where Granddaddy, when he would be watching in the cold nights, could build a fire and help with a difficult birth, or pen a ewe with weak lambs until the lambs had sucked and were well dried, or keep orphan lambs until they got a good start.
When we were done at last, Granddaddy looked at his watch and then at me. “Well,” he said, “could you eat a little something?”
The whole morning had gone by already, and I had not thought of hunger, but now when I thought of it I was hungry. I said, “I could eat a lot of something.”
We laughed, and Burley said, “His belly thinks his throat’s been cut.”
“Burley,” Granddaddy said, “won’t you come have a bite of dinner with us?”
And Burley said, “Naw, Mat. Thank you. I left some dinner on the stove at home. I better go see about it.”
Joe took the team and wagon back to the feed barn then, and I went with Granddaddy to drive Burley out to his house.
By the time we got back and washed, everybody was in the kitchen. Nettie was finishing up at the stove and Granny and Hannah were putting the food on the table. The smell of it seemed fairly to hollow me out inside. We had sausage and gravy and mashed potatoes, just like at Grandma’s. Granny’s sausage was seasoned differently but was just as good. And we had, besides, hominy and creamed butter beans and, instead of biscuits, hoecake—one already on the table, sliced, another on the griddle—a pitcher of fresh milk, coffee for the grown-ups, and again all the Christmas desserts, and again, for me, ice cream.
“Save room,” Granny said again.
And I said, “I’m going to have plenty of room.”
I had more room even than I thought.
Hannah said, “Do you think he’ll leave us anything to eat tomorrow?”
“I don’t know,” Granddaddy said. “We may have to skip a day or two.”
“Granddaddy,” I said, “what are we going to do this afternoon?”
“Oh, not much,” Granddaddy said. “We’ve got things in pretty good shape.”
When we were finished, Joe came in, and he and Nettie sat down
to their dinner. I lost track of Granddaddy. He had gone, I imagine, to look at his ewes, as he had done the first thing that morning and would again before dark.
“Andy,” Granny said, rewarding me now, “your book is still in yonder on the sofa. Why don’t you go in there a while?”
I felt wonderfully at peace. Except for that little slipup in the morning, I had been good. I seemed to have got back safely within the approval of everybody. In fact, I had been pretty good going on three days. School seemed hardly rememberable. The difficulty of being good at home and at school both at once seemed far away.
I picked up the old copy of Huckleberry Finn and lay down on the sofa. And then I truly fell under the influence of peace and warmth and my morning’s work and a full stomach. I was asleep before I could open the book.
I slept soundly and long, dreamlessly except I dreamed I was there asleep. And then my eyes opened. That, it seemed, was what woke me. Otherwise, I did not move. I lay there a long time without moving. My body was a still, comfortable place where I lay asleep. The house too was still. I could hear the quiet in every one of its rooms. It was breathing in a sort of waking sleep, like mine.
I could not move until the quiet ended. And then the clock on the mantel chimed the half-hour. The quiet returned, as if at the final “dong” time had stopped.
I got up. Walking so as not to make a sound, I went back to the kitchen. Granny was sitting by one of the windows with her sewing basket and button box and a heap of Granddaddy’s and Uncle Ernest’s work shirts beside her on the table. She was patching torn places and replacing buttons, making the shirts last. She too was not making a sound. She was under the spell of her own quietness in the quiet house, and was enjoying being alone.
When I came in, she looked up and smiled. “Well, old sleepyhead, are you awake?”
I came over to stand beside her where I could watch her. “I’m awake,” I said. We were talking quietly so that the greater quiet of the house and the afternoon stayed intact around us. “Where is everybody?”
“Auntie and Aunt Lizzie have gone visiting. Hannah took them in the car.”
I stood and watched her for a while. She was putting on a patch, stabbing the needle in, helping it with her thimble, and drawing it out, all in one fluent motion that she repeated again and again rapidly. I knew her mastery at her work, for in all my own attempts at sewing my motions were awkward and slow, my stitches unlike and irregular.
“I don’t know how you do that,” I said.
“I don’t either,” she said. “I forgot how to do this a long time ago. I just do it.”
The patch, finished, looked prettier to me than the cloth that was unpatched. She whipped in a knot and cut the thread, and then she held up the shirt and looked it over.
I said, “Where’s Granddaddy?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She was getting ready to rethread her needle. “But if I wanted to find him, I know where I’d go look.”
“Where?”
“Well, you know that little room in Jasper’s store that he used for an office?”
“Yes, mam.”
“That’s where I’d look.”
When I was out of the house, standing on the walk in front, the quiet seemed still to be unbroken. I had come out of a smaller quiet into the larger one that contained it. The wind had laid. Every tree was standing still. The overcast had thinned, and under it the light had brightened. Down in town the road was empty. There was not a soul in sight. The fronts of all the buildings looked permanently shut.
In the other direction, out toward the river valley, the country was as quiet, as still, as the town. One trance held everything. Under the gray sky, the light was strong. Every detail, every fencepost and tree, every door and window in every building, was steady and clear, luminous, as if the things of the earth had absorbed the light of the sky. On the farthest ridge, this side of the valley, I could see Uncle Virgil’s cattle lying down. The whole country seemed to be meditating on itself, as if consciously submitted to whatever was to come. I remembered it was New Year’s Eve. It was only another day, though already a little longer than yesterday, but I felt as if a great page was about to turn.
Suspended in that rapt light at the edge of time, so that my footfalls made no sound, I crossed the road and went down to Jasper Lathrop’s store. In spite of Granny’s assurance, I was a little surprised when the latch gave and the door opened. I went in and shut the door as carefully as I had opened it.
And then I had to stop and look. I had not been in there since Jasper got his call and went off to the army. I had not, I think, even looked in the windows. I remembered it fully stocked with groceries and hardware, all the varied merchandise of a general store in those days, and occupied by shoppers and loafers and Jasper himself. Now it was empty. Completely empty. Every shelf and bin and counter was as bare of goods as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. The store contained only its share of the surrounding stillness, and the light starkly shaped and shadowed by the deserted furnishings.
From the back, presently, came the sound of a voice saying something too quietly for me to understand. The voice, like Granny’s and mine a while ago in the kitchen, spoke as if under a spell. After it spoke the quiet remained.
With the same strict observance I walked back one of the aisles of the large room toward the smaller room in the back.
I heard another voice and then another one, quiet as before.
I felt I should knock and I did, lightly.
“Come in,” one of the voices said, only a little louder. The door was not even latched. I pushed and it opened.
They were sitting around Jasper’s meat block, playing rummy: Granddaddy, Frank Lathrop who was Jasper’s father, Grover Gibbs, Burley Coulter, Jayber Crow. When I opened the door they greeted me with nods, smiles, lifted hands.
“Come in, Andy,” Jayber said.
There were empty chairs here and there, and so evidently the game sometimes had onlookers or more players. I stepped in, shut the door, and sat down in the nearest chair. The quiet went on. The players were concentrating on their game and took no more notice of me.
They had a good coal fire going in the stove, and the room was warm. It was full of tobacco smoke, which hazed the cold light flowing in from the two westward windows. At the end of the room opposite the stove was a roll-top desk with its top shut. Above the desk, lined up, were several boxes with labels, and a radio, turned on but hardly audible. Tacked to the wall by the door was a large sheet of brown paper with maybe a dozen names written across the top and under each name a column of figures. Years later, when I had grown old enough to wonder and to ask, Jayber told me that they never declared a winner, never totaled the scores, but just let the numbers accumulate on that brown sheet until the war ended, when they ceased to pay it any mind. Jayber guessed that when Jasper came home and re-started his business he must have wadded up the scores and burnt them in the stove.
Out the windows the lot behind the store was scrawled over with dead weed stalks. More or less in the middle of it was a bunch of old wooden crates, boxes, baskets, and such, all cluttered together in a pile. Drawing a straight edge to that zone of neglect was a woven wire fence, and beyond that a large pasture that rose gently up to a barn on the horizon. A flock of sheep were lying at rest far up the slope on the dormant grass.
It was a comfortable place. I made myself at home. The cardplayers played on, intent upon their game, saying almost nothing. Only now and again somebody would mutter under the silence, “Well, I was wondering who had that ace” or “I can give that trey a good home.” I watched not just them but everything. I was as wide awake as when I had drunk that coffee two days ago, except now I was quiet. I sat without moving.
The next evening Granddaddy would go with me to catch the bus on its daily trip to Hargrave, and I would complete my trip, alone as I had started, back to our house in the new year. It was going to be a year that would teach me something about loss that I had not learned in
all the years before: It could happen to me. But there in that little room at the end of the old year, I was already learning something that I have never stopped learning and will never learn completely.
As I watched, it came to me that they were waiting: Granddaddy and Frank Lathrop, each with a son in the army; Grover Gibbs, whose son, Billy, was in the air force; Burley Coulter, whose nephews, Tom and Nathan, had gone off to the army, and who now could hope that Nathan only might return; Jayber Crow, whose calling seems to have been to wait with the others. They were suffering and enduring and waiting, waiting together, joined in their unending game, submitted as the countryside around them was submitted. We had come into the silence that is deeper than any other—the silence of what is yet to come, the silence of one who is waiting for what is yet to come.
And now, as often before, I am reminded how grateful I am to have been there, in that time, with these I have remembered. I was there with them; they remain here with me. For in that little while Port William sank into me, becoming one with the matter and light, and the darkness, of my mind, never again to be far from my thoughts, no matter where I went or what I did.
Drouth (1944)
EARLY IN my childhood when the adult world and sometimes my own experience easily assumed the bright timelessness of myth, I overheard my father’s friend Charlie Hardy telling about the drouth of 1908. I liked hearing the grownups talk, and when I wanted to I could be quiet. By being more or less unnoticeable, I heard a lot. Some of the adult conversations I listened to ended with a question: “How long have you been here, Andy?”
Charlie Hardy, anyhow, grew up on a rough little farm on Bird’s Branch. Charlie, as he said, “came up hard,” though that phrase, by now, has lost much of the meaning it still would have had in the early 1940s. At the time of Charlie’s boyhood, except for the railroad and the little packets that still carried passengers and freight up and down the river, there were no machines in the country around Port William, no electricity, no “modern conveniences” or not many. Now, when electricity, indoor plumbing, and many personal machines have become normal, people generally assume that a hundred years ago life was “hard” for almost everybody, though few still have the experience needed for a just comparison. It is perhaps impossible for a person living unhappily with a flush toilet to imagine a person living happily without one.