Watch With Me

  Nightlife then started toward the garden gate, went past the shop, saw Tol’s old shotgun leaning there, and picked it up. He opened the breech to see if it was loaded. When he closed the breech again they could hear the snap of the lock all the way up there in the garden. Nightlife balanced the gun in his hands for a moment as if he were thinking of buying it. And then he laid it over his shoulder and turned away.

  “Uh-oh,” Tol said. He started toward the gate with Sam Hanks stepping between the same pair of rows behind him.

  “Don’t take my gun, Nightlife!” Tol called, trying to sound not too much concerned, and yet unable to keep the tone of pleading entirely out of his voice. “I’m liable to need it!”

  Tol had started to hurry. He hung his hoe on the fence by the gate and went on toward the shop.

  Nightlife was hesitating. He turned back toward the door of the shop, as though he might actually put the gun back where he got it.

  But then he turned away again. He said, not to Tol and Sam, rather to himself, but in too loud a voice, as if he did not quite expect himself to be able to hear, “Why, a damned fellow just as well shoot hisself, I reckon.”

  “Wait, Nightlife!” Tol said. And then he added an endearment, as he usually did, to soften what might have seemed a reprimand: “Hold on, sweetheart.”

  But Nightlife was already starting down through the pasture toward the woods with the gun on his shoulder.

  “I expect I’ll just ease along with him a ways,” Tol said to Sam. “You go tell Miss Minnie, and then drive over and tell Walter Cotman and Tom and Braymer. Or send word to them if they’re out at work. And then you come with us.”

  Tol was watching Nightlife while he talked to Sam. “Mind that old gun, now. If he’s crazy enough to shoot hisself, he might be crazy enough to shoot you.”

  “Or you,” Sam said.

  “Or me,” Tol said. He stepped off down the slope, following the dark path Nightlife had made in the dewy grass.

  When he heard the screen door slam as Sam stepped into the kitchen, a kind of wonder came over Tol, for almost in the twinkling of an eye he had crossed the boundary between two worlds. In spite of the several small troubles of that morning, he had been in a world that was more or less the world he thought it was, and where at least some things happened more or less as he intended. But now he was walking down through the wet grass of his cow pasture toward the edge of his woods, a place as familiar to him as the palm of his own hand, in a world and a day in which he intended nothing and foresaw nothing.

  He hurried a little, not to catch up with Nightlife, but to keep him in sight, which would be harder to do once they were in the woods. And it was into the woods that Nightlife was going. He was not going in a hurry, but he was not loitering either. He walked like a man with a destination—though where, in that direction, he could be going was a mystery to Tol.

  And then Nightlife took the gun from his shoulder, placed it in the crook of his right arm, and went in among the young cedars that bordered the woods’ edge at that place. He disappeared as completely as if he had suddenly dived into water, but with less commotion. Not a bush trembled after he disappeared, and Tol feared that he would lose him. He went in himself at the same place, and for a while, among the cedars and other young low-branching trees, he could not see six feet ahead. And then, not far from the edge, the woods became taller and more open, and Tol could see Nightlife again.

  He was no longer going so directly down the slope, but was slanting to his right as though he intended to go toward the river along that side of the Katy’s Branch valley, and soon, when he was well into the woods, he again altered his course so that he was not going downhill at all, but was going along the level contour of the slope. He was not walking fast, nor did he appear to be looking at anything. He seemed totally preoccupied, as though all his attention were demanded by whatever was in his mind.

  Tol had thought of calling out to Nightlife, but had rejected the thought. The presence of Old Fetcher made it hard to know what to say. Tol had known Nightlife as long as Nightlife had been in this world to be known, but when one of his spells was on him, Nightlife was a stranger to everybody. There was no telling, then, what he might or might not do. Tol didn’t want to cause him to shoot himself in order to win an argument about whether or not he was going to shoot himself. Nor was Tol on his own account at all eager to face the business end of Old Fetcher.

  He decided just to follow along, keeping Nightlife in sight as best he could. He would not try to catch up; he would try not to fall too far behind; he would say nothing. And Tol’s decision then established what he and the others would do the rest of that day and into the next. They would let whatever it was run its course, if it would. They would stop Nightlife from using the gun, if they had to and if they were able. At every considerable change of direction, Tol broke a branch end and left it dangling as a mark for Sam. Otherwise, the passage of two men over the dead leaves of the woods’ floor ought to be legible enough.

  Nightlife and his widowed mother lived on a farm of maybe fifty acres that lay back in one of the several hollows that drained into Katy’s Branch. The farm was mostly hillside. It contained no ridgeland at all, and no bottomland except for a narrow shelf along the branch where the Hamples had their garden and where they had built a small log barn with a corncrib beside it. The house, built of logs like the barn, stood on the slope above the scrap of bottom, with privy and henhouse and smokehouse behind it. So far as the neighborhood remembered, nobody but Hamples had ever lived there. The farm was a remnant of land that had been overlooked or left out of the surveys of the larger boundaries that once surrounded it, or it had been sold off one of the larger boundaries at some time during the frenzy of settlement and speculation that accompanied the white people’s first taking of the land.

  There had been a time—way back when the trees of the original forest were yet growing on it—when the place was fertile. But the first-comers, having no other land to farm, cut the trees from the slopes, patch by patch, growing little crops of tobacco and corn until fertility declined by the combined action of plow and rain, and then abandoning the land again to bushes and then trees, only to repeat the whole process in forty or fifty years. In the early days, perhaps, the Hamples lived up to the standard of most of their neighbors. They had the produce of what was still a productive little farm. They had what they could kill or pick or dig up in the stands of virgin forest that still stood all around. Some of the Hample men rode flatboats or log rafts down the spring tides to New Orleans, for among the prized possessions of their descendants were a few Spanish and French coins that had been carried back on the overland trails.

  But as the forests were cut down and the wild bounty of the country diminished and the soil of the slopes fled away beneath the axes and jumper plows of generation after generation of Hamples, the family’s life became ever more marginal. They kept a milk cow or two, a team of mules, meat hogs, and poultry. They raised a patch of corn and a little shirttail crop of tobacco. They kept the garden. They hunted and fished and trapped, dug roots and stripped bark, gathered the wild potherbs and fruit. From the corn that they and their animals did not eat, they distilled a palatable and potent whiskey, of which they sold as much as they did not drink. And yet their life declined until they were reduced to dependence on daywork for their neighbors, who did not need much help. And yet the Hamples persevered, and even provided a sort of hearty and bitter amusement to themselves. Delbert, Nightlife’s father, as an old man became famous for his boast, often repeated in the store at Goforth or in the bank at Port William: “I started out with damn near nothing, and I have multiplied it by hard work until I am going to end up with damn near what I started out with.”

  But the Hamples were known, too, for their handiness. The neighborhood liked to boast of them that they could “make anything or fix anything.” They seemed to be born, virtually every one of them, with an u
ncanny mastery of tools and materials. When weak vision got bred into the line—which it did fairly early—it apparently made little difference, for Hample hands were so adept that they seemed to possess a second sight in their very fingertips. As industrial farm machinery entered the country and became more complicated, the Hamples in a way came into their own. None of them ever had the enterprise to open a proper shop, but their neighbors were forever bringing them something to fix.

  Large families of Hamples had been raised in their snug hollow with its two slopes facing one another across the rocky notch of the branch, for the Hample men, whatever the condition of their fields, were fertile, and they married fertile women. As soon as they got big enough to leave or to marry, the Hample generations scattered like seeds from an opened pod. Always, until now, somebody would be left to start the cycle again. But after his father died, Nightlife stayed at home with his mother; he did not marry, and nobody thought he ever would. Even as a Hample, Nightlife was an oddity, and nobody could quite account for him. He had inherited the mechanical gifts of the Hamples; people said that he could do anything with his hands. And yet he seemed also to have been endowed with an ineptitude that was all his own. For instance, when he was about ten years old he contrived a jew’s harp out of an old clock spring and a piece of walnut; it was a marvel of cunning artistry, as everybody affirmed, but when he attempted to play it, it very nearly cut off his tongue. He was a Hample, plain enough, but it was as though when he was a baby his mechanically minded siblings had taken him apart and lost some of the pieces, which they then replaced with just whatever they found lying around. Nightlife lacked almost entirely the rough sense of humor that had accompanied other Hamples into and out of this world. And in addition to the capability of becoming drunk, which all Hample men before him had had in varying degrees, Nightlife had the capability of becoming crazy. His mind, which contained the lighted countryside of Katy’s Branch and Cotman Ridge, had a leak in it somewhere, some little hole through which now and again would pour the whole darkness of the darkest night—so that instead of walking in the country he knew and among his kinfolks and neighbors, he would be afoot in a limitless and undivided universe, completely dark, inhabited only by himself. From there he would want to call out for rescue, and that was when nobody could tell what he was going to do next, and perhaps he could not tell either.

  Or that was what it looked like to Tol, who had thought much about it. And that was what Nightlife himself looked like that morning when Tol followed him down into the woods—he looked like somebody who didn’t know where in all the world he was, who didn’t know anybody else was there to see him, much less follow along after him.

  Tol followed him nevertheless, and yet he did so with a sense of foregone conclusion. He had too much courtesy, if he had not had too much sense, to believe for sure that Nightlife would die by his own hand that day, or even soon, if ever. But he believed that he would die somehow sometime, and that when he did die, the name and the prospects of the Hamples would depart forever from what until then would be known as the Hample Place.

  In assuming that the history and the future of the Hamples in their native hollow would end with Nightlife, Tol was right. Fifty years later, on a Sunday ramble with Elton Penn and the Rowanberry brothers and Burley Coulter, I walked up the branch through what once had been the Hample Place. It was early April. The spring work had started. When Elton and I drove down to the Rowanberry Place after dinner that day, the Rowanberrys said they were stiff and sore and needed to walk. So we climbed up through the woods onto the Coulter Ridge, where we ran into Burley, who had nothing better to do, he said, than to come along. There were five of us then, not hurrying or going anyplace in particular; we were just walking along and looking at the season and the weather, talking of whatever the places we came to reminded us of.

  We walked down the hollow the Coulters call Stepstone, past the old barn that stands there, and on down to the Katy’s Branch road. We followed the road up Katy’s Branch a little beyond Goforth, and then we crossed the branch and went up into the woods along the hollow that divided the Hample Place. By then the Hample Place, the Tol Proudfoot Place, the Cotman Place, and others had all been dissolved into one large property that belonged to a Louisville doctor, who had bought it for a weekend retreat and then lost interest in it. Now, except for the best of the ridges, which were rented and farmed badly, the land was neither farmed nor lived on. Every building on it was ruining or already ruined, and the good hillside pastures were covered with young trees—which Burley Coulter said was all right with him.

  “It’s a damned shame, anyhow,” said Elton, who did not want to forgive the neglect.

  “Well, a fellow looking for something better, he don’t want to stay in a place like this,” Art Rowanberry said.

  “Was that doctor looking for something better when he bought it?” Mart said.

  “I reckon he thought he already had something better.”

  “Well,” Mart said, laughing a little to refuse the argument with his brother, “anyhow, I reckon the more trees, the more coons.”

  They were all hunters. All the country around us was thickly crisscrossed with the nighttime passages of their hunts. They had worked over it, too, and as boys had played over it. They knew it by day and by night, and knew something about every scrap of it. As we came up by Goforth Church, the long-abandoned store building, and the site of the vanished schoolhouse, and then passed the Goforth Hill road that went up alongside the Proudfoot Place, they began to tell stories about Tol Proudfoot, quoting the things he had said that nobody who had known him ever forgot. And then when we started up along the Hample branch, they told about the time Nightlife threw his fit, and about Tol and the others following him through the woods.

  “What kind of farmers were the Hamples?” I asked.

  And Art Rowanberry said, “Oh, they growed a very good winter crop.”

  The Hample Place, when we got to it, no longer looked like anybody’s place. The woods, which had started to return after Delbert Hample’s death, had now completely overgrown it. The young trees had grown big enough to have begun to shade out the undergrowth. The barn and other outbuildings were gone without a trace. The house had slowly weathered away beneath its tin roof, which with its gables intact had sunk down onto the collapsed walls. Only the rock chimney stood, its corners still as straight as on the day they were laid. We peered under one of the fallen gables and looked straight into a buzzard’s nest containing one fuzzy white chick and one unhatched egg.

  We had come as far as we wanted to go, and we rested there a while before we started back. It was a pleasant place, sheltered, opening to the west, so that the sun would have warmed it on winter afternoons. The north slope above the house would have been good land once, and now with the woods thriving on it again, you could imagine how it once might have evoked a vision of home in whatever landless, wandering Hample had first come—though his and his descendants’ attempt to farm there could only have proved it no place to farm. Their way of farming, in fact, had destroyed maybe forever the possibility of farming there. And so you felt that the trees had returned as a kind of justice. They had only drawn back and paused a moment while a futile human experiment had been tried and suffered in that place, and had failed at last as it was bound to do.

  As we were leaving, we wandered past the fallen house and across the old garden spot to the branch. And then we saw that the chimney was not the only thing left standing, for there in the middle of the streambed stood a cylinder of laid rock that once had lined the Hamples’ well, and now it stood free like another chimney, turned wrong side out, where the stream had cut the earth from around it.

  And so the Hamples had come and gone and left their ruin. And now the trees had returned. The trees on the little shelf where the garden had been were tall young tulip poplars that lifted their opening buds into the still light and air of that evening with such an unassuming cal
m that you could almost believe they had been there always.

  Art Rowanberry, I remember, stood looking at them a long time. And then, turning to go, he said, “Well, old Nightlife didn’t have to leave this world for want of wood, I don’t reckon.”

  Tol had just begun to wonder when Sam was going to show up when Sam showed up. Tol raised his hand to him, and Sam nodded. In silence then they picked their way along together, Sam walking behind Tol. Between themselves and Nightlife, they kept a sort of room of visibility, the size of which varied according to the density of the foliage. They meant to stay separate from Nightlife by the full breadth of that room. When the foliage thickened, they drew closer to Nightlife to keep him in sight. Where the trees were old and there was not much underbrush, they slowed down and let him get farther ahead.

  After a while Nightlife came to a pile of rocks that had been carried from some long-abandoned corn or tobacco patch, and he sat down, laying the gun across his lap. He appeared now to be carrying the gun as if it were some mere hand tool, not recognizing what it was, just as he appeared to grant no recognition to himself or to where he was. When he stopped and sat down, Tol and Sam stood still. When he got up and started on again, they followed.

  After a while Braymer Hardy was there behind Sam. And not long after that, when Tol again looked back, Walter Cotman and Tom Hardy were there. Tol stopped them then, and beckoned them close. He was older than the oldest of them by twenty years; he could have been father to them all, and they came obediently into whispering distance.

  “Boys,” he said, “ain’t no use in us walking lined up so that old gun could hit us all with one shot. Kind of fan out. We’ll keep him in sight better that way.”

  They fanned out as he said. And now the room of sight that had been defined only by a diameter was given a circumference as well. As they moved along, they continued to draw closer together or move farther apart, according to visibility. In that moving room that at once divided and held them together the only clarity was their intent not to let Nightlife be further divided from them.