It seemed strange and accidental to me when Athey and Della moved to town. I had never thought of Athey before without associating him with his place, the Keith place, and I am sure he had never thought of himself so. He and it made each other what they were. And then I had to see him parted from it, and learn to think of him apart from it. It was a little as though he had died and been resurrected in Port William. I ought to have been used to this. I had seen it happen before. It had happened, in fact, to me before. Maybe it happens to every one of us every day, and we are so used to it that it seems strange only once in a while, when we have to think about it.
The parting clearly had to come. Troy was magnifying himself with power, and Athey, in the working-out of the time and in the natural course of life, was dwindling away. The farm was big enough to contain and shelter and even use many lives, but two such minds could not live in it together. Athey was coming to know that. And then in September of 1952, he misstepped at the top of the ladder as he was going up to mend the corncrib roof. He took a bad fall that broke his leg and (as he said) made an old man of him. Afterward he was lame.
For several days after his fall, lying in his bed, he was thoughtful and spoke little. And then one day when Della came into the room he reached for her hand and she gave it.
“Della,” he said, “we have got to leave this place. It’s time and past time.”
He spoke quietly the two sentences that had come at the end of all his thoughts. He and Della looked at each other. He squeezed her hand and let it go. She knew him and she knew herself. And that was all.
He had nothing he could do with his life’s work now except leave it to a man who thought nothing of it. And yet he remained true to himself and he went on, pretty much without looking back. When he was on his feet again and could see to things, he and Della bought a little homestead of twenty acres such as you used to see fairly commonly on the edges and ends of the country towns. There was pasture for the old team of mules and a Jersey cow, room to fatten a couple of meat hogs and to keep a flock of chickens, a good garden spot, the necessary buildings. It was not a place on which they could live as they had lived, for that was past and they knew it, but it was big enough to permit them still to be as they were, to do for themselves and to recognize themselves.
At about the equinox of the next spring, the old pair of mules, Pete and Mike, stood freshly bedded in strange stalls, and Athey slept the first night of his life away from home. But of course what he did was establish the work of his hands again on that little twenty-acre place. He called it “piddling,” but his work was perfect. He and that team of mules had got old together, and they understood one another. The mules seemed to understand even that Athey was lame. He could hang his cane on the fence and take hold of the handles of his breaking plow, and the mules would lean into the collars and just nudge the share into the sod. Athey grunted his instructions to them under his breath, and they listened. He stopped them often—as he would put it, in his quiet way of joking about himself—“so they could rest.” Everything they did on that little place was beautiful. And soon it came about that we ceased to think of things as “changed” or “new,” and Athey and Della seemed again to belong where they were.
Mattie and Troy had moved into the main house on the good farm in the river bottom, and Troy duly swelled himself. In the early summer of 1953, Mattie gave birth to their third child, Athey Keith Chatham.
That was about when the elder Athey began to happen by my shop on a fairly regular schedule. He would get up in the dark before daylight as he always had, do his barn chores, eat his breakfast, and then work in his garden or his little patch of tobacco or wherever else his work was needed. When the day heated up past midmorning, he would amble through town to my shop, for he would pretty well have spent his strength by then and he didn’t like to sit in the house while Della went about her work. I was glad to have him. Old Jack Beechum, who had been for several years one of my regulars and a fine friend, had died at the end of the previous summer, and I missed him. Athey came, you might say, to a place that had been prepared.
Old and lame, carrying himself, he said, “like a hatful of eggs,” he would step in through the door and stop and look the place over thoroughly. When he had examined in detail everything and everybody there, with his lips pursed and a look of distant amusement in his eyes as if he knew a great deal more than he was going to say, he would say, “Morning!”
“Well,” I would say, “anything exciting going on?”
And he would say, “Well, I reckon not. I ain’t excited.”
He would then hang up his hat and cane, seat himself, remove his eyeglasses from the bib pocket of his overalls, and go through my newspaper. He didn’t read it all, but he read it in parts, sometimes moving his lips as he concentrated, all the way from first to last, making a fairly thorough job of it. He was an alert man and did not want to miss anything, though he grunted in disapproval of much that he read, especially prices. The money that Athey had earned in his life had come hard, and he resented the advertisers’ implicit assumption that they might fool him into giving it up.
When he had finished with the paper, refolded it, laid it down, removed his glasses, and put them back into their case, he might exchange a few words with whoever else was there, depending on who it was. But he was not a talkative man. He had a good dry wit and abundant intelligence. Usually, when he had said his few words, enough had been said.
One morning when only Athey and I were in the shop, Brother Wingfare came in. He was on his way to Louisville for his classes at the seminary and was in something of a hurry. He said to Athey, in a way that was a shade too indulgent and a shade too cheerful, as if he expected to hear that all was right with the world, “How’re you, Mr. Keith?”
“Well, sir,” Athey said, “where I used to be limber I’m stiff and where I used to be stiff I’m limber. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Yessir,” said Brother Wingfare.
“Nosir,” said Athey.
“Nosir,” said Brother Wingfare.
My shop was a democracy if ever anyplace was. Whoever came I served and let stay as long as they wanted to. Whatever they said or did while they were there I had either to deal with or put up with. As a gathering place for the manhood of Port William, often open at night, it could have been a lot rougher than it was. The problem of governing the place was right there in front of me when I started in. I knew that if it got rough I couldn’t call the police; we didn’t have any police in Port William. And so from the beginning I held to pretty correct behavior in my shop. I knew better than to drink on the job or anywhere near it. If anybody offered me a drink in the shop, I knew how to refuse with the proper implications. I minded my mouth the best I could and didn’t gossip or use any sort of bad language. Certain things that people would say I would not acknowledge that I had heard. Later, my association with the graveyard and the church gave me a little dignity that I used to advantage. Even so, there would be times when I would have to take a stand. It could get socially delicate, you might say. I did very well as long as I knew what my policy was and had used some foresight and more or less prepared myself. The problem came when events got ahead of policy.
I remember a Saturday afternoon in the winter. It was cold. The shop was crowded, some having come as customers, some just to socialize and keep warm. It was not the sort of circumstances I preferred to do my work in. There was too much talk, and it was not quite possible to be sure who came next. To make matters worse, a man I did not enjoy was occupying the space right in front of the barber chair, swinging his arms and giving mouth to a series of extreme and perfectly knot-headed opinions. He had some liquor in him and would have been pleased to be disagreed with. His name was Hiram Hench. His first name (by the working of the local tongue, but also with justice) was pronounced “Harm.”
Athey, who had somehow missed reading the paper that morning, was at the back of the shop in the last of the row of chairs, reading i
t now with such concentration that he might have been out somewhere by himself. I was keeping mindful of him, needing him to be there as he was.
I don’t know what led up to it, but I heard Hiram say (maybe just to anybody who theoretically might have been listening, and generously imputing agreement to the theoretical anybody), “Some niggers looks just like apes. Did you ever think about that?”
He had hardly got that out of his mouth before I knew I had a policy against it. But I was not prepared. I didn’t know what to say. It was not a situation in which you would enjoy carrying on a serious argument with an idiot. And, to be honest, I didn’t want to see Hiram’s big fist as close to me as the end of my nose. I wondered if he would hit me when I had a razor in my hand (which, as it happened, I did).
And then I came aware that Athey had lowered the newspaper and was looking at Hiram over the top of his glasses. And then pretty quickly everybody except Hiram came aware of it. And then Hiram came aware of it. He saw where everybody was looking, and he looked around fast right into Athey’s stare.
Athey said, “Some white people do too. Did you ever think about that?”
Athey had what I needed and didn’t have: seniority and authority. Prompt, regardless courage too. He was a man of standing.
He wasn’t finished, but he held Hiram still just by looking at him for what seemed like two minutes before he said any more. Hiram was still grinning, but only with his teeth.
“It might prove out to be,” Athey said, “that if we can’t live together we can’t live atall. Did you ever think about that?”
21
Don’t Send a Boy to Do a Man’s Work
Athey was a storyteller too, as it took me some while to find out, for he never told all of any story at the same time. He told them in odd little bits and pieces, usually in unacknowledged reference to a larger story that he did not tell because (apparently) he assumed you already knew it, and he told the fragment just to remind you of the rest. Sometimes you couldn’t even assume that he assumed you were listening; he might have been telling it to himself. With Athey you were always somewhere in the middle of the story. He would just start talking wherever he started remembering.
For instance, he knew the whole life history of Fraz Berlew, most of which, by the connivance or contrivance of Fraz himself, was funny. (Fraz was Fielding Berlew’s father. The chair, so to speak, that had been held by Fielding in my time had been held by Fraz in the time before.) But there was, in Athey’s telling, no sequence to the story at all. The sequence was in the events that reminded Athey of some part of the story. He would, say, fold the newspaper and put it aside, and tell just this much:
“Fraz Berlew was drunk and wandering. He wandered into a saloon down at Hargrave. The saloonkeeper was out and the place was empty. Fraz just helped himself to a considerable portion of the merchandise, and wandered on.
“When he wandered back again the saloonkeeper was there. He said, ‘Fraz, did you come in here and drink up a bunch of my whiskey while I was gone?’
“And Fraz said, ‘I can’t rightly say. But it sounds like me.’”
Athey’s best story was a long one that I had to hear in a good many of Athey’s fragmentary remembrances before I figured out that it was one story and not at least two. Not having Athey at hand in all the circumstances in which he remembered it, I will try to tell it put together.
Athey never knew his mother—that is its necessary beginning. She died before he was a year old, leaving him to be raised partly by his father and partly by a widowed Negro woman, Aunt Molly Mulwain, once a slave and the mother of the woman who, in a later age, I would know as Aunt Ellie Fewclothes.
Carter Keith was a good father. He kept Athey with him as much as his work and, later, Athey’s schooling would allow. The Keith place was always astir with work in those days. Everybody on the place would be up and the men and boys at the barns while the stars still shone, and at work by first light. Carter Keith followed the rules that he handed on to his son: He made use of all the daylight he had and would ask no man to do anything that he would not do himself. His tenants and hands knew this and so respected him, and they worked hard.
In the fall and winter, in addition to his farming, Carter Keith had made a sideline of trading in livestock, tobacco, corn, hay, and other things that his neighbors had to sell. What he bought, together with the produce of his own place, he gathered at his landing, loaded onto the steamboats, and sent down the rivers to Louisville or beyond.
From the time he could follow, Athey went to work with his father. From the time he could straddle a pony, he went with his father on his trading trips through the neighborhood. They might ride eight or ten miles, winding about through the creek valleys and over the ridges, gathering up a bunch of calves, it might be, or a few weanling mules, and driving them back home by dark (if they were lucky). And so early in his life Athey rode with his father over the same country that later he himself would court, dance, hunt, and trade over. In his life Athey had traveled much, though not extensively. He knew more of the history and geography of the country between Bird’s Branch and Willow Run than most people know of the United States.
Athey didn’t intend ever to be separated from his father. “That boy stays as close to me as my conscience,” his father would say. By the time he was six, Athey considered that he had found his work in this world. And so his father had to make him go to school. Carter Keith (and this also his son took from him) did not speak much, but he spoke pointedly.
He said, “Well, by God, you’re going, and your opinion in the matter is of no consequence.”
And then, seeing that Athey was sulking, Carter said: “Moreover. If you get a thrashing up there, you’ll get the full brother to it down here. You mind what I tell you.”
And so when school was in session, Athey did his morning chores, ate his breakfast, and walked the children’s path up through the woods to Port William School, starting alone and arriving finally with an assortment of children, mainly Rowanberrys and Coulters. And when he walked back down again, no matter how he delayed, he found his evening chores waiting for him. His father would light the lantern and hand it to him. “If you come home in the dark,” Carter Keith said, “you have got to do your chores in the dark.”
When he was twelve Athey was big enough to harness a mule, and his father let him have a little crop of his own. By then, when his father would go away he would tell Athey, “You look after things.” Athey thought himself a man, but he was wrong. He said, “I was riding for a fall.”
That year his father had an exceptionally nice bunch of shoats, due to be fat and ready by the time the nights turned cold. The word had got out and a number of people had spoken for them—neighbors, people in Port William, some from farther away.
It happened, as hog-killing time came on and the talk went around, that the hog-buyers got together with Carter Keith and made a deal by which they would do the slaughtering and work up the meat down at the Keith place to avoid having to move the live hogs, and Carter in turn would provide scalding box, gam’ling pole, firewood, and other necessities at a small surcharge per head. They were going to kill a full two dozen hogs, which would be a big job, but with all the help they had and some careful management they expected to do everything in two days.
The appointed time, when it came a few days after Thanksgiving, turned out to be more complicated than any man would have expected, let alone a boy. The complications came in stages.
First, Carter Keith had accumulated a shipment of tobacco that he would have to accompany to Louisville on the next boat. Which happened to come so early on the day of the hog-killing that you couldn’t even call it “morning.” When they first heard the Falls City blow it was not a long time after midnight. They dressed and went down with a lantern to hail the boat.
After the hogsheads of tobacco were on board, Carter Keith, standing on the end of the gangplank, shook hands with Athey, who was standing on the shore. “Look after things,??
? he said. “See that they have what they need. They’ll know what they’re doing.”
The boat backed away and headed downstream, its lights soon disappearing around the bend, leaving Athey alone and in charge. This was the first complication, but he wouldn’t understand that it was a complication until he had understood the second complication, which was still several hours off.
He returned to the house and got back into bed in his underwear and shirt, hoping for more sleep, but had hardly shut his eyes when the wagons of the hog-killers began arriving. The wagons brought, altogether, ten men: Lute Branch, Dewey Fields, Webster Page, Thad Coulter, Stillman Hayes, John Crop, Miller Quinch, Big Joe and Little Joe Ellis (who were no kin), and a small, stout-built man Athey remembered only as Tomtit. Some had bought hogs; some had come to help.
His father had emptied the barn to give stall room to the visitors. Athey went out with his lantern and showed them where to put their teams. Somebody had brought an extra scalding box, so there were two. He showed them where to dig the trenches for the scalding boxes, one on each side of the long gam’ling pole. They dug the trenches, laid fire in them, set the scalding boxes over the fires, and filled the boxes with water.
While the men stood by the fires, waiting for the water to heat and for the daylight to get strong enough to shoot by, Athey did his morning chores and then rushed to the house to get his breakfast. He did not even take his cap off. He dragged out his chair and sat down in it without drawing it up. “Give me my breakfast!” he said to Aunt Molly, who was bringing it.
She withdrew his plate. “Now,” she said, “ain’t you something, Mister Man. You take off that cap, and square yourself to that table, and act a nickel’s worth civilized.”
Whereas his father only ruled him, Aunt Molly owned him outright, at least when he was in the house where she could get at him. He did as she said. She gave him his breakfast. When he had eaten it, she let him go. By the time he got back to the barn lot, two hogs were shot and stuck, ready to scald. He pitched in, determined to do a man’s work that day.