I sat down and let myself come to rest in the warmth and in the fragrance of the tobacco. Dick would have built the fire first thing that morning on his way up to the barn to feed and milk, and the thin-walled room, constructed of odds and ends of old lumber and corrugated roofing, by now was thoroughly warm. The men at the bench were working rapidly, but their talk was leisurely. I leaned back against the wall, making myself comfortable, for I loved their talk.
“Well, Dick,” Jess Brightleaf said, “looks like you all met that bus all right. I reckon you got there in plenty of time.”
Dick laughed his laugh—“Ho-ho-ho!”—that meant he wasn’t going to tell all that he might. “Yessir, Mr. Jessie. We was out at the pike wasn’t even day yet.”
He would tell me later that Grandpa had been talking about meeting the bus for two or three days. That I would be coming by myself was a matter that he had taken very seriously. That my father would have entrusted me alone to such a contraption as a bus had not met Grandpa’s approval. He did not understand internal combustion as a motive force, and he regarded it with a mixture of deference and awe and deep suspicion.
“Ay Lord,” Grandpa said, “there was the little thing with his satchel, come all that way by himself.” He spoke as if he had witnessed an event of great pathos and wonder, never mind that at my age he would have ridden so far on horseback alone and thought nothing of it.
Jess Brightleaf looked around at us, amused, and said, “Uncle Marce, looks like the boy has fattened up right sharply.”
“Aw,” Rufus said, “he swells up that way ever’ winter.” He turned around and, grinning, squeezed experimentally my thigh above the knee. “Ain’t that right, Andy?”
“A many a good biscuit has gone down that boy,” Jess said. “He eats so much it makes him poor to carry it.”
“Yaaa-hahaaa!” Rufus said. “That boy traded legs with a grasshopper and got cheated out of a ass.”
“Well,” Jess said considerately, “he’ll grow. He’ll fill out. We’ll get him up here with us next summer and work him hard and put some of that fried chicken and a few biscuits into him, you won’t know him by fall.”
So they greeted me, made much of me, gave me very astutely my credit rating, and so reminded me how much, how much more than they knew, I wished to grow and fill out and do work worthy of my dinner. When all their backs were turned again, I felt for myself the place where Rufus’s hard handprint still lay on my thigh, and I had to acknowledge that it was sure enough a rather grasshopperly appendage.
Jess’s allusion to the coming summer, which by the last of December would have been already on his mind, started Rufus into an elaborate prophecy of the coming hot weather, and so they were done with me for a while. Rufus said that when the weather got hot, this time around, he would have a few bottles of beer soaking in a tub of ice under a shade tree at the edge of the tobacco patch. “And then when we go down one of them long rows and the old sun’s cracking down and the sweat’s running in our eyes and we’re dry as a popcorn fart, we’ll rear back in that shade and turn up one of them good old cold ones. Ain’t that right, Uncle Marce?” He let go his big yell of a laugh, and Grandpa snorted and said, “Ay Lord, Rufus!”
Everybody knew, even I knew, so well that he would do no such thing, that Jess Brightleaf would have tolerated no such thing, that there was no further need for comment.
They worked on in silence a while and then, introducing the subject with a little laugh, Jess told how Rufus, well filled with beer in his younger days, had stretched out to sleep it off in the shade of a big oak tree in a pasture. After a while the shade moved off, and Rufus began to sweat in the hot sun. The cows came up, as cows are apt to do at any curious sight, and, smelling the salt in Rufus’s sweat, they ate his shirt off of him while he slept.
The Brightleaf brothers, like many farmers of our region who belonged to that old world that ended with mechanization in the aftermath of the war, were men who talked for pleasure. They talked to keep their minds employed, to entertain themselves, to lighten their weariness, for companionship. No silence could last very long before one of them would need to have something to say. While they talked Grandpa would chime in from time to time with a comment or a word of confirmation or commendation; from time to time their stories would remind him of a story he remembered and he would tell it. He had begun to ponder the days of his youth, as old men do, and the stories he told were of a time nobody else remembered. Dick Watson mostly listened, laughing or nodding or shaking his head. Old Man Hawk paid so little regard that he might as well have been deaf, or not there at all.
They talked about the weather and what it had done and might do. They talked about the quality of this crop, and of last year’s, and of the crops of other years. They talked of the tobacco market and prices and of the time, coming soon, when the present crop would be taken to the warehouse and sold.
Rufus said, “When we sell this crop, Uncle Marce, let’s me and you go to Louisville and rent one of them penthouses. We’ll lay in a good stock of that bottled-in-bond and plenty to eat. We’ll get us a couple of old women about eighteen or twenty years old to cook for us and see to our every need.” He was half hollering to make sure Grandpa got the full benefit of this vision, another that even I knew would never be realized. “How ’bout it, old boss?”
Grandpa snorted and laughed. “Ay Lord, Rufus, we’ll do that.”
And then, after a silence that had stretched somewhat thin, Rufus sang a song about Old Aunt Dinah who was “a good old soul,” in which it was revealed that the word “soul” had the misfortune to rhyme with “hole.”
Presently they spoke of the man they called “Mr. Roosyvelt” and of the war. They marveled at the terrible destructions that had been accomplished, at what bombs could do, at how far the big guns were able to shoot. The war frightened them as it did me, and in our fear we all clung to the thought of President Roosevelt, who consoled us, maybe just by the jaunty way he held his cigarette holder in his teeth, and gave us hope. The Brightleafs, like most of the farming people, pronounced the o’s in the first syllable of the president’s name as they pronounced the o’s in “roof,” for it was a name they frequently read in the newspaper but seldom heard.
In that stripping room the next winter, I heard Rufus Brightleaf speaking in awe of “rowboat bombs.” He meant “robot bombs,” the V-2 rockets that were then flying across the English Channel to fall upon London. But I was still perfectly gullible, still able to believe almost anything I was told by a grownup, and from Rufus’s talk of “rowboat bombs” that could “fly clean across the water” I derived a vision at once horrible and absurd. In 1943 the V weapons were a horror as yet unrevealed. The war had many horrors still to be revealed.
Thoughts of the war led them to speak of Tom Coulter, Jarrat Coulter’s boy, who had been killed in the fighting in Italy. I was a little kin, on my father’s side, to Tom Coulter. His name, as they spoke it in that little room within the barn within the wind within the story of the world, seemed to me to enter the day like a bell stroke. They spoke his name perhaps with the awareness that now his name would be spoken less and less until it would be spoken no more, for they were silent again afterwards.
And then Rufus said quietly, “Boys, he’ll be a long time gone from here.” As he spoke he had again that look on his face that I had seen before, that did not look like him, and he did not sound like himself. In my brief knowledge, I thought I knew what he meant. And now, in my long knowledge, I know what he meant.
Soon after that we heard a car drive past the house and stop in front of the feed barn. I was afraid for a minute that it was my father. All through this visit of mine, and especially during my stay at the Catlett home place, I was dogged by the thought that my father or my Uncle Andrew would show up, as I reckoned they were likely to do. This thought was merely a trouble in my mind then, for I could not have explained it to myself, but of course if one of them had shown up, driving the ten or so miles from Hargr
ave as they routinely did, then the charm of my solitary bus trip would have been dispelled; my great adventure would have been revealed to be as trivial as in fact it was. If they did not show up, as fortunately they did not, then I would take the bus home late on New Year’s Day, and my myth of my first journey alone would complete itself and remain intact in my mind from then on.
I need not have worried, for the car was only Jess Brightleaf ’s, and, hearing it, he took out his watch, looked at it, and said with much satisfaction, “Bean time.” He stepped to the door and opened the latch.
And soon Jess’s wife, Ruth, came into the room, carrying dinner and the necessary tableware in two large handbaskets. She was followed by their boy, Fred, who was a year older than I, and Fred was carrying another basket and a large coffeepot. Daylight was precious then, in the shortest days, and Jess was seeing to it that nobody went home for dinner. They were eating where they worked and stopping work only to eat.
Ruth Brightleaf was a stout, hearty woman, capable at any work of farm or household. “Why, it’s Andy! Hello, Andy honey!” she said. “Look, Fred! Andy’s here!”
Fred and I were friends and glad enough to see each other, but we couldn’t rise to whatever her enthusiasm required of us, and so we just said hello.
Fred was the only child I knew of about my own age who had been gravely ill. He had spent weeks in the hospital, had been operated on by surgeons, and had a long scar to show for it. They were afraid for a while that he would die. And so there was this knowledge about Fred that qualified everything else you knew about him: He had been to death’s door and had come back. He had come all the way back, for he was a lively boy, always ready for fun, and he had the hearty way of talking and the big laugh that belonged to all the Brightleafs.
A bucket of water for handwashing had been sitting on the drum stove. Mrs. Brightleaf set it on the floor and in its place put the coffeepot and the several vessels of food. The men, meanwhile, were clearing as much of the bench as they would need for a sort of table or sideboard. The smells of food had begun almost to overpower the smell of tobacco. Mrs. Brightleaf was a good cook, “as good as a man ever ate after,” as Grandpa said and I well knew, and she loved to feed boys. I longed to stay and eat and talk with Fred, but Grandpa was already going out, praising Mrs. Brightleaf and her cooking as he went, and I followed as I knew I had to do.
“Come back soon as you eat, Andy,” Fred said. “I got a BB gun.”
“I’ll be right back,” I said as I followed Grandpa out the door.
I followed Grandpa through the gates up into the barn lot, and old Ring came out of his hole again to see if he could be of any help. So then the three of us walked in a line across the lot and through the third gate into the backyard.
“Grandma told me to go get the mail,” I said.
“That’s right, baby,” Grandpa said. “Go get it.”
And so Ring and I went down through the long yard to the mailbox. There was nothing in it but the newspaper, and I knew Grandma would be disappointed, for the arrival of a letter or postcard from one of our far-away relatives was a great event to her, but I anyhow would have the funnies.
I went around the house and in at the kitchen door, pried off my overshoes, handed the paper to Grandma, took off my wraps, and washed my hands.
“Try combing that hair of yours,” Grandma said. “Nobody ever saw the like. It’s a regular straw stack.”
Knowing it would do no good, I took the comb from the shelf where the water bucket sat and passed it several times through my hair.
Grandma watched me, and then she laughed. “You are the limit!” Her laugh was affectionate and indulgent, and yet it was a laugh with a history, conveying her perfected assurance that some things were hopeless. “Well, give up,” she finally said. “Come and eat.”
She had made a splendid dinner, a feast, little affected by wartime stringencies, which, except for the rationing of coffee and sugar, were little felt in such households. It hadn’t been long since hog-killing, and so there was not only a platter of fresh sausage but also a bowl of souse soaking in vinegar. There was a bowl of sausage gravy, another of mashed potatoes, another of green beans, another of apple sauce. There was a pan of hot biscuits, to be buttered or gravied, and another in the oven. There was a handsome cake of freshly churned butter, the top marked in squares neatly carved with the edge of the butter paddle. There was a pitcher of buttermilk and one of sweet milk. And finally there was the pie, still warm, the top crust crisp and sugary and brown.
Oh, I ate as one eats who has not eaten for days, as if my legs were hollow, as if I were bigger inside than outside, and Grandma urged me on as if I were her champion in a tournament of eating.
Grandpa began the meal protesting that he was not hungry, but he ate, as Grandma said, “with a coming appetite,” and when it came it came in force. Before my time he had ridden horseback the five miles to Smallwood where his friend the atheist doctor Gib Holston had pulled all his teeth, but he “gummed it” as fast as I could chew with teeth, and he had more capacity.
We ate and said little, for all of us were hungry. The food, as I see now but did not then, looked beautiful laid out before us on the table. And never then did I know that it was laid out in such profusion in honor of me. It was offered to me out of the loneliness of Grandma’s life, out of her disappointments, her craving for small comforts and pleasures beyond her reach, to which Grandpa was indifferent. When I had washed down the last bite of my second piece of pie with a final swallow of milk, my stomach was as tight as a tick. I am sure I said “That was good.” I may even have said “Thank you,” for I was ever conscious that I was traveling alone and therefore in need of my manners. But time has taught me greater thanks.
Grandpa, whose mind was on the stripping room, had eaten without even taking off his coat, his cap and cane hanging from the chairback. The instant he laid down his fork he stood, put on his cap, picked up his cane, and started for the door. That put me in a panic, for I too was thinking of the stripping room and of Fred and of Fred’s new BB gun.
“I got to go,” I said. And as soon as I could get wrapped up again, I too headed to the door.
Grandma said only “Hmh!” by which she signified to herself and to me that I was doing exactly as she had known I would do, which was exactly as Grandpa had done, which was exactly what she had known he would do.
The stripping room was almost mysteriously the same as it had been through the morning. All signs of dinner were gone, and Mrs. Brightleaf was gone. The men standing at the bench had resumed the preoccupation and the rhythm of their work, which continued as if it had not been interrupted by dinner, or by anything else, perhaps for years. Behind them, unnoticed, Grandpa was dozing on his bucket by the stove and Fred was sighting his BB gun through the window.
“Look a here,” he said as I came in, and he held the gun out to show me.
“Boy!” I said, for I was longing for a BB gun of my own, and all the more keenly because I was forbidden to have one. BB guns were infamous with my mother for shooting boys in the eye.
Fred aimed the gun out the window between Rufus and Dick and said, “Pow!”
“Don’t point that thing at anybody,” Jess said. “Didn’t I tell you?”
Fred didn’t answer. He raised the barrel toward the ceiling.
“Didn’t I?” Jess said.
“Yes,” Fred said.
Rufus said: “Santy brought me one of them things when I was a boy. First thing I did with it was shoot the old man in the ass while he was bent over tying his shoe. That was when the bobbling pin flew off the wobbling shaft. He snatched the gun away from me and I thought he was going to hit me with it. I thought ‘Katy bar the door,’ but he just hit it on a tree, which didn’t do anything to it but cock it again, and went on in the house. I climbed the tree for fear he still might whip me and looked in through the window, and there the old man was with his britchies down, showing my mother a black streak where that BB had sor
t of scooted.”
We all laughed.
Fred sighted the gun up at the ceiling. “You reckon it would shoot through that tin?”
“Try it and see,” I said.
Without looking at us or stopping work, Jess said, “You boys get out of here with that damned gun.”
He meant it, and so we went. We went down the hill to the woods. Old Ring, who had been lying in the barn, got up and came along.
Having a gun, we were going hunting, of course. We thought old Ring might tree a squirrel, which he had sometimes done when we were not armed. And he did tree a squirrel as we were going into the woods, and the squirrel took his stand in the very top of a tall hickory. We wasted a good many BBs in shooting at him, but the squirrel understood the effective range of our weapon better than we did, for he did not move and we did not hit him; if we had hit him with a BB at that height, he would have laughed at us.
We were, in truth, not good hunters. We were bloodthirsty enough, for we shot at every living thing we saw, and we had the firepower to have killed at least a bird if we could have got close enough, but we made too much noise, talked too much, played too much, were too distracted. Intending slaughter, we delivered only the poor mercy of our incompetence. And so when we had shot up all of Fred’s BBs, it was a sort of relief. The woods, down there under the hill out of the wind, was quiet and inviting. When we had quit hunting, we spent a while just wandering about. We went to our tree that branched low enough to the ground so we could climb it, and we climbed it right to the top where the trunk was limber and we could feel the wind bending it, and we swung it, making it bend farther. We said we were riding the wind.
At the very back of the woods there was an enormous old white oak that had stood there, as Grandma said a little wistfully, “Oh, since the times of old.” Near it, the summer before, Fred and Henry and I had built a sort of tepee by leaning a lot of old fence rails against a young hickory. The farm had once been fenced entirely with rock fences and rail fences. But in the time of my memory they all were gone, replaced with woven wire, except for a short stretch of rail fence on the other side of the ridge below the feed barn. The old rails had been ricked up beside the woods to be out of the way and for use mostly as fuel. Our tepee, anyhow, had been a mighty work, an ample room within the larger enclosure of the woods. When we covered it with leafy branches it gave a fine feeling of shelter, an inside neatly divided from the outside. But now, on that bare wintry day, the sheltery feeling and the charm were gone. Our tepee was just a bunch of old rails leaning against a tree. And that disillusionment ended our adventure in the woods for the day.