Increasingly over the last maybe forty years, the thought has come to me that the old world in which our people lived by the work of their hands, close to weather and earth, plants and animals, was the true world; and that the new world of cheap energy and ever cheaper money, honored greed, and dreams of liberation from every restraint, is mostly theater. This new world seems a jumble of scenery and props never quite believable, an economy of fantasies and moods, in which it is hard to remember either the timely world of nature or the eternal world of the prophets and poets. And I fear, I believe I know, that the doom of the older world I knew as a boy will finally afflict the new one that replaced it.
The world I knew as a boy was flawed, surely, but it was substantial and authentic. The households of my grandparents seemed to breathe forth a sense of the real cost and worth of things. Whatever came, came by somebody’s work.
While I was preoccupied with being greeted and then with sitting in the living room with the women, who wanted to be told how everybody was at home when I left and how I had enjoyed my trip and what all I had done out at Grandma and Grandpa’s, Granddaddy had disappeared. As I replied to the women’s questions, much apparently to their pleasure and much therefore to my own, my mind nevertheless was increasingly troubled by the feeling that I was missing something.
I knew where Granddaddy had gone. He was out amongst the farm buildings and the livestock, helping his lifelong hired hand and friend from boyhood, Joe Banion, do up the evening chores. And finally I needed to get out of the center of attention. I didn’t want to hear myself say any more about where I had been and what I had done. It is the responsibility of a traveler to tell stories, but enough is enough.
I said, “I think I ought to go see where Granddaddy is.”
“Don’t do that now,” Granny said. “It’s not long till supper. No use tracking around in the mud and manure for nothing.”
That gave me another thought. “Can I go tell Uncle Ernest supper’s about ready?”
“May I go,” Auntie said, standing in for my mother and my teacher.
I almost said “Sure.” I got right to the edge of that cliff before I caught myself. I said, “May I go tell Uncle Ernest?”
“He’ll know when it’s supper time,” Granny said. “But you can go to the shop and walk back with him if you want to.”
Once I was outdoors in the quiet, I recovered the sense of myself as a solitary traveler. It came to me that, starting from the tracks I stood in, there in front of the old house, I could have gone anywhere. But I was going to Uncle Ernest’s shop because that was where Granny was expecting me to go, and it was where I wanted to go. Uncle Ernest was Granny’s youngest brother, a man fascinating to Henry and me because of his work and because of the long stories he would tell us, lasting, some of them, through the bedtimes of two weeks.
I crossed the road and turned into the alley between the hotel and the post office. Uncle Ernest’s shop was back at the end of the alley, sort of unlooked-at, out on the edge of things. His old pickup truck was parked in front, where it stayed most of the time in the winter. Smoke was coming out of the chimney. I opened the door and stepped into the warmth and the good smells.
Uncle Ernest was working at the bench, his crutches propped against the wall out of the way. When he heard me come in, he looked around and said, “Hello, Andy.”
“Uncle Ernest,” I said, “it won’t be long till supper.”
“I figured it was getting about that time.”
He had a way of talking to boys as if they were grown men. He only treated you like a child if you were being childish, and then it was awful. You knew without being told that there were limits to what he would put up with. He was like Auntie in that way.
He had been badly hurt in the First World War. Being crippled had changed him and changed his life, but there were limits also to his acceptance of his handicap. He would work mostly back there in his shop during the winter, repairing things, making things, refinishing furniture. He was handy. He could do anything he set his hands to. He kept everybody’s clocks running. He could fix the electrical household gadgets that were coming more and more into use. But his great gift and his passion were for wood, and the shop was filled with the smells of newly worked lumber, of shellac, varnish, paint, and glue. It was as fragrant in its way, as inviting and tempting, as a kitchen. It gave forth also the sounds of hammers, hatchets, drawknives, spokeshaves, saws, augers, planes, rasps, sandpaper. It was full of tools curious and beautiful to the eye, the metal polished and the handles lustrous from use. They were beautiful in themselves, in use, and in Uncle Ernest’s mastery of them.
The smells and sounds and sights of the place summoned a boy to come close, to take part, to help. But the shop was above all orderly, clean as a pin, and everything he wasn’t using would be in its place. There were rules also, three of them, that applied to boys: Don’t touch, Stand back, Be quiet. They were good rules, for they set the terms of Uncle Ernest’s welcome to boys that was genuine and generous. If you asked him, “What’re you making?” he would answer without looking at you, “Layos to catch meddlers.” But if you kept quiet and watched, you would see what he was making. If after a while you couldn’t figure it out, he would know it. He would say, “Do you know what I’m making?” and you would say, “No.” And then he would explain patiently and clearly. Sometimes he would say, “Do you want to try your hand at this?” and you would say, “Yes.” And then he would show you how.
From the time the weather got good in the spring until it turned cold again, he worked outdoors. And the shop also contained, in their places against the wall, the ladders, jacks, and other equipment that he would need then. Some work was too heavy for him, but people generally knew what he was capable of, and he seldom had to refuse a job. It was surprising what he could do. He used the crutches when he had any distance to walk. But when he started to work he put them aside, though he did look horribly crippled then, and he did not like people to watch him. He worked mainly alone. But if he thought of himself as a cripple, he was too proud to let you know it, even though nearly all the Port William men called him “Crip” and he answered to the name. His arms and upper body were powerful, as you would expect, and he made perhaps merciless demands upon his poor legs. He could carry a considerable load up a ladder. He could replace the siding on a barn. One time Martin Rowanberry came upon him sitting flat on the ground, cutting down a big tree with an axe. Mart himself told me this long after Uncle Ernest was dead. Mart said he was a good axeman. He never wasted a lick. The big chips were flying.
I stood at the appointed distance and watched him, neither of us saying anything more. He was replacing a leg on somebody’s table. It was a ticklish job, involving mortises, tenons, and pegs.
After a while, still attentive to his work, he said, “I don’t reckon you’re looking forward to supper.”
And I said, as I was supposed to, “I don’t reckon so.”
He worked on a few moments more, and then he put his tools away. He brushed the accumulated dust and shavings off the bench and swept them into a neat pile on the floor. They would help the stove to get hot early the next morning. Finished, then, he turned to me and smiled.
“Well, you may not be hungry, but I am. Let’s go.”
He got his crutches and I went ahead of him out the door.
Supper at Granny Feltner’s was a sort of indoor picnic of cold leftovers and sandwich makings. Nettie Banion, Granny’s cook, would have gone down through the field to her own house after the dinner dishes were done, and supper was meant to be an easy meal that did not heat up the kitchen in the summertime or leave cooking utensils to be washed. Under the bright electric light, that evening of my arrival, Granny and Hannah had laid out the rest of the Christmas ham and turkey on their platters, and mayonnaise and cranberry sauce, and a plate of cold biscuits and a loaf of Granny’s salt-rising bread to make sandwiches with, and a pitcher of milk. There was a pot of coffee hot on the stove for wh
oever wanted it. For dessert there was fruit cake and jam cake and custard with whipped cream. And in the refrigerator, especially for me, was a tray of ice cream made with cream from the Jersey cows. “Save room,” Granny said when she told me about it.
To me, the kitchen always bespoke the presence of Nettie Banion, even when she was absent from it, as it bespoke also the presence of Aunt Fanny, who had been there when my mother was young, and of Aunt Cass, who had been there when Granddaddy was young. All three in their times had married Banion men, Smoke and Samp and Joe, and all three had come up the hill to this house in the early mornings to cook breakfast and dinner, to help with the housework, and then had gone back home to keep house and fix supper in that other life that we white people knew existed but did not know.
When I was staying in Port William and Granny had something to say to me that was especially important, she would make me a little speech. This was because of my mind’s bad reputation for wandering. That night, after we had eaten our supper and were dawdling at the table, Granny said:
“Andy, listen to Granny for a minute. I know you want to go downtown to see if any of your friends are there. And that’s all right. But I want you to be back here at eight o’clock. Now, what did I say?”
I said, “I can go downtown, but I have to be back by eight o’clock. Well, I would like to. But how am I going to know when it’s eight o’clock?”
“There’ll be people down there who’ll know,” she said. “Just tell somebody to tell you when it’s time.”
“Yes, mam.”
And so she freed me and bound me at the same time, something she was good at.
I set forth again into the town of Port William, the nucleus, the navel, of the country that was most intimately home to me then and has been home to me all my life, even in the years when I did not live in it. It is my motherland, the mold I was cast in. As it has held and shaped me, so I have kept and contained it. Though I may have been thousands of miles away, it has been as present to me as my own flesh.
The town of Hargrave, where I was living then, had been infected perhaps from the beginning with the modern ambition to be what it was not. It longed, as people say now, to realize its full potential, whatever that might be. But Port William was eagerly interested in itself, interminably telling itself its own stories.
Of Port William proper, the center, there never has been much: a scattering of houses along the road, a church, a school, a graveyard, and what in a bigger town would have been the “business district,” which was my destination. In those days Port William’s business district consisted of two general stores, Milton Burgess’s and Jasper Lathrop’s, Jasper’s being closed at the time because Jasper was in the army; a still-working blacksmith shop; a garage and car dealership, the life of which coincided just about exactly with the working life of Mr. Milo Settle; Dolph Courtney’s “drug store,” which sold patent medicines, ice cream, “notions and sundries,” and comic books; the Port William branch of The Independent Farmer’s Bank; Uncle Ernest’s woodworking shop; Jayber Crow’s barbershop; a pool room; the paintless hotel, which now offered room and board mainly to old people; and the post office. Now we have perhaps a few more houses than then, but only one general store, an “antique and junque” store, the bank, and the post office. The Port William School of eight grades, which was going strong in 1943, has been shut now for forty years.
I knew several Port William boys about my age, with whom I played or rambled when I visited Granny and Granddaddy, and I was on the lookout for them. When I went out, all that was left of the day was just a little afterlight in the west. I crossed the street and went by the post office, which was dark; and by the hotel, which was showing a light way in the back where Mrs. Hendrick was serving supper to her boarders; by the blacksmith shop, where there was a basketball goal in the cindery lot in front; and by Jasper Lathrop’s store, which was shut and dark. Dolph Courtney’s store was showing a little light, but nobody was in there, and so Dolph had turned off all the lights except one naked bulb over the ice cream counter, on which Dolph was leaning, reading the paper. It was too dark to make out the covers of the comic books he had on display in the front window.
When I got to the poolroom, I stood and thought awhile about going in, which I had done a time or two when I was rambling about with Danny Branch and Orvie Galingale. I might have gone in if I had been with them, but I was alone, and moreover I was traveling alone and so was unusually mindful of my responsibility. Things went on in that poolroom, according to Granny, that she did not recommend to boys my age. I was, in fact, strictly forbidden to go in there.
Next was Dr. Markman’s little office of two white-painted, board-walled rooms. He was still busy, for there was a light on in the back room and his old car was parked in front. It was a coupe of some kind, black by the manufacturer’s intention, but in fact mostly the color of mud: of dried mud until it rained, and then the color of wet mud. Sometimes his patients visited him in his office. More often he called upon them, driving the creek roads and the farm tracks at all hours, carrying a few instruments and bottles of pills in a leather satchel that was as professionally black as it was meant to be. I did not dislike Dr. Markman, but my few encounters with him had not been entirely pleasant, for he came where sickness was. Once, when I got the flu at Granny’s house, she called Dr. Markman. He was a good-humored man, and he made us all feel better just by coming into the room with the air of the harsh winter night emanating like an aura from his clothes. But when he applied his cold, hairy ear to my back to listen to my lungs, it felt as big as a dinner plate.
I went on down to the barbershop at the bottom of the swag in the middle of town. Nobody at all was in there. Even Jayber was gone. He had left a light on to show that he was open for business, but everybody probably had got their hair cut right before Christmas, and so he had given up and gone off somewhere. I crossed over to Mr. Settle’s garage and went back up the hill to Milton Burgess’s store. The lights were on there, and I could see through the window that people were inside, if not customers at least loafers. I went in to see who was there and what there was to see.
The first sight, of course, was Mr. Burgess smiling at me from behind the counter. “Good evening, Mr. Catlett,” he said in his official-greeting voice while everybody looked at me. “What can I do for you this evening?”
He sounded ready, if I had only said the word, to stand on his head or jump through a hoop. Nothing could have been more embarrassing. I said, “Not anything, I don’t reckon.”
“Not anything it will be then,” said Mr. Burgess, grinning at me through his spectacles and rapping a little tattoo on the counter with his fingers.
Somebody laughed.
Now, as if through a hole in the ceiling, I can see myself, small for my age, too skinny, thoroughly embarrassed. By now I had seen that none of my friends were there, and among the several men who had come in to loaf until bedtime I was the one boy. I was sorry I had come in, but I was too embarrassed to leave. If some of the women had been there it would have been better, for they would have been openly kind to a small boy, and being there among the men had made me aware again that I was a small boy. The men would not have been impressed to know that I had come alone by bus from Hargrave to Port William. The women would have been there if it had been Saturday night, for on Saturdays whole families came to town to shop and visit. Weeknights you would find only the men, and only certain men, loafing about in the places of business and spending usually not enough money to pay the proprietors to keep a fire going and the lights on.
The conversation that these loafers kept going, night after night, was Port William’s sole indigenous public institution. By it, the manhood at least of the town reminded itself of itself, preserved its history to the extent that it was preserved, entertained and comforted itself, and in some measure even governed itself. And though I could not have been aware of it then, there was kindness in it too, inadvertent as it may have been. For Port William alw
ays had its fair allotment of widowers and aging bachelors, lonely men who used these nighttime gatherings to fend off between darkfall and bedtime the thoughts that come to the lonely and are hard to suffer alone.
This kindness, however, lived below or beyond the masculine hardness and even the sometimes cruelty of laughter at somebody else’s discomfort, or the ironies of Milton Burgess’s mercantile manners, which for a moment or two had kept me paralyzed in my shyness. But then the bunch began to clarify itself and sort itself into individual people, most of whom I knew.
Before I came in, Mr. Athey Keith had been talking to Mr. Burgess, holding a paper bag of something and ready to leave. Mr. Keith did not loaf. He spoke to me and shook my hand—he was a friend of my grandfathers’ and my father’s—and this seemed to undo Mr. Burgess’s officious silliness. Mr. Keith said, “How are you, young man?” thus, it seemed, both paying his respects to my family and telling me what he expected of me. He then went straight out the door, giving exactly as much heed to the loafers as if they had not been there at all.
Gathered in the back of the room to talk around the stove, seated on an assortment of chairs, crates, and kegs, were, among others, Grover Gibbs, Maze Tickburn, drunk, Fee Berlew, unusually sober, and, the youngest of them, Troy Chatham, who was Mr. Keith’s son-in-law. It was Troy who had laughed. Jayber Crow, the barber, was leaning against a rank of shelved canned goods, his hands in his pockets, mainly listening as usual. Jayber was always good to me, as he was to everybody, and I went and stood beside him as I would have gone to shelter in a storm. He looked down at me and smiled, gave me two pats on the shoulder, and said, “How you doing, Andy?”