“Yes, mam.”
“And you’ve got your toothbrush?”
“Yes, mam.”
“Well, take a bath and brush your teeth. I know I can depend on you to do that.”
I said, “Yes, mam, you can.” I had been afraid she might wash my ears herself, just to make sure. She was a gentle, truly good woman whose chief pleasure was in the happiness of other people, but when she went at one of your ears it felt like her finger was going to bore clean through your head and come out the other side.
“Don’t be too long,” she said. “Other people will be wanting to get in there. And don’t use too much water. Now come here and kiss your granny goodnight.”
I gave her a hug and a kiss and she left me. Feeling on my own again and responsible, I got my pajamas and my toothbrush out of my grip and went into the bathroom. I ran some water, but not too much, into the tub, and proceeded in pretty much of a hurry through all the before-bed requirements. I even did a thorough job on my ears, in them and behind them, and I brushed my teeth.
When I was in bed and the lovely feeling of that house and my welcome in it had come over me, I turned the radio on just loud enough to hear and turned out the light.
The radio brought the great world into that dark small room. It was the next-to-last night of the year, and the people on the radio were talking on the theme of time, of the old year that was passing away and the new year that was about to begin. The year of 1943, they said, had been a bloody and a murderous one. Many people had died, many had been hurt. Time and history had passed heavily over our poor world and had left it wounded and grieving. And what of the next year, 1944? Well, we would hope and pray for peace. We would hope and pray that our loved ones would come safely home. That would be our offering to that new year: a prayer for peace. Let the killing stop. Let the blood and the tears cease to flow. Let Uncle Virgil come home and never again have to go away.
The actual year of 1944 would be as bloody, in fact, as the one before and the one after. And in that year, shortly before my tenth birthday, Uncle Andrew, my father’s brother, would be shot and killed, not overseas in the war but here at home. And his began a series of deaths and losses that in the coming years would change the world as I had known it, and would change me: Dick Watson’s, Uncle Virgil’s, Uncle Ernest’s, Grandpa’s. The losses and griefs that are passing always over the world would come to us, breaking like waves upon the family houses. After Dick’s death Aunt Sarah Jane moved to Louisville, never to be heard from again. In a few more years the Brightleafs would be gone. At the Feltner place, Joe Banion would die, and Nettie and Aunt Fanny would move away, like Aunt Sarah Jane, to be near relatives who had gone to the city. And so that year of 1943 was in a sense my last year of innocence, of the illusion of permanence and peace. I was about to enter the time that is told by change, by death and loss, by the absence of the past and its members. By now, of all the people I have been remembering from those days in Port William, I alone am still alive. I am, as Maze Tickburn used to say, the onliest one.
Lying in bed that night, in the midst of my journey alone to my home places, still free of all that was to come, I felt even so the current of time flowing over me and over the house and through all the dark night outside. For a longish while, before sleep finally overtook my thoughts, I would have given a lot to see my mother.
Time is told by death, who doubts it? But time is always halved—for all we know, it is halved—by the eye blink, the synapse, the immeasurable moment of the present. Time is only the past and maybe the future; the present moment, dividing and connecting them, is eternal. The time of the past is there, somewhat, but only somewhat, to be remembered and examined. We believe that the future is there too, for it keeps arriving, though we know nothing about it. But try to stop the present for your patient scrutiny, or to measure its length with your most advanced chronometer. It exists, so far as I can tell, only as a leak in time, through which, if we are quiet enough, eternity falls upon us and makes its claim. And here I am, an old man, traveling as a child among the dead.
We measure time by its deaths, yes, and by its births. For time is told also by life. As some depart, others come. The hand opened in farewell remains open in welcome. I, who once had grandparents and parents, now have children and grandchildren. Like the flowing river that is yet always present, time that is always going is always coming. And time that is told by death and birth is held and redeemed by love, which is always present. Time, then, is told by love’s losses, and by the coming of love, and by love continuing in gratitude for what is lost. It is folded and enfolded and unfolded forever and ever, the love by which the dead are alive and the unborn welcomed into the womb. The great question for the old and the dying, I think, is not if they have loved and been loved enough, but if they have been grateful enough for love received and given, however much. No one who has gratitude is the onliest one. Let us pray to be grateful to the last.
I woke to the sound of Granny’s rapping on a pipe in the kitchen to tell Uncle Ernest in the room above that breakfast would be ready before long. She did that every morning, and it was a good sort of telegraph, for the plumbing carried her signal all over the house. It was still dark. Had Granny turned off the radio after I went to sleep? It was silent, and I didn’t remember turning it off. I switched on the light and dressed and ran down to the kitchen.
Though the daylight would not come for a while yet, the night was finished. Auntie and Aunt Lizzie were stirring in their room, Uncle Ernest in his, Hannah in hers. Granddaddy had made his and Granny’s bed and gone to the barn. Granny and Nettie Banion were busy in the kitchen, which was full of the smells of coffee and frying bacon.
“Here he is,” Granny said when I came into the kitchen. “Hungry too, I expect.”
And Nettie turned away from the stove and said, “Good morning to you, Andy Catlett.”
I said, “Hello, Nettie. How’re you?”
She said, “Just fine!”
And Granny said, “Did you wash? You didn’t. Go do it.”
I went and washed my hands and face and even wet my hair and combed it.
Granddaddy soon came in with the milk and went to wash up. And then it wasn’t long until we all were there. All of us sat down, except for Granny and Nettie, who were putting the food on the table. And then Granny sat down, leaving Nettie to pour coffee for the grownups and milk for me, and to see that everybody had enough of everything. There were eggs and bacon and hot biscuits and two kinds of jam. And of course there was no end of talk, for the night seemed to have filled everybody’s mind with new subjects.
When we had finished, Granny and Hannah cleaned the table and started washing the dishes. Nettie fixed breakfast for herself and Joe, and set their places at the table. Joe came in from the barn, and the two of them sat down to eat. I sat on at the table with Nettie and Joe while they ate, for I was glad to see them.
Whereas the hired help out at my Catlett grandparents’ came and went, the Banions had worked for the Feltners since way back. I am not quite up to explaining this. Whether or not the Banions had once been slaves of the Feltners, I don’t know. That is something else I should have asked before it was too late. I know only that the two families had been together at least since the time of Ma and Pa Feltner, the time of Smoke and Cass, who were Joe’s grandparents, and who, if they were not on the place during slavery, had come soon after. And the two families had belonged there together ever since.
Of the two of us, I think my brother Henry was Joe’s favorite. When our whole family would come to visit, Joe’s biggest greeting would be to Henry. He would begin to laugh just at the sight of Henry, who had the look of being ready to “put the cat in the churn,” as Uncle Jack Beechum said.
“Look out, Henry!” Joe would say and put up his fists, and he and Henry would spar a round while everybody laughed.
But Joe was good to me too. Now that I was getting bigger, he would sometimes let me follow him into the woods. He was a squ
irrel hunter, and on those jaunts he would be much stricter with me than Dick Watson ever was. More than anybody, Joe Banion taught me how to be quiet, and how to look until I saw. When he would turn on me with a peremptory motion of his hand and say “Hersh!” I would hush in mid-word without the further commotion even of shutting my mouth. And when, creeping along silently and seeing, I believed, all there was to see, he would turn to me—“All right. Where’s he at?”—I would feel under tremendous pressure to pick out the squirrel in his stillness among all the deceptions of leaves and shadows.
Seeing Joe had put hunting on my mind and started me into the very jabber from which, in the woods, he would have required me to “hersh.” About as much as I wanted a mule of my own, and much more than I wanted a BB gun, I wanted to have my own .22 rifle. I knew that for a boy of nine going on ten, in my family, this was a wish without hope, but I started telling Joe Banion how careful I would be with my rifle, if I had one. Partly, this was for Granny to overhear and tell my mother.
Joe knew what I was up to, and to egg me on he obliged me by agreeing with me. “Oh, yes!” he said. “Oh, I imagine!”
Joe, who had been up and busy a long time, made short work of a large breakfast, saving his coffee until last to prolong his leisure. With a grace surprising in hands so work-stiffened, he saucered the coffee, blew upon it, and supped it up in savorous whiffs.
And then, the day having established its pattern and its claim upon him, he got up and put on his cap and jacket and gloves. He hunched his shoulders in anticipation of the cold wind. “Airish out,” he said. He complimented the breakfast, “Mighty fine,” and went out.
Daylight had come strong enough now to see out the windows even with the light on in the kitchen. From where I sat at the table, I could look out across the ridges and the wooded hollows on our side of the river and on to the ridgetops and the tiny barns and houses on the far side. The limbs of the trees in the yard were swaying in the wind. After the one sunny day, it was cloudy again, and when Joe and Granddaddy had opened the back door, I had felt the cold. Every time that door had opened and shut again the warmth of the house had felt better.
I went upstairs and made my bed without waiting for Granny to tell me, in the process remembering that I had not made my bed out at Grandma’s. I had not given it a thought since I had got out of it the morning before. And that made me remember to brush my teeth without being told. Out the window of my room I could see the church and the post office and the hotel and some of the storefronts of the town. Port William had been awake and about its business for a long time. Several men were already standing in a row, leaning against Jasper Lathrop’s store, talking. One of Uncle Ernest’s fictions for Henry and me, when we were little, was that the stores in Port William would fall down if several men didn’t lean against them all the time. It still seemed strange and wonderful to me that the night could pass, so great an event of darkness, and there Port William would be again, just as it was before.
I went back down to the living room—the room that Granny always referred to from the kitchen as “in yonder”—and took Ma Feltner’s old green edition of Huckleberry Finn out of the bookcase and sat down on the sofa. I looked at Ma Feltner’s signature on the fly leaf and the date under it, “1886.” I turned through it, looking for the pictures of the river, the greatest river, that bore in its currents the waters of every stream and river I knew. I loved the scenes of boats or rafts on the wide flatness of the water. I read the captions as I went along. And then I got to the one of a forest on the riverbank somewhere way down south, in which a tree in the foreground has its branches all hung with Spanish moss. My mother had explained to me about Spanish moss, and I had looked at the picture so much and thought so much about it that it had become a sort of dream to me. It looked so strange and far away that I still shivered when I looked at it.
I closed the book on that faraway place and sat still to let the familiar house take shape around me again. Presently the clock on the mantel chimed the quarter-hour. Of all the things I loved in that house, I loved that clock maybe the most, for the sound of it signaled the presence of everything else. It played in stately measure a quarter of its tune at a quarter past the hour, half at half past, three-quarters at a quarter till, and the whole again to announce the hour. That tune, when I ring it over in my mind now, calls back into presence the house as it was, all its rooms and furnishings, its sounds and smells.
At the sound of the clock that morning I got up and wandered about the house to see what people were doing. Using a little foreknowledge, I pretty soon found Hannah sitting by herself at a window in the dining room. She had made this her workplace, out of the way of the regular work of the household and yet near enough to keep her available to help when she was needed. She was doing needlepoint, making covers for the seats of chairs that would be in the house that she and Uncle Virgil were going to build and live in when the war would be over and he would come home. She came alone to this task for a little while every day, and I understood, as all the others did, that this was her enactment of her hope. It was a hope doomed to lie in all our minds like a ruined nest, but then it was a hope merely bright that lent its distinction to the love I felt for her.
She looked up and smiled when I came in and spread her work so I could see its nearly completed floral design.
“It’s really pretty,” I said, for it really was.
I sat down and she resumed her work. The window looked out toward the opening of the river valley and the uplands on the far side. Hannah had been born and raised over in that country.
“Can you see your old house from here?” I asked. I didn’t think you could, but I wanted to hear her tell about her girlhood in her grandmother’s decaying old house.
“No,” she said, “you can’t see it from here, but it’s still over there.”
“When you were a girl over there, did you ever think someday you’d be living over here?” I asked because the question seemed to require thinking about. I had begun to be surprised by the extent to which life consists of surprises. I didn’t know but what it consisted mostly of surprises.
“Not an idea in this world,” she said. “I didn’t even know that ‘over here’ was over here.”
“So all this is a surprise?”
“Yep. Every bit of it.”
“Well, do you like it over here better than over there?”
“Some things over there I miss. My grandmother, I miss her. But there are a lot of things over here I like.” She gave me a pat to let me know I was one of the things over here that she liked. “And some things over there I don’t miss.”
She spoke then of her stepmother, Ivy, and of her two mean stepbrothers, Ivy’s boys Elvin and Allen.
Usually I was grateful for Elvin and Allen, who made me feel superior, for I was sure that I would never have been mean to Hannah if I had been her stepbrother. But her mention of their names that morning reminded me of a recent event that I had succeeded in forgetting entirely for the past two days and would just as soon have kept forgotten.
Just before school let out for Christmas, I had had a fight, an actual bodily fight, with a girl. I no longer remember the incidental details, but I am sure that I cannot have been innocent in this matter. I am in fact sure that I had given a grievous insult to my memorable classmate, Agnes Lee Lilly, but I did not know beforehand how grievous an insult it was, nor was I prepared for Agnes Lee’s response.
We boys fought each other with some frequency in those days, during recess or after school, and I had done my share of this. But when boys fought boys, as I was about to learn from Agnes Lee, there were certain commonly respected limits. There were certain things we did not do to one another. For instance, we did not try to kill each other; we were not yet mature enough for that. But when Agnes Lee sought vengeance against me, she did so with the apparent intent to kill. She opened the proceedings without warning by hitting me on the head with her entire armload of schoolbooks. She then flung
down the books and went at me with tooth and claw. She hit, bit, scratched, kicked, and pulled hair. I fought back, not because of any difference of opinion I may have had with her, but because I wished to stay alive.
Our teacher, Miss Heartsease, who had witnessed all this from her classroom window at a distance of about a hundred yards, raised the sash and cried out, “Stop that! Stop that! Stop this instant!”
I was glad enough to stop, even at the command of Miss Heartsease. And I was grateful to Agnes Lee for being similarly obedient.
When we had stopped, Miss Heartsease instructed Agnes Lee to go straight home and me to return to the classroom, where she kept me under arrest and under further instruction for a longish while. She deduced, from preceding evidence too freely supplied by me, that I was altogether at fault, having so far lowered myself as to strike a young lady.
She did not need to tell me never to do so again, for I had learned that lesson for myself; the next time I insulted a girl I would have a running start. But Miss Heartsease did tell me at length never to do so again. As she spoke, her eyes were moistly shining with righteous indignation and the satisfaction of fulfilled prophecy. She didn’t allow me to open my mouth in my own defense, and the awfulness of her indictment was itself a punishment.
Well, may Heaven bless her corky old heart, for against my will and her intention she taught me valuable lessons—about, for example, the limits of self-defense.
At that time, however, I did not feel so charitable toward her. Her righteous vehemence and certainty had put me in much uncertainty, for I was fairly assured of my guilt and yet I did not feel guilty. I felt, in fact, somewhat more than adequately punished.
Even so, as I listened to Hannah’s stories of those villains Elvin and Allen, I was fervently supposing that she hadn’t heard about my recent dispute with Agnes Lee, and I was carefully keeping my mouth shut.
Granddaddy had gone down into town after breakfast, I didn’t know what for. But I knew he was on the bank board and was trusted, and people depended on him for things. When he got back to the house, he came on to the dining room door and looked in.