With that second thunderclap, anyhow, the rain was suddenly with us, falling in spouts and sheets as if it had never started and would never stop. None of us said another word. Dick and I had returned to our own buckets. We sat with Grandpa in a row there in the doorway and watched.
Before too long the rain slacked off. Dick went to get the milk buckets, and I got on the pony and went to bring in the cows. Soon enough we had done the night work, Grandpa and I had washed at the washstand on the back porch and come in to our places at the supper table. It was getting dark. We were then on what we would come to call “the old time,” and night came two hours earlier than it does now.
The rain, the steady dizz-dozzle, had not stopped. It had set in for the night. The storm having deprived us of electricity, we ate by the light of an oil lamp and listened through the open door to the fall of the rain on the back porch roof. We said nothing. It was as though we were being told something that we had forever longed to hear.
Finally, raising his head to listen, Grandpa said, “This breaks the drouth.”
It was the voice of a sufferer. I didn’t know much, but I knew that. And in my mind or heart, or whatever the affected organ was, I felt the breaking of the drouths of 1936, 1930, 1908, and all the other drouths backward and forward to both ends of time.
Stand By Me (1921–1944)
WHEN JARRAT married Lettie in 1921 and bought the little place across the draw from our home place and started to paying for it, in that time that was already hard, years before the Depression, he had a life ahead of him, it seemed like, that was a lot different from the life he in fact was going to live. Jarrat was my brother, four years older than me, and I reckon I knew him as well as anybody did, which is not to say that what I knew was equal to what I didn’t know.
But as long as Lettie lived, Jarrat was a happy man. As far as I could see, not that I was trying to see or in those days cared much, he and Lettie made a good couple. They were a pretty couple, I’ll say that, before this world and its trouble had marked them. And they laid into the work together, going early and late, scraping and saving and paying on their debt.
Tom was born the next year after they married, Nathan two years later. And it seemed that Tom hadn’t hardly begun to walk about on his own until Nathan was coming along in his tracks, just a step or two behind. They had pretty much the run of the world, Lettie and Jarrat being too busy for much in the way of parental supervision, at least between meals.
The hollow that lays between the two places, that most people call Coulter Branch, before long was crisscrossed with boy-paths that went back and forth like shoestrings between the boys’ house on one ridge and the old house on the other where I lived with Mam and Pap. The boys lived at both houses, you might as well say. They’d drop down through the pasture and into the woods on one side, and down through the woods to the branch, and then up through the woods and the pasture on the other side, and they’d be in another place with a different house and kitchen and something different to eat. They had maybe half a dozen paths they’d worn across there, and all of them had names: the Dead Tree Path, I remember, and the Spring Path and the Rock Fence Path.
And then, right in the midst of things going on the way they ought to have gone on forever, Lettie got sick and began to waste away. It was as serious as it could be, we could see that. And then instead of belonging just to Jarrat to pay attention to, she began to belong to all of us. Dr. Markman was doing all he could for her, and then Mam and the other women around were cooking things to take to her and helping with her housework, and us others were hoping or praying or whatever we did, trying to help her to live really just by wishing for her to. And then, without waiting for us to get ready, she died, and the boys all of a sudden, instead of belonging just to her and Jarrat, belonged to us all. Nathan was five years old, and Tom was seven.
And I was one of the ones that they belonged to. They belonged to me because I belonged to them. They thought so, and that made it so. The morning of their mother’s funeral, to get them moved and out of the house before more sadness could take place, I put a team to the wagon and drove around the head of the hollow to get them. Mam had packed up their clothes and everything that was theirs. We loaded it all and them too onto the wagon, and I brought them home to the old house.
Jarrat wasn’t going to be able to take care of them and farm too, and they didn’t need to be over there in that loneliness with him. But Pap and Mam were getting on in years then. Pap, just by the nature of him, wasn’t going to be a lot of help. And Mam, I could see, had her doubts.
Finally she just out with it. “Burley, I can be a grandmother, but I don’t know if I can be a mother again or not. You’re going to have to help me.”
She had her doubts about that too. But it didn’t prove too hard to bring about. I belonged to them because they needed me. From the time I brought them home with me, they stuck to me like burrs. A lot of the time we were a regular procession—me in front, and then Tom in my tracks just as close as he could get, and then Nathan in Tom’s the same way. The year Lettie died I was thirty-four years old, still a young man in my thoughts and all, and I had places I needed to go by myself. But for a long time getting away from those boys was a job. I’d have to hide and slip away or bribe them to let me go or wait till they were asleep. When I wanted to hunt or fish the best way to be free of them was just to take them with me. By the time they got big enough to go on their own, we had traveled a many a mile together, day and night, after the hounds, and had spent a many an hour on the river.
The grass and weeds overgrew the paths across the hollow. The boys somehow knew better than to go over there where their mother was gone and their daddy was living by himself. It took them a while to go back there even with me.
Jarrat did a fair job of batching. He kept the house clean, and he didn’t change anything. He sort of religiously kept everything the way Lettie had fixed it. But as time went on, things changed in spite of him. He got busy and forgot to water the potted plants, and they died. And then gradually the other little things that had made it a woman’s house wore out or got lost or broke. Finally it took on the bare, accidental look of the house of a man who would rather be outdoors, and then only Jarrat’s thoughts and memories were there to remind him of Lettie.
Or so I guess. As I say, there was a lot about Jarrat that nobody in this world was ever going to know. I was worrying about him, which I hadn’t ever done before, and I was going to worry about him for the rest of his life. I began to feel a little guilty about him too. I had a lady friend, and by and by we began to come to an understanding. When I wanted company, I had friends. When I didn’t want company, I had the woods and the creeks and the river. I had a good johnboat for fishing, and always a good hound or two or three.
Jarrat didn’t have any of those things, not that he wanted them. In his dealings with other people he was strictly honest, I was always proud of him for that, and he was friendly enough. But he didn’t deal with other people except when he had to. He was freer than you might have thought with acts of kindness when he knew somebody needed help. But he didn’t want kindness for himself, though of course he needed it. He didn’t want to be caught needing it.
After Lettie died, he wasn’t the man he was before. He got like an old terrapin. He might come out of his shell now and again to say something beyond what the day’s work required: “Hello,” maybe, or he would compliment the weather. But if you got too close, he’d draw in again. Only sometimes, when he thought he was by himself, you’d catch him standing still, gazing nowhere.
What I know for sure he had in his life were sorrow, stubbornness, silence, and work. Work was his consolation, surely, just because it was always there to do and because he was so good at it. He had, I reckon, a gift for it. He loved the problems and the difficulties. He never hesitated about what to do. He never mislaid a lick. And half of his gift, if that was what it was, was endurance. He was swift and tough. When you tied in with him for a day?
??s work, you had better have your ass in gear. Work was a fever with him. Anybody loved it as much as he did didn’t need to fish.
So when Tom and Nathan needed him the most, their daddy didn’t have much to offer. He wanted them around, he would watch over them when they were with us at work, he would correct and caution them when they needed it, but how could he console them when he couldn’t console himself?
They were just little old boys. They needed their mother, was who they needed. But they didn’t have her, and so they needed me. Sometimes I’d find one or the other of them off somewhere by himself, all sorrowful and little and lost, and there’d be nothing to do but try to mother him, just pick him up and hold him tight and carry him around a while. Their daddy couldn’t do it, and it was up to me.
I would make them laugh. It usually wasn’t too hard. Nathan thought I was the funniest thing on record anyhow, and sometimes he would laugh at me even when I was serious. But I would sing,
Turkey in the straw settin’ on a log
All pooched out like a big bullfrog.
Poked him in the ass with a number nine wire
And down he went like an old flat tire.
I would sing,
Stuck my toe in a woodpecker hole,
In a woodpecker hole, in a woodpecker hole.
Woodpecker he said, “Damn your soul,
Take it out, take it out, take it out!”
I would sing one of them or some other one, and dance a few steps, raising a dust, and Nathan would get so tickled he couldn’t stand up. Tom would try to hold his dignity, like an older brother, but he would be ready to bust. All you had to do was poke him in the short ribs, and down he would go too.
What raising they got, they got mainly from their grandma and me. It was ours to do if anybody was going to do it, and somehow we got them raised.
To spare Grandma, and when they were out of school, we kept the boys at work with us. That way they learned to work. They played at it, and while they were playing at it they were doing it. And they were helping too. We generally had a use for them, and so from that time on they knew we needed them, and they were proud to be helping us to make a living.
Jarrat nor Pap wouldn’t have paid them anything. Jarrat said they were working for themselves, if they worked. And Pap, poking them in the ribs to see if they would argue, and they did, said they ate more than they were worth. But I paid them ten cents a day, adjusted to the time they actually worked. Sometimes they’d get three cents, sometimes seven. I’d figure up and pay off every Saturday. One time when I paid him all in pennies, Nathan said, “Haven’t you got any of them big white ones?”
They worked us too. They didn’t have minds for nothing. Sometimes, if the notion hit them, they’d fartle around and pick at each other and get in the way until their daddy or grandpa would run them off. “Get the hell out of here! Go to the house!”
But they wouldn’t go to the house. They’d slip away into the woods, or go to Port William or down to the river. And since they were careful to get back to the house by dinnertime or suppertime, nobody would ask where they’d been. Unless they got in trouble, which they sometimes did.
I worried about them. I’d say, “Boys, go to the river if you have to, but don’t go in it.” Or I’d say, “Stay out of that damned river, now. We ain’t got time to go to your funeral.”
But of course they did go in the river. They were swimming, I think, from frost to frost, just like I would have at their age. Just like I in fact did at their age.
Or they would wander over to Big Ellis and Annie May’s, which was the one place they could be sure of being spoiled. Big would never be busy at any job he wouldn’t be happy to quit if company came. Annie May always had cookies in a jar or a pie or cold biscuits and jam to feed them when they showed up, and so they showed up pretty often.
Annie May and Big weren’t scared of much of anything except lightning. They could be careless and fearless when they ought to have been scared. They would drive to Hargrave in their old car, calm as dead people, while Big drove all over the road and looked in every direction but ahead. But let a thunderstorm come up and they’d quiver like gun-shy dogs. They’d get into the bed then, because they slept on a feather-tick and they believed lightning wouldn’t strike a bird.
I went in over there one day just ahead of a big black storm, and there were Big and Annie May and Tom and Nathan all four piled up in the bed together, all four smoking cigarettes to calm their fear.
One day when we were in the woods we saw a big owl, and I pointed out how an owl can turn his head square around to look at you. I said if you came upon an owl sitting, for instance, on a tree stump, you could walk round and round him, and he would turn his head round and round to watch you, until finally he would twist his neck in two and his head would fall off. I said that was the way we killed owls all the time when I was a boy.
I told them just about any bird would let you catch him if you crept up and put a little salt on his tail.
“Why?”
“He just will.”
“But why will he?”
“You’ll have to ask somebody smarter than me.”
I told them how when I was a boy, back in the olden times, you could hear the wangdoodles of a night, squalling and screeching and fighting way off in the woods.
“Do they still do that?”
“Naw, you don’t hear ’em so much anymore.”
At first they believed everything I said, and then they didn’t believe anything I said, and then they believed some of the things I said. That was the best of their education right there, and they got it from me.
When they were little, you could always see right through Nathan. He didn’t have any more false faces than a glass of water. Tom you couldn’t always tell about. Maybe because Nathan was coming along so close behind him, Tom needed to keep some things to himself. It did him good to think he knew some things you didn’t know. He wanted to call his life his own. He wasn’t dishonest. If you could get him to look straight at you, then you had him.
As long as they were little, there would be times when they would be needing their mother, and who would be in the gap but only me? One or the other or both of them would be sitting close to me in the evening while it was getting dark, snuggled up like chickens to the old hen, and I would be doing all I could, and falling short. They changed me. Before, I was oftentimes just on the loose, carefree as a dog fox, head as empty as a gourd. Afterwards, it seemed like my heart was bigger inside than outside.
We got them grown up to where they weren’t needy little boys anymore. They were still boys. They were going to be boys a while yet, but they were feeling their strength. They were beginning to find in their selves what before they had needed from us. Tom was maybe a little slower at it than he might have been, Nathan a little faster; Nathan was coming behind and was in a hurry.
It was a wonderful thing to watch that Tom grow up. For a while there, after he was getting to be really useful, he was still an awkward, kind of weedy, mind-wandery boy who needed some watching. To him, young as he was, it must have seemed he stayed that way a long time. But before long, as it seemed to me, he had gathered his forces together, body and mind. He got to be some account on his own. He could see what needed to be done, and go ahead and do it. He got graceful, and he was a good-looking boy too.
And then, the year he was sixteen, a little edge crept up between him and his daddy. It wasn’t very much in the open at first, wasn’t admitted really, but there it was. I thought, “Uh-oh,” for I hated to see it, and I knew there wasn’t much to be done about it. Tom was feeling his strength, he was coming in to his own, and Jarrat that year was forty-seven years old. When he looked at Tom he got the message—from where he was, the only way was down—and he didn’t like it.
Well, one afternoon when we were well along in the tobacco cutting, Tom took it in his head he was going to try the old man. Jarrat was cutting in the lead, as he was used to doing, and Tom got
into the next row and lit out after him. He stayed with him too, for a while. He put the pressure on. He made his dad quiet down and work for his keep.
But Tom had misestimated. The job was still above his breakfast. Jarrat wasn’t young anymore, but he was hard and long-practiced. He kept his head and rattled Tom, and he beat him clean. And then he couldn’t stop himself from drawing the fact to Tom’s attention.
Tom went for him then, making fight. They were off a little way from the rest of us, and both of them thoroughly mad. Before we could get there and get them apart, Jarrat had just purely whipped the hell out of Tom. He ought to’ve quit before he did, but once he was mad he didn’t have it in him to give an inch. It was awful. Ten minutes after it was over, even Jarrat knew it was awful, but then it was too late.
It was a day, one of several, I’m glad I won’t have to live again. Tom was too much a boy yet to get in front where he wanted to be but too much a man to stay and be licked. He had to get out from under his daddy’s feet and onto his own. And so he bundled his clothes and went away. Afterwards, because the old ones were so grieved, me too, Nathan too, the house was like a house where somebody had died.
Because he didn’t need much and asked little, Tom found a place right away with an old couple by the name of Whitlow over on the other side of the county, far enough away to be separate from us. I knew he would do all right, and he did. He knew how to work; and the use of his head, that was already coming to him, came fast once he got out on his own. He began to make a name for himself: a good boy, a good hand.
When we had found out where he was, Nathan and I would catch a ride on a rainy day or a Sunday and go over to see him, or we’d see him occasionally in town. After he got his feet under him and was feeling sure of himself, he would come over on a Sunday afternoon now and again to see his grandma and grandpa. In all our minds, he had come into a life of his own that wasn’t any longer part of ours. To the old ones, who had given up their ownership of him by then and their right to expect things from him, every one of those visits was a lovely gift, and they made over him and honored him as a guest.