A World Lost: A Novel (Port William) (3 page)

It was not apparent to me how a two-legged creature could perform
the slow gait or rack, but I could do very credible versions, I thought, of
the walk, trot, and canter. And so I was a three-gaited horse, light sorrel,
very fine in my conformation and motion and style. And I was the rider
of the horse I was. And I was the announcer who said, "Ladies and gentlemen, please ask your horses to canter."

I saw my grandfather then. He was on Rose, his bay mare, coming
around the corner of the barn toward the lot gate. He let himself through
the gate and shut it again without dismounting, and started up the rise
toward me. He was eighty that summer; his walking cane hung by its
crook from his right forearm. He had the mare in a brisk running walk. From where I watched, except for the cane, you would have thought him
no older than my father. Afoot, he was clearly an old man; on horseback
he recovered something of the force and grace of his younger days, and
you could see what he had been. He rode as a man rides who has forgotten he is on a horse.

As we drew near to each other, I slowed to a walk and then changed to
a trot, which I thought my best gait, wanting him to be pleased. But his
countenance, set and stern as it often was, did not change. He reined the
mare in only a little.

"Baby, go yonder to the house. Your daddy wants you."

"Why?" I knew he wouldn't tell me, but I asked anyhow.

"Ne' mind! He wants to talk to you."

He put his heel to the mare and went by and on up toward the ridgetop. He rode looking straight ahead. The wind carried the mare's tail out
a little to the side and snatched puffs of dust from her footfalls. I watched
until first the mare and then he went out of sight over the ridge.

I did not enjoy transactions that began "Your daddy wants to talk to
you." I did not cherish the solemn precincts of the grown-up world in
which such transactions took place. But I had no choice now, having
heard, and I went on to the house. In my guilt I supposed my father had
somehow learned of my trip to the pond.

There was nobody in the kitchen; it was quiet; a cloth was spread over
the dishes on the table; the afternoon sunlight came into the room
through the open pantry door. I went through the back hall to the front
of the house. When I came into the living room I was surprised to see
Cousin Thelma there, dressed up. She was Grandma's sister's child, about
my father's age, forty-five or so. She and my father were sitting in rocking chairs, talking quietly. I do not know where my grandmother was.

When I opened the door my father and Cousin Thelma quit talking.
Cousin Thelma smiled at me and said, "Hello, Andy, my sweet."

My father smiled at me too, but he did not say anything. He stood,
held out his hand to me, and I took it. He led me out into the hall and up
the stairs.

And I remember how terribly I did not want to go. I had come in out
of the great free outdoor world of my childhood -the world in which,
in my childish fantasies, I hoped someday to be a man. But my father, even more than my mother with her peach switch, was the messenger
of another world, in which, as I unwillingly knew, I was already involved
in expectation and obligation, difficulty and sorrow. It was as if I knew
this even from my father's smile, from the very touch of his hand. Later
I would understand how surely even then he had begun to lead me to
some of the world's truest pleasures, but I was far from such understanding then.

We went back to the room over the dining room. My father shut the
door soundlessly and sat down on the bed. I stood in front of him. He was
still holding my hand, as though it were something he had picked up and
forgotten to put down.

`Andy," he said, "Uncle Andrew was badly hurt this afternoon. A fellow
shot him. I want you to understand. It may be he won't be able to live."

He was looking straight at me, and I saw something in his eyes I never
had seen there before: fear-fear and grief. For what I felt then I had,
and have, no name. It was something like embarrassment, as if I had blundered into knowledge that was forbidden to small boys. I knew the disturbance my father had felt in imparting it to me; this made me feel that
something was required of me, and I did not know what. That Uncle
Andrew was a man who could be shot had not occurred to me before,
but I could not say that.

What I said sounded to me as odd and inane, probably, as anything
else I might have said: "Where did he get shot?"

"Down at Stoneport."

"I mean where did he get hit?"

"Once above the belt and once below." And my father touched his
own belly in the places of Uncle Andrew's wounds. Now, when I remember, it sometimes seems to me that he touched those places on my own
belly-certainly, in the years to come, I would touch them myself-and
perhaps he did. "Here," he said, "and here."

"Did you see him?"

"Yes. I've been to the hospital, and I saw him."

"What did he say?" I was trying, I think, to call him back, not from
death, but from strangeness, the terrible distinction of his hurt, into
which he was now withdrawn.

"He said a fellow shot him."

And I did then have at least the glimpse of a vision of Uncle Andrew
lying on a bed, saying such words to my father who stood beside him.

What more we said and how we left that room I do not remember.

Now I know that my father led me away to keep me, in my first knowledge of what had happened, away from Grandma in her first knowledge
of it -as if to reduce grief by dividing it. Also I think he was moved by a
hopeless instinct to protect me, to shield me from the very thing he had
to tell me, before which he was himself helpless and unprotected.

Somehow I got out of the house again. As I stepped around the corner
of the back porch, Jarrat Coulter and Dick Watson drove up to the barn
lot gate in Cousin Jarrat's scratched and dusty car. They had been to
town to get Grandpa's broken hay rope spliced; there was hay to be put
up the next day.

I ran to greet them. Both of them were my friends, and I was happy
to see them. I needed something ordinary to happen.

They were looking out at me, smiling. Ordinarily Cousin Jarrat would
have said, "Andy, how about opening the gate, old bud?"

But I violated my own wish for the ordinary by stepping up on the
running board and announcing, "Uncle Andrew got shot."

They had already heard-! could see that they had - but in their confusion they pretended that they had not.

Dick said nothing, and Cousin Jarrat said, "Aw! Is that a fact? Well!"

And then the day seemed to collapse around me into what it had become. There was no place where what had happened had not happened.

Later, I remember, I was standing in the little pantry off the kitchen,
watching my grandmother at work. In the pantry was the table covered
by a broken marble dresser-top where she rolled out the dough for biscuits or pie crusts, and so she must have been making biscuits or a pie,
though it is not clear to me why she should have been doing that at such
a time. I suppose that, in her trouble, she had needed to put herself to
work. Perhaps she thought she was distracting or comforting me. She
knew at least how I loved to watch her at work there, especially when she made pies: rolling out the dough for the bottom crust and pressing it into
the pan, pouring in the filling, crisscrossing the long strips of dough over
the top, and then holding the pan on the fingertips of her left hand while
she stroked a knife around the edge, cutting off the overhanging bits of
dough.

The sun, getting low, shone in at the one window of the pantry, and
everything it touched gleamed a rich reddish gold. I stood at her elbow,
as I had done many times, and watched and we talked, about what I cannot imagine. My father must have been gone for some time. Cousin
Thelma, if she was still there, was in the living room. My grandfather
had not returned.

And then my other grandfather, Mat Feltner, rapped at the kitchen
door and came in. He had come, he said, to take me home. I remember
him and Grandma smiling, speaking pleasantly, looking down at me.

I followed my grandfather out to his car. We got in and started down
toward Hargrave. We had gone maybe two miles when Granddaddy, who
had driven so far in silence, laid his hand on my knee, as he would do
sometimes, and said, "Hon, your uncle Andrew is dead. He died about
five o'clock."

I did not reply, and he said no more. He was a comforting man to be
with. Perhaps that was enough.

The sun was down by the time we got to Hargrave. Granddaddy
pulled up in front of our house, and I got out. Where he went then, I do
not know.

Henry and our friends Tim and Bubby Kentfield and Noah Burk were
standing in the front yard. They gathered around me.

"Uncle Andrew got killed," Henry said.

I said I knew it. They were all looking at me, solemn-faced and excited
at the same time.

"I know it," I said. "Granddaddy told me."

There we were, all of us together as we often were, and yet changed,
and none of us knew what to do.

"Well. What are we going to do?" Henry said.

"The man that killed him's name's Carp Harmon," Noah Burk said.
"He shot him with a.38 pistol."

"Carp Harmon," I said.

"They got him in the jail right now"

I went on into the house - looking, I suppose, for something that was
the same as before. But neither of my parents was in the house. Nor were
my sisters. The kitchen was full of women who had come to help or bring
food. They were putting things away, sort of taking over, the way they
would do.

"Hello, Andy hon," they said. They gave me hugs. They were treating
me like somebody special, which made them seem strange. And their
presence in the house without at least my mother there made it seem
strange.

Miss Iris Flynn said, "Honey, I loved your uncle Andrew. We'll miss
him, won't we?" She bit her underlip and looked away.

Some of the others said things too. It was a little as though they wanted
to ensure that their love would last by telling it to somebody young.

I wanted to be able to think of something proper to say. It came to me
that if I had been a grown man I probably could have thought of something. I would have comforted them.

"Well, good-bye," I said. "I reckon I'm going outdoors." And I went
out.

"Come on," Henry said. He was the youngest one of us, but nobody
held back to argue. We all went out to the street and started down into
town.

I don't know where any of our grown-ups were. They were somewhere else, struck down or disappeared. The streets were empty. It was
late in the evening, a weekday, and everybody was at home, eating supper maybe, or getting ready for bed, or sitting on porches or in backyards, cooling off. But to us, to me at least, it seemed that the life of the
town had drawn back and hushed in wonder and sorrow that Uncle
Andrew was dead. It was as if the people withdrew and hid themselves
in deference to us boys who used to devil Uncle Andrew to take us swimming, which he had sometimes done. In the warm, slowly dimming twilight, nothing was abroad in the town except the pigeons clapping their
wings about the courthouse tower and our little band walking bunched
together to the jail. Nobody saw us. It seems to me that, for the time
being, not even a car passed. The river flowed solemnly by as if strictly
minding its own business.

The jail adjoined the back of the courthouse, its tall stone-barred
facade set back a little behind an iron fence. When we got there we just
stopped and looked at it, as though at that moment an immense reality,
that we would not be done with for a long time, first laid hold on us.
Uncle Andrew had been killed. Somewhere inside the jail, only a few feet
from us, was the man who had killed him. For a long time there was nothing to be done but stand there in the large silence and the failing light,
and know and know the thing we knew.

And then, filling his eight-year-old voice with a bravado that astonished me and perhaps astonished him, Henry called out at the front of
the jail and its padlocked iron door: "Carp Harmon, you son of a bitch,
come out of there!"