Fields of Home (20 page)

21

Grandfather’s War, and Mine

A
FTER
I got back to Medford, I bought a Boston
Globe
and read all the “Male Help Wanted” ads. I had to try a dozen different places before I found a job, and the one I got was an easy one. That was the trouble with it. It was too easy. All I had to do was to run an elevator up and down in an apartment hotel at Mount Vernon and Joy Streets.

If the job had been in a busy office building, a department store, or a warehouse, I wouldn’t have minded it, but Gray Chambers was too dignified and too quiet. I had to wear a tight green uniform, be careful never to close a door hard enough to make any noise, and to speak almost in a whisper. When there was nobody to take up or bring down, I had to stand beside the elevator doorway, and not cross my feet or lean against the wall.

Most of the people who lived at Gray Chambers were bachelors or old maids, and they were all past fifty. I went to work at three o’clock in the afternoon, and stayed till midnight, but the only time I had anything to do was when they were going out to supper or coming back afterwards. The rest of the time I just stood and looked in the mirror or at the floor or the ceiling, and thought about different things at the farm and how Annie Littlehale looked. After a week of it, I wished I was back picking up useless rocks or spreading manure, and I wouldn’t have cared how much Grandfather yelled, “Tarnal fool boy,” at me.

On my first Sunday night, I didn’t have a single passenger after eight o’clock. Long before midnight, I was having a terrible time to keep awake and stand up straight. When I had only fifteen minutes more to wait, and was looking at my uniform in the mirror and telling myself I really was a tarnal fool boy, I heard the lobby door click. I’d just pulled my jacket down so my shirt wouldn’t show around the middle, squared my shoulders, and was looking straight ahead when a familiar voice called out, “It’s a God’s wonder they ain’t give you a bass drum. Where’s the rest of the band?”

I forgot all about Gray Chambers and whispering, and shouted, “Hi, Uncle Levi! How did you get here?”

“Come in a hansom cab. Man’s got to put on the style when he goes to visiting his folks on Beacon Hill. Kind of getting up in the world, ain’t you?”

I’d never noticed that Uncle Levi’s voice was loud till the “ain’t you” came echoing down from the dome of the lobby. I think he noticed it, too, because he dropped the tone right down, and said, “Cabby’s waiting outside. Ain’t it ’bout time you was knocking off for the day?” As he spoke, he was slipping his watch out of its little leather pouch. He looked at it and added, “Ain’t nothing but the shank of the day left noways. Just come from seeing Mary. She says you can sleep the night with me if you’ve a mind to.”

I had never ridden in a hansom cab before, but the driver seemed to know Uncle Levi pretty well. “Fetch us to Hayes’ place on Causeway Street,” Uncle Levi told him. Then he slapped me on the leg and said, “Been to see Thomas. It’s a God’s wonder he hadn’t starved afore I got there. Don’t calc’late he’d et a bite ’cepting oatmeal since he run you and Millie off. Pot of the cussed stuff setting on the back of the stove when I come. Burnt on the bottom, dry on top, and sour in the middle. It’s a God’s wonder he ain’t poisoned hisself, the kind of victuals he’ll eat when there ain’t nobody to watch after him. Calc’lates that what a man eats is wasted. Never seen him short a critter, but he’ll pinch his own belly till there ain’t enough of him left for the wind to get a-holt of.”

“His own belly or anybody else’s,” I said.

Uncle Levi didn’t seem to have heard me, and went on, “Wouldn’t doubt none it come from the hard row he had to hoe the time he lost your grandma. Like to broke his heart; putting a debt agin the old place and all. Don’t calc’late he et a decent meal ’twixt then and the day he paid the mortgage off. Took him thirty years. Couldn’t think of another cussed thing the whole time. Scratch and dig and starve till he was wore down. Then lay abed with chills and fever, and rant ’cause the work wa’n’t done.”

“He rants whether the work is done or not,” I broke in, but Uncle Levi didn’t pay any attention. He just sat, hunched forward a little, and looking at his hands, cupped over his knees.

“Run Ralph and Frankie off afore they was older’n what you be. Lacked having patience with ’em. Lacked having the understanding that they wa’n’t as het up over the mortgage as what he was.”

The cab had stopped in front of a restaurant with big, bright windows. The driver had climbed down and stood by the cab step, but Uncle Levi didn’t look up. “Trouble with Thomas, he can’t see out nobody else’s window but his own. Can’t see no farther’n the walls roundabouts the land Father left him. Can’t see no way of doing things ’cepting the way Father done ’em. A shame! A shame Father spoilt him afore ever he learnt him to stand alone.”

“How was it he didn’t spoil you?” I asked.

Uncle Levi heard me, but he didn’t look up. “I come too late,” he said. “Thomas come when Father was seventy-three. Father never calc’lated on getting a son at that age. Loved him more’n the Almighty loves the world. Spoilt him rotten afore ever he could walk. I come when Father was nigh onto eighty. Heard tell he clum the house chimney and sot a red flag; a-bragging to the neighbors he’d fetched another boy. Never knowed Father well. Time I was getting old enough to remember, he was getting on in years. Calc’late I was more a nuisance to him than a joy.” He lifted his big-knuckled hands from his knees, rubbed one inside of the other, and said slowly, “Curious, ain’t it? Me, the spittin’ image of Father, and Thomas not favoring him. There’s times I wonder if that ain’t hurt Thomas.”

Uncle Levi raised his head heavily, then turned it quickly toward the driver. “Great day! How long we been sitting here?” he asked. “Come on, Ralph! These Hayes folks whacks up a pretty good squash pie.”

The restaurant had a long glass case behind the counter with all kinds of cakes and pies, fruits, puddings, cookies, and coffee cakes on it. I wasn’t very hungry, but Uncle Levi kept going along the counter asking me if I didn’t want some of this or some of that. It didn’t make much difference whether I said I did or I didn’t. He told the waiter to bring it to us anyway. When we went to the table, we had as many different desserts as they have at a church supper.

I’d just taken a couple of swallows of milk when Uncle Levi said, “Ain’t like blowing back the foam and drinking it warm off the lip of the pail, is it? Never did get so’s’t I didn’t count warm milk worth a cow hair or two.”

“Old Bess likes warm milk,” I told him. “I never milked but what she’d come and whine for me to squirt it at her mouth. Before I came away, she got so she’d never miss a drop.”

“Curious, ain’t it, the way Old Bess cleaves to Thomas? . . . Same way as Thomas clove to Father. Poor Old Bess! Dread the day of her passing. Thomas leans heavy on her for love. Children all away and wed. ’Bout all he’s got left is Old Bess . . . and Millie.”

I looked up so quickly that I spilled milk from my glass. “I didn’t know she was back,” I said. “I didn’t think she’d ever come back.”

Uncle Levi sat, rubbing one hand inside the other, as he said, “Always has. Prob’ly will this time. Curious, ain’t it; the feeling that’s growed up ’twixt Thomas and Millie? Thomas is awful fond of Millie.”

“Then why did he say he never wanted to see her again?” I asked. “And why did he kick her screen door all to pieces?”

Uncle Levi didn’t answer till he’d rubbed one hand over the other a dozen times. He watched them as the fingers dragged across the high knuckle bones, and said slowly, “Thomas is in the midst of the biggest war ever a man fit, and you put him into it, Ralph. He comes as nigh to loving you as ary man that walks the earth.”

Something in the way Uncle Levi said it, made my throat hurt, and I blurted out, “He doesn’t either; he hates me! He calls me useless and worthless, and he’s always yelling and calling me a tarnal fool boy. If he cared as much about me as he does for the yella colt, he wouldn’t give me senseless jobs and tell me it’s to keep me out of mischief. What is he trying to make me lug rocks off that high field by hand for, if he likes me so much? He tells me to put more manure on the field than he thinks I can haul in a week. Then, when I do it, he gets mad and says I’ve wasted it. It wouldn’t be wasted if he’d put a decent crop on that field. I’ve tried a dozen times to tell him it would be good for strawberries and tomatoes. They’d make him forty times what that dressing is worth. But every time I mention them, he nearly bites my head off. Millie and I put up most of the hay crop all alone, and all he does is yammer because I ripped a little piece off the ridgepole of the barn. I made a rake for the . . . ”

“Having a side war all your own, ain’t you, Ralph?” Uncle Levi asked me quietly.

“I don’t know what you mean by this war business,” I told him. “If there’s a war, it’s a one-sided one. Grandfather’s doing all the fighting. I haven’t raised my voice to him once since I went back there.”

“Mmmhmmm. Ain’t used no machines he didn’t tell you to?”

“Well, the stone rake isn’t really a machine. It’s more like a harrow with the teeth set so they’ll bring the rocks to the top.”

“Mmmhmmm. Thomas, he’s mighty proud about it. Took me out to the field to see it.”

“Then why did he call it a contraption and tell me to pick up the rocks by hand? And why did he tell me to haul more dressing than he thought I could, and get mad because I did it?”

“’Tain’t ’
cause
you done it; it’s
how
you done it. For more’n fifty years, Thomas has farmed the old place the way Father learnt him to do it. He run his own boys off ’cause he made ’em do things the way Father done ’em, ’stead of keeping up with the times. He dug his heart out on them stony hills till the years and the malaria dried most of the sap out of him. It’s a God’s wonder it didn’t kill him. ’Twould a-killed ary other man I know, but Thomas, he wouldn’t change jot nor tittle. Like to broke his heart to start a-using that cussed old mowing machine. Come the time he couldn’t hand-hoe the crops, he turned the whole place into hay, and sot back to ride out what further years the Almighty give him.”

When I looked up, Uncle Levi’s eyes were blurry, but he smiled and laid one hand over on mine. “Then you come along and the war commenced. He seen you was a farmer. He seen the mark of the land on you, Ralph, and that you knowed the worth of a field. Why do you calc’late he fit you on the high field? Why do you make him so cussed mad when you say strawberries and tomatoes? ’Tain’t ’cause he thinks you’re wrong; it’s ’cause he knows you’re right. It’s ’cause he knows it can’t be done without hired help and without the things he calls contraptions. He’s fit agin ’em so long, it’s come to be his nature to hate ’em.”

For two or three minutes Uncle Levi was quiet. Slowly his fingers stopped rubbing across his knuckles. He held his loosely closed fists side by side, with the knuckles up. Then the two forefingers lifted above them till they stood together like the spire of a church. “Curious,” he said. “Never come to think of it this way afore, but Father and the Almighty stands shoulder to shoulder in Thomas’s belief, and the land they give him is holy ground. I calc’late, when he sees strangers and contraptions a-working that ground, his feelings is a sight like them the Lord had when he seen the money changers in the temple.”

Uncle Levi looked up from his fingers, and the ends of his mustache lifted with his smile. “Leastways, Thomas piles into ’em in about the same fashion as the Lord done.”

Ever since I’d had the elevator job, I’d known I wanted to go back to Grandfather’s. The want had been growing stronger and stronger as Uncle Levi talked. When he’d said Grandfather knew I was right about the strawberries, I’d wanted to break right in and tell him I was going back and that Grandfather could yell at me all he wanted to. Then, when he talked about the money changers, I felt as if I’d gone all empty inside. I swallowed hard and said, “Then I’m not going back. It’s better to let the whole place stay in hay. I don’t want to be a money changer. I don’t want to be a stranger on the place. And I don’t want to be the cause of Grandfather’s having a war with himself.” I tried to keep my voice steady, but it was quivering a little at the end.

Uncle Levi reached over and took hold of my wrist, hard. He looked right into my eyes, and said, “God love you, boy, you ain’t a stranger to Thomas. You’re his own blood and his father’s blood. He’s lacking in the grace to show it to you, but he loves you and he’s proud of you, Ralph. If he wa’n’t, there wouldn’t be no war. One day he looks at your young hands and sees ’em as his own when he was young; a-turning the soil, a-making it bloom, and a-fetching them wore-out, rocky hills again into mellow plowing fields. He sees the run-out hidden field a-bloom with clover, and the wilderness field took up again. Then, up pops the devil. Thomas, he ain’t nobody’s fool. He knows there ain’t no hope to hold you ’less’n you have the tools you’ll need to do the job. Don’t nobody have to tell him the job’s too big for a young boy and an old man to do with their bare hands.”

Uncle Levi reached into his inside coat pocket and took out a bundle of letters tied with a white thread. “Curious, ain’t it, the way this thing’s a-working on Thomas?” he said. “Writ me more letters this last month than in all the days of his life put together. If ’twa’n’t for the handwriting, you’d swear to God they was from two separate men. One of ’em’s full of what he’s about to do: clearing the wilderness field anew, building a piece onto the barn, twenty head of milk cows, and asking me this and that. Even asking me what I know about strawberries. . . . Didn’t know that he’d wrote the gover’ment and half the seed comp’nies ’bout strawberries, did you? Never guessed why you was clearing that high field of stone? The next, he’s a-ranting and raving at me for trying to tell him how to farm. Poor Thomas! It’s an awful war he’s got hisself into! ’Tain’t easy for a man of seventy-two to cast the idols out of his temple. Don’t calc’late he’s been too easy to live with.”

“I thought I knew all the fields on the place,” I said, “but I don’t know the wilderness field. Which one is it?”