Remembering (4 page)

“That's right,” Elton said, grinning big. “I'm not.”

But they knew he was sick. And he knew it, though he made a principle of not knowing it.

“You all come over to supper,” Mary said to Sarah, Henry's wife. “Elton's down in the dumps and I am too. Come over and cheer us up.”

So they went. And it
was
a cheerful meal. They ate, and then sat at the table afterwards, talking about the times, beginning nearly thirty years before, when Henry and Andy had worked sometimes as Elton's hands. They had gone through some hard days together. The work had been complicated always, and sometimes impeded, by the youth and greenness of the boys, by the brotherhood of the brothers, by the friendship of them all. Most of their workdays had ended in simple weariness, but some had ended in coon hunts, some in fish fries, some in furious arguments, one or two in fights.

Among the results were a lot of funny stories, and that night Elton had been telling them, Henry egging him on.

Elton told about Henry and the bumblebees. They had been cleaning the toolshed, and there was a bundle of old grain sacks hanging from a rafter.

“Cut it down,” Elton said.

“Sounds like I hear something humming in there,” Henry said.

“Ahhhh, take your knife and cut it down!” Elton said. “There's nothing in there.”

“I swear I didn't think there was,” he said, for the hundredth time, laughing and looking at Henry, who laughed and looked back, for the hundredth time not believing him.

“So I loaned him my knife. He didn't have a knife, of course. Never did have one. Hasn't got one yet. And he cut it down.

“It fell right on his feet. ‘Ow!' he said. ‘Ow!' He did a little dance, and then ran right out from under his hat. His clothes were just sizzling.”

Elton was laughing while he told it, and they all laughed.

“I reckon it's a lot funnier now than it was then.”

“A lot,” Henry said. “You were running before I even cut the string.”

“
Naw,
I wasn't! No
sir
! I was just as surprised as you.”

That had been a long time ago, when Henry was about fourteen and Elton not yet thirty. Probably neither of them any longer knew whether Elton had known about the bees or not. But they played out their old game of accusation and denial once more, both enjoying it, both grateful to be in the same story.

Elton pushed back his chair and got up as if to lead the way into the living room.

“Well,” he said, “we've had some good times, haven't we?”

He staggered, reached to catch himself, failed. And all that was left of him fell to the floor.

To Andy, Elton's absence became a commanding presence. He was haunted by things he might have said to Elton that would not be sayable again in this world.

That absence is with him now, but only as a weary fact, known but no
longer felt, as if by some displacement of mind or heart he is growing absent from it.

It is the absence of everything he knows, and is known by, that surrounds him now.

He is absent himself, perfectly absent. Only he knows where he is, and he is no place that he knows. His flesh feels its removal from other flesh that would recognize it or respond to its touch; it is numb with exile. He is present in his body, but his body is absent.

He does not know what time it is. Nothing has changed since he woke. The darkness is not different, nor is the faint blur of light above the curtained window, nor are the muted night sounds of the streets.

For a long time he has not moved. He lies with his unhanded right forearm upright in the air in the darkness, his body bemused at its own stillness, as if waiting patiently to see how long his strayed mind will take to notice it again.

And now the anger he felt at the conference starts up in him again, for after his fear and grief and boredom it was anger that finally woke him and hardened him against that room. He did not belong there. He did not know anybody who did belong there.

He listened to a paper on “Suggestible Parameters in the Creation of Agricultural Meaning,” read by a long-haired man with a weary face, who had never been consulted by a government and who read his paper diffidently, with oddly placed fits of haste, as if aware of the audience's impending boredom or his own; and then another paper on “The Ontology and Epistemology of Agriculture as a Self-Correcting System,” read by a woman whose chief business was to keep anyone from viewing the inside of her mouth.

It was endless, Andy thought, a place of eternal hopelessness, where people were condemned to talk forever of what they could not feel or see, old farm boys and old farm girls in the spell of an occult science, speaking in the absence of the living and the dead a language forever unintelligible to anyone but themselves.

And then — it was nearly noon, and a number of the auditors were leaving — he heard himself introduced as “an agricultural journalist who could hardly be said to be complacent about the Future of the American
Food System, but whose ideas had attracted some attention — Mr. Andrew Catlett of Fort William, Kentucky.”

Andy, getting to his feet, said loudly, “Port!”

The organizer of the conference bent to the microphone again. “I'm sorry. Yes, of course, Mr. Andrew Catlett of
Port
William, Kentucky.” He smiled, and the audience laughed, with sympathy for the organizer and in discomfort at Andy's unseemly chauvinism.

Having made one mistake, and knowing it, Andy proceeded directly to another. Instead of the text of the speech he had prepared, he spread on the rostrum the notes he had made on the speeches preceding his.

“What we have heard discussed here this morning,” he said, “is an agriculture of the mind. No farmer is here. No farmer has been mentioned. No one who has spoken this morning has worked a day on an actual farm in twenty years, and the reason for that is that none of the speakers
wants
to work on a farm or to be a farmer. The real interest of this meeting is in the academic careerism and the politics and the business of agriculture, and I daresay that most people here, like the first speaker, are proud to have escaped the life and work of farmers, whom they do not admire.

“This room,” he said, “it's an image of the minds of the professional careerists of agriculture — a room without windows, filled with artificial light and artificial air, where everything reducible has been reduced to numbers, and the rest ignored. Nothing that you are talking about, and influencing by your talk, is present here, or can be seen from here.”

He knew that he was showing his anger, and perhaps the fear under the anger, and perhaps the grief and confusion under the fear. He looked down to steady himself, feeling some blunder, as yet obscure to him, in everything he had said. He looked up at the audience again.

“I don't believe it is well understood how influence flows from enclosures like this to the fields and farms and farmers themselves. We've been sitting here this morning, hearing about the American food system and the American food producer, the free market, quantimetric models, pre-inputs, inputs, and outputs, about the matrix of coefficients of endogenous variables, about epistemology and parameters — while actual fields and farms and actual human lives are being damaged. The damage has
been going on a long time. The fifteen million people who have left the farms since 1950 left because of damage. There was pain in that departure, not shown in any of the figures we have seen. Not felt in this room. And the pain and the damage began a long time before 1950. I want to tell you a story.”

He told them how, after the death of Dorie Catlett, his father's mother, he had sorted through all the belongings that she had kept stored in the closets and the dresser drawers of the old house where she had lived as wife and widow for more than sixty years. He went through the old clothes, the quilt pieces, the boxes of buttons, the little coils and balls of saved string. And old papers — he found letters, canceled checks, canceled notes and mortgages, bills and receipts, all neatly tied in bundles with strips of rag. Among these things he found a bill on which the ink had turned brown, stating that in 1906 Marce Catlett's crop had lacked $3.57 of paying the warehouse commission on its own sale.

Neither Andy nor his father had ever seen the bill before, but it was nevertheless familiar to them, for it had been one of the motives of Wheeler Catlett's life, and it would be one of the motives of Andy's. Wheeler remembered the night his father had brought that bill home. His parents tried to disguise their feelings, and Wheeler and his brother pretended not to notice. But they did notice, and they learned, over a long time, what the bill meant. Marce Catlett had carried his year's work to the warehouse and had come home
owing
the warehouse $3.57. And that meant difficulty, it meant discouragement, it meant grief, it meant shame before creditors. And it might have meant ruin. It was a long time before they knew that it did not mean ruin.

On the back of the bill, in some moment of desperation, Dorie Catlett had written, “Oh, Lord, whatever is to become of us?” And then, beneath, as if to correct what she had written already, she wrote: “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord.”

“I think that bill came out of a room like this,” Andy said, “where a family's life and work can be converted to numbers and to somebody else's profit, but the family cannot be seen and its suffering cannot be felt.”

He knew then that he had damaged himself. As he had spoken of his grandmother in that room, she had departed from him. He was
sweating. His legs had begun to tremble. And yet he still stood at the rostrum, in the harsh light, in his anger, sounding to himself as if he spoke at the bottom of a well.

“I say damn your systems and your numbers and your ideas. I speak for Dorie Catlett and Marce Catlett. I speak for Mat and Margaret Feltner, for Jack Beechum, for Jarrat and Burley Coulter, for Nathan Coulter and Hannah, for Danny and Lyda Branch, for Martin and Arthur Rowanberry, for Elton and Mary and Jack Penn.”

As he named them, the dead and the living, they departed from him, leaving him empty, shaking, wet with sweat. The audience, embarrassed, had begun to shift and murmur. He had to get down, away, out of that light and that room.

“In conclusion,” he said, “I would like to say that what I have had to say is no more, and is probably less, than what I have had to say.”

He hears himself cry out — “Ah!” — and he is standing in the dark.

He is standing in the dark, the sound of his outcry so present to him as to be almost palpable, as if he might reach out and put it back in his mouth. Slowly the memory of the meeting room drifts away from him, and the remembered panic of yesterday becomes, without changing, the panic of today.