A Place in Time (12 page)

She went to the row of pens. In the second one a ewe was nuzzling and muttering to a lamb as it stood unsteadily to nurse. Almost at her feet her suckling lamb's twin lay on the straw, still slimed and bloody from its birth, marvelously formed to live, except that it was dead and now to the ewe a thing of no importance.

“I should have got that out of there,” Tom said.

“No,” she said. “It's all right.”

He had lifted from a nearby pen an orphan lamb and was holding it, its long legs dangling, in one hand, a nippled bottle of cow's milk in the other.

And suddenly she was filled with knowledge of him that was like love, or was love. In him, as he stood before her then, she saw the ancient unthanked care of shepherds. The sheep merely suffered what was to be suffered, living the given life, dying the given death. They did not ask for care or appreciate it when they received it. And yet the care was given. The flocks throve by no care commensurate with a price, but by an overplus of love, filling a known need in the shepherd, passionate and beyond memory old.

What Laura said then she said as if merely in answer: “You're in love, aren't you?”

He gave back her look. He grinned. She could see the boy in him then—the boy, anyhow, that he had been not long ago.

“I thought you knew it,” he said. “I didn't look for you to say so.”

She said, “I would like to thank you.”

Their held gaze seemed then to be one thing to which their two beings were for the moment incidental. It was a moment that had to pass. And it did pass. Time carried them from the moment before to the moment after.

She smiled. “I don't think we'll talk of this again.”

He nodded, and the boy he had been was nowhere near him now. “No. We won't again.”

There was in fact no more to say. Because they said no more, for the rest of his life, which would not be long, she shone in his mind as she had been that day: “I would like to thank you.” And to the end of her own long life she was grateful to him because with his young heart, never old, he had loved her.

The house where my father's parents, Dorie and Marce Catlett, spent their long marriage was not a happy one, though I was often happy in it. It was regulated by the seasonal order of all farmhouses of its time and shared in the comeliness of that order. Even so, it was not a happy house because my grandparents' marriage had been so often a collision of wills. Opposites attract, but this can be so only within limits, and Grandma and Grandpa's story had the contending themes of attraction and conflict.

To all of us younger ones in the family and some who were not in it, Grandpa in his old age referred to Grandma as “your mammy,” thus acknowledging their fundamental difference: She, and not he, had borne their two sons, a fact that he held in awe. This was the honest, insoluble awe of a livestockman and farmer who had been preoccupied all his life with the fecundity of the world.
She
had borne their children, had suffered their births—and how far this set her apart from him! But in telling of a time he went to see her during their courtship, a time he returned to often in his last years, he would conclude, “And your mammy came out to meet me—the prettiest
formed
little thing.” He would gaze away, seeing her again as she was, and again he would be moved. “Ay Lord!” Thus he acknowledged the attraction.

It had been mutual. She had thought him in those early days “the best-looking man on the back of a horse that ever I saw.” In the first years of their marriage she would hear him away in the distance, calling the
cattle. His call was beautiful, and she would think, “Oh, that such a voice should ever cease!” He remained a good-looking man on the back of a horse almost to the end of his days. Grandma came to take that as much for granted as he did. That he was as he was she saw as a condition of her life, and their fundamental difference, the difference of dam and sire, grew between them.

There were other differences, some issuing from that primary one, some that were differences of character.

Grandpa, burdened as he was by things as they were, suffering as he had and did from the circumstances of this world, accepted them nevertheless with the finality of a tragedian. This was in no sense “stoical,” for he was a passionate man, but was simply a disposition to see the world as a matter of fact. The deity he most spoke of he called “Old Marster,” and this was a world-making, weather-making, fate-making deity, not effectively to be pled with, who revealed his purposes by what happened.

Though she faced with equal candor the things that were, Grandma resisted and protested. Some things that were should not have been. I don't think Grandma ever reconciled herself to mortality—or, for that matter, to humanity. Her mourning of her losses, which were ever on her mind, always involved an unrelenting objection. She objected to growing old, which she felt as a wrong imposed upon her. “Oh, Andy,” she would say to me, “it's awful to get old,” and she said this, I felt, pitying not only herself but also the old man that I would one day be. Of humanity in general she was skeptical. She had a few favorites, of whom I was one, but even of those she could be suddenly and peremptorily dismissive, unsurprised at any outrage they might commit.

And yet, going wide of Christian charity and forgiveness as she sometimes did, she adhered to her church and served it. She was one of the pillars of the little white clapboard Bird's Branch Church, to which Grandpa did not adhere and of which he was not a pillar. Like, I believe, a good many others of his kind, who like him deferred to Old Marster in their ultimate unknowing, Grandpa felt excluded, and perhaps according to doctrines made to exclude him and his likes. And so religion had come between them. Grandpa told me once in the presence of Grandma, and for her benefit, that he was thinking of buying the church and tearing it
down. This was a joke surely, and just as surely a provocation, a blow dealt in an established conflict.

Grandma replied, “Yes. I reckon you would.”

Her domain was the house and household, the domestic economy. The house, in the course of her time with Grandpa, had been under the influence of hard times from the depression of the 1890s to that of the 1930s, and it bore everywhere the signs and marks of economic constraint. Until well on in my childhood, when the electric lines and our brief heyday of cheap fossil fuels finally reached it, the most modern thing in it was the coal oil stove sometimes used for cooking in hot weather.

The matching set of furniture in the dining room was of oak and oak veneer, not fine. That room was heated only by a grated fireplace, was mostly unused, and smelled unforgettably of the spices and brown sugar that Grandma kept in the sideboard. The parlor, also rarely used, offered the luxuries of a sofa and easy chair identically upholstered, an upright piano, and a glass-fronted bookcase containing a collection mainly of old textbooks and old popular novels. Except for that in the dining room, all the furniture in the house—even in the parlor, with its air of determined and deserted refinement—had a way of being mismatched. There were a few truly fine old pieces, perhaps left over from the time of Grandpa's parents, but those were odds and ends along with the rest, not so fine, that appeared to have been acquired randomly, a piece at a time, from hard telling where. Except in the parlor, the floor coverings were of linoleum, with a few worn scatter rugs. There was a general character of make-do. And yet the house afforded the common luxuries of deep feather beds that made for delicious sleeping on winter nights, and a wealth of good food, nearly all of which came from the place.

The household economy included a milk cow or two, meat hogs, a flock of chickens, a few turkeys, a big garden. There was a grape arbor, a pear tree, a cherry tree, a few scattered old apple trees, and wild berries for preserves and pies. The surpluses of cream and eggs provided Grandma a small money income of her own, of which she was watchful and proud. She deposited it in the bank and used it sparingly, except that once in a long while she would indulge herself by ordering from Sears, Roebuck something she didn't really need. This often would be something that
looked good in the catalogue but odd in reality. Once she ordered a pair of toeless white shoes that clearly, even to my eye, were made for a much younger woman. Once she ordered a small metal bed with a baked-on, imitation-wood finish. The bed, as pictured in the book and in her mind, was undoubtedly pleasant, but it could have matched nothing in the world but itself.

She was, on the contrary, an infallible cook. Her kitchen and pantry and smokehouse and cellar were places of abundance. One of the happinesses of the place, for me, was in observing her intricate housewifery, her economizings and small savings, her mendings and patching. But she was never stingy with food. She put meals on the table that were luxurious.

Grandpa belonged to the farm, the barns and fields, the pastures and crops, the animals. The farm had been his life, his passion and his trial. The economy of the farm, depending as it did on markets and the money economy, had been during most of his life far less stable and secure than the household economy that depended almost entirely on the place itself. Grandpa's long effort to possess and thrive on a place whose economy he did not in the least control had been inevitably a trial. But insecurely as the farm had belonged to him, he had belonged absolutely to it. He had been ruled absolutely by his vision of pastures deep in grass, abundant crops, good animals well fed.

When the farm was handed on to him, one of the back fields was scarred by gullies. Working with a breaking plow and a slip scraper, Grandpa dug a pond in a swale of that field and used the extracted soil to fill the washes, and so he healed them. Driven by debt, he planted another field all to corn, plowing more than he knew he should, and it washed badly in a hard rain. He put it back in grass and never plowed it again, and he grieved to the end of his life over the hurt he had given it. And yet the farm, past all losses and griefs, called him to imagine it as good as it was, and better than it was.

He had been a man of notable hardiness and strength. A neighbor woman told me in her old age that she remembered him disking ground with a team of mules, wearing only a pair of pants. She was carrying water to her father on the adjoining farm. Grandpa called to her, “Sally Ann, when you bring your daddy another drink, would you bring me one?” Was he working a young team he could not leave? He was thirsty, anyhow, and
he had not stopped to drink. He had come by then into responsibilities and lean times. He did not afford himself clothes he could do without.

Once he was leading a brood mare from home to the Forks of Elkhorn beyond Frankfort. He had arranged to breed the mare to a stallion at that place. She would have been a standardbred, not saddle broke, and he had set out to walk the forty or so miles, leading her. But she was not well broke even to lead, and she was wearing him out. Finally he stopped at a farm and borrowed a saddle, not doubting that if he could saddle her he could ride her. He saddled her, straddled her, and went his way. Presumably she was well broke by the end of the trip. This was told to my father, after Grandpa's death, by the man who had loaned the saddle.

Late in his life, when he might have considered himself old, his teeth began to bother him. He got on his horse, rode the five miles to Smallwood on the railroad where Gib Holston, the atheist doctor, was then living. He told Doc Holston, “Pull 'em out! Ever' damned one of 'em!” And Doc Holston did so, one after another. When all were pulled, Grandpa got on his horse again, rode home, and ate his supper. Teeth had become incidental to him, a bother gone, and he was toothless then until his death, which was still a long way off.

At some time before I came along he ceased entirely to wish to be anywhere but where he was. His mind belonged as entirely to the place as its rocks and trees. Grandma, though, remained always curious about distant places, treasuring the postcards she received from traveling friends and relatives. She went once to South Carolina to visit her eldest son, my uncle Andrew, who was then working down there. She walked beside the ocean, and brought back a big seashell in which, holding it to my ear, I could hear the ocean for myself. She and some neighbors once made an excursion to the Cincinnati Zoo, from which her most persistent and delighted memory was of Uncle Eb Markman who, scouting ahead, had come rushing back in a state of near-death excitement: “They got a hippopotaymus!” She had gone also, with the ladies of the church, on a visit to Mammoth Cave, and had brought back as souvenirs from deep in the earth several crystalline rocks that she prized.