A Place in Time (14 page)

To do this, she would have had to face the scandal of Doc's boastful athiesm. Doc was a small man who aspired to higher standing by looking down upon God. He would have been astonished to know that his blasphemy did not offend her nearly so much as his absurdity.

“Marce is having a terrible misery in the night. What can I do?”

“Does he have the misery in the daytime?”

“No.”

“Why, damn it to hell, woman, when he wakes up that way, give him a drink!”

“A drink?”

“Of whiskey, damn it! Put a little water in it. Sweeten it a little if you want to.”

And I can imagine her asking my father—who else could she have asked?—to get her a bottle of whiskey. She would have blushed.

He would have laughed. “An old white-ribboner like you? What do you want it for?”

Such impudence would have made her secretive. “In case I get a cold.”

So then I can see her, on the nights of Grandpa's misery, going down the stairs and straight back to the kitchen, where she had hidden the bottle. For I know she would have hidden it. Grandpa, she said, could smell out candy and find it, no matter how well she hid it. But he could not have smelled whiskey in a stoppered bottle wiped clean, even though he would know she had hidden it somewhere.

She would have poured the whiskey into a table glass with some water, perhaps a little sugar. And then, holding it well away from her for the harm in it, determined to do good with it, she would have carried it to his bedside.

“Sit up, Marce. Drink this.”

He would not have needed to be invited twice.

I can see her standing and watching as he drinks. After the first swallow, he says, “Ah! Ay Lord!” He drinks slowly, with pleasure. When he has finished she takes the glass. He lies down, and she draws the cover over him. She sits down in the rocking chair by the bed. Holding the empty glass, gazing away into her thoughts as she would often do, she sits by Grandpa, patting his arm, as she would have sat by a wakeful child, until he goes to sleep.

That is my vision. I would like to think it might have happened so, and maybe it did. It is probable enough, credible enough. But what is the good of it? Perhaps none at all. But on my own now, from my imagination and my sorrow for them, I offer them nevertheless, out of time, this wish.

In grades one and two I was a sweet, tractable child who caused no trouble. I was “little Andy Catlett,” the second of that name, the first being my uncle Andrew who had raised more than his share of hell and mowed a wide swath among the ladies. My own public reputation so far was clean as a whistle. But in grade three I learned of the damage that could be done to a strict disciplinary harmony by a small discord, and I was never the same afterwards.

In grade four, Miss Heartsease, abandoning her premature hope that I might be educable, brought stacks of
National Geographics
to keep me quiet. In one of them I found several pictures of a chemistry laboratory, and I fell into what I can only call an infatuation. I had no idea what was done in a chemistry laboratory. What captivated me was the intricate plumbing of glass pipes, some of them in coils; the vials, tubes, beakers, and retorts; the neat rows of bottled powders and fluids; the bunsen burners. The thought of working in such a room with such equipment sent me into urgent fantasies. I would be a chemist when I grew up. I would be a chemist
before
I grew up. I entertained seriously the possibility of becoming a child prodigy. I could see a picture of myself in my white coat in my laboratory in
National Geographic,
pouring a fuming green liquid from one container into another.

My scientific bent led me in that same year to the discovery of afterimages. One of the bare lightbulbs in the ceiling of our classroom was of clear glass and much larger than the others. Inside it was a filament in the shape of a horseshoe that glowed with a white incandescence. I learned that I could stare at that lightbulb for a while, and then, by blinking, send a flock of brightly colored horseshoes flying all over the room. But my experimental looking around and blinking proved too violent for Miss Heartsease, and she soon forced me back into my chemical fantasies.

I asked for a chemistry set for Christmas, and got one. But it was a disappointment. It was deficient in apparatus and drama, and too obviously intended to be “educational.” I mixed up a concoction that smelled bad but was otherwise uninteresting, and gave up chemistry.

I went instead into the business of candle-making. Since it was not long after Christmas, candles were on my mind and the makings readily findable. I made a colorful collection of candle drippings and butt-ends. For good measure I added one whole candle that didn't match any of the others in the pantry, and I knew my mother wouldn't want it if it didn't match. I had read in a book about pioneer days that you could make a candle by dipping a string into melted tallow, and I knew from looking at lighted candles how to go about melting them.

And so I waited until I was at home by myself, to avoid disturbing others, before I started my candle-making business. It was in fact going to be a business, for I fully intended to sell my candles at a profit, and I thought I could count on my grandmothers to buy at least two apiece.

I put my drips and fragments into a small pot, cutting up the nonmatching whole one so it would fit, measured a piece of string to about the right length, and turned on the burner. How what happened next happened I can't say, for I soon found that I didn't have time just to stand around watching a pot, but it did happen that a fairly spectacular tall flame was standing on top of the stove. Pretty quickly it burnt up all my wax and went out, and I soon got the kitchen back to rights and no harm done. There was no sign of fire except for the faintest little cloudy smoke stain on the ceiling that you wouldn't see if you didn't look close. If my parents ever looked close they must have wondered, but they never asked me.

So I went out of the candle business with no profit, but also with no loss except for the burnt wax, which I no longer needed.

My parents were very much afraid that my brother, Henry, and I would not live to be grown. This fear, when it manifested itself, could be oppressive. But we were fortunate, Henry and I, in having a father who was often busy at his office and a mother whose attention was often required by our two younger sisters. This state of things bestowed upon us boys a latitude of freedom that we knew exactly what to do with.

As a result, a secondary fear haunted particularly our mother—namely that the behavior of her sons would deviate so far beyond the known human range that an apocalyptic embarrassment would fall upon the family. This too could be oppressive. When my mother said to me, “I don't know what's going to become of you!” I could hear the squeak of the hinges of the jailhouse door. In her worst moments, I fear my mother too could hear those hinges, and she also could see in her mind's eye the raw opening of an early grave for a boy drowned or burned or run over by a car or kicked in the head by a mule.

To save us from ourselves—and herself from the anguish she knew she would feel at the shutting of that iron door or the opening of that grave, if she had not done all she could have done by way of prevention—at certain extremities of our self-education and of her tolerance, she resorted to the use of a switch. The switch would be one of the sprouts that grew up from the roots of our lilac bush, and it would be keen, lithe, and durable. Our mother's use of it was fiercely honest. She dispensed the “good whipping” she had promised, no fun for the recipient, though the pain was soon over. What was not soon over was my sense of her own reluctance and regret, which stayed with me and made me sympathize with her as maybe nothing else could have done.

I sympathized with her; in my sympathy, as I can see now, I greatly loved her, and yet her punishments wrought no significant change in my behavior. Her influence over me at that time did not extend many feet beyond the end of her lilac switch, whereas my quest for knowledge extended limitlessly round about.

Probably because of my early gift for science, I was eager to learn in school. But I was not intellectually stimulated by the schoolbooks or the established curriculum. What I wanted to learn was the precise line between what my teachers would put up with and what they would not put up with. And to draw a line of this sort required much experimentation.

My curiosity about the limits of, for instance, Miss Heartsease was extraordinarily keen. I probed the coastlines of her patience and sounded its estuaries like an early navigator mapping the New World. When school let out, I shifted my interest to other continents as handily as an astronaut.

It may have been in the fall of my year of Miss Heartsease that I applied myself to a critical textual examination, and ultimately to the scientific debunking, of
The Night Before Christmas.

At that time my sisters' upstairs bedroom still had an open fireplace with a grate that, before our time, had been used for burning coal. I had never paid it much attention until one night after supper, when I was loitering in that room, enjoying maybe the strangeness of its feminine prettiness, one of my earliest quandaries attached itself to that fireplace as if by magnetic attraction. It was far yet from Christmas, still warm. And by then I'm sure I “knew about Santa Claus.” But my quandary was a Christmas quandary of long standing, and it had to do specifically with Santa Claus.

I knew from my close observation of falling bodies, and from having been a number of times a falling body myself, perhaps as much as one needs to know about gravity. And so I saw no great problem in the alleged descent of chimneys on the part of Santa Claus. If the chimneys had been big enough, and if he had no more graceful way of doing so, he could have got down them by falling.

How he got back up them again was my question. I was going, you see, by the book. As a critic, from the beginning I held the text in great honor, and the text did not say that he came down the chimney, left the toys for the children, and let himself out by the door. The text said in plain English: “up the chimney he rose.”

In those days I was a true pure scientist. If the subject of my inquiry had been the nature of gravity itself, I would not have minded whether the falling body had been an apple or a bomb, or upon what or whom it might have fallen. I was hard driven in my quest for truth.

And so, being alone, and having therefore full intellectual freedom, I stooped into the fireplace, inserted my head and shoulders into the chimney, and did a passable job of standing up. Such was my objectivity in regard to the chimney that I would not have been surprised if I had been able to go right up it.

But it was not a roomy chimney. I could not raise my arms to feel for a
handhold, and except for the grate there was no foothold. And so I absolutely knew something: If I couldn't get up it, Santa Claus couldn't get up it. I wasn't entirely objective at this point, for I was truly sorry. It would have been extraordinarily pleasant to go up the chimney and climb out onto the peak of the roof. From there I could have gone down onto the roof of the back porch, from there into the branches of our big old apple tree, and from there to the ground.

But I accepted disappointment, shrank out of the dark chimney, and stood up again in the lighted room. And that, I think, must have been the occasion upon which I discovered soot. Coal soot is exceedingly black and exceedingly light. I was covered with it, which I only found out by using one of the curtains to wipe what felt like cobweb out of my eyes. I was a living pencil, for on everything I touched I left a mark.

And then I saw that the soot, in addition to being on me, was coming off. It was drifting loose in chunks and flakes and floating to the floor, where it broke into pieces that fled away on tiny currents of the air, insidious little breezes which I also discovered at that time.

The Christmas quandary I had started with, despite its scientific interest and the seriousness with which I had taken it up, began to look like a pleasant sort of ignorance. I would gladly have gone back to it, except that it had now evolved into an insistently present problem for which there was no present solution. In fact, every attempt I made at a solution reliably worsened the problem. Even when I merely rubbed my head the better to study the situation, I loosened more soot. I saw a flake of soot levitate from the top of my head and land on a bedspread, white to match the curtains. When I took a swipe at it to knock it to the floor, I made a broad dark streak. It began to seem to me that I needed to be going.