A Place in Time (15 page)

I started to the door and only then saw that my mother was standing in it, having just arrived. We paused and looked each other over. I saw from her stance and demeanor that the situation was not as she would have preferred it to be.

I managed to dodge past her, maybe because she was dazed, not having as quick an eye for the truth as I did, or maybe she was reluctant to touch me. She hadn't even thought of anything to say.

Once I was safely past her, I ran to one of the windows at the back of the hall, “threw up the sash” (as
The Night Before Christmas
says), and
flung myself out onto the porch roof. Thereupon, displaying a presence of mind I had never given her credit for, my mother shut the window. I heard her lock it. I heard her go to the window on the other side of the hall and lock that one.

Laying low seemed to be called for, and like Brer Rabbit I laid low. For a long time I didn't make a sound, and I didn't hear a sound. I thought hard, and I didn't come to a satisfactory conclusion. I was safe as long as I stayed on the roof. My mother, I knew, would not climb onto the roof. But then there was a limit to how long I could stay there. There was no bed or blanket on the roof, and there would be no breakfast. I could go down by the apple tree, but where would I go then? I didn't know where everybody else was, but I knew my mother was at home. Sooner or later my father would come home, and that did not brighten my prospects.

The idea of running away from home in case of need had been readymade in my mind for a good while, but to do that I would have to be on the ground. Once on the ground and safely gone, I would maybe think of a place to go, some place an orphan boy might find welcome and shelter. So I got up ever so quietly, and slowly so as not to make a sound I eased down the slope of the roof. I went so far as to step from the roof into the apple tree before I looked down and saw my mother.

She was sitting on the ground with her back against one of the tree's three trunks. She looked comfortable. A lengthy switch was lying across her lap beneath her folded hands.

She looked strange. I had never before seen her or anybody else look as she did then. It took a long time for my education to catch up with the vision of her I had then, for though she was a Christian woman she was sitting down there looking positively Buddhist. She was sitting perfectly still. She was not going to move in so much as I could imagine of the future. She was not looking left or right, let alone up into the tree where I was. But I knew she knew where I was. I felt illuminated as if by omniscience. She was at peace down there. She was using up all the peace there was. There was none at all up in the apple tree where I was.

Without making a sound I eased back out of the tree and onto the roof again. Though I knew she was not looking at me and was not going to look at me, I moved back out of her line of sight, where at least I was relieved of looking at her.

My mind was breaking new ground and was working hard. It was working so hard I could spare no energy for standing up. I sat down. For quite a while I thought methodically and strenuously. I saw that I did not have many options. I had, in truth, only three options: I could climb down that tree, which, with precise reason, I was afraid to do; or I could kick the glass out of one of the hall windows and go back into the house, which, on second thought, did not seem to be an option; or I could jump off the roof, and then, if able, run.

To avoid thinking again of the tree, I gave a lot of thought to jumping off the roof. If I did that successfully, with no damage to myself, the option of running away would be renewed. But if I jumped it would be a long way to the ground, and I would have a fair chance of breaking a leg. This was a possibility not entirely unattractive, for if I broke a leg my mother surely would feel sorry for me and forget to whip me. On the other hand, I might kill myself, in which case I would lose the benefit.

And so I was driven back by my thoughts to the first option of climbing down the tree. But I lingered on a while to give my mother a reasonable opportunity to depart, an opportunity which she did not receive with favor. When I got up and eased back again to look for her, there she was. She had not moved. She looked exactly as she had before.

I was really getting to know my mother. I am many years older now than she was then, and I can easily imagine how knowingly she was amused. But I could imagine then, for I saw, how perfectly she was determined. It was getting dark. It was time to bring this story to an end.

Making no longer an effort to be quiet, I stepped back into the tree, slid down, and stood in front of my mother. I felt as if I were presenting myself to a bolt of lightning. It was somewhat like that: swift, illuminating, and soon over.

Early in my childhood when the adult world and sometimes my own experience easily assumed the bright timelessness of myth, I overheard my father's friend Charlie Hardy telling about the drouth of 1908. I liked hearing the grownups talk, and when I wanted to I could be quiet. By being more or less unnoticeable, I heard a lot. Some of the adult conversations I listened to ended with a question: “How long have
you
been here, Andy?”

Charlie Hardy, anyhow, grew up on a rough little farm on Bird's Branch. Charlie, as he said, “came up hard,” though that phrase, by now, has lost much of the meaning it still would have had in the early 1940s. At the time of Charlie's boyhood, except for the railroad and the little packets that still carried passengers and freight up and down the river, there were no machines in the country around Port William, no electricity, no “modern conveniences” or not many. Now, when electricity, indoor plumbing, and many personal machines have become normal, people generally assume that a hundred years ago life was “hard” for almost everybody, though few still have the experience needed for a just comparison. It is perhaps impossible for a person living unhappily
with
a flush toilet to imagine a person living happily without one.

Like every child of his time and in his circumstances, Charlie grew up working. One of his jobs was to carry water for the household from a spring at the bottom of the hill. It was a good spring, with a reputation for never going dry. It was known as the Hardy Spring, and people spoke
of its “deep vein,” and of its fine-tasting water that ran cool through the hot weather. It didn't go dry in 1908, but it came close. In 1908 Charlie was big enough to carry two ten-quart buckets of water from the spring to the house. He made many trips.

In tolerable weather the spring was a good place to go. The water issued from a cleft in the ledgerock down near the creek. The place was always in deep shade. The spring itself and the little basin where the water collected had been enclosed with a rock wall and roof, and fitted with a door, to keep the livestock out. The water striders and the round-and-about bugs conducted their daily business in the pools downstream, and the shike-pokes came and fished. But for Charlie, in the drouth of 1908, it became a place of suffering. He would come down with his buckets, dip one full from the basin, and then wait a long time for the basin to fill again so that he could dip the second.

The drouth, the withering foliage, the heat, and the diminished flow of the spring filled Charlie with misery, and his misery was made worse by his longing for rain. Until it finally rained again, something fundamental seemed to have gone wrong with the world. In the secrecy of his thoughts, after the way of boys, he mourned and he was afraid.

Noticing his misery, his father gave him an instruction that Charlie always remembered when he needed to. “You think it's awful. And it is. But I'll tell you something. You can't believe it now, but times will come when this won't be on your mind. You won't think of it.”

And that, Charlie said, was true. There had been times when he had not thought of it.

But hearing him tell about it put it on
my
mind.
I
thought about it. And so when the first drouth of my own experience and memory came to our part of the country during the war year of 1944, I already knew one thing about it: It was not the first.

In addition to the drouth and the war, and the absence of my uncle Virgil, my mother's brother, who had gone off to fight, the summer of 1944 was the summer of the death of my namesake and hero, Uncle Andrew, my father's brother. For me, it was a summer of need—of more need, probably, than I was capable of recognizing or feeling. That one may be grieved and in need and all the while living one's life, often enough with interest and even pleasure, was an ordinary oddity far beyond my years and
understanding. Grief, great as it might be, did not consume all the world, but now, for me, it had taken its place among the world's other things.

I was staying that summer with my father's parents, Dorie and Marce Catlett. As the days without rain accumulated until the word “drouth” took its place in our daily vocabulary, I learned of two other drouths that were still new in the memory of my elders. One had come in 1930. Another, a worse one, had come in my own lifetime, in 1936 when I was two years old, though I did not remember it.

A drouth is an event of the atmosphere of the earth. It is also an event of the atmosphere of the human mind, which suffers a disturbance that affects everything. It affects the meanings of memory and history. It affects one's sense of the future. Everybody on the place old enough to remember the 1930s regarded our present drouth with a fearful respect that could be described as primeval: It had been felt by country people since the beginning of time. It was not qualified by youth or innocence. I felt it, I think, as fully as my elders, for I had quickly caught their memories and their awe.

Grandpa Catlett showed me a rewired place in the line fence where in 1936 a gap had been cut, allowing the neighbors to drive their cows to our spring that had kept flowing. He and his black hired hand Dick Watson remembered how they and others had hauled water to the livestock in barrels dipped full one bucket at a time. They told of people who drove their cattle miles through the heat to drink at the river, and the cattle would be as thirsty when they got home as they had been when they left. Who could not see the misery of that? And how, having seen it, could you keep it from filling your mind?

We looked at the parching ground and at the drying creek whose pools got smaller every day, we suffered the heat, and we watched the sky. We expected, or at least I did, the end of the world. I was much under the influence, in those days, of Grandma Catlett and Dick Watson's wife, Aunt Sarah Jane, to whom about equally the end of the world was a scheduled event, though nobody knew the schedule. The end of the world was not as exactly predictable but was just as expectable as Christmas or the Fourth of July. And of course they were right.

Grandpa, I think, did not give much thought to the end of the world. It was the continuance of the world that worried him. Of the theologies
then available on the place, Grandpa's was probably the simplest: Old Marster is in charge, and we are not; Old Marster knows, and we don't. But Grandma had pondered a good deal about the end of the world. It was fearful to her, and in times of unusual weather she dwelt upon it. If, for instance, there would come a spell of cold weather in late spring, she would say to me, perhaps wishing not to, to spare me, but unable to contain her thought, “Oh, Andy, they speak of a time when we'll not know the summer from the winter but by the budding of the trees.”

I would sit with her in a bay of one of the upstairs rooms whose windows looked out to the north. She would have her lap full of sewing or mending, we would talk, and we would watch the clouds that passed, stately and aloof, in their procession from west to east. According to her, they followed the great river to the north of us, leaving us dry. Around here, you still sometimes hear that thought—“The rain follows the river,” meaning the Ohio—but with the support, I think, of little evidence.

In the minds of us humans, weather draws superstition as molasses draws flies. It draws also a sort of supernatural mystification that is a cut or two above superstition. Aunt Sarah Jane was full of the spaciousness, and the enchantment too, of mystery, and in the network of attractions that ruled me in those days I would be drawn down to listen to her in the two-room house where she and Dick lived at the corner of the woods. Like Grandma, Aunt Sarah Jane was thoughtful of the end of the world. But whereas Grandma regarded it with some deep disturbance of temporality and dread, Aunt Sarah Jane, who held it sufficiently in fear, also looked upon it with some approval as the time when justice would rain down at last. I think she anticipated with a certain pleasure the look on some people's faces when suddenly they would hear behind them the “great voice, as of a trumpet, Saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last.”