A Place in Time (26 page)

In his triumph, instead of the elation he might reasonably have felt, Elton felt himself suddenly stranded in a kind of embarrassment. A charge passed through him, as if he had wakened from a dream. He had made a dare, and had fulfilled it so far in excess of what he might have expected, and so much further in excess of what the others had expected, that he did not know where to look or what to say. He was now the exceptional man. He had become, strangely, new to himself and to them all.

And then old Mr. Wright, who was standing closer to Elton's lead horse than the others would have allowed him to do if they had been watching him, said for all to hear, his voice trembling, “As good a ones as 'ar a man drawed a line over!” Utterly oblivious of the others standing behind him, he was leaning on the cane held in his right hand. With the flat of his left hand he stroked once the horse's black-and-white rump, and then he turned to Elton. “And ay
God,
son! You're a
teamster
!”

After my parents were married in 1933, they lived for three years with my father's parents, Marce and Dorie Catlett, on the Catlett home place near Port William. My mother and my grandmother Catlett did not fit well into the same house. Because of that, and I suppose for the sake of convenience, my parents in 1936 moved themselves, my younger brother, Henry, and me to a small rental house in Hargrave, the county seat, where my father had his law practice.

And then in 1939, when I was five years old, my father bought us a house of our own. It was a stuccoed brick bungalow that had previously served as a “funeral home.” It stood near the center of town and next door to a large garage. After we had moved in—there being six of us now, since the births of my two sisters—my parents improved the house by the addition of a basement to accommodate a furnace, and by the installation of radiators and modern bathroom and kitchen appliances.

My brother and I were thus provided with spectacles of work that fascinated us, and also with a long-term supply of large boxes and shipping crates. The crate that had contained the bathtub I remember as especially teeming with visions of what it might be reconstructed into. These visions evidently occasioned some strife between Henry and me. The man who installed our bathroom assured me many years later that he had seen me hit Henry on the head with a ball-peen hammer.

One day, while Henry and I were engaged in our unrealizable dream of making something orderly and real out of the clutter in our back yard, a man suddenly came around the corner of the house carrying a dog. The dog was a nearly grown pup, an English setter, white with black ears and eye patches and a large black spot in front of his tail. The man, as we would later learn, was Mike Brightleaf.

Mr. Brightleaf said, “Andy and Henry, you boys look a here. This is a pup for your daddy.”

He set the big pup carefully down and gave him a pat. And then, with a fine self-assurance or a fine confidence in the pup or both, he said, “Call him Mike.”

We called, “Here, Mike!” and Mike came to us and the man left.

Mike, as we must have known even as young as we were, came from the greater world beyond Hargrave, the world of fields and woods that our father had never ceased to belong to and would belong to devotedly all his life. Mike was doomed like our father to town life, but was also like our father never to be reconciled to the town.

Along one side of our property our father built a long, narrow pen that we called “the dog lot,” and he supplied it with a nice, white-painted dog house. The fence was made of forty-seven inch woven wire with two barbed wires at the top. These advantages did not impress Mike in the least. He did not wish to live in the nice dog house, and he would not do so unless chained to it. As for the tall fence, he would go up it as one would climb a ladder, gather himself at the top, and leap to freedom. Our father stretched a third strand of barbed wire inside the posts, making what would have been for a man a considerable obstacle, and Mike paid it no mind.

As a result, since our father apparently was reluctant to keep him tied, Mike had the run of the town. For want of anything better to do, he dedicated himself to being where we children were and going where we went. I have found two photographs of him, taken by our mother. In both, characteristically, he is with some of us children, accepting of hugs and pats, submissive, it seems, to his own kindness and our thoughtless affection, but with the look also of a creature dedicated to a higher purpose, aware of his lowly servitude.

One day our father found Henry and me trying to fit Mike with a harness
we had contrived of an old mule bridle. We were going to hitch him to our wagon.

Our father said, “Don't do that, boys. You'll cow him.”

I had never heard the word “cow” used in that way before, and it affected me strongly. The word still denotes, to me, Mike's meek submission to indignity and my father's evident conviction that
nothing
should be cowed.

Mike intended to go everywhere we went and he usually did, but he understood his limits when he met them. One Sunday morning we children and our mother had started our walk to church. Mike was trailing quietly behind, hoping to be unnoticed, but our mother looked back and saw him. She said sympathetically, “Mike, go home.” And Mike turned sadly around and went home.

He was well-known in our town, for he was a good-looking dog and he moved with the style of his breeding and calling. But his most remarkable public performance was his singing to the fire whistle. Every day, back then, the fire whistle blew precisely at noon. The fire whistle was actually a siren whose sound built to an almost intolerable whoop and then diminished in a long wail. When that happened, Mike always threw up his head and howled, whether in pain or appreciation it was impossible to tell. One day he followed us to school, and then at noon into the little cafeteria beneath the gymnasium. I don't believe I knew he was there until the fire whistle let go and he began to howl. The sound, in that small and supposedly civil enclosure, was utterly barbarous and shocking. I felt some pressure to be embarrassed but I was also deeply pleased. Who else belonged to so rare an animal?

But Mike knew well that his deliverer was my father. He might spend a lot of time idling about in town or playing with children, but he was a dog with a high vocation, and he knew what it was. He knew too that my father fully shared it. Mike loved us all in the honorable and admirable way of a dog, but his love for my father was too dedicated to be adequately described as doglike. He regarded his partnership with my father as the business of his life, as it was also his overtopping joy.

My father was a man of passions. I don't think he did much of anything except passionately. When he was removed from his passions, as in some public or social situations, he would be quiet, remote, uncomfortable,
and unhappy. I think he was sometimes constrained by a sense of the disproportion between the force of his thoughts and the demands of polite conversation. He loved serious talk and the sort of conversation that is incited by pleasure. He loved hilarity. But he had little to offer in the way of small talk, and he always seemed to me to be uncomfortable or embarrassed when it was required of him.

He was passionate about the law. He loved its argumentative logic, its principles and methods, its discriminating language. He was capable of working at it ardently for long hours. His sentences, written or spoken, whatever the circumstances, were concise, exact, grammatically correct, and powerful in their syntax. He did not speak without thinking, and he meant what he said.

He used such sentences when instructing and reprimanding us children. We were not always on his mind, I am sure, but when we were he applied himself to fatherhood as he did to everything else. When we were sick or troubled he could be as tender and sympathetic as our mother. At other times, disgruntled or fearing for us as his knowledge of the world prompted him to do, he could be peremptory, demanding, impatient, and in various ways intimidating. I was always trying to keep some secret from him, and he had an uncanny way of knowing your secrets. He had a way of knowing your thoughts, and this came from sympathy. It could only have come from sympathy, but it took me a long time to know that.

I have always been a slow thinker, and he was fast. He could add, subtract, and figure averages in his head with remarkable speed. He would count a flock of sheep like this: one, five, seven, twelve, sixteen, nineteen, twenty-four . . . One day when he had done this and arrived promptly at the correct number, a hundred and fifty or so, he turned and looked at me for my number. I was still counting. “Honey,” he said with instant exasperation, “are you counting by
twos
?” That was exactly what I was doing, and in my slowness I had started over two or three times.

He was as passionate about farming as about the law. He could not voluntarily have quit farming any more than he could voluntarily have quit breathing. He spent great love and excitement in buying rundown farms, stopping the washes, restoring the pastures, renewing the fences, buildings, and other improvements. He performed this process of regeneration seven times in his life, eventually selling six of the farms, but he kept one,
and in addition he kept and improved over many years the home place where he was born and raised. He hired out most of the work, of course, but he worked himself too, and he watched and instructed indefatigably. He would drive out to see to things in the morning before he went to the office, and again after he left the office in the afternoon. He took days off to devote to farming. He would be out looking at things, salting his cattle and sheep, walking or driving his car through the fields, every Sunday afternoon. In the days before tractors he would be on hand to take the lines when there were young mules to break. He did the dehorning, castrating, and other veterinary jobs. All the time he could spare from his law practice he gave to the farms. Because of his work for an agricultural cooperative, he would frequently have to make a trip to Washington or some other distant place. Sometimes, returning from one of those trips in the middle of the night, he would go to the home place or one of the other farms and drive through the fields before going home to bed.

Of farming, he told me, “It's like a woman. It'll keep you awake at night.” He loved everything about it. He loved the look and feel and smell of the land and the shape of it underfoot. He loved the light on it and the weather over it. He loved the economics of it. As characteristic of him as anything else were pages of yellow legal pads covered with columns of numbers written in ink in his swift hand, where he figured the outgoes and the incomes of his farming, or drew the designs of farm buildings to be built or rebuilt.

When he went to the farms, he would often take Mike with him. He would hurry home from the office, change his clothes, and hurry out again. Going to his car, he would raise the trunk lid. “Here, Mike! Get in!” And Mike would leap into the trunk and lie down. My father would close the trunk, leaving the latch unengaged so Mike would have air.

If there were farm jobs to be done, Mike would just go along, running free in the open country, hunting on his own. If it was hunting season, my father might bring along his shotgun in its tattered canvas case. The gun was a pump-action Remington twenty-gauge, for in those days my father had excellent eyes and he was a good shot.

In those days too the tall coarse grass known as fescue had not yet been introduced here. That grass and the coming of rotary mowing machines
have made the good old bobwhite a rare bird in this country now. The improved pastures in Mike's time were in bluegrass, and a lot of fields would be weedy in the fall. There was plenty of good bird cover and as a result plenty of birds. My father would know where the coveys were, and he and Mike would go to seek them out.

And here they came into their glory, and here I need to imagine them and see them again in my mind's eye, now that I am getting old and have come to understand my father far better than I did when I was young. For right at the heart of his passions for his family, for the law, and for farming, all consequential passions with practical aims and ends, was this other passion for bird hunting with a good dog, which had no practical end but was the enactment of his great love of country, of life, of his own life, for their own sake.

When he stepped out in his eager long strides, with Mike let loose in front of him, he was walking free on the undivided and priceless world itself. And Mike went out from him in a motion fluid and swift and strong, less running than flying, and he would find the birds.