A Place in Time (7 page)

When I got reorganized enough to look up at where I'd come from, there was Jarrat holding to his rope and looking over the eave of the roof
to see what was left of me. We looked back and forth at each other what seemed a long time, and it was awfully quiet.

After a while he said, “Well, are you practicing up for something, or was that it?”

It came to me I was alive. That cigarette was still stuck in the corner of my mouth, still lit. I didn't answer. I sat there with half my face painted blue and finished my smoke. Jarrat watched me until I reckon he was satisfied, and then he got back to being himself.

“Long as you're on the ground, how 'bout getting us a fresh jug of water?”

“Me and Teddy Roosyvelt, we rode through hair, shit, blood, and corruption up to
here
.” Uncle Peach used the stick he was whittling to mark a level across his nose about an inch above his nostrils.

“You did not,” Wheeler said, but all the same he was laughing. He was seven years old, and sometimes just looking at Uncle Peach made him laugh.

“The hell you did,” said Andrew, who was Wheeler's brother, five years older, because to Uncle Peach he could say anything he wanted to, and he did. Andrew, as Wheeler understood, was practicing to be a grownup. An ambitionless boy would not say “The hell you did” even to Uncle Peach.

The boys supposed, because everybody else appeared to suppose, that Uncle Peach had been somewhere in the Army during the war with Spain. But they knew from their own observation that Uncle Peach's shotgun, “Old Deadeye,” was an instrument of mercy to all creatures that ran or flew as well as to some that were sitting still.

The three of them, the two boys and their uncle Peach, who was their mother's baby brother, were sitting in the shade of the tall cedar tree in front of the house. Uncle Peach was whittling a small cedar stick, releasing a fragrance. His knife was sharp, and he was making the shavings fine for fear he would use up the stick and have to go look for another. One of his rules for living was “Never stand up when you can set down,” and he often quoted himself.

None of the three of them wanted to get up, for the day was already hot, and the shade of the old tree was a happiness. It was happier for being a threatened happiness. A sort of suspense hung over them and over that whole moment among the old trees and the patches of shade in the long yard. Maybe that was why Wheeler never forgot it. They did not know where the boys' father was. They did not know how come he had forgotten them. They knew only that if Marce Catlett came back from wherever he was and found them sitting there, they would all three be at work before they could say scat.

“Yeees sahhh,” Uncle Peach said, drawing out the words as if to make them last as long as his stick, “them was rough times, which was why we was called the Rough Riders. Hair, shit, blood, and corruption up to the horses' bits, and you needed a high-headed horse to get through it atall. When it was all over and we was heroes, Teddy says to me, ‘Leonidas, looks like one of us is pret' near bound to be the presi-dent of our great country, and if it's all the same to you, I'd just as soon it would be me.' And I says, ‘Why, Teddy, by all means! Go to it!'”

“The hell you did!” Andrew said again. “You couldn't tell the truth if it shit on your hat.”

And that made Wheeler laugh so much he had to lie down in the grass.

At the age of seven, Wheeler was already aware of a division of his affection between his father and Uncle Peach that he could not resolve, and he felt the strain. He loved Uncle Peach because he was funny and was interesting in the manner of a man who would do or say about anything he thought of, and because Uncle Peach loved him back and treated him as an equal and was always kind to him. Uncle Peach's trade was carpentry, which he was more or less good at, more or less worked at, and made more or less a living from. When he made more than a living from it, sooner or later he spent the surplus on whiskey and what he called “hoot-tootin” in Hargrave or Louisville or wherever he could get to before he got down and had to be fetched home.

Uncle Peach was in fact a drunk, which at the age of seven Wheeler pretty well knew and easily forgave. Once, thinking to change his life after a near-lethal celebration of the heroism he had shared with by-then President Roosevelt, Uncle Peach had gone so far as to plan a migration
to Oklahoma, which he actually carried out, and had persevered there for one year, to which he ever afterward referred as “my years in the territory.” While there, he said, he had been adopted into a tribe of Indians with whom he had lived and hunted and fought, which Wheeler even at the age of seven knew he had not done. Uncle Peach called Indians Eenjins. His Eenjin name was “See-we-no-ho,” which in English meant “Friend of Great Chief.” Though Wheeler knew that Uncle Peach was just storying, he could see nevertheless in his mind's eye Uncle Peach feathered and painted, riding his Indian pony named “Wa-su-ho-ha” which in English was “Runs Like Scared Rabbit.” Uncle Peach loved to tell how he had hunted buffalo with his Eenjin friends, how well he had ridden, how accurately he had shot with his bow.

And Andrew would say, “You got enough damn wind in you to blow up an onion sack.”

Uncle Peach had about him the ease of a man who had never come hard up against anything. All his life he had been drifting. All his life he had followed the inclination of flowing water toward the easiest way, and the lowest. Wheeler may always have known this, in the way an alert boy picks knowledge out of the air without asking. And with a boy's love for even the appearance of freedom, he loved Uncle Peach for his drifting.

He loved his father, as eventually he would know, for precisely the opposite reason. Marce Catlett was a man who lived within limits that he had accepted. He did not drift. Year after year he had been hard up against the demands of farm and family, the weather and the bank. He had known more hard times than good ones. In the winter of the year Wheeler was six, his father had sold his tobacco crop for just enough to transport it to the market and to pay the commission on its sale.

But he was not a one-crop farmer. His rule was “Sell something every week.” This, as Wheeler would come to know, meant economic diversity; it required a complex formal intelligence; it was good sense. Marce was a man driven to small economies, which his artistry made elegant. He once built a new feed barn exactly on the site of the old one, tearing down the old one, reusing its usable lumber, as he built the new one, and his work mules never spent a night out of their own stalls. His precise fitting of force to work, his neat patches and splices, his quiet transactions with a
saddle horse or a team of mules—Wheeler learned these things as a boy, and all the rest of his life he thought and dreamed of them, as of precious things lost.

As he grew in understanding, Wheeler more and more consciously chose his father over Uncle Peach. He chose, that is, his father's example, not his life. For when the time came, and out of plain economic necessity, for there was not a living for him at home and he could not afford to buy a place, Wheeler went to school and became a lawyer. And yet he never abandoned his inheritance from his father. Marce Catlett's love of farming lived on in his son, as later it would live on in his grandsons. And all his life Wheeler felt his father's good ways aching in his bones, for he remembered them in palpable detail and loved them, though in his own life he had given most of them up for others less palpable.

Because after law school Wheeler did not go to any place offered him as “better,” but returned to set up his practice at home, he came into an inheritance that was, as he knew, in many ways desirable, but was also complex and in some ways difficult. That he had deliberately made himself heir to his father's example did not prevent him also from inheriting Uncle Peach, as an amusement but also as a responsibility and a burden.

Uncle Peach was in truth amusing. He always had been—“in his way,” as his sister, Dorie Catlett, often felt called upon to add.

As a boy of seven, wanting to “do like the old mule” who drank directly from the water trough, he tried to drink buttermilk from a stone churn and got his head stuck. Dorie had to break the churn to get him loose.

“Damn him, I would have left his head right where he put it,” Marce would say. He would be growling, also laughing.

He would pause then, to allow her to say, “Yes, I reckon you would have let him drown.”

And then he would say, “Something gone, nothing lost.”

Once, exasperated by his daily resistance to washing and going to school, Dorie told her brother, “I ought to let you grow up in ignorance.”

And he replied, “
That's
it, Dorie! Let me grow up in ignorance.”

As Wheeler would tell it much later, his Uncle Peach did grow up in ignorance. And even before he had finished growing up, he shifted from buttermilk
to whiskey, which also he drank, while it lasted, as freely as the old mule drank water. He seldom had enough money to make it last very long, “And that,” Dorie would say, “was his only good fortune, poor fellow.”

But his sufficient surpluses of money, seldom as they were, gave him a sort of fame. His reputation as a drinker far exceeded his reputation as a carpenter, and stories of his exploits were still told in Port William and Hargrave half a century after the beginning of television.

One afternoon Burley Coulter came upon Uncle Peach in front of a roadhouse down by Hargrave. Uncle Peach had been drinking evidently a lot of whiskey and also eating evidently a lot of pickled food from the bar. He had just finished vomiting upon the body of a dead cat, at which he was now gazing in great astonishment.

“Well, what's the matter, old Peach?”

“Why, Burley,” Uncle Peach said, “I remember them pigs' feet and that baloney, but I got no recollection whatsoever of that cat.”

Sometimes Uncle Peach found drunkenness to be exceedingly hard work. Dancing to keep standing, he would pronounce solemnly, “Damn, I'm tard! My ass is draggin' out my tracks.”

Sometimes he found himself in a moral landscape exceedingly difficult to get across: “I got a long way to go and a short time to get there in.”

Wheeler's own favorite story was about, so far as he knew, Uncle Peach's only actual fight.

Standing at the bar of a saloon in Louisville, Uncle Peach discovered, to his great disgust, that the man standing next to him was drunk.

“If they's anything I can't stand,” Uncle Peach confided to the man, “it's a damn drunk.”

At which the man confided back to Uncle Peach: “You ain't nothing but a damn drunk yourself.”

Upon which Uncle Peach, grievously offended, took a swing.

“It is generally understood,” Wheeler would say, “that when one man aims a violent blow at another, he had better hit him.”

But Uncle Peach missed. Whereupon the previously offended flew at Uncle Peach and thrashed him not hardly enough to kill him, but thoroughly even so.

When Wheeler came later to rescue Uncle Peach from the Stag Hotel
where he lay, as he said, “bloodied but unbowed,” Uncle Peach was already referring to his opponent as “them gentlemens.”

“Them gentlemens sholy could fight. They sholy was science men.”

When Uncle Peach had decided to become a carpenter and showed some inclination to settle down, Marce Catlett helped him to find and buy a place with a few acres for pasture, a garden, and a little tobacco crop over by Floyd's Station. It was ten miles away, a distance that ought to have kept Uncle Peach “weaned,” as Marce conceived it, from Dorie. But when Uncle Peach was on the downslope of a binge and in need of help, he would show up, intending to stay until he wore his welcome out—and longer, if he could.

On a certain night in Wheeler's childhood, perhaps not long after their conversation under the cedar tree, Uncle Peach showed up and, to the immense happiness of Wheeler and Andrew, drank copiously from a pan of dirty dishwater, complaining all the while of the declining quality of Dorie's soup. He proceeded to get sick, and then, shortly, to disappear. There must have been a passage of strict conversation between him and Marce at that time. Uncle Peach continued to show up now and again, but he never again showed up except sober.

Wheeler inherited Uncle Peach from his mother, who had inherited him from her mother, who had died soon after his birth. Dorie had pretty much had the raising of him, and it was she who named him “Peach,” because it was handier than “Leonidas Polk” and because as a little fellow he was so pretty and sweet. That this Peach may have been a born failure did not mitigate Dorie's sense that he was
her
failure. With exactly the love that “hopeth all things,” she did not give up on him.