A Place in Time (8 page)

Marce, on the contrary, gave up on his brother-in-law as a condition of his tolerance of him. It was a tolerance that worked best at a distance. With Peach in view, it was limited. After he had met its limit, Uncle Peach was always sober when in view. For Peach Wheeler drunk there was no longer room within Marce Catlett's horizon.

And so Wheeler inherited, along with Uncle Peach, two opposite attitudes toward him, and was never afterward free of either. As he grew
into the necessary choice between his father and his uncle, and made the choice, Wheeler found that he had not merely chosen, but, by choosing his father, had acquired in addition his father's indignation. Wheeler could at times look upon his uncle as an affront, as if Peach had at conception or birth decided to be a burden specifically to his as-yet-unborn nephew.

But as he grew in experience and self-knowledge, Wheeler also grew to recognize in himself a sort of replica of his mother's love and compassion. He was never able quite to anticipate and prepare himself for the moment at which the apparition of Uncle Peach as nuisance would be replaced by the apparition of Uncle Peach as mortal sufferer. This change was not in Uncle Peach, who never changed except by becoming more and more as evidently he had been born to be. The change was in Wheeler. When the moment came, usually in the midst of some extremity of Uncle Peach's drinking career, Wheeler would feel a sudden welling up of love, as if from his mother's heart to his own, and then he would pity Uncle Peach and, against the entire weight of history and probability, wish him well. Sometimes after telling, and fully delighting in, one of his stories about Uncle Peach, Wheeler would fall silent, shake his head, and say, “Poor fellow.”

Andrew, the firstborn son and elder brother, despite all his early practicing to be a grownup, did not manage to grow much farther up, if any, than Uncle Peach. Andrew, as it turned out, did not inherit attitudes toward Uncle Peach so much as he inherited Uncle Peach's failing. For Andrew in his turn became a drinker, and he too would say or do about anything he thought of. He would do so finally to the limit of life itself, and so beyond. As Andrew's course of life declared itself more or less a reprise of Uncle Peach's, that of course intensified and complicated the attitudes of the others toward Uncle Peach. Their stories all are added finally into one story. They were bound together in a many-stranded braid beyond the power of any awl to pick apart.

When Wheeler came home and started his law practice, he bought a car, for his practice involved him in distances that needed to be hurried over. But the automobile also was a fate which, as it included distance, also included Uncle Peach. The automobile made almost nothing of the ten miles from the Catletts' house to Uncle Peach's. Because of the
automobile, Dorie could more frequently go over to housekeep and help out when Uncle Peach was on one of his rough ascents into sobriety, when, she said, he needed her most.

Uncle Peach most needed Wheeler when he was drunk and sick and helpless and broke and far from home. The automobile made this a reasonable need. No power that Wheeler had acquired in law school enabled him to argue against it, though he tried. Because he had the means of going, he had to go.

If Uncle Peach had the money to get there, his favorite place of resort was a Louisville establishment that called itself the Hotel Stag. From the time of Wheeler's purchase of the automobile until the time of Uncle Peach's death, Wheeler, who would not in any circumstances have taken Uncle Peach to the Stag Hotel, went there many a time to bring him home.

At the Stag Hotel and other places of refreshment Uncle Peach would encounter commercial ladies of great attractiveness and charm. Sometimes when Wheeler would be bringing him home, and despite his pain and exhaustion, Uncle Peach would still be enchanted, and he would confide as much to Wheeler: “Oh, them eyes!” he would say. “Oh, them eyes!”

Many a good and funny story came of Wheeler's missions of mercy, and also many a story of real pain and suffering that moved Wheeler to real pity, and also many moments of utter exasperation at the waste of time and effort when Wheeler, mocking himself and yet meaning every word, would cry out against “the damned Hotel Stag and every damned thing involved therein and pertaining thereto.” Or he would say of Uncle Peach indignantly, “He's got barely enough sense to swallow.” And then he would laugh. “Burley Coulter told me he'd seen Uncle Peach drink all he could hold and then fill his mouth for later.” He would laugh. And then, affection and hopelessness and sorrow coming over him, he would shake his head. “Poor fellow.”

In his turn, young Andy Catlett, namesake of his doomed uncle Andrew, also inherited uncle Peach from his grandmother's lamentation and his father's talk, from trips with his father to see that their then-failing Uncle Peach was alive and had enough to eat, and from various elders who remembered with care and delight Uncle Peach's sayings and doings.

One Christmastime, when he was about six, Andy overheard his father
tell Uncle Andrew, just home for the holidays, that Uncle Peach, “sleeping it off in his front yard,” had frozen several of his toes, which had then needed to be amputated.

“Toes!” Uncle Andrew said, laughing his big laugh. “Anybody can spare a few toes. He better be glad he didn't freeze his
pecker
off.” In the midst of his sadness and exasperation Wheeler also laughed, and they went away, leaving Andy, whom they had not noticed, with a possibility he had never considered before.

Andy had gone with his father to visit Uncle Peach after the surgery. Uncle Peach was sitting by the drum stove in his bare, bad-smelling little house with his foot wrapped in a soiled white bandage. He was talking in his old, slow voice about the hospital in Louisville, which he pronounced “Louis-ville.” Though Andy, who had seen inside a hospital, could not picture him in one, Uncle Peach had enjoyed his stay. He had admired the nurses. “Damn pretty, some of 'em,” he said to Wheeler.

And then, studying Andy, he said, “This boy'll be looking at 'em, 'fore you know it.”

When Uncle Peach died in Andy's seventh year, and they all knew that he was dead, Andy overheard his father and mother saying what a story it had been. His father said with regret and sorrow and amusement and, instead of indignation, perhaps relief, for Uncle Peach had died sober in his sleep in bed at home: “Like Jehorum, poor fellow, he has departed without being desired.” Wheeler was capable of feeling some things simply, but he never spoke of Uncle Peach with unmixed feelings.

And then when they were all in Wheeler's car, driving home from the graveyard on the hill outside Port William where they had laid Uncle Peach to rest, they were silent until Wheeler said, “Well!”

He let the silence come back, and then he said, “The preacher takes a very happy view of Uncle Peach's prospects hereafter.”

Wheeler was lining out a text that would be clearly printed in his son's memory, where it would wait a long time for interpretation.

When his father again let the silence come back, Andy understood that his mother wasn't saying anything because she felt that the fate of Uncle Peach hereafter was none of her business, and his grandfather wasn't saying anything because he didn't want it to be his business, and his
grandmother wasn't saying anything because it
was
her business. It came to Andy then, for the first time, that his father was still relatively a young man.

The preacher had said Uncle Peach was going to Heaven, or was there already, because his soul had been saved when he gave his life to Jesus and was baptized at the age of twelve. His baptism, so many years ago, in another century, was still in force. Andy imagined that baptism had left on Uncle Peach's soul a mark like a vaccination scar to show that he had been saved. When he got to Heaven he was to be let in.

Andy had stood in church beside his mother, had heard her singing with the others,

While I draw this fleeting breath,
When mine eyes shall close in death,
When I rise to worlds unknown,
And behold Thee on Thy throne,
Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee,

and he had thought, “
She
?
She
will?” And so he knew that in the soul's bewildering geography there was a Rock of Ages. In his mind it looked like the Rock of Gibralter cleft like a cow's foot, and you could hide in the cleft and be all right.

But from other songs they sang he knew that this geography had a shore too from which the dead departed to cross a wide river, and another shore beyond the river, a beautiful shore, that was Heaven. He had seen in his mind a picture of people on the far shore waving to people coming across in a boat who were waving back. They were calling each other's names and they were happy.

But Wheeler wasn't finished. He was always concerned with fittingness, which was maybe a kind of honesty. Those were words he used: “fitting” and “honest.” He was always trying to get the scattering pieces of their history to fit together in a pattern that made sense. He wanted to find the right words and to say things right. “Right” was another of his words, as was “sense.” His effort often made him impatient. This also Andy took in and remembered.

“If Uncle Peach is in Heaven,” Wheeler said, “and Lord knows I hope that's where he is, then grace has lifted a mighty burden, and the preacher ought to have said so.”

And then he said, as if determined in his impatience to capture every straying piece, “And as an earthly burden it wasn't only grace that lifted it”—meaning it was a burden he too had borne. Even at the time, Andy caught that.

So did his grandmother. She said one syllable then that Andy later would know had meant at least four things: that his father would have done better to be quiet, that she too had borne that earthly burden and would forever bear it, that Uncle Peach had borne it himself and was loved and forgiven at least by her, and that it was past time for Wheeler to hush.

She said, “
Hmh
!”

For Tanya and David Charlton

She was not beautiful according to the standards of the magazines and moving pictures of the time, and she knew it. But by any standard she was a desirable woman, and she also knew that. She knew it from what she had seen in the eyes of certain men, to which from time to time she had felt something like an echo in herself.

That she was desirable was acceptable to her as a part of the liveliness and also the goodness of the world. It was a gift. But that she was desirable and knew it and accepted it unfitted her somewhat for her role as a minister's wife. It was not expected. She had not expected it herself until her own wits told her it was so. Part of her desirability was her look of knowing more than she was saying, and of being amused by the difference. That, and the utter frankness of her presence. There was in her, even in old age, a declarative force of being that was unhesitating and without disguise.

She was born Laura Stafe. She became Laura Milby. She was in love with her husband and would remain so. Another gift. This was not just because she knew she was desirable to him, as he to her—they had settled that soon enough—but from the beginning she had sensed a goodness in him that she knew she could trust. Later it seemed to her that she had not known such trust was in her until he called it from her and she gave it.

They met at a small denominational college where her parents had sent her because they thought it a safe place to send a girl, and where he had come, after an interval of employment in his father's small lumberyard, to prepare for the ministry. His name was Williams Milby. When they were introduced, she laughed. “Oh! Do they call you Bills?”

His reply, the grin subtracted, she thought was elegant, even courtly: “Not yet, mam. But if
you
call me that, that's my name.”

He was a good-looking young man, regular of feature and curly-haired, his countenance so open and unassuming that it might have passed for naïve except for a self-knowing good humor that sometimes lighted it. He attracted her also because the seriousness, even the solemnity, of his vocation already hung about him as a kind of obscurity, and she loved her own power of drawing him forth, in person, out of that shadow.

“What do you want? What do you want for your own self?” she asked. “Oh, that! Oh!” She looked straight at him then, and her laugh undisguised them both.

The day after they graduated they were married. That was 1938.