Remembering (11 page)

Margaret has a list in her mind. Andy is going away to college, and she has been thinking, for days maybe, of what she must do and what she must say.

“Okay,” he says. He would like to leave, for he knows that all these things signify her love for him, and he is going away, and she is sad, and he is.

“Now wait. I'm not finished. Inside that sack is a tin of cookies for you to take with you to school. Don't shake them and make crumbs out of them, and don't eat them before you get there. And when you do get there I want you to apply yourself and study hard, because I think you've got a good mind and it would be a shame to waste it. Your granddaddy thinks so too.”

She pauses, thinking over the rest that she must say. Her eyes are on him, direct and grave behind her glasses. He cannot turn away or look away until she is ready for him to go. He is grinning but not, he knows, fooling her.

“Listen. There are some of us here who love you mighty well and respect you and think you're fine. There may be times when you'll need to think of that.”

He has two thousand miles to go, and if he is going he must begin. He thinks of how far he has come, how many miles, how many steps. Some who came here came by steps, across prairie and desert and mountain, past the whitened bones of starved oxen and horses and mules, the discarded furniture and wrecked wagons, the stone-mounded graves of those who had come earlier and come no farther. He thinks of flying. At what risk and cost do the fallen fly?

When he does remove his elbows from the parapet where he has been leaning, and turns, and steps away, a history turns around in his mind, as if some old westward migrant, who had reached the edge at last and seen the blue uninterruptible water reaching out around the far side of the world, had turned in his tracks and started eastward again.

He walks along the pier, past the backs of the intent fishermen and the concrete benches and back onto land again. There are swimmers in the harbor, early sightseers standing and walking about, and on the walks of Aquatic Park joggers trotting in pairs and talking. He makes his way among them, in the hold of a direction now, stepping, alone and among strangers, in the first steps of a long journey that, by nightfall, will bring him back where he cannot step but where he has stepped before, where people of his lineage and history have stepped for a hundred and seventy-five years or more in an indecipherable pattern of entrances, minds into minds, minds into place, places into minds: the worn and wasted, sorrow-salted ground, familiar to him as if both known and dreamed, that owns him in a membership that he did not make, but has chosen, and that is death and life and hope to him. He is hurrying.

“Hey, man!”

Andy stops, astonished, for it is clear to him that he is being addressed, though he does not yet see by whom. And then he sees the fringed and shaggy man hurrying toward him out of a side street, the rolled bandanna around his head, his hand in the air.

“Say, good brother, could you, like, spare me a buck for a light lunch?”

“Hold on, now,” Andy says. “Isn't this the same day it was this morning when I gave you six dollars?”

“Ah!” the man says. “Indeed!” He steps back a pace and makes the low bow of a cavalier, sweeping the pavement with the edge of his hand. “Pass, friend.”

“Thanks, friend,” Andy says. He hurries on.

The city encloses him now, the bay out of sight behind him. The streets are all astir, thousands of directions and purposes shifting and turning, meeting and passing, each making its way in the midst of the rest, colliding, turning aside, failing, succeeding, so that a man without a direction would be lost there and carried away. Ahead of him, up Columbus Avenue, the Transamerica Pyramid points up into an empty sky, so blue it makes his eyes ache.

He is hurrying. He is walking up Columbus Avenue on his way to Port William, Kentucky, but he is moving too in the pattern of a succession of such returns. He is thinking of his father.

Wheeler is on a train in the mountains west of Charlottesville, thinking of his father. It is a late evening in early summer. The sun is down, its light still in the sky. Wheeler's valise is in the rack overhead, his small trunk in the baggage car. Tomorrow morning he will get home. Marce will be at the station to meet him. Ordinarily he would come in the buggy, but tomorrow, because of the trunk, he will have the team and wagon. Wheeler is thinking of his father, and of tomorrow when they will ride together on the spring seat of the wagon through the tree-shaded lanes, looking at the country and at the light sliding over the sleek hides of the mules — five miles from the station at Smallwood, through the sweet gap that Wheeler feels opened around him now between his past and his future, and then they will be home, and his mother will have dinner ready. His thoughts force Wheeler suddenly to breathe deeply as if to make room for his heart to beat. He has the whole night ahead of him. Later, he will go to the dining car for supper, and afterwards sleep, if he
can
sleep. Sleep will shorten the time.

Andy has tried before this to imagine his father as a young man. And now, without any effort or even forethought of Andy's, his father has appeared to him: a young man, eight years younger than he would be at Andy's birth, sixteen years younger than Andy is now, his face pleasant, lighted by humor, and yet his mouth and jaw are already firmed by a
resolution that will be familiar to anyone who will know him later, and in his eyes there is already the shadow of effort and hard thought.

Wheeler was an apt and ambitious student who, after college, had been invited by the about-to-be-elected congressman from his district, Forrest Franklin, to go to Washington with him as his secretary. Wheeler accepted, on the condition that he would be permitted to attend law school as well. Mr. Franklin agreed to that, perhaps supposing that Wheeler would soon find the double load too much and would quit law school. Wheeler did not quit either one, and he did well at both.

By the time Wheeler's graduation was in sight, Mr. Franklin, who had become his friend, undertook to help him find employment. Mr. Franklin assumed, along with virtually every teacher Wheeler had ever had, that Wheeler's destiny was to be that of thousands of gifted country boys since the dawn of the republic, and before: college and then a profession and then a job in the city. This was the path of victory, already trodden out and plain. But Wheeler, to Mr. Franklin's great surprise, hesitated and put off. And one day Mr. Franklin called him in. The job in question was one with a large packing house in Chicago.

“Wheeler, you're an able young man. You've got the world in front of you. You can grow and develop and go to the top. You can be something your folks never imagined. You've got the ability to do it, Wheeler. And nobody will be prouder or delight more in your success than I will.”

Mr. Franklin put both feet on the floor and leaned forward. He propped his right forefinger on Wheeler's knee.

“Wheeler. Listen. Don't, damn it, throw this opportunity away.”

“Thank you, Mr. Franklin,” Wheeler said, “I understand. I'll think about it.”

He did think about it. He sat down at his desk and he thought. He thought of his mother and father who had skimped and denied themselves to send him to school. He asked himself what they had imagined he might become or do as an educated man, and he knew that they had imagined him only as he was, a bright boy and then a bright young man, deserving, they thought, of such help as they could give; for their help they wanted only his honest thanks, and they did not ask even for that. He knew that he could become what they had never imagined, and what he had never imagined himself. And he asked finally, thinking of them,
but of himself too, “Do I want to spend my life looking out a window onto tarred roofs, or do I want to see good pastures, and the cattle coming to the spring in the evening to drink?”

Elation filling him, he answered, “I want to see good pastures and cattle coming to the spring in the evening to drink.” For suddenly he did imagine what he could be. He saw it all. A man with a law degree did not have to go to Chicago to practice. He could practice wherever in the whole nation there was a courthouse. He could practice in Hargrave. He could be with his own.

He got up then and went back to Mr. Franklin's office. “Mr. Franklin,” he said, “I'm going home.”

And Mr. Franklin said, “WHAT?”

Andy knows how firmly ruled and how unendingly fascinated his father has been by that imagining of cattle on good grass. It was a vision, finally, given the terrain and nature of their place, of a community well founded and long lasting. Wheeler held himself answerable to that, he still holds himself answerable to it, and in choosing it he gave it to his children as a possible choice.

“It can inspire you, Andy,” he said. “It can keep you awake at night. It doesn't matter whether you've got a manure fork in your hand or a library in your head, or both — you can love it all your life.”

“Look,” he says, for he has brought Andy where he has brought him many times before, to the grove of walnuts around the spring, and the cattle are coming to drink. The cattle crowd in to the little stone basin, hardly bigger than a washtub, that has never been dry, even in the terrible drouth of 1930; they drink in great slow swallows, their breath riffling the surface of the water, and then drift back out under the trees. Andy and Wheeler can hear the grass tearing as they graze.

“If that won't move a man, what will move him? It's like a woman. It'll keep you awake at night.”

Andy is old enough to be told that loving a place is like loving a woman, but Wheeler does not trust him yet to know what he is seeing. He trusts it to come to him later, if he can get it into his mind.

“Look,” he says. And as if to summon Andy's mind back from wherever
it may be wandering, for Andy's mind can always be supposed to be wandering, Wheeler takes hold of his shoulder and grips it hard. “Look. See what it is, and you'll always remember.”

Andy would like to know, for he is walking up Powell Street alone with the print of his father's hard-fingered, urgent hand as palpably on his shoulder as if the hand itself were still there. He is going past store-fronts lined with fish, vegetables, and herbs, roasted ducks hanging by their necks in windows. He is hurrying among all the other hurriers, on his way to Port William.

Where is Port William? If he asked, who would know? But he knows.

He reaches the hotel and enters the lobby. It is all alight now with ordinary day. People are coming and going, standing around, sitting and talking. Reflected light from the passing traffic quivers and darts on the walls.