Remembering (18 page)

That was an island in time, between the horse and mule teams and the larger, more expensive machines that came later. They were not going to live again in a time like that.

The Harford Place appealed to Elton and touched his imagination, and he made them see it as he saw it.

“Listen,” he said to Andy once — they had brought sandwiches with them that day and were eating in the shade by the spring — “do you see what this old place is? The right man could do something here. It's been worked half to death and mistreated every way, but there's good in it
yet.” He gestured up toward the house and barn. “That's still a sound, straight old house. The barn's not much, but it could be put right and made into something.”

He had been thinking about it all morning, Andy knew, studying it as it was, foreseeing it as it might be, and now was telling him about it, because, though Elton knew that he would never make it over himself, he wanted
somebody
to do it.

“Listen, Andy,” he said, “if you could find the right girl, a little smarter than you, and willing to work and take care of things, here's where you could get started and amount to something. Put some sheep here. A few cows. I'd help you, and the rest of them would, we'd neighbor with each other and get along.”

And so Andy had the old place in mind, as it was and as it might be made, long before it ever occurred to him that he might be the one to live there and attempt to make it as it might be.

For that to happen required, in fact, the right girl, but also many miles, many happenings, and several years.

And it required trust. He sees it now. What he and Flora have made of the Harford Place has depended all on trust. They have not made it what it might be — how many lives will it require for that? — but they have made it far more than it was when they came to it. In twelve years they have given it a use and a life; a beauty has come to it that is its answer to their love for it and their work; and it has given them a life that belonged to them even before they knew they wanted it. And all has depended on trust. How could he have forgotten? How could he have failed to understand?

His life has never rested on anything he has known beforehand — none of it. He chose it before he knew it, and again afterwards. And then he failed his trust and his choice, and now has chosen again, again on trust. He has made again the choice he has made before, as blindly as before. How could he have thought that it would be different? How could he have imagined that he might ever know enough to choose? As Flora seems to have known and never doubted, as he sees, one cannot know enough to trust. To trust is simply to give oneself; the giving is for the
future, for which there is no evidence. And once given, the self cannot be taken back, whatever the evidence.

He sees again the long room, the librarian at her desk, tall shelves of books all around the walls, the double row of heavy oak tables with shaded lamps — a place where two ways met. He sees as from the penumbra above the shelf tops the eight students at the table in the farthest corner of the room: Flora, Hal Jimson, Ted Callahan, Norm Leatherwood, himself, and three others. They are most of Professor Barton Jones's class in the history of the American Revolution. Professor Jones, known beyond his own earshot as Black Bart, is legendary for his freshman history classes, which terrorize even those freshmen who do not take them. The eight at the table are not freshmen, and they are not terrified; but the midterm examination is approaching, and they are properly intimidated. Professor Jones regards the teaching and learning of American history as a matter of desperate emergency. Day after day he has stood in his classroom in his portentous bulk, glowering upon them, thumbing his text with his great thumb, or beating with a pointer for emphasis upon a blackboard perfectly blank. That he loves the people he is teaching about, or some of them, only a little on the critical side of idolatry, and that he is capable of the most generous kindness to those whom he is teaching, they all know. And yet they are intimidated. For they know too the simple ferocity with which he regards their least proclivity to misunderstand or forget. They have been trying to make fluent their understanding of the development and the influence of the mind of Thomas Jefferson. They know that they are going to have to deal convincingly with that on the midterm, and again on the final.

It is late. The room is almost empty. The quiet in the room has begun to communicate with the quiet of the dark trees outside. One by one, Black Bart's little clutch of students disperses, having attained either confidence or resignation. Now only Andy and Flora remain, Andy at the foot of the table and Flora two chairs away. With each departure it has become harder for Andy to think about Thomas Jefferson, and now he is not thinking about Thomas Jefferson at all. He is thinking about Flora, who is still at work, bent over her book and notebook. Andy is not at work, though he is pretending to be. He is looking at his book and thinking about Flora, from time to time raising his eyes over the top of the
book to look at her, to see if external reality lives up to the image in his mind, realizing, each time with a clench in his chest very like pain, that it does. For a college girl of the time, she is plainly dressed: a gray skirt, a white blouse with little buttons, open at the throat, a black unbuttoned cardigan. Except for perhaps a touch of lipstick, she wears no makeup, and needs none, and no jewelry, and needs none. Above her preoccupied face, her dark curls are rejoicing on their own.

He can see nothing wrong with her. She has closed entirely the little assayer's office that he runs in his mind. She seems perfect to him, and there is something about her, something beyond her looks, something that he calls “something about her,” that has unsteadied whatever square yard of ground or floor he happens to be walking or standing on.

Such joy and pain are in him to be so near her, alone with her, permitted to look at her, that he can hardly breathe. It seems to him that apart from her he can no longer breathe. It seems to him that if he does not speak to her he will stop breathing. If he speaks, he knows, everything is going to change, into what he does not know.

He says, hardly above a whisper, his heart crowding so into his throat, “Flora, do you want to come here for just a while?”

She smiles and looks up at him with a look that she will give him again, amused a little, perhaps, but not surprised; it is a look that suggests to him, in his alarm, that she never has been surprised in her life.

He cannot deny her. Her eyes as they were then are on him now, and as they were when he saw them last, hurt and angry, full of tears. He cannot meet her eyes. It has been a long time since that night when she first looked at him, her face open to him, her eyes unguarded. It has been twenty years. He knows their duality in those years, the imperfection of them both, the grief and longing of their imperfection. And yet it is her justice that he feels now. He cannot meet her eyes that give his eyes such pain he cannot raise or open them. He has been wrong. His anger, his loneliness, his selfish grief, all have been wrong. That she, entrusted to him, should ever have wept because of him is his sorrow and his wrong. He sits with his head down, his eyes burning, such fire of shame covering him that he can hardly hold himself in his seat.

He knows she is right. He must have her forgiveness. He must forgive himself. He must forgive the world and his own suffering in it.

He must have his own forgiveness and hers and the children's, and the forgiveness of everyone and every thing from which he has withheld himself.

Now she comes to him again. He can see her again: a bride, dressed all in white, as innocent as himself of the great power they were putting on, frightened and smiling — a gift to him such as he did not know, such as would not be known until the death that they would promise to meet together had been met, and so perhaps never to be known in this world.

The way is open to him now. Thanks, as if not his own, shower down upon him.

“Are you all right?”

It is the young woman in the seat next to him, who to his astonishment is patting his arm.

“Yes. I've been all right before, and I'm all right now.”

Returned from the sky, his shadow attached to him again, Andy unlocks the door of his old pickup, slides the suitcase in across the seat, and climbs again into the aura of his workdays: the combined essences of horse sweat, man sweat, sweated leather, manure, grease and oil, dirt. He opens the windows to let out the trapped hot air, starts the engine, which roars loudly through its leaky muffler, drives to the booth, pays the girl in the glass enclosure, and heads for the interstate, hurrying again, but being careful.

He passes through the swoop of the entrance ramp, and is at once hurtling along in four lanes of roaring traffic that seems to have been speeding there forever. He speeds along with it, being careful, eternity gaping all around him. He drives like a messenger entrusted with a message that at all costs he must deliver. The message, it seems, is only himself. When he arrives he will have some things to say, he will have to say some things, but he does not yet know what.

But he is not trying to think of words now. He is thinking about being careful, the bright crustaceans speeding all around him along the road, each enclosing its tender pulp of flesh, creatures of mud and light, each precious beyond telling for reasons never to be known to the others, already dead to one another in mutual indifference. If one of those particles erred in its flight, then an appalling innovation would occur, an entrance to another world mauled through the very air and light. He is praying to remain in time until what he owes is paid.

The eight lanes of the interstate become six and then four. The traffic thins. The city is behind him now, except for the road itself that is the city's hardened effluent, passing through its long gouge without respect for what was there before it or for what is now alongside it. The road reminds him, as it always has before, of the power of words far removed from what they mean. For the road is a word, conceived elsewhere and laid across the country in the wound prepared for it: a word made concrete and thrust among us.

He knows that he is not yet beyond the spell of the unpeopled language that emanates from conference rooms and classrooms and laboratories and offices and electronic receivers, day after day, all across the land, the deserted speech of a statistical greed, summoning intelligence and materials out of the land to turn them into blights, justifying by an unearthly accounting and speech what decency would never have considered in the first place. There is no place that is not within reach of it and under threat of it. That speech is in Port William too, coming out of the walls of the houses, saying that all is well, all is better than ever, while the life of the place itself frets and fritters away.