Remembering (19 page)

By the time Andy and Flora returned from Chicago, the Port William schoolhouse had become a “rest home,” where the old, the useless, the helpless, and the unwanted sat like monuments, gaping into the other-worldly light of a television set. There, within two years of their return, Jarrat Coulter lay like a man carved on a tomb, only breathing, a forlorn contraption living on fluids needled into his veins. Andy would go from time to time, as the others did, and stand by his bed and gaze upon his wasting body, the derelict hands lying useless on the sheet. All of them went from time to time, duty bound, to stand beside him and watch him breathe indomitably on, and leave and never speak, to be troubled afterwards by what — whatever it was — they had not said.

Only Burley had the courage or the grace to make what seemed a visit. He did not stand by Jarrat and look. He went in and sat down as though invited to do so, and put his hat on his lap. And he talked. He talked without embarrassment either at his brother's silence or at the presence of anybody else who might be there. He spoke into the silence where Port William's children had studied and played, and into Jarrat's silence. Sometimes, he would tell things that nobody on earth but Jarrat would have understood, if Jarrat was understanding them.

After he had said whatever Jarrat might be interested in hearing, he would get up and put on his hat. “Well, I've got to go. But I'll be back.” He would lay his hand that was still brown and hard on his brother's pale, softening one. “Don't worry. You don't have to worry about a thing. Just rest and be easy in your mind.”

In the river valley Andy takes the slower Port William road, and the pickup begins to move with a different motion, approaching the shape of the country. It moves now more nearly as eyes or feet might move, curving along the bases of the hills, not like a pencil point along the edge of a ruler. And Andy's body begins to live again in the familiar sways and pressures of his approach to home. His own place becomes palpable to him. Those he loves, living and dead, are no longer mere thoughts or memories, but presences, approachable and near.

He turns up Katy's Branch, going ever slower now, following the road up along the creek in the shade of the overarching trees. He comes to his mailbox and turns into his own lane up Harford Run, the road hardly even a cut now but just a double track leveled along the valley side under the trees.

Now they are coming to him again, those who have brought him here and who remain — not in memory, but near to memory, in the place itself and in his flesh, ready always to be remembered — so that the place, the present life of it, resonates within time and within times, as it could not do if time were all that it is living in.

Now Mat runs up the bank toward Margaret, who is running to meet him with her arms open; they meet and hold each other at last.

Wheeler, standing on the bottom step of the coach as it sways and slows finally to a standstill at the station at Smallwood, puts his hand into his father's hand and steps down.

Andy pushes open the door of the old house, and steps in behind Flora. They stop and stand looking at the wallpaper hanging in droops and scrolls, at the broken windowpane, at the phoebe's nest on the mantelpiece, and Flora says, “Oh, good!”

When he has driven up the slope in front of the house, and back alongside the house into the barn lot, and stopped the pickup in front of the barn, Andy switches off the engine, and sits still while the five-and-a-half-hour, two-thousand-mile uproar of his approach loosens from him and begins to withdraw like a long swarm of bees. When it has gone away, and the evening quiet of the place has returned to it and to him, he opens the door and gets out. An old black and white Border collie who has been standing beside the truck, waiting for him, now walks up and lifts his head under Andy's hand.

“You here all by yourself?”

The dog wags his tail appreciatively, and Andy strokes his head.

“Where is everybody?”

The evening chores, he sees, are done. The two jersey cows are loafing in the shade by the spring, their udders slack, and Flora's car is gone. He can hear the somnolent drumming of a woodpecker off in the woods, and from somewhere on the hillside above the barn the bleating of a sheep.

He takes his suitcase out of the cab and walks to the house and across the back porch, through the screen door, and into the kitchen, a pretty room, bright and quiet. He loves this quiet and he stands still in it, breathing it in. There is a note to him on the table; after looking at it for a minute or two, he goes over and reads it:

With her note in his hand, standing in her place, in her absence, he feels the strong quietness with which she has cared for him and waited for him all through his grief and his anger. He feels her justice, her great dignity in her suffering of him. He feels around him a blessedness that he has lived in, in his anger, and did not know. He is walking now, from room to room, breathing in the smell of the life that the two of them have made, and that she has kept. He walks from room to room, entering
each as for the first time, leaving it as if forever. And he is saying over and over to himself, “I am blessed. I am blessed.”

After a while he returns to the kitchen. He takes his suitcase to his and Flora's bedroom and unpacks it and puts it away, and walks again. He can no more sit down than if he has no knees. He does not know when Flora and the children will be back, and he sees that he cannot wait for them in the house. He puts on his work clothes and starts out the back door. And then — the thought of mortality returning to him; he must take no chance — he goes back to the kitchen table and beneath Flora's note writes:

The cows are still at the spring, still in the leisure of their drinking. They look at him and look away, knowing him. To them he is no one who has been far away, but only himself, whom they know, who is here. He takes a tin can from the ledge above the spring outlet and dips and drinks. And then he walks out into the pasture on the hillside.

The air is cooling now, the shadows growing long. He is walking upward along the face of the slope, following the slanting sodded groove of what was once a wagon road — before that perhaps a buffalo trace — that went from Katy's Branch to Port William. Where the road enters the woods, he opens a gate and goes through.

When he fenced the woods to keep the stock out, Elton asked him, “Why did you do that?”

“For the flowers,” Andy said, giving one of his reasons.

Elton looked at him to see if he meant it. “Well. All right,” he said.

The almost-disappearing road slants on up along Harford Run, through the woods, through the Harford Place and the others beyond, for perhaps a mile, until finally it comes out of the woods again on a high part of the upland near Port William.

The evening is quiet; there is no wind, and no sound from the stream that here, above the spring, is dry. The woods is filling with shadows. Everything seems expectant, waiting for nightfall, though the sky is still sunlit. Andy walks slowly upward along the road until he is among the larger trees and the woods has completely enclosed him. And here finally he comes to rest. He finds a level place at the foot of a large oak, and sits down, and then presently lies down. A heavy weariness has come over him. For a long time he has not slept a restful sleep, and he has journeyed a long way.

But the sleep that comes to him now is not restful. He has entered the dark, and it is such a darkness as he has never known. All that is around him and all that he is has disappeared into it. He sees nothing, remembers nothing, knows nothing except a hopeless longing for something he does not know, for which he does not know a name. Everything has been taken away, and the dark around him is full of the sounds of crying and of tearing asunder. If it is a sleep that he is in, he cannot awaken himself. Once he was nothing, and did not know it; and then, for a little while, it seems, he was something, to the sole effect that now he knows that he is nothing. And somewhere there is a lovely something, infinitely desirable, of which he cannot recall even the name. What he is, all that he is, amid the outcries in the dark and the rendings, is a nothing possessed of a terrible self-knowledge.

But now from outside his hopeless dark sleep a touch is laid upon his shoulder, a pressure like that of a hand grasping, and his form shivers and forks out into the darkness, and is shaped again in sense. Breath and light come into him. He feels his flesh enter into mind, mind into flesh. He turns, puts his knee under him, stands, and, though dark to himself, is whole.

He is where he was, in the valley, on the hillside under an oak, but the place is changed. It is almost morning and a gray light has made its way among the trees. The freshness of dew is on everything. And it is springtime, for the dry stream has begun to flow. The early flowers are in bloom, pale, at his feet. Everywhere, near and far away, there is birdsong. The birds sing a joy that is theirs and his, and neither theirs nor his.

When he has stood and looked around, he sees that a man, dark as shadow, is walking away from him up the hill road, not far ahead. Andy
knows that, once, this man leaned and looked at him face-to-face and touched him, but now, walking ahead of him, is not going to look back.

He hurries to follow the dark man, who is almost out of sight and who he understands must be his guide, for the place, though it is familiar to him, is changed. Though he can see ahead to where his guide walks, the ground underfoot is dark, seeming not to exist until his foot touches it. He follows the dark man along the narrow ancient track in the almost dark, as when he was a boy he followed older hunters in the woods at night, Burley Coulter and Elton Penn and the Rowanberrys, men who knew the way, who
were
the way of the places they led him through.

The trees on the hillside are large and old, as if centuries have passed since Andy was last here. It is growing rapidly lighter. Daylight is in the sky now, and against it, still in shadow, Andy can see the small new foliage of the great trees, the white and yellow and blue of the flowers, and birdsong fills the sky over the woods with a joy that welcomes the light and is like light.

And now above and beyond the birds' song, Andy hears a more distant singing, whether of voices or instruments, sounds or words, he cannot tell. It is at first faint, and then stronger, filling the sky and touching the ground, and the birds answer it. He understands presently that he is hearing the light; he is hearing the sun, which now has risen, though from the valley it is not yet visible. The light's music resounds and shines in the air and over the countryside, drawing everything into the infinite, sensed but mysterious pattern of its harmony. From every tree and leaf, grass blade, stone, bird, and beast, it is answered and again answers. The creatures sing back their names. But more than their names. They sing their being. The world sings. The sky sings back. It is one song, the song of the many members of one love, the whole song sung and to be sung, resounding, in each of its moments. And it is light.