Remembering (9 page)

Though he did not think of her, the words come to him in his grandmother's voice. They breathe themselves out of him in her voice and leave him empty, empty as if of his very soul. As though some corrosive light has flashed around him, he stands naked to time and distance, empty, and he has no thought.

He hears the sound of hoofbeats approaching on a gravel road. It is dusk. He sees a little boy standing barefoot on the stones of a driveway leading up to the paintless walls of an old house, about which the air seems tense with the memory of loss and dying not long past, of weeping and gnashing of teeth. The swifts, oblivious, circle in long sweeps over the roof of the house and hover over its chimneys. The boy watches the swifts, thinking of the sounds of rifle fire and of cannon, of the running of many horses, and of the dead sons of the house, so much older than he, so long gone, that he will think of them always as his father's sons, not as his brothers. He hears the nearer hoofbeats too, and he waits.

They turn in at the gate; he turns to look now, and sees that it is a good high-headed bay horse. The man riding the horse is square-built and has a large beard. The boy likes the man's eyes because they look straight at him and do not change and do not look away. The man stops beside the boy and crosses his hands over the pommel of the saddle.

“My boy, might your sister be home?”

“She ain't ever anyplace else, hardly.”

“I see.” The man thinks while he talks, and before, and after. “Well, can you show me where to put my horse?”

“Yessir.”

“Do you want to ride?”

“Yessir.” He does want to ride, for he loves the horse, and perhaps the man too.

The man reaches down with his hand. “Well, take a hold and give a jump.”

The boy does as he is told, and is swung up behind the saddle.

“I'm Ben Feltner. Who are you?”

“Jack Beechum.”

“That's what I thought.”

Ben Feltner clucks to the horse.

“You came to see my sister?”

“Your sister is Nancy Beechum?”

“Yessir.”

“Well, I came to see her.”

That would have been 1868, and then and thus was the shuttle flung, for the first time in Andy's knowledge, through the web of his making. Beyond that meeting, Mat, his grandfather, wakens, crying, in his cradle, and Bess, Andy's mother, in hers, and Andy in his, and Andy's own children in theirs: Betty, named Elizabeth for his mother, and Marcie, named Marcellus for his great-grandfather Catlett, born four years later than Jack Beechum into the same place and life.

Though the light is still gray on the pier and over the water, a few windows are shining on the hill above Sausalito. Weak sunlight, while Andy watches, begins to color the slopes of other hills north of the bridge, whitening the drifts of fog that lie in their hollows.

A gull is walking on the parapet nearby, crying loudly, “Ahhh! Ahhh!” It comes so close that Andy can see its bright eye and the clear bead of seawater quivering on its beak.

“What?” Andy says.

The gull says, “Ahhh!”

A sailboat passes, its sail unraised, its engine running slowly and quietly. The tug has met its ship and they are starting in.

Again hoofbeats approach him over gravel, and he sees an old man coming on horseback through the same gate through the mist and slow rain of a morning in early March. Except for the strength of the light, the warming air, and a certain confidence in the surrounding birdsong, it still looks like the dead of winter. The pastures are brown, the trees bare. The house, though, is painted, and the whole place, which in 1868 looked almost forgotten, has obviously been remembered again and for a long time kept carefully in mind. It is seventy-six years later. The old man on the horse wears neatly a canvas hunting coat frayed at the cuffs and a felt hat creased in the crown by long wear and darkened by the rain. The horse is a rangy sorrel gelding, who, by the look of his eye, requires a
master, which, by his gait and deportment, is what he has on his back. As he rides, the old man is looking around.

He goes up beside the house and through the gate into the barn lot and into the barn.

“Whoa,” he says. “Hello.”

“Hello,” a voice says from the hayloft.

There are footsteps on the loft floor and then a scrape, and a large forkful of hay drops onto the barn floor.

The horse snorts and lunges backward. The old man sits him straight up and unsurprised. “Whoa,” he says, and with hand and heel forces the horse back up into the tracks he stood in before. With a little white showing in his eye, breathing loud, the horse stands in them, quivering. He does not offer to move again.

A young man comes down the loft ladder. “I'm sorry. I didn't hear your horse.”

“It's all right.”

The old man waits, and the young man comes up by the horse's left shoulder, laying a hand on his neck. “Whoa, boy.”

“I'm Marce Catlett. I'm your neighbor. I've come to make your acquaintance.”

The old man reaches down his hand and the young man reaches up and takes it.

“I'm Elton Penn, Mr. Catlett.”

Each knows the other by reputation, and each looks for the marks of what he has heard.

The old man sees that the young man's clothes are old, well mended, and well worn. He sees that he has a straight, clear look in his eye. He sees the good team of horses standing in their stalls, and their harness properly hung up.

The young man sees the respect the sorrel horse has for his rider, and vice versa, the excellent fettle of the horse, the old saddle and bridle well attended, and he recognizes the exacting workman, the man of careful satisfactions whom he has heard about.

“I think you know Wheeler Catlett,” Marce says. “He's my boy. He thinks a lot of you.”

“Yessir. I think a lot of him.”

Elton stands with his hand on the horse's neck. Marce sits looking over Elton's and the horse's heads into the barn.

“Well, Jack Beechum was my neighbor all my life.”

He looks back down at Elton and considers and says, “Jack Beechum is a good man. He's been a good one. None better.”

“That's what I hear.” Elton says, “I haven't met Mr. Beechum yet.”

“Well, when you do, you'll know him for what he is. You'll see it in him.”

Now, as by agreement, they turn and look out across the lot at the house, Elton no longer touching the horse.

“I've got two grandboys. Wheeler's. They'll be over to bother you, I expect, now that the weather's changing. You won't offend me if you make 'em mind.”

“Yessir.”

Elton's wife, Mary, comes out the kitchen door with a dishpan of water, crosses the yard, and flings the dirty water over the pasture fence. She comes back, stepping in a hurry, waves to the two of them, smiles, and goes back into the kitchen. Marce has watched her attentively, going out and coming back, and out of the corner of his eye Elton has watched him watching.

“Son, you've got a good woman yonder. She'll cook a man a meal of vittles before you know it.”

“Thank you, sir.”

They are again silent a moment, and then Marce says, “Well, you'll do all right. Go ahead.”

Without any signal from Marce that Elton sees or hears, the horse steps back into the swift, easy stride that brought him.

“Come back, Mr. Catlett.”

“I will that.”

“Old man Marce Catlett will neighbor with you, if you treat him right,” Elton had been told before he moved. It proved true. Marce and Dorie Catlett and Elton and Mary Penn were neighbors, and in that neighborhood, Andy and Henry grew familiar and learned much.

It did not last long as it was. It was the end of something old and long
that Andy was born barely in time to know. Old Jack Beechum was already gone from his place. In two years Marce was dead, the horse and mule teams were going, the tractors and other large machines were coming, the old ways were ending.

After Marce's death, Andy came to stay with his grandmother, to help her and to be company for her. He was a restless boy, and to keep him occupied, she gave him all the eggs that her dominicker hens laid outside the henhouse. After school, he searched out the hidden nests in the barns and outbuildings, and put the eggs a few at a time into a basket in a closet. Through that early spring of Marce's death, the grieved old woman and the eager boy talked of his project. He would save the eggs until he had enough, and then sell them, and with the money buy a setting of eggs of another kind from a neighbor. “Buff Orpingtons,” Dorie said. “They're fine chickens. You can raise them to frying size and sell them, and then you'll have some money to put in the bank.”

“And next year we'll raise some more.”

“Maybe we will.”

The evening comes when they put the eggs under a setting hen in the henhouse. He is holding the marked eggs in a basket, and Dorie is taking them out one by one and putting them under the hen.

“You know, you can just order the chickens from a factory now, and they send them to you through the mail.”

“But this is the
best
way, ain't it?” He hopes it is, for he loves it.

“It's the cheapest. And the oldest. It's been done this way a long time.”

“How long, do you reckon?”

“Oh, forever.”

She puts the last egg under the hen, and strokes her back as she would have stroked a baby to sleep. Out the door he can see the red sky in the west. And he loves it there in the quiet with her, doing what has been done forever.

“I hope we always do it forever,” he says.

She looks down at him, and smiles, and then suddenly pulls his head against her. “Oh, my boy, how far away will you be sometime, remembering this?”

The wind blows his tears back like the earpieces of a pair of spectacles. The bridge has begun to shine. He turns and sees that the sun has risen and is making a path toward him across the water.

He is held, though he does not hold. He is caught up again in the old pattern of entrances: of minds into minds, minds into place, places into minds. The pattern limits and complicates him, singling him out in his own flesh. Out of the multitude of possible lives that have surrounded and beckoned to him like a crowd around a star, he returns now to himself, a mere meteorite, scorched, small, and fallen. He has met again his one life and one death, and he takes them back. It is as though, leaving, he has met himself already returning, pushing in front of him a barn seventy-five feet by forty, and a hundred acres of land, six generations of his own history, partly failed, and a few dead and living whose love has claimed him forever. He will be partial, and he will die; he will live out the truth of that. Though he does not hold, he is held. He is grieving, and he is full of joy. What is that Egypt but his Promised Land?