from THE THREEPENNY REVIEW
I. FREEDOM
Andy Catlett was a child of two worlds. At his house down at Hargrave, at the river mouth, going by car was taken for granted. But at his Catlett gi andpaients place, in the summer of 1945 and for yet a few more years, there was not a motor-driven implement or vehicle, except for the elderly automobile owned by Jess Brightleaf and his family, who lived down the creek road on the back of the farm. Andys Grandpa Catlett, at eighty-one, less than a year from his death, still rode horseback when he had any distance to go, though now he had to mount from the well-top. The farmwork was still done by the Brightleaf brothers, Jess and Rufus, and by Dick Watson, with teams of mules. They were good mules too, as Grandpa Catlett would have added: mules well conformed and matched, well broke to work.
What he thought of as the town-world of automobiles Andy had known from his first consciousness and was accustomed to, though until the war’s end and a little after, some farm people still drove into Hargrave in horsedrawn wagons and buggies. Eveiy summer one of the last of those, a sweet old woman, as Andys mother called her, with her nice grandson always in his Sunday clothes to come to town, drove her horse and buggy through the streets, peddling jams and jellies, vegetables from her garden, and fresh-picked wild berries.
But with no more deliberate choice than he had invested in the townworld, Andy had given his heart entirely to the older world of what his father, and Andy and his brother Henry also, would always call the
“home place” as it was until the great alteration that followed the war. Until then it belonged to the motorless world of stones, streams, and soil, plants and animals, woods and fields, footpaths and wagon tracks, all of it infused still by his grandpa’s still-excitable passion for good land, good livestock, good horses and mules, and good work.
The town of Hargrave, charmed by its highway and motor connections to everywhere else, thought itself somewhat worldly, but at the home place, with its broad open ridges falling away and steepening to the woods along Bird’s Branch on one side and Catlett’s Fork on the other, Andy felt himself in the presence df the world itself, in the world’s native silence as yet only rarely disturbed by the sound of a machine, its darkness after bedtime unbroken by human light, its daylight as yet unsmudged, its springs and streams still drinkable. It was a creaturely world, substantial and alive. Even the rock ledges of the slopes, even the timbers and planks of the buildings seemed to him to be alive in the vital presence of the place. In those days he simply lived in it and loved it without premonition. Eventually, seeing it as it would become, he would remember with sorrow how it had been.
From the farmers he was kin to, and from others who were his influences, Andy learned that there was a difference between good and bad wprk, and that good work was worthy, even that it was expected, even of him. He wanted to work, to work well, to be a good hand, long before he was capable. By the time he became more 01 less capable of work, he had become capable also of laziness. Because he knew about work, he knew about laziness. Though he could not always resist the temptation to be lazy, he knew that laziness was what it was, and he was embarrassed by it even as he indulged in it.
His father, whom he knew familiarly, but also by reputation as Wheeler Catlett the lawyer, who had his law practice and other duties to attend to, had never been able to wean himself from farming if he had ever tried to do so. As Grandpa Catlett got older, Wheeler had assumed increasing responsibility for the home place. And also, in partnership with his brother Andrew, he had acquired two othei farms, which he carried on alone after Andrew’s death in 1944.
Because he was a lawyer by profession, but a fanner by upbringing and by calling, Wheeler always had farming on his mind. He went to the farms before and after his day at the office, on Saturdays, on Sunday afternoons, and he would sometimes take a day off from the office to
work with the cattle or the sheep, or to break a team or two of young mules. Or he would be up long before daylight, waking his sons to help, to meet a trucker at one of the farms to load a load of spring lambs, or of hogs, or, late in the fall, the year’s crop of finished steers, for the trip to the Bourbon Stockyards in Louisville.
And so the first, the most continuous, and the dearest fabric of Andys consciousness was provided by the home place, its life and work and the creatures, human and not-human, tame and not-tame, who lived there. And the home place belonged to the countryside around Port William and Port William itself, which was the native countiy of both his father’s and his mother’s families.
The home place, his fathers home place, was about four miles, by road, fiom Port William. On one of the far comers of Port William
stood the old house where his mother was bom and grew up. At the houses of their Grandma and Grandpa Catlett and of their Granny and Granddaddy Feltner, Andy and his brother Henry were as freely welcome and as much at home as they were in the house of their parents down at Hargrave, the county seat. But for Andy, the Catlett home place was the focus of his consciousness and affection because, of the three places, it was the most creaturely, the quietest, undisturbed by the comings and goings of even so small a center of trade as Port William. And it was at the home place that he was most free.
As he looks back across many years from his old age to his childhood, it seems to him that there was a time, from when he was eight or nine years old until he was fourteen, when he experienced intervals of a fieedom that was almost absolute. This freedom came to him mostly in the neighborhood of the home place, mostly when he would be alone. Sometimes, when he was with his brother Henry and their friend Fred Brightleaf, they would be sufficiently free, by default of the watchfulness of their elders. They were capable then of exploits beyond the powers of a single boy. But sometimes they would get at cross purposes, and would squander their freedom in arguments over what to do with it. Alone, Andy was free sometimes even of his own plans and intentions.
Grandpa and Grandma Catlett were the older of Andy’s grandparents. He was freest at their place, maybe, because he got over the ground faster than they did, but also because they were not much inclined to worry about him. When he was with them he sometimes tried
their patience, but he liked their company and their talk. Their memories went back almost to the Civil War, to a time long before the internal combustion engine, when the atmosphere of the Port William country would be pierced only occasionally by a steam whistle. For most of their lives the country had been powered almost entirely by the bodily strength of people and of horses and mules, and the people had been dependent for their lives mostly on the country and on their own
knowledge and skills. .
Without intending to do so, Andy learned much from watching his
Catlett grandparents and from listening to them. From his grandpa he gathered knowledge of land husbandry, and of the proper conformation and good management of livestock. These were things that Grandpa Catlett passionately knew, and he enforced them in his grandson’s mind by his naked contempt for anybody ignorant of them. From his grandma he became familiar with the economy of the household: the keeping and care of the old house, the uses and re-uses of all the things that could be saved, and all the arts and refinements by which food made
its passage from the ground to the plate.
From the house and bams and other outbuildings clustered on the hilltop, he passed beyond the supervision of his grandparents into the open fields on the ridges, or down into the woods on the steeper land along the creeks. On these travels he would often be alone, on foot 01 riding Beauty the pony. Sometimes he carried a cane fishing pole and a can of worms to the pond in the back field or to the holes along the creeks, coming home on his lucky days with strings of small perch or catfish that his grandma fried in batter. He might swim in the pond, which he was not supposed to do, or spend a long time watching the tumble bugs rolling their dung balls along the cow paths. He loved the mown fields and the croplands open to the sky. Even more, he loved the woods, where it seemed to him that eveiy life was secret, including his own. Of the secret lives of the woods and the tall grasses he did not leam much, for he lacked the patience to sit still. But the place itself he learned so well that when he went to bed at night, then and foi the rest of his life, he could see it all in his mind. In thought he could follow the paths and the wagon tracks. In thought he could walk over it and see how it looked from every height of the ground.
And there were hours and days when he hung about the men at their work, to watch, to listen, hoping to be given some bit of real work to
do, sometimes proving able actually to help, but more likely than not told to watch himself or get out of the way, or he would be assigned to some drudgery that the men preferred to avoid: go to the spring or well, for instance, to bring back a fresh jug of water. But sometimes when he begged to drive a team, they would hand him the lines and then watch to see that he drove correctly and kept out of danger. And so he learned to do what he was capable of doing, and he imagined himself grown big and strong enough to cut swiftly and accurately with an axe, or to lift great forkfuls of hay onto the loading wagon, or to unload com into the crib, the metal ringing as the mounded ears flew off the scoop.
As the men worked they talked, and their talk was wonderful. They told jokes and stories, some of which were full of grownup knowledge. Ajidy especially liked the talk of Rufus Brightleaf, who had a poetical and profane answer for everything.
One day, coming upon Rufus working alone, Andy asked, “Where’s Jess?”
And Rufus replied without stopping or looking up, “He went to shit and the hogs eat him.”
Or sometimes, When they had had a good day at work and he was feeling fine, Rufus would sing one of the songs of his extensive repertory. He would sing to the tune of “The Great Speckled Bird,” raising his voice over the rattle of chains and wheels, maybe, as he drove a wagon home to the bam:
Did you ever see Sally make wor-ter?
She could pee such a beau-ti-ful stream.
She could pee for a rod and a quar-ter,
And you couldn’t see her a-ass for the steam.
And he spoke of doctors who treated certain troublesome swellings with haiiy poultices that never failed, healings that to Andy seemed veiled in a mysteiy almost biblical.
But rowdy as Rufus was, as he enjoyed being and was gifted to be, he was also a man perhaps of many small regrets and certainly of one great sorrow. His great sorrow was for his son whose death in a logging accident Rufus had witnessed, knowing on the instant that there was “not a thing I could do, not a thing.” He had told Andy of this, as old Andy supposes, because he needed to speak of it to somebody, because he and the boy Andy were friends, and the boy was a listener. Knowing this, Andy was aware also that there were other hard things to know
that came to Rufus’s mind, causing a look to pass like a shadow over his face.
They were artists, the Brightleaf brothers, their work in all its stages beautiful to see. Like artists of other kinds, and like a considerable number of their neighbors in that country at that time, they held befoie themselves an ideal of perfection that every year they approached and every year inevitably failed and yet attempted again the next year, year
after year.
They were of the kind known as “tobacco men,” a title not bestowed upon eveiy grower of tobacco, but only upon the most select, the best. In those days, just after the war when cigarettes had been standard equipment for the men fighting overseas, long before the proof of the unhealthfulness of tobacco, and tobacco’s consequent decline in public favor and in quality, the premium at sale time was absolutely upon excellence.
The crop itself was in every way exceptional. It was intricately and endlessly demanding in the ways it was cultivated, handled, and prepared for market. In the time before tractors and chemicals, the tobacco crop was made by the work of mules and men and, when needed, women, the man-hours far exceeding the mule-hours. All crops then, of course, were dependent on such work, but tobacco was unique in the intensity, skill, and length of the work it required. Its pioduction then, as Andy Catlett now thinks, looking back, involved higher standards and a greater passion for excellence than any other practice of agriculture, excepting only that of the better livestock breeders.
For the Burley tobacco of these parts, the crop year lasted from early spring, when the plant beds were burnt and sowed, until late winter, when at last the crop of the summer before would have been stripped, tied into “hands” according to grade, compacted in presses, loaded, hauled to market, and sold. The requirement for informed attention, care, judgment, and work was unremitting. Some of the work would be more or less solitaiy. But especially at the times of transplanting, harvesting, and stripping, crew work was necessary, and the crew was supplied by family members and hired help, both men and women, and by exchanges of work with neighbors. At these times the difficulty of the work was relieved, in some measure even compensated, by the sort of talk that people do for pleasure, the telling of jokes and stories, and by
dinners at noon that were daily banquets, the food bountiful in variety and quantity, capably prepared, and joyfully eaten. Many a wife then
received and deserved the highest praise: “As good a cook as ever I ate after.”
Jess and Rufus Brightleaf, and Jess preeminently, had a high reputation throughout that part of the country. They put their characterizing maiks upon their crops at every stage. Their finished work on the warehouse floor would be recognized on sight by any bystanders who knew what to look for.
Often when Andy would be riding with his father through the fields, Wheeler would stop the car at some point of vantage to watch Jess Brightleaf at work in a tobacco patch, for Jess was a man worth watching. At his work he moved carefully, thoughtfully, with authority, and yet swiftly and gracefully, surrounded by his own work well done.
And always, a moment or two before putting the car into motion again, Wheeler would say quietly, “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Yes, Andy would say. For it was in fact beautiful, and unforgettably so.
That was a good time for farmers. During the war and for several years after, farmers received prices that were something like just. And this, in expectation, brightened the mood of the work.
From their first year as tenants on the home place in 1939 until their last in 1948, Jess Brightleaf and his wife, by their work and their thrift, saved ten thousand dollars with which they bought a farm of their own.
II IN THE OLD TIME
In his latter years Andy Catlett has tried to use appropriate hesitation and care in speaking, in any way particularly personal, of the diminishment of the world. He dislikes hearing old men, including himself, begin sentences with such phrases as “In my day” or “When 1 was a boy.” But when he thinks of the freedom he enjoyed during the five or six years of his boyhood that were most active and carefree, he recognizes that he is setting up a standard of sorts by the measure of which the world must be seen to have diminished. It has diminished by the standard of a boy’s freedom, but that freedom has diminished necessarily in association with other diminishments, both social and material.
His freedom then had little to do with home or school, but everything to do with a home landscape which was, as he can see now, an
inhabited and a human landscape. On the farm of either set of his grandparents, he could walk within a quarter or half an hour from some spot in the woods where he imagined that no human had ever stood before to places where he knew he walked in the tracks of elders and companions, some ol whom had died in his own time.
He could walk as quickly, moreover, from solitude that had lasted as long as needed into the company of men and women at work, who were doing work that they did well and even liked, that they expected to continue to do for the rest of their lives, in a place or a part of the country that they did not expect to leave. They were leading lives that were capable and settled. This was mainly true even of Jess Brightleaf s hired hand, Corky Dole, whom Jess paid off eveiy Saturday night and bailed out of jail every Monday morning. They knew their work. They did not dither. It was a settled culture, and there was a certain freedom for a child in that alone.
It was hardly a perfect place or time. Like any of the past, it was not a time that a person of good sense would consider “going back to. But that time, to the end of the war and a while after in that part of the world, had certain qualities, certain goodnesses, that might have been cherished and enlarged, but instead were disvalued and discarded as
of no worth.
Its chief quality can be suggested by the absence from it of a vocabulary that in the last half of the twentieth centuiy and the beginning of the twenty-first would become dominant in the minds of nearly everybody. Nobody then and there was speaking of “alternatives” or “alternative lifestyles,” of “technology” or “technological progress,” of “mobility” or “upward mobility.” The life that Andy knew then in Port William and its neighborhood was not much given to apologizing for itself. People did not call themselves, even to themselves, “just a fanner” or “just a housewife.” It required talk of an infinitude of choices endlessly available to eveiybody, essentially sales talk, to embitter the work of husbandly and wifery, to suggest the possibility always elsewhere of something better, and to make people long to give up whatever they had for the promise of something they might have—at whatever cost, at whatever loss. You might of course have heaid somebody wonder toward the end of a long, hard, hot day of work, “You reckon you’ll ever get anywhere without changing jobs?’ But that was weariness and wit such as might come from anybody at any work in the midst of the hardest of it. You might have heard the same self-critical
humoi from somebody who had danced or coon-hunted half the night before a hard workday. Andy has no record of this time except his memory, but he does not remember that anybody who spoke so of
changing jobs ever spoke of the job he wanted to change to.
Rather than alternative jobs or lives, the ordinary talk in barns or at low ends ran to the best remembered or imagined versions of things that were familiar: harvest dinners, capable mules or horses or hounds or bird dogs, days or nights of hunting or fishing, good crop years and crops, good days and good hands. Or they told jokes or stories in which there was an implicit recognition and acceptance of the human lot.
Such settled and decided people are parts of the world, as the unresting, never-satisfied seekers of something better can never be. The boy who wandered away alone into a new world newly discovered by himself could return to a familiar world communally known by people he knew who were at work or at rest in it. And in both worlds he was free. He was free not only to ramble at will and at large when he was beyond family supervision or had not been put to work, but he was free also in the company of Dick Watson, the Brightleafs, and any other grownups, who treated him as a child only when he was in the way, in danger, or in need of correction. Otherwise, they made no exceptions. They spoke to him as they spoke to one another, as a familiar.
Home to him, then, was a home countiyside, one place with the limits of one place but limitlessly self-revealing and interesting, limitlessly to be known and loved. It was precisely in that limitlessness that he was free, a limitlessness inherent in the nature, the “genius,” of the one place, free then of the litter of alternatives.
This was a freedom undoubtedly more apparent and available to a boy than to a man. But Andy would remember it. It would be the enabling condition and the incentive of his choice finally to leave off his wanderings and come home, to make his own life indistinguishable from the life of his place. And this was his choice, by the terms and standards of his time, to become “odd,” as one of his most reticent old friends told him at last that he had chosen to be.
But the young Andy Catlett was free in another way that he did not know when he was young, that he has learned in all the time he has spent in growing old. In those years he thinks of now as the years of his freedom he was free of a fear that has since grown greater in eveiy year
he has lived. He was free of the fear of the human destruction of the world, a freedom that no child will again enjoy for generations to come, if ever again.
If Andy’s regret for the loss of the old creaturely world of Port William in his childhood were only nostalgic or sentimental, then it would be merely a private feeling, properly to be ended by his death. His regret is considerable and worth talking about because it is applied to real losses, tangible and significant, some of which are measurable: the loss of the economic integrity and neighborly collaboration of rural communities, the loss of independent livelihoods, the loss of topsoil, the toxicity of air and water, the destruction by mining of whole mountains, the destruction of land and water ecosystems—so much destruction in the interests of machines, chemicals, and fuels to replace the people who have been displaced, by the same interests, from the home places of the world.
We can brush away the past, as we like to do and feel superior in doing, but the nightmare of Andy’s old age is to know, wide awake, the destruction of many and of much not only pleasing and desirable, but of lasting value if they had lasted, and, for all we can yet know, necessary.
And suppose, to elaborate the nightmare, that we had decided even as late as 1950 to grant a proper stewardship and husbandry to the natural world. Suppose we had refused to countenance the industrialization of everything from agriculture to medicine to education to religion. Suppose we had not tolerated the transformation, in the official and then the public mind, of vocation to “a job,” which is to say the transformation of the fanner, the tradesman, even the sharecropper (all subsistence-based) to an “employee” helplessly dependent on an employer and “the economy” and interchangeable with any other employee. Suppose we had not stood for the displacement of people who once functioned as parts of the creaturely world, working members of their places—the quality of their work always, of course, in question to the “labor pool” and the placelessness of modem life.
Andy by now has lived and watched long enough to know the 1 eality of the ongoing human destruction of the world. He knows that he himself is involved inescapably in its destruction. But he can remember, to further elaborate his nightmare, wandering in the woods or working in the fields early in the year, when he drank from wet-weather springs, the water cool and tasting of the ground, with no thought of chemical contamination. His experience of that time was decisive for him. It was
luck, perhaps a blessing. It was an unaccountable gift, for the place and the way of life he learned then was in fact a sort of island: a small, fragile, threatened order in the midst of a world war and all its dire portent.
Freedom, then, existed. Andy knew so from his early travels and his early work in his home countiy. Along the way he learned too that freedom, when it happened, was an interval with responsibilities at either end. He knew long before he understood, or could choose to act on the knowledge, that neither freedom nor responsibility existed alone, or could exist alone veiy long, but that each depended on the other.
He was late in acting on that interdependability, partly maybe because of school, but certainly because he would remain a boy for a long time, a boy either in deference to the authority of grownups or in rebellion against it. His early experience of freedom, anyhow, prepared him poorly for school, and for prolonged enclosure of any kind. School, before it had taught him much else, taught him to be a critic, though it did not intend to do so, and though “critic” was not even a word he knew. He was in school when he made his first conscious objection to something he read in a book.
He read in a book (maybe it was a reader; maybe it was from the small library the teacher kept in her classroom) a story of two children, brother and sister, who visited their grandparents’ farm where there was a wonderful woodland. The children played happily among the trees. They had a pet crow and a pet squirrel that accompanied them on their visits to the woods—and this, to Andy, was a charming thought, as was the thought of the beautiful woodland itself, as was the thought of the woodlands around Port William.
And then, without explaining why, the stoiy told how the grandparents sold the trees to a logger, who cut them down. The logger cut them all down, every one of them. In proof there was a picture of the boy and girl standing in a field of stumps, and the crow and the squirrel perched on a stump apiece. The stoiy then explained that, though the children and the crow and the squirrel would miss the woods, this was really not too sad because the woods would grow back again.
Until then, Andy had thought that anything printed in a book was true. And so it was a considerable shock to him when he realized that he knew—though he could not then have said how he knew: he knew from intuition and experience; maybe he knew, Heaven help us, by premonition—that the story had told a lie. The stoiy was in fact too sad,
it was a story of great loss and sorrow, and it could say nothing to make itself happy. To know that grownups, even writers and teachers, were questionable did not smooth Andy’s way through his formal education.
III. A TIME OUT OF TIME
The old man, Andy Catlett, does not believe that the mind of any young creature is a blank slate. But he knows without doubt that young Andy Catlett, in the years of his boyhood, was bping formed. He was being in-formed. He was being shaped, and this was his dearest education, as a creature of his home place, his home country, by his growing knowledge of it. He was sometimes deliberately taught by his grandparents, his father, and the other elders who in one way or another were gathered around him. He was learning by their example, instruction, and insistence the ways of livestock, of handwork, of all in the life of farming that would make him, beyond anything else he might become, a countryman. But he was also shaping himself, in-forming himself, by knowledge of the country that he got for himself or that the country itself impressed upon him.
jji the winter of 1947, after Grandpa Catlett died, Grandma Catlett wintered in a room in the Broadfield Hotel down in Hargrave. And then, early in April, when Elton Penn came in his truck to load her and her spool bed and her bureau and her rocking chair to take her home, Andy loaded himself and his bundle of clothes and books and went home with her. Now, as Andy thought, as she allowed and maybe encouraged him to think, her ability to live at home depended on him. He took a deep pleasure in the sense of responsibility that filled him then, and he was steadily dutiful and industrious. Grandma was cooking as always on the wood stove, and in the mornings, sometimes all day, they still needed fires for warmth. Andy kept the kitchen supplied with firewood, and carried in coal for the stove in the living room. When the cow freshened, Andy did the milking, night and morning. Later, Grandma said, they would need a garden, of course, and Andy would need to help with that.
On school day mornings, after he had done his chores and eaten breakfast, he got himself out to the road in time to catch the school bus. But he had a little initiative in this. Because he was considered an occasional or temporary rider of the bus, he apparently was not officially expected by the driver. And so if he got to the road ahead of the bus, he would put up his thumb. If he failed to catch a ride for himself, then
he rode to school on the bus. This was a freedom he cherished, and he told nobody about it. The people who gave him rides also apparently kept his secret. He shirked his lessons, antagonized his teachers, stored up trouble for himself. On days of no school, as long as he showed up for meals and did his chores, and as soon as he was out of sight of the house, he was free.
One warm spring Saturday afternoon, when he had fished his way from pool to pool down Bird’s Branch and had caught nothing, he came to a large, dry, flat rock. He propped his fishing pole against a tree and lay down on the rock. The rock was unusually large and flat and smooth, and he felt that something should be done about it. And so he stretched out on it for some time, looking up into the treetops of the woods. He was no longer on the home place then, but had crossed onto the more or less abandoned back-end of a farm that fronted in the river valley. He was at the mouth of a tributary dell known as Steep Hollow, whose slopes you could not climb standing up. The woods there was an old stand of big trees. Whether because of the steepness of the ground or the dubious benevolence of neglect, the stand had never been cut. But now, remembering it, he is obliged to remember also that a few years later it was cut, and is forever gone.
The woods floor was covered with flowers, and the tree leaves were just coming out. Andys eyes were quick in those days, and he could see everything that was happening among the little branches at the top of the woods. He saw after a while, by some motion it made way up in a white oak and not far from the leafy globe of its nest, a young gray squirrel that, except for its tail, appeared to be no bigger than a chipmunk.
The squirrel was just loitering about, in no hurry, and Andy studied it carefully. The thought of catching and having something so beautiful, so small, so cunningly made, possessed him entirely. He wanted it as much as he had ever wanted anything in his life. He knew perfectly that he could not catch a mature squirrel. But this one being so young and inexperienced, he thought he had half a chance.
The tree was one of the original inhabitants of the place. It had contained a fair sawlog in the time of Boone and the Long Hunters. By now it was far too big to be embraced and shinned up by a boy, or a man either, and its first limb was unthinkably high. But well up the slope from the old tree was a young hickory whose first branch Andy could
shinny up to, and whose top reached well into the lower branches of the oak. Andy was maybe a better than average climber, and he had spent a fair portion of his life in trees. He was small for his age, and was
secure on branches too flimsy for a bigger boy.
He went up the hickory and then into the heavy lower limbs of the oak. The climbing was harder after that. Sometimes he could step from one thick limb to another up the trunk. Sometimes he had to make his way out to the smaller branches of one limb, from there into the smaller branches of the one above, and from there back to the trunk again. Finally he was in the top of the tree, a hundred or so feet from the ground. Just above him was the little squirrel, more beautiful, more perfect, up close than it had looked from the ground. The fur of its back and sides was gray but touched, brushed over, with tones of yellowish red and reddish yellow, so that against the light it seemed surrounded with a small glow, and the fur of its underside was immaculately white. Its finest features were its large, dark eyes alight with intelligence and the graceful plume of its tail as long as its body.
Andy knew with a sort of anticipatory ache in the inward skin of his hands and fingers what it would feel like to catch and hold this lovely creature and look as closely at it as he wished. He climbed silently, and slowly from one handhold and foothold to another, up and out the little branches that held him springily and strongly until he was within an easy arm’s reach of the squirrel. He reached almost unmovingly out, and at the approach of his hand, the squirrel leapt suddenly and easily to another branch. It did not go far, but the small branch it was now on belonged to a different limb from the one Andy was on. And so he had to go back to the trunk and start again.
About the same thing happened for a second time. The almost-catchable little squirrel waited, watching Andy with a curiosity ol its own, until it was almost caught. This time it ran a little farther out on its limb and leapt onto a branch of another tree, another oak. Now Andy had to climb a long way down to find a limb that crossed to the second tree, make his way out to limbs still affording handholds and footholds, limber enough to lean under his weight until he could catch a limb as strong in the other tree, swing over, go to the trunk of that tree and up and out to the highest branches, where again he almost caught the squirrel.
That was the way it happened so many times he lost count. The squirrel seemed to wait for him, watching him with interest, imaginably even with amusement, taking its rest while Andy laboriously made his ap
pioach, and then at the last second, without apparent fear, seemingly at its leisure, leaping beyond reach, never far, but always too far to be easily approached again. In fact, Andy and the squirrel must have been at about the same stage of their respective lives: undoubting, ignorant, fearless, curious, happy in the secret altitudes of the treetops and the little branches, neither of them at all intimidated by the blank blue sky above the highest branches, the outer boundaiy of both their lives.
It was a time out of time, when time was suspended in constant presence, without past or future. It began to move again only when the squirrel finally leapt onto the snag of a dead tree and disappeared into an old woodpecker hole.
And then it was late in the day, past sundown, and Andy was still high up among the tall trees. He had not thought of getting back to the ground for a long time, and from where he had got to he was a long time finding a way. The trunks were too large to grip securely and were limbless from too high up. He finally made his way to a grapevine, and slid down it slowly to ease the friction on his hands and legs. When he stood finally on the ground again, it seemed at first to rock a little as if he had stepped down into a boat. He was sweating, his hands and arms and legs bark-burnt and stinging, and he was a long way from home. He recovered his fishing pole, now deprived of its charm and the sense of adventure he usually invested in it, and started back.
When the screen door slammed behind him and he stepped into the back porch, his grandma opened the kitchen door.
“Where,” she said, drawing the word out, “on God’s green earth have you been?”
“Fishing,” he said, which was true as far as it went.
But he was late. He was too late. It was getting dark. In coming back so late he had betrayed not only her trust but his own best justification for staying out there in the free country with her and not in town.
“Oh,” he said, “I’ll go milk right now. I’ll hurry. I won’t be long.”
She said, “I did it.”
So while he had been up in the tree tops with the squirrel, forgetful of the time of day and where he was, she alone had done the evening chores and milked the cow. She said no more. She left him, as she would have put it, to stew in his own juice, which he did. He would not forget again, and he would not forget the lesson either.
Nor would he forget for the rest of his life his happiness of that af
temoon. What would stay with him would not be his frustration, his failure to catch the squirrel, but the beauty of it and its aerial life, and of his aerial life while he tried to catch it among the small, supple branches that sprang with his weight as if almost but not quite he might have leapt from one to another like the squirrel, almost but not quite
flying.
He had not wondered how, if he had caught the squirrel, he would have made his way back to the ground. It would take him several days to get around to thinking of that. The heights of that afternoon he had achieved as a quadruped. From where he had got to he could not have climbed down with his two feet and only one hand. If he had caught the squirrel, he would have had to turn it loose.
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