The streets filled as far as you could see; past the oak grove one way, down toward the river another way. Most of the faces were black, the black bulk accented here and there by a white face. There were dogs in the crowd, too, and children as well as adults.
They had come to see the Old Man off, to “say good-bye” to the Cap’n. The only face among his kinry that was missing was mine. I had said good-bye to him; he had said good-bye to me. I didn’t want it all confused with a lot of mourners. I went and got the oars from under the house and rowed over to Battery Island. There didn’t figure to be anything on it but birds.
There is no way, absolutely no way, to describe the desolation I felt. The Old Man was gone, and I was fifteen years old and alone without a prop in a world that was too big for me without the Old Man. I rowed the boat hard, trying not to think of him dead, but not succeeding. Then I thought of what had sent me onto the water—his old axiom that a boat and open water would come pretty close to solving any problems you had at the time, if only because water cleared your head, fishing calmed your nerves, “and you can always eat the fish.” I suppose that some people would think it odd that I skipped the Old Man’s funeral services and went fishing. The Old Man would not have thought it odd.
I noticed that from force of habit I had brought the cast net, and there were hand lines in the locker. I drove the boat over into the shallows, jammed her into the bank with an oar, and looked about the marsh for some schools of shrimp. In a bit I had bait, and I pushed her free of the beach and went out to a fishing hole I knew, where there were plenty of croakers and often sea trout. I anchored, baited the line, and proceeded to fish. What I caught I cannot say. I assume I caught something. I usually caught something on these expeditions.
“March is an awful month,” the Old Man used to say. “Best you use it for remembering.” So I sat in the boat and methodically fished, and remembered.
“I ain’t going to leave you much,” he had said, when it got bad toward the end. “This sickness cost an awful lot of money. The house is mortgaged, and there’s a note in the bank, and the depression is still on. There won’t be much left but some shotguns and a cast net and a boat. And, maybe, a memory.”
All of a sudden the sun came out in my head. What did he mean, he wasn’t going to leave me much? Who was kidding whom? I was the richest boy in the world. Croesus was a beggar alongside me. I had had fifteen years of the Old Man, and nearly everything he knew he’d taught me. I started to take a check on my assets.
First he had raised me as a man among men, without condescension, without patronizing. He had allowed me companionship on an equal basis with himself and with his men friends. He had given me pride and equality. He had taught me compassion and manners and tolerance, especially toward the less fortunate, white or black. That sea of black faces which appeared in the street had not heard desegregation or any other “ation” except starvation. They came because they loved the Old Man, their friend. All but the younger ones had been born of slaves.
The preachers, white and black, had been in the crowd. And so had the bums. These were the hairier types who had taken a part in my education, the drinkers and the fighters and the loafers. They were there, together with the city fathers, and the Coast Guard boys, and the Pilots’ Association, plus the relatives and the hound dogs. I reckoned that the Old Man must have had something that rubbed off on people, including me.
What else was there?
Well, he had given me the vast gift of reading. He had made reading a form of sport, like hunting was a sport and fishing was a sport. He had unleashed all the treasures of the knowledge of the world, so that I always had my nose buried in a book. It didn’t matter what kind of book so long as it had words in it. I was reading Macaulay and Addison and Swift and Shakespeare for kicks. I never read the Bible for religious reasons. Reading the Bible as a straight book, and not as a tract, I had found it to have more action than Zane Grey’s woolliest westerns. I read history as avidly as fiction, and the ancient Egyptians got away with very little I wasn’t hep to. Everybody else called her Venus, but I knew the lady that rose from the sea was called the Aphrodite of Melos a long time before Dr. Harland got hold of me in college.
So the Old Man had also given me the gift of avoidance of boredom. If there is any piece of paper anywhere, whether it’s a patent-medicine bottle or a soap wrapper, and if it has words on it I will read the words and not be bored. I am well past forty now, and do not remember a moment of boredom, because, among other things, the Old Man also gave me eyes to see—to actually see.
“Most people,” he had said, “go through life looking and never see a thing. Anything you see is interesting, from a chinch bug to a barnacle, if you just look at it and wonder about it a little.” Then he would send me to the swamps or out in the boat or off along the beach with a firm command to look and tell him later what I saw. I saw plenty and in detail, whether it was ants working or a mink swimming or a tumblebug endlessly pushing its ball.
I saw male squirrels castrate rivals in the rutting season; I saw a sea turtle laying eggs and weeping great tears. I saw the life of the swamps and the marshes, heard the sounds and watched the lives outdoors change as the climate varied. I learned to listen to the night sounds: the dogs barking in concert when the moon was right for it, the mournful hoot of owl and plaint of whippoorwill, the querulous yap of fox and the belling of a lonesome hound on a trail of his own devising. I learned to love the mournful coo of doves as the evening approached, the desperately forlorn call of quail as they tried to reassemble a scattered covey.
I became acutely conscious of smells: crushed fern, dogfennel, the bright slashes of split pine with the oozing gum, bruised Jimson weed—the little smells apart from the major ones, like jessamine or magnolia or myrtle. The smell of summer differed from the smell of autumn. Summer was languid and milky, like the soft breath of a cow. Autumn was tart and stimulating, with leaves burning, frost on the grass, and the gum trees turning. Spring was a young girl smell, and winter was an old man’s smell, compounded of grate fires and tobacco juice.
Cooking? The Old Man had taught me that food can be something more than fodder to distend a growling gut. We had had as much fun out of preparing food as in the procuring of it with gun or rod. He had taught me to make an adventure out of cooking a catfish on a sandspit, of making an oyster roast or eating raw clams busted on the gunwale of a boat. I was proud of me as a cook—and grateful for the knowledge that hawg-and-hominy, if you’re hungry, or a bait of turtle eggs or a fried squirrel or rabbit is better than the fine-haired saucy stuff you eat when you get wealthy enough to traffic with restaurants.
What else had he left me, apart from these things?
Well, good manners, painfully impressed, and once or twice with a lath. I said “Sir” and “Ma’am” and “Please” and “Thank you,” and was more or less silent in the presence of my elders and at table. I didn’t try to hog my shooting partner’s bird shots, and I never infringed on another man’s right to command his dogs. I was quiet in the woods, and I left my campsites clean, with all the refuse buried and the fire raked neat.
I could throw a cast net, shoot a gun, row a boat, call a turkey, build a duck blind, tong an oyster, train a puppy, stand a deer, bait a turkey blind (illegal), call the turkey to the blind, cast in the surf, pitch a tent, make a bed out of pine needles, follow a coonhound, stand a watch on a fishing boat, skin anything that had to be skun, scale a fish, dig a clam, build a cave, draw a picture, isolate edible mushrooms from the poisonous toadstools, pole a boat, identify all the trees and most of the flowers and berries, get along with the colored folks, and also practice a rude kind of game conservation.
That seemed to sum it up, as far as legacy was concerned; two shotguns, a cast net, a boat, and a house with a new mockingbird in the magnolia—a house that wouldn’t be ours much longer. College just around the corner, if I could figure out a way to work my way through it.
I heaved up the hook, picked up the oars, and rowed home. By the time I got there the funeral crowd had dissipated, and there wasn’t anybody there but a few relatives and close friends. Nobody appeared to have missed me.
I was hungry, and in the South funerals are always accompanied by food. The idea is slightly macabre, but everybody pitches in a cake or a turkey or a ham, and if you can conquer the funereal smell of the flowers the dining-room table is groaning. I made myself a ham sandwich and was pouring a glass of milk when one final thought hit me, wham!
On the rainy days or driving the Liz or rowing a boat or in the off seasons where there wasn’t anything to hunt or fish the Old Man had made a habit of what he called indoctrinating me into the world of human beings. This consisted of the sum of his travels and his reading. He was a shark on the old West, for instance, and he knew a great deal about Coronado’s treasure and the people who had wasted their lives looking for it. He was a bug on the great trek westward, when the prairie schooners set out on a prayer and a venture. He knew all about what happened to the buffalo and about the passing of the carrier pigeon. He was an old-timer who was modern enough to know he was the last of the old-timers. He knew about all the world as well, whether it was ancient Egypt or Stanley looking for Livingstone in Africa, and he had fed me these stories like cakes ever since I was a toddler.
It suddenly occurred to me that I was educated before I saw a college. I made up my mind right then that someday I would learn to be a writer and write some of the stuff the Old Man had taught me. There was only one thing I had to do first, and that was to get educated and make enough money to buy back the old yellow-painted square house with its mockingbird in the magnolia and its pecan trees in the back yard.
This took a lot of time, and included a war, outraged peace, and a lot of written words. It included Washington and New York, London and Paris, Spain and Australia, Africa and India, lions and tigers, hope and despair. But the Old Man’s house is back in the family now, and the mockingbird—lineal descendant of the one I once murdered—sings cheerfully on the moonlit nights in the magnolia, the pecans are bearing again and so is the fig tree. The oak grove hasn’t changed.
There is gray in the boy’s hair, but the Old Man persists, and you will be hearing more about the things he told me. And perhaps the gray will momentarily depart, and I shall not be the Old Man, but the boy again, because it is all coming powerfully clear.