OLD WILDWOOD

On a soft morning in May, at the American Express in Rome, the grandson was handed a letter; and high up on the Spanish Steps he sat alone and opened the letter and read its news. It was in his mother’s hand:

“Well, your grandaddy died two days ago and we had his funeral in the house in Charity. There were so many flowers, roses and gladiolas and every other kind, that the front porch was filled with them, twas a sight to see. Then we took him to the graveyard where all the rest are buried and added his grave, one more, to the rest.

“At the graveyard your father suddenly walked out and stood and said the Lord’s Prayer over his daddy’s grave, as none of the Methodists in the family would hear a Catholic priest say a Catholic prayer, nor the Catholics in the family allow a Methodist one; and your grandaddy was going to be left in his grave without one holy word of any kind. But both were there, priest and preacher, and I said what a shame that your poor old daddy has to go to earth without even ‘Abide with Me’ sung by a soloist. His own begotten children marrying without conscience into this church and that, confounding their children as to the nature of God, caused it all, and there it was to see, clear and shameful, at the graveyard. Then all of a sudden your two great aunts, my mother’s and your grandmother’s sweet old sisters, Ruby and Saxon Thompson, one blind and the other of such strutted ankles from Bright’s Disease as could barely toddle, started singing ’Just As I Am Without One Plea,’ and many joined in, it was so sweet and so sad and so peaceful to hear. Then we all walked away and left your grandaddy in his grave.”

The grandson lifted his eyes from the letter and they saw an ancient foreign city of stone. So an old lost grandfather, an old man of timber, had left the world. He folded the letter and put it in his pocket. Then he leaned back and settled upon the pocked stone of the worn steps, supporting himself upon the opened palm of his hand. He rested a little, holding the letter, thinking how clear pictures of what had troubled his mind always came to him in some sudden, quiet ease of resting. He considered, as a man resting on stone, his grandfather.

Yes, he thought, the little old grandfather had the animal grace and solitary air of an old mariner about him, though he was a lumberman and purely of earth. His left leg was shorter than his right, and the left foot had some flaw in it that caused the shoe on it to curl upwards. The last time the grandson had seen his grandfather was the summer day when, home on leave from the Navy, and twenty-one, he had come out into the back yard in his shining officer’s uniform to find his grandfather sitting there snowy-headed and holding his cap in his hand. Grandfather and grandson had embraced and the grandfather had wept. How so few years had changed him, the grandson had thought that afternoon: so little time had whitened his head and brought him to quick tears: and the grandson heard in his head the words of a long time back, spoken to him by his grandfather that night in Galveston, “Go over into Missi’ppi one day and see can you find your kinfolks…”

Where had the grandfather come from, that summer afternoon? Where had he been all these years? The grandson had scarcely thought of him. And now, suddenly, on that summer day of leave, he had heard his mother call to his father, “Your daddy’s here,” with an intonation of shame; and then his mother had come into his room and said, “Son, your grandaddy’s here. Go out in the back yard and see your grandaddy.”

When he had put on his uniform and stepped into the yard, there he saw the white-headed little man sitting on the bench. And there, resting on the grass and lying a little on its side as though it were a separate being, curled and dwarfed, was his grandfather’s crooked foot, old disastrous companion.

The grandfather was an idler and had been run away from home, it was said, by his wife and children time and time again, and the last time for good; and where did he live and what did he do? Later, on the day of his visit and after he had gone away, the grandson’s mother had confessed that she knew her husband went secretly to see his father somewhere in the city and to give him money the family had to do without. It was in a shabby little hotel on a street of houses of women and saloons that his father and his grandfather met and talked, father and son.

As he sat with his grandfather in the yard on the white bench under the camphor tree that summer, and now on this alien stone, the grandson remembered that the first time he had known his grandfather was on the trip to Galveston where they went to fish—the grandson was fourteen—and how lonesome he was there with this little old graying limping stranger who was his grandfather and who was wild somewhere that the grandson could not surmise, only fear. Who was this man tied to him by blood through his father and who, though he strongly resembled his father, seemed an alien, not even a friend. The grandfather had sat on the rocks and drunk whiskey while the grandson fished; and though he did not talk much, the grandson felt that there was a constant toil of figuring going on in the old man as he looked out over the brown Gulf water, his feet bare and his shoes on the rock, one crooked one by one good one. On the rock the boy gazed at the bad foot for a long, long time, more often than he watched the fishing line, as though the foot on the rock might be some odd creature he had brought up from the water and left on the rock to perish in the sun. At night he watched it too, curled on the cot in the moonlight as his grandfather slept, so that he came to know it well on both rock and cot and to think of it as a special kind of being in itself. There on the rock, as on the cot, the bad foot was the very naked shape of the shoe that concealed it. It seemed lifeless there on the rock, it was turned inwards toward the good foot as though to ask for pity from it or to caricature it. The good foot seemed proud and aloof and disdainful, virile and perfectly shaped.

On the rock, the grandfather was like a man of the sea, the grandson thought, like a fisherman or a boat captain. His large Roman head with its bulging forehead characteristic of his children shone in the sun; and his wide face was too large for his small and rather delicate body, lending him a strangely noble bearing, classic and Bacchian. There was something deeply kind and tender in this old gentleman grandfather barefooted on the rock, drinking whiskey from the bottle. The grandson felt the man was often at the point of speaking to him of some serious thing but drank it all away again out of timidity or respect.

Each night they straggled back to their room in a cheap Gulf-front cabin full of flies and sand, and the grandson would help his grandfather into his cot, where he would immediately fall to sleep. Then the grandson would lie for a long time watching his grandfather breathe, his graying curly hair tousled over his strutted forehead, and watching the sad foot that sometimes flinched on the sheet with fatigue, for it was a weak foot, he thought. Considering this man before him, the grandson thought how he might be a man of wood, grown in a wilderness of trees, as rude and native and unblazed as a wildwood tree. He held some wilderness in him, the very sap and seed of it. Then, half fearing the man, the grandson would fall asleep, with the thought and the image of the blighted foot worrying him. He was always afraid of his grandfather, no doubt because of the whiskey, but certainly for deeper, more mysterious reasons which he could not find out in this man who was yet so respectful to him.

One night after the grandfather had been drinking on the rock all day, he had drunk some more in the cabin and finally, sitting on the side of his cot, he had found the words he had to say to the grandson. He had spoken to him clearly and quietly and in such a kind of flowing song that the words might have been given him by another voice whispering him what to say.

“We all lived in Missi’ppi,” was the way he began, quietly, to speak. “And in those days wasn’t much there, only sawmills and wildwoods of good rich timber, uncut and unmarked, and lots of good Nigras to help with everything, wide airy houses and broad fields. It all seems now such a good day and time, though we didn’t count it for much then. Your granny and I moved over out of Missi’ppi and into Texas, from one little mill town to another, me blazing timber and then cutting it, counting it in the railroad cars, your granny taking a new baby each time, seems like, but the same baby buggy for each—if we’d have named our children after the counties they were borned in, all twelve of them, counting the one that died in Conroe, you’d have a muster roll of half the counties of Texas—all borned in Texas; but not a one ever went back to Missi’ppi, nor cared. Twas all wildwood then, son, but so soon gone.

“I had such man’s strength then, the kind that first my grandfather broke wilderness with into trail and clearing, hewed houses and towns out of timber with, the kind his grandsons used to break the rest. Why I fathered twelve children in the state of Texas and fed them on sweet milk and kidney beans and light bread and working twelve hours a day—mill and railroad—working Nigras and working myself and raising a family of barefooted towheads chasing the chickens and climbing the trees and carrying water, playing tree tag in the dirt yard stained with mulberries. Your granny wasn’t deaf then, had better hearing than most, could hear the boll weevils in the cotton, could listen that well. We all slept all over the house, beds never made, always a baby squalling in the kitchen while your granny cooked, or eating dirt where it sat in the shade as your granny did the washing in the washpot on the fire with Nigras helping and singing, or riding the hip of one of the big girls or boys… my children grew up on each other’s hips and you could never tell it now the way they live and treat each other.

“I didn’t have any schooling, but my grandfather was a schoolteacher and broke clearing and built a log schoolhouse and taught in it—it still stands, I hear tell, in Tupelo—and lived to start a university in Stockton, Missi’ppi; was a Peabody and the Peabodys still live all over Missi’ppi, go in there and you’ll find Peabodys all over Missi’ppi. You know there’s a big bridge of steel over the Missi’ppi River at Meridian; that’s a Peabody, kin to me and kin to you. Another one, John Bell, built a highway clean to the Louisiana line and starting at Jackson; that’s some of your kinfolks, old John Bell, such a fine singing man, a good voice and pure black-headed Irishman with his temper in his eyes. Called him Cousin Jack, he was adopted, and just here in Galveston, to tell you the truth, I’ve been wondering again who from; I’ve wondered often about John Bell all these years, studied him time and again. When I came he was already in our family, running with the other children in the yard, seems like, when I first saw him, and we all called him Cousin Jack, and of all my family, brother and sister and even my own children, John Bell was the best friend ever in this world to me. Aw, John Bell’s been heavy on my mind—John Bell! He was one to go to. Cousin Jack was not ascared of anything, brave everywhere he went and not ascared of hard work, spit on his hands and went right in. Went to work at fourteen and helped the family. Was a jolly man and full of some of the devil, too, and we raised a ruckus on Saturday nights when we was young men together, we’d dance till midnight, court the girls on the way home and come on home ourselves singing and in great spirits. John Bell! Fishing and singing on the river with a pint of bourbon in our hip pocket and a breath of it on the bait for good luck. But something always a little sad about John Bell, have never known what it could be. Maybe it was his being adopted. He knew that; they told him. But it was more than that. Then he married Nellie Clayton, your granny’s niece, and I have never seen him again. He built a highway clean through the state of Missi’ppi and I always knew he would amount to something. Died in 1921, and now his children are all up and grown in Missi’ppi. They are some of the ones to look for. Find the Bells.

“Time came when all the tree country of East Texas was cut, seemed like no timber left, and new ways and new mills. I brought all my family to Houston, to work for the Southern Pacific. Some was married and even had babies of their own, but we stayed together, the whole kit and kaboodle of us, all around your granny. In the city of Houston we found one big old house and all lived in it. Then the family began to sunder apart, seemed like, with some going away to marry and then coming home again bringing husband or wife. I stayed away from home as much as I could, to have some peace from all the clamoring among my children. I never understood my children, son, could never make them out, my own children; children coming in and going out, half their children living there with this new husband and that, and the old husbands coming back to make a fuss, and one, Grace’s, just staying on there, moved in and wouldn’t ever leave, is still there to this day; and children from all husbands and wives playing all together in that house, with your granny deaf as a doornail and calling out to the children to mind, and wanting care, but would never leave and never will, she’ll die in that house with all of them around her, abusing her, too, neither child nor grandchild minding her. I just left, son, and went to live in a boarding house. I’d go home on Sundays and on Easters and on Christmas, but not to stay. There’s a time when a person can’t help anything anymore, anything. Still, they would come to me, one or another of my sons and daughters, but not to see how I was or to bring me anything, twas to borrow money from me. They never knew that I had lost my job with the S.P. because I drank a little whiskey.

“And I never went to any church, son, but I’m fifty years of age and I believe in the living God and practice the Golden Rule and I hope the Lord’ll save me from my sins. But I never had anybody to go to, for help or comfort, and I want you to know your father didn’t either, never had anybody to go to. But I want you to know you do, and I will tell you who and where so you will always know. I don’t want you ever to know what it is not to have anybody to go to.

“So when you get to be a young man I hope you’ll go over into Missi’ppi and see can you find your blood kinfolks. Tell them your grandaddy sent you there. Haven’t been over there myself for thirty years, kept meaning to but just never did. Now I guess I never will. But you go, and when you go, tell them you are a Peabody’s grandson. They’re all there, all over there, all over Missi’ppi; look for the Peabodys and for the Claytons and look for the Bells…”

After the grandfather had finished his story, he sat still on his cot, looking down as if he might be regarding his bare crooked foot. The grandson did not speak or ask a question but he lay quietly thinking about it all, how melancholy and grand the history of relations was. Then, in a while, he heard his grandfather get up softly, put on his crooked shoe and the good one, and go out, thinking he was asleep. He has gone to find him John Bell, the grandson thought. The creaking of his bad shoe and the rhythm of his limp seemed to the grandson to repeat his grandfather’s words: Peabodys and the Claytons and the Bells.

The grandson did not sleep while his grandfather was gone. He was afraid, for the tides of the Gulf were swelling against the sea wall below the cabin; yet he thought how he no longer feared his grandfather, for now that he had spoken to him so quietly and with such love he felt he was something of his own. He loved his grandfather. Yet now that he had been brought to love what he had feared, he was cruelly left alone in the whole world with this love, it seemed, and was that the way love worked?—with the unknown waters swelling and falling close to the bed where he lay with the loving story haunting him? There was so much more to it all, to the life of men and women, than he had known before he came to Galveston just to fish with his grandfather, so much in just a man barefooted on a rock and drinking whiskey in the sun, silent and dangerous and kin to him. And then the man had spoken and made a bond between them and brought a kind of nobility of forest, something like a shelter of grandness of trees over it all. The tree country! The grandson belonged to an old, illustrious bunch of people of timber with names he could now name, all a busy, honorable and worthy company of wilderness breakers and forest blazers, bridge builders and road makers, and teachers, Claytons and Peabodys and Bells, and the grandfather belonged to them, too, and it was he who had brought all the others home to him, his grandson. Yet the grandfather seemed an orphan. And now for the first time, the grandson felt the deep, free sadness of orphanage; and he knew he was orphaned, too. That was the cruel gift of his grandfather, he thought. The crooked foot! John Bell!

In this loneliness he knew, at some border where land turned into endless water, he felt himself to be the only one alive in this moment—where were all the rest?—in a land called Mississippi, called Texas, where? He was alone to do what he could do with it all and oh what to do would be some daring thing, told or performed on some shore where two ancient elements met, land and water, and touched each other and caused some violence of kinship between two orphans, and with heartbreak in it. What to do would have the quiet, promising dangerousness of his grandfather on the rock in it, it would have the grave and epic tone of his grandfather’s ultimate telling on the side of the cot under one light globe in a mist of shoreflies in a sandy transient roof of revelation while the tide washed at the very feet of teller and listener. And what to do would have the feeling of myth and mystery that he felt as he had listened, as though when he listened he were a rock and the story he heard was water swelling and washing over generations and falling again, like the waters over the rock when the tide came in.

Suddenly he heard footsteps, and when the door opened quietly he saw his grandfather and a woman behind him. They came in the room and the woman whispered, “You didn’t tell me that a kid was here.”

“He’s asleep, John Bell,” the grandfather whispered.

Something began between the two, between the grandfather and the woman, and the grandson feigned sleep. But he watched through the lashes of his half-closed eyes as through an ambush of grass the odd grace of his grandfather struggling with the woman, with whom he seemed to be swimming through water, and he heard his grandfather’s low growl like a fierce dog on the cot, and he saw his grandfather’s devil’s foot treading and gently kicking, bare in the air, so close to him that he could have reached out to touch it. And then he knew that the foot had a very special beauty and grace of moment, a lovely secret performance hidden in it that had seemed a shame on his person and a flaw upon the rock. It had something, even, of a bird’s movements in it. It was the crooked foot that was the source and the meaning of the strange and lovely and somehow delicate disaster on the bed; and it was that shape and movement that the grandson took for his own to remember.

John Bell!

The two people drank out of a bottle without saying a word, but they were celebrating something they had come through, as if they had succeeded in swimming, with each other’s help, a laborious dangerous distance; and then they rose to leave the room together. But at the door, the grandfather called softly as he lifted the bottle once more to his mouth, “For John Bell…,” and the name rang deeply over the dark room like the tone of a bell upon the sea.

When they were gone, the grandson rose and looked out the window and saw the water with a horned moon over it and smelled the limey odors of shrimp, saw the delicate swaying starry lights of fishing boats; and there in the clear light of the moon he saw the rock he and his grandfather fished on. The tide was climbing over it and slipping back off it as if to cover it with a sighing embrace, like a body, as if to pull the rock, for a swelling moment, to its soft and caressing bosom of water; and there was a secret bathing of tenderness over the very world like a dark rock washed over with moonlit sea water and whiskey and tenderness and the mysteriousness of a grandfather, of an old story, an old ancestor of whom the grandson was afraid again. Now the grandfather seemed to the grandson to have been some old sea-being risen out of the waters to sit on a rock and to tell a tale in a stranger’s room, and disappear. Would he ever come again to fish on the rock in the Gulf and to snore on the cot in the cabin? But as he looked at the world of rock and tide and moon, in the grandson’s head the words of a pioneer sounded, quiet and plaintive and urgent: Go over into Missi’ppi when you get to be a young man and see can you find your kinfolks, son. Look for the Claytons and look for the Peabodys and look for the Bells, all in there, all over Missi’ppi… And the bell-rung deepness of a name called sounded in the dark room.

John Bell!

There in the room, even then, alone and with the wild lovely world he knew, tidewater and moonlight tenderly tormenting the rock outside, and inside the astonishing delicate performance tormenting the room, and the shape of the foot on both room and rock, the grandson thought how he would do, in his time, some work to bring about through an enduring rock-silence a secret performance with something, some rock-force, some tideforce, some lovely, hearty, fine wildwood wildwater thing always living in him through his ancestry and now brought to sense in him, that old gamy wilderness bequeathed him; how shaggy-headed, crooked-footed perfection would be what he would work for, some marvelous, reckless and imperfect loveliness, proclaiming about the ways of men in the world and all that befell them, all that glorified, all that damned them, clearing and covering over and clearing again, on and on and on.

He went back to his cot and lay upon his young back. Not to go to sleep! but to stay awake with it all, whatever, whatever it was, keeping the wilderness awake in this and many more rooms, breathing sea-wind and pinesap. Because—now he felt sure—the thing to do about it all and with it all would be in some performance of the senses after long silence and waiting—of the hair that would grow upon his chest like grass and of the nipples of his breast, of the wildwood in his seed and the sappy sweat of the crease of his loins, of the saltwater of his tears, the spit on his palms, the blistering of the blazer’s ax-handle, all mortal stuff. To keep wilderness awake and wild and never sleeping, in many rooms in many places was his plan in Galveston, and the torment that lay ahead for him would come, and it would hold him wakeful through nights of bitter desire for more than he could ever name, but for some gentle, lovely and disastrous heartbreak of men and women in this world. And in that room that held the history of his grandfather, the little poem of his forebears and the gesture of the now beautiful swimming and soaring crooked foot, he knew for himself that there would be, or he would make them, secret rooms in his life holding, like a gymnasium, the odors of mortal exertion, of desperate tournament, a violent contest, a hardy, laborious chopping, manual and physical and involving the strength in his blistering hands and the muscles of his heaving back, all the blazer’s work, the pioneer’s blazing hand! Or places upon rocks of silence where an enigma lay in the sun, dry and orphaned and moribund until some blessed tide eventually rose and caressed it and took it to its breast as if to whisper, “Belong to me before I slide away,” and what was silent and half-dead roused and showed its secret performance: that seemed to be the whole history of everything, the secret, possible performance in everything that was sliding, sliding away.

Finally, his breast aching and its secret that lived there unperformed, but with the trembling of some enormous coming thrill, the distant disclosure of some vision, even, of some glimmering company of humanity of his yearning with whom to perform some daring, lovely, heartbroken and disastrous history; and with terror of listener and sadness of teller, the grandson fell alone to sleep and never heard his grandfather come back to his cot, that night in Galveston.

Now they had buried the grandfather. Bury the good man of wilderness, he thought; bury in Texas dirt the crooked foot that never walked again on the ground of Missi’ppi where mine has never been set. And find him John Bell in the next world.

His hand upon which he had rested was aching and he relieved it of his weight and sat upon the solid slab of ancient travertine stone. There, engraved in the palm of the hand he had leaned on, was the very mark and grain of the stone, as though his hand were stone. He would not have a hand of stone! He would carry a hand that could labor wood and build a house, trouble dirt and lay a highway, and blaze a trail through leaf and bramble; and a hand that could rot like wood and fall into dust.

And then the grandson thought how all the style and works of stone had so deeply troubled him in this ancient city, and how he had not clearly known until now that he loved wood best and belonged by his very secret woodsman’s nature to old wildwood.