Andy Catlett is sitting on top of a post in the board fence between the back yard and the barn lot, ringing the dinner bell. He can hear the sound of it, dong after dong, flying away, rippling out in circles over the countryside, how far hearable he does not know.
He is facing westward, the now-fading sunset on the horizon beyond the Bird’s Branch hollow, and the world beyond, known to him only from maps in a geography book: California, the Pacific Ocean, its many bloodstained islands now quiet, and finally Japan that now to his supposing also is quiet. Distances and events that he cannot imagine are yet somehow present to his thoughts. In a thought that he will think for the rest of his life, he is sitting at the world’s center, sending forth in circle after circle around him the joyous clamor of the bell. It is August 15, 1945, and he is ten days past eleven years old.
Before supper he had been in the barn, leading and handling the filly foal of old Rose, his grandpa Catlett’s saddle mare. By portions of intuition and perseverance and portions of incomplete advice from his grandpa—“Don’t fight her. You can’t force her to agree with you. Mind, now, what I tell you”—and some help gently given by Dick Watson, he broke the foal to lead with a halter that Dick had fashioned for him from a piece of cotton rope. But now he had a real leather halter of his own, made by A. M. Naparilla in his harness shop at Hargrave. “That’s a Naparilla,” his grandma said of the halter as she presented it to him on his birthday, announcing the name, rare and famous in that country, as another kind of woman in a different place and time might have said, “That’s a Botticelli.” For the little halter was in fact a thing of beauty, a work of art, as the boy himself readily saw, though he did not know yet to call it “art.” Before he ever put it on the filly, he spent much time handling it and looking at it, seeing and feeling its lightness and strength, the elegant proportions of its supple leathers finely stitched, its shined brass hardware, its precise fitting to its purpose.
That evening, when he had returned the mare and foal to their pasture and started to the house for supper, he had heard suddenly rising and building in the town of Port William, too far away to be ordinarily heard from, an exuberation compounded of car horns, bells, and a shout compounded of many voices.
And so he ran the rest of the way to the house, to be met on the screened back porch by his grandma, whose eyes were moist behind her glasses, who said, “Oh, honey, it’s over. This terrible war has stopped at last.”
The public electric line by then had reached their place. She had heard about V-J Day on the small radio she had ordered from the catalog.
She was not a woman of high expectations. That human beings would by their sorry nature make war did not surprise her. She had been born when memories of the Civil War were still fresh, and she had borne, grieving in her thoughts, the wars that had followed, surprised by none of them, and yet knowing, as a woman of her kind and time would know, the cost in suffering and tears. And so when she spoke the word “war” she invariably added the adjective “terrible,” as if to call it almost courteously by its full name. She applied the noun, moreover, not to a series of similar but distinct calamities, but rather to a single calamity that, as she expected, reappeared from time to time. In her grandson’s memory of her, her sentence of just before the Christmas of 1941, “Oh, Andy, what of this terrible war that has come upon us!” seemed merely to continue in the summer of 1950: “Oh, Andy, we are at war again. It has come again.”
Falling so short as he did of her length of memory, Andy supposed only that the peace he had awaited with longing had finally come. So far as he was capable of feeling, he felt that it had come forever.
With the clamor from town still audible through the open windows by the kitchen table, he was not long at his supper. His grandmother, greatly moved by her thoughts, only picked at her food. His grandpa, by long habit concentrated on the place, its life and its work, conceded by principle, perhaps by defiance, no importance to the largeness of the world. While his grandma picked and lingered, gazing away, and his grandpa ate as ever with intense concentration and relish, Andy placated his hunger by cleaning up his plate as fast as he could. He then pushed back his chair and ran out again into the yard. The tumult at town was still in progress and he had to respond. He climbed onto the post-top and, seizing the bell rope, began ringing back to Port William and to all the world.
Without a thought of anything else in the world he might do, he rings the bell. In his little knowledge and great ignorance, he rings back to the celebratory ruckus in Port William and with a fierce gladness in his heart for the end of war and the beginning of peace. He will not forget his simplemindedness of that night, which joined him as if drunkenly to the equally singular elation that danced, drank, shouted, and sang itself away before dawn in Port William. He rings for the peace he dreams has come forever, for all the absent ones who now will come safe home.
That all who have gone will not come back, he knows, though in his joy, in the flightiness of his young mind, he is not thinking of them. He knows that his uncle Virgil, his mother’s brother, whom he loved and loves, who was reported “missing in action,” is now believed by the family to be dead, killed in what way, somewhere along the battle lines of the Bulge, they will never know.
Of such knowledge he knows more. He knows that his uncle Andrew Catlett, the loud-laughing, careless, unreckoning man whom he loved and loves, for whom he was named, was shot dead in a quarrel at Stoneport, several miles upriver from Port William, in the summer before.
Andy’s experience thus, at the beginning of his twelfth year, includes grief. It includes, intermittently for the time being, but also forever, awareness of the curtain, impenetrable by the living, before which they enact their lives. He has begun his acquaintance in the graveyard on the hill at Port William, a fellowship that by now, when he is old, far exceeds his acquaintance among the living.
He does not know the deaths that are to come, that will end his childhood. He has not begun the long growing up that will call him to the work that will be his to do.
He does not know the wars yet to come.
That his government, in ending the war, has again proved the willingness of some of his kind to do anything at all that is possible, he has after a fashion heard, but is far from knowing.
He is far from knowing that, virtually from that moment of rejoicing at the coming of peace, an industrial assault upon his home community and countryside, and upon such homeplaces everywhere, will now begin, and will continue into his final days.
And so ring the old bell, young Andy Catlett. Ring your ignorant greeting to the new world of machines, chemicals, and fire. Ring the dinner bell that soon will be inaudible at dinnertime above the noise of engines. Ring farewell to the creaturely world, to the clean springs and streams of your childhood, farewell to the war that will keep on coming back.