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, through the years of his boyhood, was being 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 parents, 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.
In the winter, Grandma Catlett occupied 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 would load himself and his bundle of clothes and books and go home with her. As he thought, as she allowed and maybe encouraged him to think, because probably it was true, 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 woodstove, and in the mornings, sometimes all day, they still needed the kitchen fire for warmth. Andy kept the kitchen supplied with firewood. When the cow freshened, Andy did the milking, night and morning. When they planted the garden Andy opened the ground in straight small furrows with the hoe, Grandma dropped in the seeds, and Andy covered them.
On schoolday 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, 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, did his chores, and kept out of sight of the house, he was free.
On the warm afternoon of a Saturday in the early spring of 1947, 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 hardly climb standing up. The woods there was an old stand of big trees. Whether because of the steepness of the ground or the fragile benevolence of neglect, it 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. Andy’s 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 at once and 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 probably 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 to think “gray” was not enough. When he looked at it steadily and long, as his desire bade him to do, a wreath of light and color seemed to surround it. The fur of its underside was immaculately white. Its finest features were its large, dark eyes bright with intelligence and the graceful plume of its tail as long as its body.
Andy knew with a sort of anticipatory ache in the insides 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 his hand almost unmovingly out until it seemed almost to touch the squirrel. His hand seemed to him to offer a tenderness so welcoming that the squirrel might give itself into his grasp. Instead, it leapt, he felt, almost from his fingertips 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. As he climbed he watched the squirrel with a curiosity as palpable and pressing as hunger.
About the same thing happened a second time. The almost-catchable little squirrel waited, watching Andy with a curiosity of 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. It was as if he were being led by the hand with which each time he reached out. It was as if his hand itself incarnated his desire, and it foreknew or forefelt the squirrel’s shapeliness and warmth, the breath and pulse of the life of it. And the squirrel seemed to wait, watching with interest, imaginably even with amusement, taking its rest, while Andy laboriously made his approach, 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 boundary 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 to 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 divested of its old charm, and started home.
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 treetops with the squirrel, unknowing the time of day, she, 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. He would not forget the way he had learned his lesson.
Nor would he forget for the rest of his life his happiness of that afternoon. 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 while in the other holding the squirrel. If he had caught it, he would have had to let it go.