(1979)
This comes from Andy Catlett’s memory of a day back when Pascal Sowers and the Rowanberry brothers, Arthur and Martin, were still alive, and they and all the younger ones still were strong. They were a neighborhood then, a company of kin and friends, none of whom ever worked at any hard task alone. In other times or on other days, various Coulters, Branches, and Penns might have been with them. Their heavy work in the barns or fields or woods brought together always their many hands, which lightened the work, and also their several minds from which they made, among their other necessities, much conversation, which also lightened the work.
They completed one another, not by proposing any such thing, as a marriage might, but merely by caring about one another and by being available when needed. From each of them Andy learned things good to know that he would not otherwise have known. When he lost his right hand to a corn picker in the fall of 1974, it was those others who made him whole in his changed life by conceding no difference to his loss, and by helping him, without his asking, when he needed help.
When they worked together, their work always rose above necessity. However hard or hot or uncomfortable it was, it was also a pleasure.
Not long ago, running into Pascal’s son Tommy at town, Andy asked him a question he’d had on his mind:
“Tommy, what was the last year I helped you cut tobacco?”
“I don’t know,” Tommy said. “I can’t tell you right off. But you know I miss them old times.”
Andy misses them too, and his thoughts go back to them in wonder that such a settled companionship could ever have existed in the time past of a time present when Port William and its countryside are populated more and more by newcomers and strangers, mobile homes and modular homes. In the town, among the few old ones who are left, the question most often asked is “Who was that?” and the oftenest answer is “I don’t know.” Now in the onetime neighborhood of Port William neighbors may not even know one another, let alone gather their hands and minds together to lighten work.
It was a morning in midsummer, already hot, and they were unloading hay into one of the small tin-sided sheds that Pascal had built in his pastures for handiness in feeding his cattle in the wintertime. Mart Rowanberry and Andy’s boy, Marcie, who was then about seventeen, were handing the bales off the wagon. Art and Tommy and Andy were ricking the bales in the shed at the end where they had stopped the wagon, and Pascal, who was in a bad mood, was ricking at the other end by himself.
Nobody knew why Pascal was in a bad mood, but he plainly was. His mood plainly was one in which he did not want to get in anybody’s way and did not want anybody to get in his way. And his mood was having an influence. Since they had begun the unloading nobody had said a word.
Their silence became socially awkward. Finally, perhaps to bring forth a resumption of good manners, Mart said, “Well, I reckon you all heard about that smart fellow down at Ellville can scratch his ass with his big toe.”
The silence then resumed. It continued until Marcie, with the ostentation of patience by which a grown boy indulges his elders, said, “All right. I give up. How can that smart fellow at Ellville scratch his ass with his big toe?”
“Well,” Mart said, “he got his thumb caught in some kind of a grinder. It was all mangled up to where they had to cut it off. And then they cut off his big toe and made him a thumb out of it.”
Mart’s explanation seemed to end the story. Nobody could think of another question. Nobody could think of another story that Mart’s story reminded him of. Nobody spoke again. They went on unloading the wagon and building the rick in the shed, working then in the sort of approximate rhythm that establishes itself at such times.
Until, sounding unhappy that he could not forbear a comment, Pascal from his distance said, “He’d better be glad they didn’t cut his dick off and make him a thumb out of it.”
Nobody wanted to interfere with Pascal’s bad mood. He had expressed one of the universal hopes of an age of medical miracles, but that was not all. He clearly had cast several aspersions, but nobody knew for sure which way they had flown or where they had lit. And so until that load was off nobody spoke again. But whenever any two of the rest of them looked at each other, there would be a grin, a look, or a snort, and already they were thinking carefully back over the details, preparing the story of that morning as they were going to tell it.
(1994)
Finally they dwindled until one hot, bright late August afternoon only four of them were at work in the tobacco harvest on the Sowers place: Pascal’s wife, Sudie, who was the Rowanberry brothers’ much younger sister, Tommy Sowers’s wife, Daphne, known as Daph, Tommy, and Andy. The Rowanberry brothers by then were dead, and Pascal had got too old to be capable of more than the piddling helps he occasionally offered.
They were housing a load of tobacco they had just brought in from the patch. The two women, turn about, were handing the sticks of tobacco—five stalks “speared” onto every four-foot stick—off the wagon to Andy. Andy, walking a long board between the wagon bed and an upended barrel, was handing the sticks up to Tommy. Tommy, who was standing in the tiers, was hanging the tobacco, the sticks and stalks of it carefully spaced, between the two tier poles at his feet and the two at shoulder height, where it would hang until it was cured. Pascal was seated on an upturned bucket against one of the posts along the driveway. From there he could watch both the work going on in the barn and, out the big open doorway, the vehicles that passed now and then along the road. He was not missing much. That year he was eighty years old and Andy was sixty, which made them, as they often noted, a hundred and forty years old. Tommy and Daph’s granddaughter, Birdie, a pretty little girl two years old, for the moment entirely cooperative, was playing in the dust of the barn floor, variously talking and singing to herself.
The work of the four able-bodied grownups had been done by them and by others, dead and remembered, dead and forgotten, in years going back long before the coming of the tractor that had drawn the present load into the barn, and this year their work was carrying them through one of the last tobacco crops that would be grown on the Sower place. Though they did not yet know it, Pascal’s last years would coincide with the last years of the tobacco program, which for sixty years had secured a measure of prosperity for farm couples such as Pascal and Sudie, Tommy and Daph. But for now, as if entranced by the old motions that they repeated over and over again, or like dancers carried by the familiar rhythm of an old song, they worked without speaking.
When this load was off, they would be on the downslope of the afternoon. They would pass the water jug then and gather round while Tommy would slice a water melon, as somebody in that family had done at that time of day in the tobacco harvest going back, at least to Sudie’s grandfather, laying the green, white, and red slices, rind-side down, along the edge of the wagon bed for them to salt and eat. For perhaps half an hour then they would eat, rest, and talk, gathering strength and pleasure to ease them through to the day’s end.
But the wagon was only half unloaded when the little girl quit her play and came running to the wagon, calling to her mother and making motions of urgency. She had something to say that needed to be whispered. Daph caught her lifted hands, swung her up onto the wagon, and leaned down to her. Birdie tiptoed and whispered.
“Oh,” Daph said. “Good girl. Just go outside anywhere. It’ll be all right.”
Lifted down, Birdie ran not far beyond the doorway.
“Andy,” Daph said. “Look.”
And then they all looked as Birdie pushed down her shorts and, standing, peed a gracefully arching glistening stream, her own invention, of which she was proud.
There were laughs of appreciation and congratulation called out by the two women to Birdie, who was still in some need of such encouragement.
And Pascal, who still was sitting on his bucket, took off his hat, rubbed meditatively his bald head, and put his hat back on.
“Yeah,” he said. “I used to go with an old gal could do that.”
(2002)
There was nothing simple about Pascal Sowers. Like most farmers of his generation in that country, starting in childhood, he had done a lot of the hard handwork that, by commentators and experts who have never done it, is said to be “mind-numbing.” But Pascal’s mind, like that of many a farmer of his kind and time, was lively and capable. He was good at his work. He had studied closely a number of the people he knew or had known. He knew good stories and told them well.
Like the Rowanberrys, he spoke the language he was born to, that his parents were born to. Nothing he said, nothing in the way he spoke, had been learned from the radio or television. What does it mean, his friend Andy Catlett asks, when one speaks a language that is not public, that is shared and is so intended, but is not public? Partly it meant that Pascal lived a life entirely his own, not a life recommended by others, not a life advertised and sold.
In the presence of strangers or people with whom he was uncomfortable, he said little. He took himself seriously enough, and he did not wish to be taken lightly. If among his familiars he often said bluntly things that were astonishing or outrageous, that was partly to indulge and enjoy his aptitude for such eloquence. But partly also it was his way of brushing aside something serious that he had thought of and preferred not to say.
Or so Andy has come to think, after knowing Pascal for soon-to-be seventy years, and after thinking about him with particular tenderness and care since he and the others parted with Pascal, who finally was without a comment, at his grave on the hill at Port William.
The fact, anyhow, that Andy has had to keep returning to, circling about, and considering, is that Pascal was not an eagerly self-revealing man. If you wanted to know Pascal, beyond the often unignorable things he said or pointedly did not say, you needed to study carefully the originally swampy small river-bottom farm that he and Sudie bought in the forties, made over, carefully farmed, paid for, and modestly prospered on. To know his fairness and his gratitude you had to hear him in his bluntest way of speech giving credit, never to himself, but to Sudie for all he owed to her. To take the temperature of his heart, you had to notice his hospitality to stray cats and his attention to the personalities of dogs. His affection would be revealed by favors that he would do unexpectedly, disowning them as he did them, ignoring thanks.
One day when Andy came out of the bank in Port William and was crossing the road to his pickup, he was headed off by Pascal, who was carrying one of the devices known as “come-alongs,” needful for lifting or pulling. It was a new one.
“You got a come-along?” Pascal asked.
“No,” Andy said. “I don’t.”
“Well, you got one now,” Pascal said. He pitched it into the back of Andy’s truck and walked away while Andy was thanking him.
Maybe twice, at moments when it most counted, Pascal looked point-blank at Andy and called him “my friend.” And this Andy cannot remember now without his eyesight blurring.
From his admirable competence at his work, which lasted well into his seventies, Pascal declined gradually down a long slope into uselessness. He suffered this with his customary disdain for falsification, and consequently with composure, even good humor. Anybody’s attempt to overlook or be polite about his debility he cut off with a sentence absolutely declarative: “I am not worth a damn.”
He foresaw clearly, and said, that he would end his days at Rest Haven down at Hargrave, for there would be nobody at home capable of helping him when he no longer could help himself. And when the time came he was taken, on his own advisement and demand, to Rest Haven.
Except for his “going down,” as he put it, he stayed pretty much himself to the end, keeping his intelligent silences when there was nothing to be said, fending away overseriousness when necessary by his blunt declarations of the truth, bluntly serious when he needed to be.
One day when he visited Rest Haven, Andy had one of his granddaughters with him. Pascal was bedfast by then. When they entered his room he was lying straight and still with his eyes shut.
“Pascal?” Andy said, and Pascal opened his eyes.
“Why, I reckon so,” Pascal said. “Come in.”
“Pascal,” Andy said, “do you remember this young lady? This is Flora, Betty’s youngest girl.”
And then Pascal seemed to gather his strength into his eyes. He raised his head a little from the pillow and looked at Flora. She was a pretty girl. He studied her a moment with a kind pleasure he made no attempt to dissemble, and then he rested his head again upon the pillow.
“Ah,” he said. “She’s waiting for me, to be young.”