Several years before he died, before any of us had thought to associate him with a death that might be his, Elton Penn bought the run-down ninety acres directly across the north fork of Bird’s Branch from his home place, the Jack Beechum place, that he had come to as a tenant in the spring of 1945 and stayed to own. He bought the ninety acres to redeem his vision of what could be made of it by good treatment. By then Elton had the money to pay for it—and he did value money in proportion more or less to his early want of it—but money in this matter was not his first consideration. His first consideration, which I think he hardly needed to consider, was that he was a farmer born and bred, a land husband, who longed to put his hand to the ground and cause it to flourish. He foresaw the good and beautiful work that would be required to remake what hard use and neglect had unmade, and he wanted to be the one to do it.
This my father understood, for he had done the same thing, and more than once, for the same reason. That my father had become a lawyer, in addition to the farmer that he, like Elton, was born to be and could never quit being, was because the farm depression of the 1920s so reduced the income to his parents and himself from their own home place that he had to look elsewhere for money. He had been to college, and certain events guided him into law school. That, as it turned out, was in many ways fortunate. It was also one of the anomalies that modern times had begun to impose on our native countryside around Port William.
By necessity, anyhow, my father had two vocations. He was a man, as I saw him early and as I see him now, who most belonged outdoors. Among his right companions would have been a good bird dog, which at least once he had, a well-worked and obliging saddle horse, which he never had, and one of his father’s long-outmoded teams of work mules. And so his office was for him often enough a place of exile. And yet he found in the law also a true calling. He loved his knowledge of it. He reveled in it. And yet at the end of the day when he shut his office door and headed out of town into the wide world where his cattle were grazing, he was a man going home. Some of his days would also begin with farming: a quick trip after breakfast to see what had happened during the night, to do something that needed doing that would not wait until evening, or just to allow, while he could, an unbounded space to enter his mind.
My father was Wheeler Catlett. His father, Marce Catlett, and Jack Beechum, two of the old kind, had lived as neighbors, their farms on opposite sides of the road. As a lawyer, my father had inherited Old Jack as a client, just as Old Jack laid claim to my father as a possession in consideration of time and interest invested in him and his upbringing from about the time my father learned to walk. And so it was my father, who had looked up Elton, on the recommendation of Braymer Hardy, to be Old Jack’s tenant in his declining years. “He’s a good one,” Braymer told my father, who took him at his word. He knew Braymer as an elder who seemed appointed to keep watch for “a good one” of whatever kind, who was more than apt to know what a good one was, and to know what he was looking at when one appeared. “He’ll take hold,” Braymer said. “He’ll do.”
And Elton, who stood up fully to Braymer’s measure, stood up also to Old Jack’s. He became in effect Old Jack’s son and in more than one way his heir. Half-orphaned in his childhood by the death of his father, Elton was crowded to the outer edge of his mother’s household and care, and finally out of the house itself when he was fourteen, by an unkind stepfather. And then, four years later, to complete his singling out from lives he might possibly have lived, and to place him in the life he would have, the one he resolutely did live for the next thirty-six years, he was disowned with his young wife by her parents.
Elton, as they saw him, came from nothing. He was of low birth and circumstances. He possessed eight grades of schooling, a team of horses, a few tools, and the knowledge of the use of them, but no visible prospects, no “future.” He was no doubt as far as possible unlike the minister or the doctor the lofty Mountjoys had foreseen and spoken for as their son-in-law. But by the time he was twenty-five he had within him, nevertheless, a settled love of farming and an ability to work and manage that were rare and plain enough to have attracted the discerning eye of Braymer Hardy.
And so Elton came to the Beechum place with something of a reputation and was so far explained, but to a further extent he came unexplained—as, to a further extent, probably all of us do. His father had been a hard, capable worker, and a renowned teamster who, as Braymer told it, “when he was saw-logging in the woods, could make one horse stand and the other one pull, and never touch a line.” But Elton was only nine years old when his father died, and so what he got from his father must have come partly by example and some instruction, partly from what he overheard. He told me once of his father’s precaution against harness galls when he was working his horses hard in hot weather: “When he stopped to let them rest, he would raise their collars and piss on their shoulders.” This was a practice well known and often followed by the oldtime teamsters. It is another testimony to his father’s horsemanship. But mostly Elton’s inheritance from his father was within him when he was born.
Though Elton blamed his mother for the encroachment of her too-soon-married second husband, he also spoke of her with carefully weighed respect. His gift for management—for rightly ordering his workdays and his work, his place and the seasons—certainly might have come from her. He remembered a dry year, probably 1930, when their garden did not make. When its failure was clear and complete, his mother made one trip to the store, bought all the canned goods she perfectly knew they would need until the next year’s garden, and she never went back to the store. When Elton was still a dependent boy, she bought him a pair of brown cotton gloves at the start of every winter. If he lost them, he got no more. If he kept them, she would mend and patch them endlessly to make them last until spring, and he remembered his pride in the beautiful care she gave to her stitches.
“He don’t come from nothing,” Braymer told my father. “But nothing is pret’ near what he’ll bring with him. He’s got a good enough pair of horses and a milk cow—paid for, I think—some chickens, a few tools. And I’d say he’s married to a right good girl.”
“That’s something,” my father said. “Enough, maybe.”
“Enough for a start,” Braymer said. “There’ll be more. That old place he’s started out on don’t amount to much. It’s held him back. Put him on a good farm—put him on that old Beechum place that’s been looked after—it’ll be something to see.”
It was something to see. Elton came to the Beechum place with Mary, his wife, with the few animals, tools, and household furnishings they had managed so far to own, with his intelligence and talent, his athlete’s grace and dexterity at his work, but also, and above all, the passion with which he used his gifts, his so far cooped-up desire to farm, his quickness in possessing everything he learned, his delight in the use of his mind.
The Beechum place, in a way, set him free. It gave him scope, room to reach out with his mind and his hands to see how much he could do of what might be done. In the first year and often enough in the years that followed, he worked in a kind of elation. In that first spring, once he had made his own beginning at the beginning of the crop year, he began to leave behind him the visible marks and signs by which he would be known. Everywhere he worked he made order. Task by task, piece by piece, he began to recover the Beechum place from the inattention that had come upon it in Old Jack’s waning years. It seemed to turn back toward life. It seemed to come again into sight and to be seen. It began to look, as Elton himself said, “like somebody lives here.”
My father saw that this was so. He told Braymer, “You were right about him.”
And Braymer said, “Wheeler, you don’t need to tell that to me.”
My grandfather Catlett, watching from across the road, saw that it was as Braymer had said it would be. Old Jack saw it. Eventually, so did I. And so, from watching Elton, from working for him as a hired hand, finally from working with him as his neighbor and friend, I came, like Braymer Hardy, to know a good one when I saw one.
We arrive here in this world having forgotten where we came from, though something of a memory seems to remain: a whisper, a distant shine like that of a house window at night on the far side of the valley, perhaps what some have called “the inner light,” to guide us when finally we have been jolted awake. And so we don’t come from nothing. But once here we don’t know where we are. At first I learned the world as a book written, completed the day before my birth, not to be changed by another penstroke. And then I saw that some I knew were departing from it, never to return, and new strangers were arriving. The newcomers, if they stayed, would learn more or less of where they were. And then, in time, they too would depart, taking with them the sum of all they had learned, leaving behind them maybe a few who would remember them, and then the rememberers too would go and be gone. I see in this the order of things, nothing to complain about. I have been here long enough to watch the whole turn of the wheel. I see that we are passing through this world like a river of water flowing through a river of earth. A far cry from a written book, the world—to extend my desperate metaphor—is a book ceaselessly being written, and not in a human language. This too has not been submitted to our judgment, and it is not for us to regret. To give thanks seems truly to be the right response, for as we come and go we learn something of love, the gift and the giving of it, and this appears to lay a worth upon us, if we want it, if we accept it, to give us standing hereafter.
That is the heart speaking in the heart’s language, and out of a mystery so vast that order and chance may be reconciled within it. Because, for all we surely know, we come into our times and places as much at random as leaves falling, it is remarkable, as I look back, that Elton seems to have stepped at the age of twenty-five into vacancies in the story of our home country that had been devised for him, for which he had been predestined and prepared. As he entered into his life on the Beechum place, as if according to nature so that probably none of us saw it happening, he became Old Jack’s appointed son and successor, my grandfather Catlett’s neighbor and student, my father’s student and friend, my friend and teacher. He went among us in his way of always paying attention, learning us, making of us and for us and to us a sense that, without him, we could not have made for ourselves. His sense of us gave us a sort of historical coherence, in which of course he himself was included.
As everybody saw soon enough, Mary was the “right good girl” Braymer had said she was. She was to the end of his days the help meet for him that Elton would always need. She made him the only household and home that ever was securely his. And she loved him. When necessary, she worked beside him in the field. She often cooked dinner, by herself, for a dozen hands and then, as soon as she had done the dishes, went to work with the crew she had fed. And I remember her avowal of Elton’s advantage in the bad weather of the seasons and his moods: “He had me.”
Young as they were, so distinguished as they were by their orphan marriage, the notoriety and the hurt of it, Elton and Mary seemed to make a sort of refuge of my Catlett grandparents, to whom they endeared themselves by being young and well-mannered and glad to help. In the afternoons, when she was caught up in her work, Mary often would walk across the fields to visit with my grandmother, from whom she took comfort and learned a lot and borrowed books, and whom she called “Grandma,” as I did. And often in the evenings Mary and Elton would drive over in their car, a mudstained and hard-used black coupe, to sit and talk until bedtime.
Elton, who was eager to prove himself and was watchful for any advantage, had not been long on the Beechum place before he bought a secondhand tractor, large for the time, with cleated iron wheels. His purpose was to add some custom work for neighbors to his own work at home. Because the tractor was equipped with lights, he could do a good deal of the extra work at night. His only head-on confrontation with my grandfather came when he drove the tractor into the barn lot at our home place early one morning, intending only to take what really was a reasonable shortcut to a neighboring farm where he was going to work. But the tractor’s loud exhaust brought my grandfather out of the barn with his cane in the air. “Nawsir! Nawsir! Get that God damned thing out of here!”
Elton killed the engine. “How’re you this morning, Mr. Catlett!”
“I don’t want that thing on this place!” The old man’s voice was shaking. “It’s got no business here! It don’t belong here!”
“Yessir!” Elton said. “I pretty well know what you mean.” In fact, and all of a sudden, he pretty well did know. He had felt his heart touched by my grandfather’s passion. He sat on his high seat, looking down at my grandpa, who seemed to have come rushing out of a time before that time, and who stood with his cane still raised as if to kill the tractor by striking it on one of its vital parts, and whose eyes shone with a hard blue light. And Elton felt himself, to his surprise, on the verge of a radical beginning he was not altogether glad of. He did still love and was proud of the horses that for a while he would still be using—his seasoned team, Prince and Dan, and the green-broke three-year-old he called Dobbin—and he knew Marce Catlett’s reputation as a mule man and a teamster. But the morning light was still brightening and he was on his way to work. Also he was amused, in fact delighted. He had been smiling when he spoke, and he was still smiling, because the circumstances asked him to do so, also because he could not stop.
“Uncle Marce,” he said, giving him the customary honor of his old age, “I was hoping you wouldn’t mind if I drive across your place to get to Mr. Simms’s. That’ll get me to work a little quicker.”
“Simms’s! You got no work at home?”
“Plenty. But I’m pretty well caught up over there. I’m going to do some plowing for Mr. Simms. Some other people too. I’d like mighty well to get ahold of some money.”
“Money! What do you need with money?”
“Well, I wouldn’t mind having some, but it’s the fellow over at the bank that’s needing it.” He was not going to say that he had got the loan to pay for the tractor.
“You owe money at the bank, boy?”
“Yessir. Mr. Wheeler Catlett has stood behind me for a loan. I want to get it paid.”
Elton knew he had been coming to judgment. He would remember that my grandfather’s eyes had become thoughtful instead of angry, though they kept a hard glitter. He was still looking at Elton, the cane still raised but apparently forgotten.
“Yes!” he said. “Pay if off! Stay out of debt if you can. It’ll ruin you. I know what I’m talking about.”
He turned a little aside then, as if only to let himself think, and for a while neither of them spoke.
“I’ve lived here all my life. Or mighty near all of it. Most of it under the burden of owed money. A time was I asked too much of my place. I made some mistakes. I’ve mended it back the best I could. I’d hate to see it trampled by that thing, with debt driving it.”
Elton said not a word. He had heard his fear speaking.
“But mainly I’ve treated it right. You can look at it and see what you think.”
And then an ache of understanding startled Elton’s heart. It seemed to him that he became older.
“Mr. Catlett,” he said. They were looking at each other then, and Elton’s voice and my grandfather’s had come into accord. “I have looked. And I know what to think.”
“We were sounding alike,” Elton would say when he told this story, which he loved and told many times, to me, to my brother, to anybody listening—and of course always to himself, to test his understanding.
“Boy,” my grandfather said, “you had your shoes on before daylight,” and this was merely a statement.
“Yessir.”
“And it’ll likely be dark again before you pull ’em off.”
“I expect it will.”
Some more thinking then was done, and Elton waited.
“You were aiming to drive through here to get over to Simms’s.”
“Yessir.”
“To break ground for old man Simms.”
“Yessir.”
“To get money to pay to the bank.”
“Yessir.”
“And when you go through my gates, you’ll fasten ’em behind you.”
“Yessir, Mr. Catlett, I will.”
And then, while the tractor’s steering wheel itched under Elton’s right hand, my grandfather looked into him at a place, Elton said, where everything he had ever done “was written in writing.”
When my grandfather was satisfied with his reading, he appeared to remember the cane, which he had lowered and now raised again, this time in a kind of salute.
“Son, you’re all right. You’re a good one. Drive on.”
After that, and during the time, almost a year, they were allowed to live and speak as neighbors, you might say that Elton made an effort to memorize my grandfather. To an extent that was significant certainly for me, he succeeded. He was a good student of character, who had always paid close attention to his elders. He had watched Braymer Hardy, for instance, as carefully as Braymer had watched him. He had made no big thing of his watching, but he saw that Braymer was, in his entirely unpresuming way, a superior man. Just by keeping interested, Elton had picked up the character, the feeling, the tone or the tune, of Braymer’s way of being in the world. So he did with my grandfather, whom he often quoted to me. Sometimes this would be a handing on of advice: “See, laugh, and say nothing”—by which my grandfather refused standing to what he thought unworthy. Sometimes, just for his delight in it, Elton would repeat: “Son, you’re all right. You’re a good one. Drive on.” He did not mimic my grandfather, but he did deliver rightly the gravity and tone and emphasis of my grandfather’s sayings as they would be brought to mind. When in remembrance and commendation he would repeat to me, “Ay God, son, I know what a man can do in a day,” the tone of his voice would tell me how, in my grandfather’s understanding, that knowledge could be both exultant and tragic. To a man eager and strong a day is an invitation, but the day passes, and in passing it sets upon his mind and his hands its intractable limit.
And so Elton was able to convey to me my grandfather himself as I remembered him. But he also gave me a competent appraisal and sense of my grandfather’s worth, the tone or tune of his experience of this world, that I could not have received for myself when I was a boy. I am more completely my grandfather’s grandson than I would have been had Elton not so carefully known us.
In the same way, he completed my sonship to my father. That was because he and my father, in a way that was crucial to them both, completed each other. The two of them knew nobody, had no friend, as much in love with farming, so unendingly interested in it, so eager to talk about it, as they were. They spent countless Sunday afternoons driving in my father’s car over their farms, slowly, contemplatively, often stopping, looking at the crops, the pastures, and the livestock, noticing qualities, likenesses and differences, also just keeping company with each other, remembering things, telling stories, laughing. Of all that our land produced in those days, their greatest love and interest went to the pastures and the grazing animals. The sight of good cattle or good sheep on good pasture could stop them even from talking. I know this because from my boyhood until I was more or less one of them, I would be sitting in the back seat, listening. That conversation that they carried on in my father’s sequence of scratched and scarred Chevrolets, considering the variety of its subjects and the ardor and care with which they were discussed, was the best part of my education, and the part I loved best because none of us thought it “educational.” Only long into the absence of those friends have I thought how badly I have sometimes reduced them by calling them my teachers. Each of them at times did deliberately and pointedly teach me. But mostly they taught me by example and by the good chance that made me their overhearer, at times when they thought of me only when I was needed to open a gate.
My father thought Elton “the best manager of work” he had ever known and gave full respect to his mind. Elton, who was an equal partner in their friendship, nevertheless studied my father with full appreciation of the rarity he happened to be in his place and time. One day when my father was showing his cattle to a prospective buyer, Elton rode along in the back seat, in my role as observer, auditor, and gate-opener. The cattle were scattered somewhat widely, and as my father drove his car among them, Elton said, he never approached one of them from a slant or angle that did not show it to advantage. “He was thinking,” Elton said to me, whose mind was still young and wandering, “all the time.”
He told me some things also that I would never have heard from my father. They went, just the two of them, on a bird-hunting trip down south, I forget where. On their way home in the dark of an evening, my father was driving fast, and they were intently talking. They came upon a curve in the road that was too sharp for their speed, as my father saw too late. It was a left-hand curve. On the right-hand side of the road, just at the start of the curve, a farm gate was standing wide open. Braking carefully and still talking, my father drove through the gate into what the headlights revealed to be a fairly level pasture. He had done a lot of what we now call “off-road driving.” He often had avoided getting stuck in unpaved places, and seldom, but often enough, had got stuck. And so he felt equal to the present emergency, made perfectly confident by so much imperfect experience. Without slowing down more than enough, exactly preserving the needed momentum, still talking, he made a long, gentle loop out into the pasture, drove once more through the gate and back again onto the road. They had been talking about the right time to sow red clover. When he first had applied his brakes, my father was remembering one of the half a dozen old farmers he had prized as clients because they knew so much. Mr. Buttermore. Like Elton, I had heard my father speak of Mr. Buttermore.
“Mr. Buttermore,” my father said, “always sowed red clover in November.”
“Your daddy never stopped talking,” Elton said.
“And,” my father said, “he may have been right.”
“Your daddy,” Elton said, “had got started and he wasn’t finished.”
For all the good, and also the goodness, that Elton had in him, he was not an easy man. Because of the hard circumstances of his life after his father’s death, the never-ended antagonism between him and his stepfather, the rejection of his and Mary’s marriage by her parents, he came to the Beechum place bearing more than his share of anger and resentment. Though this was perfectly understandable and so (by some) forgivable, it could make him extremely touchous. He could be hard to get along with. He disliked a lot of people. The insult he received from his self-exalted in-laws was a sting he felt for many years. It was a wound deliberately given, and it was grossly unjust. But Elton also was much inclined, as my father put it, “to cherish petty grievances,” about which he could be fiercely outspoken.
My father, as sympathetic and generous as he could be, and often was, also was not an easy man. He was quick-minded, which shortened his patience. When he was wound up in certain ways, he could be peremptory and regardless, about as tactful as a handsaw. And so the way between him and Elton was not always smooth. They would fall out, not so far as I know for any reason very large or significant, but there would be some negligence, a disappointment, a fancied slight. “We both,” Elton once said, “are as sensitive as your eye.” They were not so petty as to not-speak or turn their backs. But there would be times when they did not see much of each other. And then whatever their difference had been would wear out or disappear, and they would take up where they had left off. I think that few friends have been so nearly of one mind about the things that mattered to them both.
Years ago, when I was still in my teens and was working for Elton in the tobacco cutting, one of my fellow harvest hands was Floyd Moneyworth, known as Fatty. Fatty was not fat, but he had been somewhat plump when he was a boy, which had been a distinction, a rare thing in those days. Perhaps contradicting Fatty’s surname, Elton refused to pay his earned wages in full until the harvest was over. That was for fear that Fatty, while he was still needed, would be drawn back into the daytime portion of the Port William conversation, of which he was a hereditary member, and from which he had solemnly agreed with Elton to take a temporary leave of absence.
One day when the two of us were working side by side, Fatty confided to me: “They’re saying you’ve got an old head.” By “they” he meant the elders and authorities of the conversation, which for the time being he was attending only between suppertime and bedtime, and into which he evidently had inserted the members of our crew. By “old head” I believe I thought then that he and they meant that my mind was more serious or settled, less threatening, less potentially dangerous, than the minds of some other big boys. Until just now I had not for a long time remembered Fatty and his handing over to me the revelation that I had an old head. I suppose that phrase, that concept, has come back to me now because now I finally need it.
The phrase may well have meant what I at first thought it did. But the world changes, perspective lengthens, and that was seventy years ago. My mind now is not as superficial as it was then. And now I hold the minds of the elders and authorities of old Port William in far more respect than I did then. I am one of them now, one of the last of them. I know how much they had known of time and change, how much and how well some of them had thought about what they knew, how well some of them remembered what they would rather have forgot. I know that they knew then more about my family and history, more about me, than I did. And ever since I had got big enough to walk about on my own among the town’s sitting and talking places, they had been watching me, teasing me, sometimes befriending and indulging me. They knew things about me that I had not yet noticed or, as a chuckleheaded big boy, had for the time being forgot or thought I had outgrown: that I was a listener and a watcher, that I could be so intent and quiet on the edge of their conversation that they would forget I was there, that I liked the company of the old people.
I am able now to imagine that they regarded me as a throwback, a boy from somewhere back in their time, who had somehow turned up in my time. And so, I imagine, they may have thought of me as something like a late-come contemporary of theirs: a young boy with an old head. At the time of that crop year, 1950 or a little later, I had updated myself into an authentic chucklehead who thought my driver’s license more liberating than the Bill of Rights. But there had been a time before that when in a sort of elation—sometimes in prepared speeches to my more indulgent elders—I had imagined what would be made of me by the ownership of a team of mules, a wagon, and some tools. After that there had been a time when in solitude, understanding by then my oddity, I had mourned the displacement by tractors of the living creatures bred and born to work. This grief was less a thought than a feeling, a sort of palpable emptiness in the mysterious organ, both bodily and cultural, that we call “the heart.” For after all I had seen with my own eyes the way a grown man could be completed, even improved, by the collaboration between himself and a good team of mules—not in that way so different from the collaboration between a hunter and a good dog, which also I had seen.
And so it has occurred to me that Elton and my father must have belonged before me to the rare company of people with old heads, for I knew that they hearkened back to older times and ways, and that the landmark by which the three of us had oriented ourselves to our home country and to one another had been Marce Catlett, my grandfather. What young man other than Elton could have looked down from the tall perch of his first tractor at that outraged old man and understood him, felt for him, and in fact loved him? And my father, having begun his passage back across the threshold of this world, in one of his mind’s final clarities, spoke of his father: “We miss him, don’t we?”
It must have been because we knew collectively my grandpa Catlett, because we saw and recognized in him some determination we might otherwise not have known in ourselves, we were moved by an old feeling in the bones, an old delight in the places of this world that we needed to live in, work in, know the light and the weather in, to the end of our days. The sympathy, the unanimity, that passed among us remains with me in their absence, and it will remain with me, I pray, as a consolation and a light as long as I am here.
In the decades between Elton’s arrival on the Beechum place and his death, it seems to me now that the three of us were working out the terms of a fittingness to our home country here and so to one another. That fittingness, so far as it was made, I had to grow up into, for I was the youngest, the slowest, and certainly the most distracted. After I came to it, it became simply necessary to my mind’s way of knowing itself and locating itself. And when I settled here at home and made the old-headed choice of a team of horses to do my farming, who were my most eager encouragers and abettors but Elton and my father?
But significant and dear as our understanding has been, it has had to be maintained by much resistance to all that has been brought upon the world by the geniuses of greed, conquest, and war. As we lived and went on, anomalies continued to gather around us: things which were alien to the life and intelligence of this place, but which for us, in our time and times, were inescapable. We were living into the ever-greatening domination of the land and the people by machines.
Though this was entirely materialistic and the work of materialists, it was the ascendancy of mind over matter, giving to thought an absolutely logical or mechanical propulsion toward the disembodiment of human life. It imposed on the living land and people an economy merely mental, merely an idea, that steadily ruled and diminished the lives of both. Elton, in his time, saw and foresaw much of this. My father, who survived Elton by seventeen years, saw more of it—saw it in fact established, temporary as it has got to be, as the only way of the world. I, who now have survived my father by thirty years, have seen its triumph, as if in their exiled millions the people have unanimously lifted their feet from the land and washed the stain of it from their shoes.
Elton, who in the spring of 1945 drove into Grandpa Catlett’s barn lot under his curse and left with his blessing, drove on into the time determined to come, that my grandfather could not have imagined or believed. Elton had begun a succession of tractors that would carry him from the clear advantage offered by the first one to a young man, strong and tireless, who wanted to plow at night, to his last one that, as he saw, was a part of the progression toward the even larger machines that would cost too much and earn too little.
Those Sunday afternoon conversations in my father’s automobile, which were and are so dear to me, were powered by oil and fire, and were more ominous than we could then have known. And yet, convergent as it was upon the time to come, that conversation was an inheritance. It descended to us from Grandpa Catlett, a somewhat tragic figure, lonely in his marriage, the last of those we called “the old kind,” who stood behind us even as we departed from him. We would never know again in our country a man so intact, so fully incarnate as he was, who had never enlarged himself by a power that he had not spoken to and been heard by.
The ninety-acre place across the creek, that late in his life Elton bought and called simply “Across the Creek” or “Over Yonder,” he meant to use as winter pasture for his brood cows. He would mow it early for hay and then let the grazing accumulate until cold weather, when he would move the cows over there to make and birth their calves. To shelter the cattle and to store the hay he needed to supplement the pasture, he built a barn that after half a century is still standing.
He spent a lot of time in thinking about and designing the barn, drawing the plan of it in ruled lines, revising and perfecting it as his thoughts changed and improved. To build it he had lumber milled from big trees cut on the place. I regretted without saying so the sacrifice of the trees, but I also saw how appropriate it was that the cattle should thus be sheltered by the land that fed them.
The barn stood for Elton’s good will toward the animals that depended on him as he depended on them. It was stoutly built, with a shed roof, its open side facing away from the prevailing winds, offering shelter to the cows when they would be most in need. The barn embodied Elton’s kindness to them—his thanks, you might say—his comfort in their comfort. It was his watchfulness over them paid in advance.
The barn, I think, also embodied Elton’s love for good work: work good in the moment it was being done, as he did it, and then a lasting good. “Don’t think of the dollar, think of the job,” he would say, meaning that if you kept your mind on your work and did it right, maybe you wouldn’t need to worry about the dollar. This was the law of an ancient love, passing from the world, but he kept it alive in himself, and he taught it to me.
The injured land, by his use of it, healed and became better. It looked better. “It looks like somebody lives there,” he would say, and he would laugh.
In his own latter years and while he was still an active participant in this world, my father from time to time would remember something or discover something that he would want to show me. He would drive in at my place, going slow, considering, looking around. When I came outside to meet him or he came upon me at work, he would lean across the seat, unlatch the passenger side door, and push it open. “Come go with me.” It was not an order, for by then it did not occur to him that I might not do as he told me. Which I did joyfully, for at those times, when he was glad to see me and full of the sense of adventure, he was excellent company, and I would be comforted to be with him.
One warm rainy afternoon in the second spring after Elton died, while we were still getting used to his absence, my father drove over to get me. “Come go with me.” He had located the site of an old grist mill of which he knew some history, and he wanted us to look at it together.
The ruins of the mill were in the valley of a large creek that empties into the Ohio River west of Hargrave. My father stayed on his marks and drove directly to it. We examined the disintegrating stone walls of the mill itself and then walked for some distance along the mill race that had been dry and grass-covered for many years.
The mill had been built at the start of the white people’s occupation of that valley. The mill race we were walking in had been dug by Indians whom the miller and others had enslaved and put to work under threat of death. As those men, supposedly wild, were completing what was supposedly a first work of domestication, the chief of the enslaved Indians appeared on the bluff above them and hurled down a curse upon the miller and upon all of his get that might survive him in that place.
The story, as my father knew it and told me, is far from complete. It tells the origin of the mill race, and it remembers the chief’s curse by remembering also that, for as long as the miller and his family lasted there, they suffered one dire misfortune after another. My father knew the rules of evidence. He knew the differences between proof and coincidence and between truth and belief. He had applied his mind for years to the sense of the words “deserve” and “deserving.” There was a certain standing he could not grant to the chief’s curse as the cause of the miller’s fate. But he did grant fully the gravity and magnitude, the historical sense and portent, of the coincidence, if that is what it was. And so, in his telling, the story was weighted by his acknowledgment that we had behind us a door remaining ajar, that we might shut and lean against, but could not latch.
We went on and stopped again at an abandoned house and farmstead that my father also knew the history of and wanted to see. He remembered it from many years ago when it was a flourishing small place. Now the house showed the bad signs of use by people who did not live there, or perhaps not anywhere. In the barn we found still hanging on its pegs the set of harness worn by that farm’s last team of mules. The leather was dry and cracked, the hardware crusted with rust. We rode on from there several miles without thinking of anything we wanted to say.
Our windings pretty soon took us onto the river road from Hargrave to Port William. My father speeded up a little. I thought he was ready then to take me home. But he soon turned into the lower end of the Bird’s Branch road and began the climb out of the river valley, following through the woods and along the creek the road that would take us up onto the open ridge, past Elton’s place and our home place.
The weather had become more unsettled. There had been showers, starting and stopping, passing over quickly, divided by big patches of blue sky. When we came up out of the hollow onto the ridge, we were in sunlight, but a large dark cloud had piled up on the horizon in the west. An extraordinarily brilliant rainbow had formed over there, the secondary bow almost as bright as the other. The great double arc appeared to stand just beyond Elton’s Across-the-Creek place. At the entrance into that place, my father abruptly, as his way was, turned in, drove over the cattle guard, and on back to the barn, which was almost centered beneath the rainbow. Within the inmost arc there was an intense golden light.
My father lifted his foot from the accelerator, let the car roll to a stop, turned off the engine, and let his hand fall open onto his knee. We seemed then to be inside the light. Neither of us moved or spoke. The light seemed almost substantial, ambient and directionless as a still mist that is almost rain, too light to fall. It seemed to touch everything and to perfect everything it touched.
We sat perfectly still, for what I believe we both thought an allotted time. We understood that this would happen to us only once. It might happen again, but we would not be there together to see it. We knew that we could not remain in that beautiful light. We needed to go before it was gone, so as not to spoil it by our too much wanting.
I was not surprised but was nonetheless glad when my father reached forward and touched the key.
“Well,” he said, and it was a benediction. “If Elton sees it now, he’s pleased.”