Twelve: Wheeler
In the warm clear sunlight pouring upon the ridges and slopes and woods and roofs and walls, the brushy fence rows, pastures, cornfields, and dwindling tobacco patches of that country as deeply familiar to him as if both dreamed and seen, Wheeler Catlett drives his car out the Birds Branch Road. He drives slowly up the rises and then lets the car drift down again of its own weight. On the steering wheel his fingers beat a light, gentle, unattended rhythm while he watches the country open ahead of him and go by. He left Bess at the Feltners’ after the funeral, saying that he had an errand to do before they went home. But it is not just the errand. Wheeler Catlett has thinking to do. Like Mat and the others, he has recognized Old Jack’s death as one of the crucial divisions in his own life. And he has felt a need, as yet obscure to him, to let his mind and his eyes drift a while again upon the country, to sense himself again as native and belonging there, and perhaps at last to feel established in his life whatever change it is that has been made.
For nearly thirty years Wheeler has been involved in the founding and the administration and the defense of a marketing cooperative whose purpose is to assure a decent living, a chance to survive on their land, to the farmers of this part of the country. It is a Jeffersonian vision, one might say, that the cooperative was founded to implement and preserve, but in Wheeler the effort was founded also upon an impulse sterner and more personal: as a boy he had seen his father and his neighbors sell their crops for too little to pay the warehouse commission; he had seen the time when the market was a tragedy in which good men saw their ruin. With a child’s clear sense of justice he determined then to do something about it if he could. And in considerable measure he and his friends in the cooperative have so far succeeded in doing something about it. But the complexity of Wheeler’s history has been that in order to serve and defend the way of life that he loves and respects above all others, he has had to leave it to live another kind of life, first in college and law school and then in the courthouse town of Hargrave.
And yet he has stayed near enough to home—to the farms and households and sickbeds and then the graves of those men whose worthiness and whose troubles first defined his aims—so that he has always had clearly in mind what it was he served. Now Old Jack, who was the last of that generation that Wheeler looked to with such filial devotion, is dead. And Wheeler is fifty-two years old, as old as the century, and younger men are looking to him. Now he must cease to be a son to the old men and become a father to the young. He has his own sons, of course. But there are also the young men of the farms, coming on, men such as Elton Penn and Nathan Coulter, in whom the old way has survived. Wheeler has been thinking about them and about the troubles that probably lie ahead of them: an increasing scarcity of labor as more and more of the country people move to the cities; the consequent necessity for further mechanization of the farms; the consequent need of the farmers for more land and more capital in order to survive; the consequent further departure of the labor force from the country; the increasing difficulty of preserving an agricultural economy favorable to small farmers as political power flows from the country to the cities. These interlinking chains of consequence have lain heavily upon Wheeler’s mind for years. But Old Jack’s death has raised anew and more starkly than ever the possibility that men of his kind are a race doomed to extinction, that the men Wheeler loves most in the world are last survivors. Driving out the Birds Branch Road this afternoon, he sees the farms and their fences and fields and buildings as never before in the light and shadow of a human history that had its beginning in time, and will have its end. His eyes lingering familiarly over the lay of the fields in the brilliant fall sunlight, he muses upon the mortality not of individual men and women but of the human life of the earth.
As the white buildings of Old Jack’s place become visible among the shade trees at the top of the rise, Wheeler drives even more slowly, and his eyes move more carefully still over the ground. Year by year, for almost as long as Wheeler has been conscious of it, the place has been improved by Jack Beechum’s impassioned kindness to it. Even after Old Jack’s departure his kindness remained, and then Elton and Wheeler himself were its agents; between them they made the plans and did the work to carry out the old man’s wishes. During the war years and afterwards the farm made money. And Old Jack—whose own wants and needs, never great, had become small indeed—turned his earnings to further improvements on the farm. Elton was eager to do the work and to see it done, and incited and pleased by that eagerness in the young man, Old Jack spared no expense. It has become a place a man like Wheeler would drive or walk many miles to admire.
He turns in at the gate and drives slowly up through the yard under the limbs of the old trees, and past the house and into the barn lot. He stops the car in front of the barn and gets out. He steps through the wide doorway into the hay-fragrant shadow, nearly blinding after the bright sun. He calls quietly: “Elton?”
Getting no answer, he turns and stands looking thoughtfully out across the lot. The Penns’ automobile is parked on the grass near the back porch. They cannot be long home from the funeral. Elton is probably still at the house, changing his clothes.
Though he is alone, Wheeler has about him an air of alertness, of implicit haste; he seems to be not resting but poised in passage. It was this quality perhaps more than any other that endeared him to Old Jack. Wheeler could get things done, and Old Jack liked that.
Now, seeing Elton come out of the house, Wheeler steps forward into the light of the doorway. Elton has changed from the suit he wore to the funeral back into his work clothes.
“Hello, Wheeler,” Elton says, stepping into the barn. “It’s a pretty day, ain’t it?”
But now that he has spoken of it, his satisfaction with the weather seems to him unfitting. He turns and stands beside Wheeler, like him looking out into the daylight for a good many seconds before either of them speaks again. It is as though they are two of an assembly of spectators, and this passage of the light is an event they will be long and quiet in watching.
And then Wheeler says: “It is. It’s a fine day.”
For a while again they are silent. There is an embarrassment between them that neither of them expected or prepared for. It is only now that it exists that they realize its possibility. Until now their two lives have been bound together by their mutual allegiance to a third life, Old Jack’s. They wait to see what they may mean to each other now.
Wheeler feels the abruptness of the first words that he must speak beyond Old Jack’s death and the change it has made: “Elton, Uncle Jack arranged in his will for you to buy this place. He set the price and left you half the cost.”
Elton looks at Wheeler quickly, a peculiar challenge in his eyes.
“He’ll begin to believe it about day after tomorrow,” Wheeler thinks. He grins at Elton and says: “He didn’t want to leave it to you outright. He thought you ought to work for it the way he did. It was his opinion, you know, that there were some essential things he never learned until he got in debt.” Wheeler laughs briefly, and then, as if to keep his mind strictly on its business, looks at the ground. “I was to tell you as soon as he was buried and not wait, so you could make your plans.”
There is another silence of some length, and then Elton says: “Well, Wheeler, I reckon the old boss has got a little too far away to thank.”
“He thought you were worthy,” Wheeler says. “You were a son to him.”
He hears Elton draw a long, careful breath, and after a moment draw another.
“I was going to work some of my tobacco ground this afternoon, Wheeler, while we’re not cutting. I reckon I’d better go do it. I thank you.”
“Sure,” Wheeler says. “I’ve got to be going myself. We’ll be talking.”
But he does not move. He stands still, listening, as Elton’s footsteps go around the barn. He hears the tractor engine start and move out the ridge. And then instead of getting into his car, Wheeler walks slowly up and down the driveway of the barn, the sense of change, of loss, of the passing of things suddenly heavy upon him. For years he has come here as Old Jack’s friend and agent and emissary, almost as his son. Now that is over, but he cannot yet bring himself to leave. It is as though he has carried and passed on some key, some vital power, from an old man to a young one, and he thinks of the distance he has come.
He walks the length of the driveway three times, at a loss, filled with an objectless grief, and then on an impulse opens the door of what used to be the harness room and steps inside. At first he sees nothing that he might have come looking for. The room is dim and orderly—a bin of feed, three empty barrels, hand tools, buckets, all placed neatly and handily around the walls, the floor swept, several old sets of harness hanging on pegs—but its present order supersedes by several years any order that Old Jack ever made.
Only after his eyes grow used to the dimness does Wheeler begin to see, hanging against the walls above shoulder level, the evidence of Old Jack’s time. Hanging from nails driven everywhere into the boards are various pieces of harness, collars, collar pads, an odd hame, a set of check lines, pieces of leather strap, short lengths of rope, iron rings, snaps, lengths of chain, the iron fittings for singletrees and doubletrees, a wooden pulley, lap rings, clevises, plow plates, rusty horse and mule shoes, bridle bits, a broken shovel handle—the leftovers and odds and ends of a lifetime of farming, too good to throw away.
In the days before Old Jack moved to town, Wheeler remembers, when one of his tenants would ask where something was, the old man would answer indignantly: “Hanging up!”
Of course it was hanging up! He had been hanging things up all his life, taking care of things, keeping his leavings out from under his feet. If what he picked up had no place, he drove a new nail and made one.
“Hanging up!” he would say, to the bewilderment and intimidation of whoever dared ask, for though he grew ever less likely to remember where he had hung it, he knew there was no need to look for it underfoot.
Among that assortment of possibly useful objects that Old Jack saved and hung up, Wheeler comes upon a 1936 campaign poster of Franklin Roosevelt, bearing in black capitals the legend: A GALLANT LEADER. Wheeler himself was county chairman for that campaign, and he must have given the poster to Old Jack, who admired Roosevelt mainly for the game look of him in his pictures and for his willingness to place himself in difficulty. The paper is badly worn, torn, creased, snagged, brown at the edges. All the white area of the paper is covered with figures and with writing in Old Jack’s hand, whose laborious engraving Wheeler had observed a thousand times. (“You don’t have to push it clean through the paper,” he would say. “Damn it, son,” Old Jack would say, “I been to school!”) At the top of the poster, above the legend, is written: “Gray mare bred May 10” and near the bottom, at a slant, in blacker pencil: ”spotted sow to Ware Clayborn’s boar March 17” and under that, at a slightly different slant: “10 pigs lost 2.”
There are several more dates without explanation, and the rest of the space is filled with figures, additions and subtractions as abstract and unmeaning now as a child’s exercises in arithmetic. But though the writings on it have shed whatever significance they may have had, to Wheeler, who knows something of the solitude and the passion and at times the desperation of that account-keeping, the scribbled poster appears as a sort of emblem of Old Jack. Now that he looks, the whole wall is covered with those dates and figures that when they were written were never just figures, but the visible tracks of Jack Beechum’s mind, planning and counting, saying what was lost, what was left.
Wheeler remembers the successor to that wall, the little notebook that Old Jack carried in the bib of his overalls during his life at the hotel, and all the fierce and sporting arguments it led to. He laughs. And then, without realizing that he is about to do it, he cries.
Standing there has become pointless, pointlessly painful. Making up his mind to go, he carefully takes the old poster loose from the wall. He intends, as he removes the nails, to make a keepsake of it. But once he has taken it down and is holding it in his hands, its meaning seems already to have diminished. In a kind of guilt, in the sort of haste with which one would stop the bleeding of a living thing, he nails it back where it was.
“No,” he thinks, “we’ll take no trophies, no souvenirs. Let it fall like a leaf.”