my own that have lived and died until I no longer remember where I am. And then I lift my head and look about me at the river and the valley, the great, unearned beauty of this place, and I feel the memoryless joy of a man just risen from the grave.
What I liked best to do with Uncle Othy was go along with him in the boat or the buggy. He loved to fish and to eat fish, and so we would often be on the river, the first and last thing of the day, to run a trotline or raise a net. I loved to be out there in the early mornings and the late evenings, for then the river would seem spellbound, we and it caught in the same spell. It would be quiet, beckoning us into the presence of things. Uncle Othy would feel adventurous at those times and was easy to get along with. He took care to teach me to fish and to handle the boat.
Except for our trip to church on Sunday morning, our only regular use for the buggy was to take groceries to Dark Tom Cotman. After he was struck blind, Tom Cotman said, “I’m dark,” and ever afterward that was what they called him: Dark Tom.
To get to his place, we would follow the river road—it was just a track in those days, with gates to open as you went along—across the branch and up past Woolforks’ and over the Willow Run bridge. After a little more than a mile, where the river came in closest to the hill and there was no bottomland at all, Dark Tom’s house stood on the hillside, looking right down at the river.
A long wire had been anchored in the river and stretched tight to a post in the yard. For wash water, when his well was low, Dark Tom hooked a weighted bucket onto the wire, let it slide down into the river, and hauled it up again by a rope tied to the bail. Other wires led from the back porch to the privy, the coal pile, and the barn where he milked his cow and fed his hens and fattened his hog. When he got beyond the wires, he felt his way along with a stick. Sometimes he would feel his way clear down to the landing and spend half a day talking. When he got drunk, he said, he got around by falling: “I’ve surveyed the whole geography hereabouts in man-lengths.” He had been in the Spanish-American War, and had a pension. The neighbors, of course, helped him out, but he did pretty well on his own.
He sent his list one day, as he usually did, by somebody coming down to the landing. Uncle Othy boxed up his order, and that evening we took it up to him in the buggy. Dark Tom was in the kitchen, frying corn batter cakes on a griddle. Uncle Othy set the box down inside the door and then stood, leaning against the jamb, and talked a while with Dark Tom. I didn’t hear what they said because I was too taken up with what was happening there in the kitchen. It is another of those moments long past that is as present to my mind as if it is still happening.
Dark Tom was frying the batter cakes one at a time, feeling at the edges with the spatula to tell when to turn them. When they were done, he laid them on a plate on the seat of a chair at the end of the stove. His black-and-brown-spotted foxhound, Old Ed, was sitting by the chair, and every time Dark Tom laid down a batter cake Old Ed promptly ate it, all in one bite, and then sat and licked his chops until Dark Tom laid down another batter cake. I should have said something, I suppose, but I didn’t think of it. At the time, and for years afterward, I thought that Old Ed was eating Dark Tom’s supper, taking advantage of his blindness, and that Dark Tom and Uncle Othy were too occupied by their talk to notice. Later it occurred to me to wonder if that was merely Dark Tom’s way of feeding his dog. It is a question with me still, and the answer has altogether disappeared from the world.
That would have been in the summer of 1923. Though of course none of us knew it, Uncle Othy was then living the last of his days in this world. One afternoon Put Woolfork found him lying in the mud down on the riverbank, where he had gone to bail out his boat after a hard rain. Put hollered for us, and Aunt Cordie sent me running across the hill to the Thripples’. Put and the whole Thripple family helped us to get Uncle Othy up the hill to the house and into bed, and then stayed and watched with us. Uncle Othy died just a little while after dark.
And that left Aunt Cordie and me to keep things going there on the place and at the store. We were not, I believe, anyways near equal to the job. The neighbors, especially the Thripples, were always coming over to help us with something. Uncle Arch took over the crop on the halves, but that still left us a lot of work. And we missed Uncle Othy. We were always needing him to help with something or tell us something, but we missed him just for his own sake too. We needed to hear him say, “Hurry along with them biscuits, Cordie, for I got things that needs a-seeing to,” or, “If you can’t do it, son, quit and get out of the way. Don’t send a boy to do a man’s work.”
It was a time under a shadow, and yet I remember being happy, for I had responsibilities then, and I knew that I was useful. I took charge of the milking and the care of the animals, and at the store I had the hang of things better than Aunt Cordie did. I had been watching Uncle Othy for years, and I knew how much he stocked of this and that and how he arranged things. And since I had been going to school some, up at the mouth of Willow Run, I could keep track of the figures.
I could see that Aunt Cordie was grieving, and yet she took care to be a good companion to me. She praised my work, calling me “my boy,” and told me stories, and would sit with me by the hour after supper, playing Rook or Old Maid. We were, in a way, playmates.
And then toward the end of the next summer I saw her begin to fail. She got so she couldn’t remember things. And she would have to rest two or three times coming up from the store to the house.
One day, standing in the kitchen door, she called loudly, “Oh, Othy! Oh, Othy!”
I said, “Aunt Cordie, Uncle Othy ain’t here.”
And she said just as nicely, as if I had put her mind at rest, “Well, I reckon that’s why he don’t answer.”
Sometimes she would look at me with a worry in her eyes that I didn’t understand until later, and she would say, “I don’t know. Honey, I just don’t know.” She meant she didn’t know what would become of me after she was gone.
One evening when the wind blew up the river with the first cold edge of fall, she stopped to rest as we were coming up from the store. She turned and looked north, the way the wind was coming.
“It’s got a chill in it,” I said. “We’ll need a fire tonight.” I remember I was looking forward to the fire, the good warmth.
But she said, “Child, I just don’t know if I can endure another winter.”
I can see now that she had given up. She had searched inside herself, looking for some sign that she still desired to live, and had found none. She wanted to live for me, maybe, but not for herself.
One morning I woke up and realized that it was daylight already and I had heard not a sound. Though there was frost on the ground, I didn’t even wait to put on my shoes but just barefooted it over to the Thripples’.
Aunt Cordie had died in her sleep, an easy way to go. I am thankful.
I was a little past ten years old, and I was the survivor already of two stories completely ended.
4
The Good Shepherd
Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told. As almost any barber can testify, there is also more than needs to be told, and more than anybody wants to hear. The story of the next dozen years of my life could be made long, but I want to be careful to offer you only the proper handful—just enough to describe the course that carried me away from the Port William neighborhood and then twelve years later brought me back again to the proper end of my life, to the love of my life, Mattie Chatham.
Aunt Cordie, departing, left behind her the problem of me. What, as she had wondered, was going to become of me? I could not stay on at the landing by myself, though of course that is what I wanted to do. I remember arguing, to the forces of seniority and authority who had to decide what was to become of me, that staying on was what I could do, that I was well able to do so. But of course I was only a child trying to call back a lost world.
By then I had no living relative,