Nathan Coulter (6 page)

Daddy sat there looking down at his hands, handling them, running the fingers of one hand across the palm and out over the fingers of the other one. His hands were heavy and big, with white scars on them that never sunburned. His hands never quit moving. Even when he went to sleep sometimes at night sitting in his rocking chair in the living room his hands stirred on the chair arms as if they could never find a place to rest.

Finally he looked up at us. “You'd better go help your grandma, boys.”

We went upstairs and found her in our room. She had the bureau drawers open and was packing our clothes into a big pasteboard box.

“What're you doing that for?” Brother asked her.

“You'll have to come over and live with us for a while. Your Uncle Burley'll bring the wagon to get you.”

We started helping her pack the clothes.

“How long are we going to live at your house?”

“Oh, a while.”

“Why do we have to leave?” I asked.

“Your daddy's not going to be able to take care of you. He's going to be by himself now.”

I saw that she was about to cry again. I didn't want her to do that, and so I laughed and said what a good time Brother and I'd have with Uncle Burley.

We packed all the clothes that were in the drawers, and then took our Sunday clothes off the hooks in the closet and folded them on top of the rest and closed the box. Grandma left to get ready for the funeral.

Brother and I went out in the back yard and waited for Uncle Burley. And before long he came, driving the team and wagon down the ridge toward our house, sitting dangle-legged on the edge of the hay frame.

He left the team standing in front of the barn and came on into the yard. “Hello, boys,” he said.

It didn't come out the way it usually did when he said it. It had the same sound as everything that had been said to us for three days, as if it were embarrassing to be around people whose mother was dead. So all we said to him was hello.

Grandma came to the back door. “Burley, take Tom and Nathan in to see their mother before you go.” She went back inside, and we didn't see her any more until that night.

Uncle Burley put his hands on our shoulders and went with us into the house and down the hall to the living room. When we went through the door I realized that Grandma had forgotten to make us dress up.

The people quit talking when they saw us. It made me uneasy to have them quiet and watching, and I looked down at the floor while we crossed the room to the coffin.

Big Ellis and Annie May were there ahead of us, and we stopped to wait for them to get out of the way.

“Ain't she the beautifullest corpse!” Annie May said. And she started crying.

Big Ellis looked around at us and grinned. “Howdy, boys,” he said. His shirttail was half out, and he'd sweated until his collar had rolled up around his neck like a piece of rope. Seeing him made me feel better. I told him hello.

Annie May finished crying and we went up to the coffin. Our mother had on a blue dress, and her head made a little dent in the pillow. Her hands were folded together, and her eyes were closed. But she didn't look really comfortable. She looked the way people do when they pretend to be asleep and try too hard and give it away. I touched her face; it felt stiff and strange, like touching your own hand when it's asleep and can't feel.

The inside of the coffin looked snug and soft, but when they shut the lid it would be dark. When they shut the lid and carried her to the grave it would be like walking on a cloudy dark night when you can't see where you're going or what's in front of you. And after they put her in the ground and covered her up she'd turn with the world in the little dark box in the grave, and the days and nights would all be the same.

We went up to our room to get our clothes. The wind blew the window curtains out over the corner of the bureau where the empty drawers were, and I could see the barn out the window with the sun shining on it. It seemed awful to go. I felt like crying, but I held it down and it knotted hard in my throat. I took the pillow off my bed and crooked my arm around it.

“You'd better leave the pillow, boy,” Uncle Burley said. “We've got plenty of them.”

“It's mine, God damn it.” I said it loud to get it over the knot.

Uncle Burley laughed. “Well, take it then, old pup.”

Brother and I laughed too, and it wasn't so bad to leave then.

Uncle Burley picked up the box and we went down the stairs. As we walked out the back door they started singing in the living room. I listened to them, while we crossed the yard and went through the lot gate:

Uncle Burley set the box on the wagon and we climbed on and started out of the lot. I heard them singing again:

My mother's soul was going up through the sky to be joyful with the angels in Heaven, so beautiful and far away that you couldn't think about it. And we were riding on a wagon behind Grandpa's team of blackmules, going to live with Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Burley, leaving the place where they were singing over her body. The sun was bright on the green grass up the ridge and glossy on the slick rumps of the mules. When we were driving away from the lot gate the people at the house were singing:

It was pretty; and sad to think of people always ending up so far from each other. We could hear Annie May Ellis's high, clear voice singing over all the rest of them.

“That Annie May's got a voice on her,” Uncle Burley said.

He let the mules into a brisk trot, and we went up the ridge and around the head of the hollow where Aunt Mary was buried, and down the next ridge toward Grandpa's house.

It was strange at first to wake up in the mornings and remember that I wasn't at home any more, and to see Daddy go away every night and leave us at Grandpa's. But before long we got used to the way things were and began to feel like a family again. Brother and I began calling Grandpa's house our home.

Things got pretty jolty there sometimes. Once in a while Grandpa would get mad at Brother and me and swat us with his cane, and then he and Grandma would get mad at each other because she always took up for us. The two of them didn't agree on much. Grandma said you didn't live with a man like Grandpa; you lived around him. And that was pretty much the way things were between them. Grandpa didn't feel at home in the house, and when he wasn't at work he spent most of his time at the barn. When he was in the house they lived around each other.

Both of them were usually aggravated at Uncle Burley. Grandpa thought Uncle Burley was a disgrace because he'd rather hunt or fish than work. Grandma didn't mind that so much, but she was always grieving because he was so sinful. He never was very sorry for his sins, and that got her worse than anything. But he hardly ever paid attention to their haggling. When they started on him he'd grin and ask them if they didn't think it was going to rain, and that usually put a stop to it. When it got to be more than he could stand, he'd leave and spend a few days in his camp house at the river. Brother and I stayed with him whenever we could, and when the three of us were together we had a good time.

We'd been living at Grandpa's for a little more than a year when Mrs. Crandel died. And the next day Kate Helen Branch had a baby. Uncle Burley said that was just the way things were. They put one in and pull another one out.

Mrs. Crandel's funeral was the day after that. Grandma tried to get Grandpa to go, but he wouldn't. He said the Crandels needed thinning out anyway. Uncle Burley and Brother and I laughed until Grandma made us shut up. After dinner was over and Grandpa had gone out she cautioned Brother and me about laughing at the sinful things Grandpa said. She told us it was an awful thing to speak that way of the dead, and that it was written down against Grandpa in the Great Book of the Judgment. Uncle Burley said he imagined Grandpa had been giving the book-keeper about all he could handle for a good while now. Grandma told him to hush his mouth. She said that he and Grandpa were doing all they could to make sinners out of Brother and me.

“Tom and Nathan want to be good boys,” she said, “so they can go up to Heaven where their mother is.”

Brother was going to the funeral with her, and she'd said that I could
go too. But I'd never liked Mrs. Crandel much, and I didn't like funerals, so I was going to stay at home with Uncle Burley.

While they got ready to go I went out on the front porch to talk to him. He was propped against one of the porch posts, whittling on a piece of yellow poplar two-by-four. The sun was shining straight down and hot beyond the shade of the porch roof. Down in the yard the locusts were singing. First one would start and then the rest would take it up, until it seemed they made the air and the sky rattle. When they stopped I could feel the quiet muffling down into my ears.

“Plague of Egypt,” Uncle Burley said.

“What're you whittling?” I asked him.

“A piece of wood.”

“What're you going to make out of it?”

“Be right quiet,” he said.

I sat down beside him on the edge of the porch and watched.

He split off four chips as thin as a ruler and laid them in a neat pile between us. Then he started scraping them smooth, whistling “Molly Darling” through his teeth. He frowned as if he were taking pains to do everything just right.

Daddy came in the car to take Grandma and Brother to the funeral. Uncle Burley watched them leave, and went back to his whittling.

“When will they be back?” I asked.

He held one of the chips up to the sun and squinted at it with one eye. “Shhhh. Be awful quiet, boy.”

He went on shaving and scraping at the pieces of wood. After he got them all shaved down fine enough to suit him, he split a thicker piece off the two-by-four and began trimming on it. The shavings curled all the way from one end of the piece to the other without breaking. He didn't let on that I was there at all. When he caught me looking at him he'd gaze off across the river and start whistling again. He shaved on that stick until it was round, then tapered the ends and cut four notches longways down the center of it.

“What's it going to be?” I asked.

Without looking at me he gathered up the pieces and lined them in a row on the porch. “Boy,” he said, “I just can't think with you doing all that talking.”

He got out his whetrock and walked down in the yard, sharpening his knife. There was a big maple by the fence and he walked around it a time or two and finally cut two forked branches. I waited on the porch while he trimmed them, afraid that if I bothered him again he wouldn't finish what he was making.

He came back and squatted down by the steps and started putting the pieces together. He stuck the little blades of wood into the notches he'd made in the round piece. Then he looked at me under the brim of his hat and grinned.

“Well, I'll be dogged,” he said. “It turned out to be a water wheel.”

We stuck the maple branches in the ground and laid the axle of the water wheel in the forks. Uncle Burley flipped one of the blades with his finger and twirled it around.

After he'd watched me twirl it for a minute he got up and started into the house. “Well, put it away now, Nathan. You can set it up at the spring tomorrow.”

I took the water wheel upstairs and put it away. When I came down Uncle Burley was waiting for me in the living room. He'd put on a clean shirt and his newest pair of shoes.

“Are we going someplace?” I asked him.

“Well, since everybody else is gone, I figured we might as well go and see Kate Helen Branch's new baby. How'd that suit you?”

“All right.”

“We'll just keep it to ourselves around your Grandma and the others. It's not any of their business where we go.”

I said it wasn't. We went back to the kitchen and Uncle Burley got enough matches to last him the rest of the afternoon and stuck them in the band of his hat.

“It won't do to talk too much about your business,” he said.

We took the road to Port William, and stopped at the grocery store. Uncle Burley bought a sack of Bull Durham and a box of snuff, and a candy bar for me. We went on through town toward the house where Kate Helen and her mother lived.