Remembering (10 page)

Word of death and grief
has
reached him, and it is word of his own death and grief, which are his life too, his remembering and his joy.

“Boys,” Mat says, “it was a
hot
day. There wasn't a breeze anywhere in that bottom that would have moved a cobweb. It was punishing.” He is telling Elton and Andy.

It was a long time ago. Mat was only a boy yet, though he was nearly grown. His Uncle Jack hired him to help chop out a field of tall corn in a creek bottom. It was hot and still, and the heat stood close around them as they worked. They felt they needed to tiptoe to get enough air.

Mat thought he could not stand it any longer, and then he stood it a little longer, and they reached the end of the row.

“Let's go sink ourselves in the creek,” Jack said.

They did. They hung their sweated clothes on willows in the sun to dry, and sank themselves in the cool stream up to their noses. It was a good hole, deep and shady, with the sound of the riffles above and below, and a kingfisher flying in and seeing them and flying away. All that afternoon when they got too hot, they went there.

“Well sir,” Mat says, “it made that hard day good. I thought of all the
times I'd worked in that field, hurrying to get through, to get to a better place, and it had been there all the time. I can't say I've always lived by what I learned that day — I wish I had — but I've never forgot.”

“What?” Andy says.

“That it was there all the time.”

“What?”

“Redemption,” Mat says, and laughs. “A little flowing stream.”

Beside Andy, the city stands on its hills, beyond the last dry pull across the rocks, the last dead mule and broken wheel. He can hear it, all its voices and engines washed together in the long murmur of its waking.

Once, years ago, he and Flora and their friend Hal Jimson stood on Tamalpais, all the world below them covered with fog, and heard that murmur, low and far away, as of a country remembered. The sea of fog, white to the horizons, gleamed below them, and, in the draws of the mountain, swallows swung and dived in their hunting flights as though they moved in the paths of some unutterable song.

And that was on the way. He is not going there.

All the Marin peninsula is in sunlight. So far away, so bright, it might be the shining land, the land beyond, which many travelers have seen, but never reached.

But the whole bay is shining now, the islands, the city on its hills, the wooden houses and the towers, the green treetops, the flashing waves and wings, the glory that moves all things resplendent everywhere.

Though he has not moved, he has turned.
I must go now. If I am going to go, it is time.
On the verge of his journey, he is thinking about choice and chance, about the disappearance of chance into choice, though the choice be as blind as chance. That he is who he is and no one else is the result of a long choosing, chosen and chosen again. He thinks of the long dance of men and women behind him, most of whom he never knew, some he knew, two he yet knows, who, choosing one another, chose him. He thinks of the choices, too, by which he chose himself as he now is. How many choices, how much chance, how much error, how much hope have made that place and people that, in turn, made him? He does not know. He knows that some who might have left chose to stay, and that some who did leave chose to return, and he is one of them. Those choices have formed in time and place the pattern of a membership that chose him, yet left him free until he should choose it, which he did once, and now has done again.

Nancy Beechum had her father to keep house for and then nurse and then bury, and her brother to raise. Ben Feltner was her faithful and patient suitor for eleven years. They married in 1879, when she was thirty-four and he thirty-nine. They had four children, of whom Mat, after the perils of birth, accident, and epidemic, was the one survivor. Mat was the first Feltner in his own line to leave Port William after the first ones had
come there at the beginning of the century, and by then it was the beginning of the next.

He did not go by his own choice. He went because he was sent; he was fifteen, and the time had come to send him, if he was ever to go. He had been the subject of discussion between his father and his mother, he knew. And so he was discomforted but not surprised when one day, instead of leaving the dinner table when he was finished, his father remained in his place and thought, and looked at Nancy, and looked at Mat.

“Mat, my boy, we think highly of you, you know, and so we must part with you for a while.”

They had arranged for him to attend a boarding school at Hargrave, run by a couple named Lowstudder. Mat did not want to go. He had never thought of going, and now that he had to think of it his reluctance took the shape of a girl, Margaret Finley, whom he had never not known, and whom, now that he thought of leaving her, he did not want to leave.

But when the time came he did leave her. Ben drove him to the landing and put him on the boat with a small trunk, and shook his hand and gripped his shoulder and said nothing and left him. They raised the gangplank, the little steamboat backed into the channel, and Mat watched the green water widen between him and his life as he knew it.

After three weeks Ben came to see him. Mat, summoned, found him sitting on the stile block where he had hitched his horse. He was smiling. He shook Mat's hand, and Mat sat down beside him.

“Do you like it here?”

“Nosir.”

Ben, his hand flat on his beard, sat looking out at the big trees in the yard in front of them.

“Have you learned anything?”

“Yessir. Some.”

Again Ben looked away and considered.

“Do you cry any of a night, son?”

“Nosir.”

“Are you lonesome for Margaret Finley?”

“I miss you all too.”

Ben stroked his hand slowly down his face and beard, thinking of something that made him smile.

“You're a good boy, Mat. I think you'd better stay.”

He stayed four years. And then — because he did well enough, because Ben and Nancy thought well of him still — he went to the state college at Lexington. After two years, because he knew his own mind by then, and knew Margaret's, he wrote at the end of one of his letters home: “Pa, when I come back this June, I am going to stay.” And Ben replied:

 

My dear Mat,

You have grown to a man and a good one I think. I ask no more. Come ahead. Stay on. There is employment here for you as much as you can make yourself equal to. We are plowing as weather permits. We have two excellent mule foals from the gray mares. Your Ma is well and sends her love, as I do also. Pa

 

It is early June of 1906, a sunny day. The little steamboat,
The Blue Wing,
has stopped, it seems to him, a hundred times, to unload a barrel of flour and a bolt of cloth at one landing, and at another, a mile downstream, to load a drove of hogs and two passengers, as unmindful of his haste as time itself.

At last he sees forming ahead of them, still blue with distance, the shape of the Port William hill, and then one of his father's open ridge-tops, and then the steeple pointing up over the trees, and then the old elm at the landing. As the boat sidles in out of the current, he looks up and sees standing on the porch of the store above the road Margaret, who has loved him all his life until then, and will love him all the rest of it. She has heard the whistle and walked down to meet him. He waves. She smiles and waves back, and an old longing, the size of himself, opens within him.

He is moving toward the gangplank, the end of which is already poised over the bank. The boat is coming in only to put him off; it will not stop long enough to tie up. He is ready to step onto the plank when an old man who has been watching him hooks him with his cane.

“You're Ben Feltner's boy.”

“Yessir.”

The old man shakes his white beard in self-congratulation. “I sometimes miss the dam. I never miss the sire.”

“Yessir.”

“And your mammy was a Beechum.”

“Yessir.”

“Well, you got some good stock in you,” the old man says, feeling his shoulder and looking him over. Oh, taking his time!

“You been up there to that college, my boy?”

“Yessir.”

“Well, you'll be going away now, I reckon, to make something out of yourself.”

Mat is stepping onto the plank, free now. “Nosir, I reckon not.”

Margaret is coming down the bank to meet him, her long skirt gathered in one hand to keep it out of the dew.

“Now, here are your extra clothes. They're clean, and I've darned your socks. That sack's got your shaving things in it and some other odds and ends. And there's a check in there from your granddaddy for your wages, and I think maybe a little more.”