Remembering (17 page)

Andy is one of the last to receive his lunch: a plastic tray containing a tossed salad, an empty coffee cup, a helping of roast beef with gravy, small carrots, and a potato, a piece of chocolate cake, a tiny paper carton of pepper and one of salt, a plastic envelope containing a knife, a fork, a spoon, and a napkin.

Andy tears the envelope of salad dressing with his teeth and squeezes the contents onto his salad, needing another hand for this operation, but finally succeeding approximately; and then he begins the struggle to liberate his silverware.

The stewardess, pausing in the aisle with a pot of coffee, watches him a moment with unseemly absorption — a one-handed man in the toils of supraterrestrial sanitation — and then, leaning solicitously toward him, asks, “Does everything seem to be all right, sir?”

“Well, as long as we are supposing, let us suppose so.”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“I'm sorry,” he says, “I was joking. Everything seems to be all right. Thank you.”

She returns to her distance and her smile. “En
joy
your meal, sir.”

They eat and drink, pretending to be groundlings who are pretending
to fly, trays in front of them laden with food and drink that will leave a plastic residue to be thrown away in some place out of the sight of groundlings pretending to be clean, the country below them become a map, perhaps not even of itself.

There comes over Andy a longing never to travel again except on foot, to restore the country to its shape and distance, its smells and looks and feels and sounds.

The stewardesses have taken the trays away. Utah is below them now, canyon country, eroded yellow and pinkish walls opening among sparsely forested slopes. Andy is thinking of the wagons laboring westward against the resistant shapes of the land, places supplanting places. Of the one-armed Powell and his men on the Colorado, living by intelligence and strength and will alone.

How many connecting strands are braided there in the passes and the fording places, to be dissolved out of mind and lost almost before the grass could grow again over the wheel tracks, almost before the rain could wash them away?

“Andy, here's something you ought to see,” Burley Coulter says, handing him a page, folded and worn, brown with age, the ink on it brown. Burley is sitting in his chair by the stove in the living room with a shoebox open on his lap.

Flora is there too, and Danny and Lyda Branch, their children playing among the chair legs, returning now and again to the large bowl of popcorn that Lyda is holding. Outside, the wind is blowing and it has started to snow. Andy and Flora have already said twice that they need to be going, but Burley has kept on taking things from the box and handing them to Andy, who has examined them and passed them on to Flora, who has passed them on in turn to Lyda and Danny. They do not remember what reminded Burley of the box. At some point in their conversation he remembered it, and went up the stairs to his room and got it. He
set it on his lap, untied the heavy string that was around it, and began to probe into it with his crooked, big-knuckled forefinger. The box contains his keepsakes — the family's from long back, but his because after his mother's death he continued to keep them and to add to them the odd relics of his own life that he could not bring himself to part with. There were some photographs, a few letters, a gold watch, Spanish and French coins carried back along the footpaths from New Orleans in the pockets of Coulter men who had made the downward trip on flatboats or rafted logs. These had all been looked at and explained as far as Burley could explain them. And then from the very bottom of the box he brought up the folded brown page.

“Boys,” he says, “your great-great-great-grandmother wrote that. She was married to the first Nathan Coulter. Way back yonder. She was a McGown. Letitia. Letitia McGown. Read it, Andy. My eyes have got so I can't make it out.”

And so Andy reads the script, not much used since it was a schoolgirl's, of an old woman dead before the Civil War:

“Oh that I should ever forget We stood by the wagon saying goodbye or trying to & I seen it come over her how far they was a going & she must look at us to remember us forever & it come over her pap and me and the others We stood & looked & knowed it was all the time we had & from now on we must remember We must look now forever Then Will rech down to her from the seat & she clim up by the hub of the wheel & set beside him & he spoke to the team She had been Betsy Rowanberry two days who was bornd Betsy Coulter 21 May 1824 Will turnd the mules & they stepd into the road passd under the oak & soon was out of sight down the hill The last I seen was her hand still raisd still waving after wagon & all was out of sight Oh it was the last I seen of her that little hand Afterwards I would say to myself I could have gone with them as far as the foot of the hill & seen her that much longer I could have gone on as far as the river mouth & footed it back by dark But however far I finaly would have come to wher I would have to stand and see them go on that hand a waving God bless her I never knowd what become of her I will never see her in this world again”

They have passed the snowfields of the Rockies, Denver under its pall, and now in their orient flight are passing above a great floor covered with newly sheared fleeces shining in the sun, sight going down through it, where it thins, into shadow, the shadowed world, diminished, thirty-seven thousand feet below.

Now it comes back into his mind, that country, green and folding, that he knows as his tongue knows the inside of his mouth. It appears to him as if from the air, as in fact he remembers seeing it from the air, when a plane he was on happened to fly over it. He saw it then, he thought, as it might appear to the eye of Heaven, and afterwards was obliged to see himself and his life as small, almost invisible, within the countryside and the passage of time.

He sees Elton's old truck rocking and jarring over the humps and holes of the Katy's Branch road on the way to the Harford Place early in the morning. He and Henry and Elton are in the cab. He is sitting between Elton and Henry. Elton is driving. He sees the countryside shadowy and dewy under the misty light; he sees the road and the truck and the three of them in the cab littered with tools, ropes, spare parts, and other odds and ends that they have grown used to or may need. Henry is holding the water jug on his lap to keep it from turning over. He has been telling about his date of the night before for the edification of Elton, who has been egging him on by protesting that
he
would never have thought of anything like that, not him.

Elton says, “What did you do last night, Andy?”

“I stayed at home.”

“You run out of girls?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you need to find one that's not too smart, old pup.”

Henry says, “
Duh,
kiss me, old pup.”

And Andy says, “Shut. Up.”

Henry makes his hands quiver. “Sometimes. He causeth me. To tremble.”

“I told you.”

“He giveth me. Trembolosis. Of the lower. Bowell.”

Elton is enjoying this, but he knows he won't enjoy it long. “I'll causeth you to tremble in a minute.
Both
of you shut up.”

He sings with raucous sorrow two lines of “Blue Eyes” as a comment on Andy's girl-lessness, and gives a long raucous squall as a comment on yodeling. They laugh and go on up the lane, happy, the old truck creaking and rattling, the day brightening.

Andy can see the three of them jolting along over the bumps of the road — no blacktop on it then — overgrown with trees, a tunnel. It is as though he is standing in the air, watching, and at the same time an unseen fourth person in the cab. And he is moved with tenderness toward them and with love for them.

They come to the bright field, the stand of alfalfa nearly perfect on it, and Elton stops beside the two tractors where they left them the evening before. They fill the gas tanks and check the oil. They make the necessary small repairs on the mowing machines and grease them.

Elton says, “All right. You're ready to go. Be careful. If the hay you cut day before yesterday is dry enough by ten-thirty or eleven o'clock, Henry, you quit mowing and hitch to the rake. I'll be back to get you at dinnertime.”

And then, looking up at Henry, who is standing on the truck bed, looking down at him, he says, “Get off of there now, damn it, and get started.”

Henry takes three steps and does a handspring off the truck bed and lands standing up in front of Elton, who has to grin in spite of himself. “I wonder,” he says. “Sometimes I wonder.”