Of Time and the River (10 page)

“He’s got some kind of kidney trouble, I think. He goes up there for radium treatments.”

“It’s the same thing John Rankin had,” the florid-faced man glibly interposed at this moment. “Some sort of prostate trouble, isn’t it?” he said.

“Yes, sir, that’s it,” the boy said. For some reason he felt a sense of relief and gratefulness towards the man with the florid face. The easy, glib and false assurance that his father’s “trouble” was “the same thing John Rankin had” seemed to give the disease a respectable standing and to divest the cancer of its fatal, shameful and putrescent horror.

“I know what it is,” the florid-faced man was saying, nodding his head in a confident manner. “It’s the same thing John Rankin had. A lot of men get it after they’re fifty. John told me he went through agony with it for ten years. Said he used to be up with it a dozen times a night. It got so he couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t rest, he couldn’t do anything but walk the floor with it. It got him down so that he was nothing but skin and bones, he was walking around like a dead man. Then he went up there and had that operation and he’s been a new man ever since. He looks better than he’s looked in twenty years. I was talking to him the other day and he told me he didn’t have an ache or a pain in the world. He said he was going to live to be a hundred and he looked it—the picture of health.

“Well,” he said in a friendly tone, now turning to the boy, “remember me to your father when you see him. Tell him Frank Candler asked to be remembered to him.”

“Are you and him good friends?” Mr. Flood demanded heavily, after another staring pause, with the brutal, patient, and somehow formidable curiosity which belonged to him. “You know him well?”

“Who? Mr. Gant?” Mr. Candler cried with the hearty geniality of the politician, which seemed to suggest he knew the man so well that the very question was amusing to him. “Why, I’ve known him all my life—I’ve known him ever since he first came to Altamont— let’s see, that’s all of forty years ago when he first came here?” Mr. Candler went on reflectively, “or no, maybe a little less than that. Wait a minute.” He considered seriously for a moment. “The first time I ever saw your father,” said Mr. Candler very slowly and impressively, with a frown on his face and not looking at any one, but staring straight before him, “was in October, 1882—and I believe—I believe,” he said strongly, “that was the very year he came to town—yes, sir! I’m positive of it!” he cried. “For Altamont was nothing but a cross-roads village in those days—I don’t believe we had 2,000 people there—why, that’s all in the world it was.” Mr. Candler now interrupted himself heartily. “The courthouse up there on the square and a few stores around it—when you got two blocks away you were right out in the country. Didn’t Captain Bob Porter offer me three lots he owned down there on Pisgah Avenue, not a block from the square, for a thousand dollars, and didn’t I laugh at him to think he was fool enough to ask such a price as that and expect to get it! Why!” Mr. Candler declared, with a full countrified laugh, “it was nothing but a mud-hole down in the holler. I’ve seen old Captain Porter’s hawgs wallerin’ around in it many’s the time. ‘And you,’ I said to him, ‘you—do you think I’d pay you a price like that for a mud-hole? Why, you must think I’m crazy, sure enough.’ ‘All right,’ he says, ‘have it your own way, but you’ll live to see the day you’ll regret not buying it. You’ll live to see the day when you can’t buy ONE of those lots for a thousand dollars!’ ONE of them!” Mr. Candler now cried in hearty self-derision. “Why, if I owned one of those lots to-day, I’d be a rich man! I don’t believe you could buy a foot of that land to-day for less than a thousand dollars, could you, Bruce?” he said, addressing himself to the swarthy, pompous-looking man who sat beside the boy.

“Five thousand a front foot would come closer to it, I should think,” the pompous little man replied, with the crisp, brisk and almost strutting assurance that characterized all his words and gestures. He crossed and uncrossed his fat little legs briskly as he uttered these words and then sat there “all reared back” as the saying goes, unable even to reach the floor with his fat little legs, but smiling a complacent smile and simply exuding conceit and strutting self-satisfaction from every pore. “Yes, sir!” the swarthy little man continued, pompously, “I should doubt very much if you could buy a foot of that property for less than $5,000 today!”

“Well,” said Mr. Candler with a satisfied air. “That’s what I thought! I knew it would be way up there somewheres. But I could have had the whole thing once for a thousand dollars. I’ve kicked myself in the seat of the pants a thousand times since to think what a fool I was for not taking it when I had the chance! I’d be a rich man to-day if I had! It just goes to show you, doesn’t it?” he concluded indefinitely.

“Yes, sir,” the pompous, swarthy little man replied, in his dry, briskly assured tones, “it goes to show that our hindsight is usually a great deal better than our foresight!” And he glanced about him complacently, obviously pleased with his wit and convinced that he had said something remarkably pungent and original.

“It was about that time when I first met your father,” said Mr. Candler, turning to the boy again. “Along there in the fall of ‘82—that’s when it was all right—and I don’t think he’d been in town then more than a month, for in a town that size, I’d have known if he’d been there longer. And yes, of course!” he cried sharply, struck by sudden recollection, “that very first day I saw him he was standing there in front of his shop with two nigger men, unloading some blocks of marble and granite and tombstones, I reckon, and moving them back into his shop. I guess he was just moving in at the time. He’d rented an old shack over there at the north-east corner of the square where the Sluder building is now. That’s where it was, all right. I was working for old man Weaver at the time—he had a grocery and general-goods store there opposite the old courthouse about where the Blue Ridge Coal and Ice Company is now. I was going back to work after dinner and had just turned the corner at the Square there from Academy Street when I saw your father. I remember stopping to watch him for a moment because there was something about his appearance—I don’t know what it was, but if you saw him once you’d never forget him—there was something about the way he looked and talked and worked that was different from any one I’d ever seen. Of course, he was an awful tall, big-boned, powerful-looking sort of man—how tall is your father, son?”

“He was about six feet five,” the boy answered, “but I guess he’s not that much now—he’s stooped over some since he got old.”

“Well, he didn’t stoop in those days,” said Mr. Candler. “He always carried himself as straight as an arrow. I noticed that. He was an awful big man—not that he had much weight on him—he was always lean and SKINNY like—but he LOOKED big—he had big bones— his FRAME was big!” cried Mr. Candler. “You’ll make a big man too when you fill out,” he continued, giving the boy an appraising look. “Of course, you look like your mother’s people, you’re a Pentland and they’re fleshy people, but you’ve got the old man’s frame. You may make a bigger man than he is when you put on weight and widen out—but it wasn’t that your father was so big—I think he looked bigger than he really was—it was something else about him—about the way he gave orders to the niggers and went about his work,” said Mr. Candler, in a rather puzzled tone. “I don’t know what it was, but I’d never seen any one like him before. For one thing he was dressed so good!” he said suddenly. “He always wore his good clothes when he worked—I’d never seen a man who did hard labour with his hands who dressed that way. Here he was, you know, sweating over those big blocks of stone with those two niggers and wearing better clothes than you and me would go to church in. Of course, he had his coat off, and his cuffs rolled back, and he was wearing one of those big striped aprons that go the whole way up across the shoulders—but you could see his clothes were GOOD,” said Mr. Candler. “Looked like black broadcloth that had been made by a tailor and wearing a BOILED shirt, mind you, and one of those wing collars with a black silk neck-tie—and not afraid to work, either! Why, the first thing I saw him do,” said Mr. Candler, laughing, “he let out a string of words at those niggers you could have heard from here to yonder because they were sweating and straining to get a big hunk of marble up on the rollers, that they hadn’t been able to budge an inch. ‘Merciful God,’ he says, that’s just the way he talked, you know—‘Merciful God! Has it come to this that I must do everything for myself while you stand there gloating at my agony? I could as soon look for help from a couple of God-damned wooden Indians! In the name of God, stand back. I’ll do it myself, sick and feeble as I am!’ Well,” said Mr. Candler, chuckling with the recollection, “with that he reaches down and gets a grip on that big hunk of stone and gives a heave and up she comes on to the rolling pins as nice and easy as anything you ever saw. Well, sir, you should have seen the look upon those niggers’ faces—I thought their eyes were going to pop out of their heads. And that’s the first time I ever spoke to him, you know. I can remember the very words I said. I said to him, ‘Well, if you call that being sick and feeble, most of the folks up in this part of the country are already dead and in their graves.’”

The man’s story had stirred in the boy’s mind a thousand living memories of his father. For a moment it seems to him that the lost world which these words evoked has never died, lives yet in all the radiant and enchanted colour of his childhood, in all its proud, dense, and single fabric of passion, fury, certitude and joy. Every memory that the story brought to life is part of him. There are a thousand buried, nameless and forgotten lives, ten thousand strange and secret tongues alive now, urgent, swarming in his blood, and thronging at the gateways of his memory. They are the lives of the lost wilderness, his mother’s people; they are the tongues, the faces of the secret land, the dark half of his heart’s desire, the fertile golden earth from which his father came.

He knows the farmer boy who stood beside the road and watched the dusty rebels marching past towards Gettysburg. He smells the sweet fragrance of that lavish countryside, he hears the oaths, the jests, the laughter of the marching soldiers, he hears the cricketing stitch of noon in drowsy fields, the myriad woodnotes, secret, green, and cool, the thrumming noises. He feels the brooding wait and murmur of hot afternoon, the trembling of the distant guns in the hot air, and the vast, oncoming hush and peace and silence of the dusk.

And then he is lying beside his father in the little gabled room upstairs. He is there beside his father and his father’s brothers in the darkness—waiting, silent, waiting—with an unspoken single question in their hearts. They are thinking of an older brother who that night is lying twelve miles away, shot through the lungs. He sees his father’s gaunt, long form in darkness, the big-boned hands, the gaunt, long face, the cold, green-grey, restless and weary eyes, so deep and untelling, so strangely lonely, and the slanting, almost reptilian large formation of the skull that has, somehow, its own strange dignity—as of some one lost. And the great stars of America blaze over them, the vast and lonely earth broods round them, then as now, with its secret and mysterious presences, and then as now the million-noted ululation of the night throngs up from silence the song of all its savage, dark and measureless fecundity. And he lies there in the darkness with his father and the brothers—silent, waiting—their cold, grey eyes turned upward to the loneliness of night, the blazing stars, having no words to say the thing they feel, the dream of time and the dark wonder of man’s destiny which has drenched with blood the old earth, the familiar wheat, and fused that day the image of immortal history in a sleepy country town twelve miles away.

He sees the gaunt figure of the stone-cutter coming across the square at his earth-devouring stride. He hears him muttering underneath his breath the mounting preludes of his huge invective. He sees him striding on for ever, bent forward in his haste, wetting his thumb and clearing his throat with an infuriated and anticipatory relish as he comes. He sees him striding round the corner, racing up-hill towards the house, bearing huge packages of meat beneath his arm. He sees him take the high front steps four at a time, hasten like a hurricane into the house, lay down the meat upon the kitchen table, and then without a pause or introduction, comes the storm—fire, frenzy, curses, woes and lamentations, and then news out of the streets, the morning’s joy, the smoking and abundant dinner.

A thousand memories of that life of constant and unresting fury brim in the boy’s mind in an instant. At this moment, with telescopic force, all of these memories of his father’s life become fused and blurred to one terrific image, in which it seems that the whole packed chronicle, from first to last, is perfectly comprised.

At the same moment the boy became conscious that the men were getting up around him, preparatory to departure, and that the florid-faced man, who had been speaking of his father, had laid his hand upon his shoulder in a friendly gesture, and was speaking to him.

“Good night, son,” the man was saying. “I’m getting off at Washington. If I don’t see you again, good luck to you. I suppose you’ll be getting off at Baltimore to see your father before you go on, won’t you?”

“Yes. Yes, sir,” the boy stammered confusedly, getting to his feet.

“Remember me to him, won’t you? Tell him you saw Frank Candler on the train and he sent his best regards.”

“Yes, sir—thank you—I will,” the boy said.

“All right. And good luck to you, boy,” the politician said, giving him his broad, fleshy and rather tender hand. “Give ‘em hell when you get up there,” he said quietly, with a firm, friendly clasp and a good-natured wink.

“Yes—I certainly will—thank you—” the boy stammered, flaming in the face, with a feeling of proud hope, and with affection for the man who had spoken to him.

Then the man had gone, but his words had brought back to the boy suddenly the knowledge that in the morning he was to see his father. And that knowledge instantly destroyed all the exultancy of flight and darkness, the incredible realization of his escape, the image of new lands, the new life, and the shining city that had been swelling in his spirit all night long. It had interposed its leaden face between him and this image of wild joy towards which he was rushing onward in the darkness, and its grey oppressive cloud weighed down upon him suddenly a measureless weight of dull weariness, horror and disgust.