A Time and Times and the Dividing of Time
I.
IN THE AFTERNOON of a gray Friday in February 1944, Andy Catlett rode the school bus from the Hargrave School to its place of turning around on the Birds Branch Road near Port William. From there it was a walk of half a mile or so to the house of his Catlett grandparents on the farm that his family called “the home place.” He was not one of the bus’s regular passengers. It could carry him only as far as the end of its established route. This day and this trip would begin one of the dominant patterns of his early life: his passages back and forth between his parents’ household in Hargrave and that of his Catlett grandparents on the home place, between town and country, that from then on would give him a disruptive sense of his own irregularity.
The memory of that afternoon, when he stepped out of the confinement of the bus and its enveloping sound and smell into the felt breadth and chill of the open country, has stayed with him for three-quarters of a century. Except for the foreclosure of nature and his numbered days, it might last him as long again. He would then have been just about nine and a half years old, a count he would have been keeping, for he longed to be ten and to write his age in two numbers. And that pretty well exhausted his use, so far, for arithmetic.
With the increase of physical idleness in his old age, he has acquired almost the ability to see himself as he was then: a boy small for his age and in his own estimate and foreboding forever too skinny, carrying his book satchel into which, over his objection, his mother had inserted a neatly folded extra shirt and his toothbrush. Better than he can see himself as he was, he can see as he then saw the segment of his native country that lay before him as he began his walk: its winter-silenced hollows and ridges, its bare trees, the lichened and moss-grown rock fence then still standing alongside the two-track gravel road. Behind him he could hear, for he disdained to look, the yellow school bus turning around and heading back, empty, to Hargrave.
As he walked he was watching the world, which seemed to turn backward under his feet as he stepped along, and in his mind he was saying after the manner of writing in books, “The boy has got off of the bus. He is walking on the Birds Branch Road toward the home place.”
He had not been at the home place with his feet on the ground under his own guidance since the new year had begun. After so long an interval in town and school, the life of schedules and ruled streets, and his out-of-school life with his fellow boys, he felt a strangeness about himself, and about the place, that would take him a while to get over. The change that would be coming slowly to him was that out there in the country, in the big unbounded air with not a building yet in sight, life was not shaped by other people’s expectations, but by seasons, days, and weathers, and by work done when it was time to do it.
Though he could not have said so at the age of nine and a half, he felt that he was walking from one time, one kind of time, into another, and he was somewhere between them. As if watching from the air, at a remove of seventy-five years, old Andy feels the modern age, the “post-war world,” in the offing, and he is grateful for the little while of his childhood when he was still innocent of it. If the departing school bus is an intrusion of the future of schooling and the time to come, the boy Andy is now walking, step by step, back into the old time, the time before, so far hardly enough intruded upon to trouble its ignorance of the future.
Andy felt somewhat rebuked by his knowledge of the home place and the older, longer time that adhered to it, as if fearing a little that he looked schoolish or still carried with him, trailing in the air behind him, the smell of school. But with all the country around him, stepping alone upon the surface of it, hearing only the sound of his own footsteps on the packed gravel, the awareness grew upon him that he was intact and free. It occurred to him that at that moment only he in all the world knew where he was. The thought was new to him and vast, for he had never before been by himself so far out of sight and sound of all other people.
He gave no more thought to his family down at Hargrave than he gave to his teacher and his schoolmates. He was happy to be where he was, and he missed none of them. If it had been summer, and he was out like this somewhere among the farms, he would likely have been with his uncle Andrew. And so as he went along, Uncle Andrew came to his mind, and he did think for a while of Uncle Andrew, for as always when he was not with him he missed him. Being with Uncle Andrew was fairly often an adventure. As old Andy knows with familiar sorrow, looking back, Uncle Andrew was a man often at large, an unruly and a reckless man. If it was a summer day and Andy was with Uncle Andrew, the two of them might be at work at something somewhere for a while, or they would stop by where Jake Branch and his crew or the Brightleafs were at work to see if something might be needed to help them. And then they might drop back down to Hargrave to the Farm Supply Company to get a replacement part and to talk a while, or to stop by the triple A office to talk with the ladies there. Or, if it was a day when Uncle Andrew was extra thirsty, they would stop by Slope Sims’s store to get a soft drink and talk a while with Slope, who would probably be lying sideways on a countertop cushioned by a litter of bills, receipts, old sacks and wrappers, and dried onion skins, with his feet drawn up and his head propped on his hand, smiling as he listened and talked. Wherever they went, Uncle Andrew was welcomed by his friends, and they would talk and laugh. Their hilarity, for it was often that, rode upon references to matters of the world of grownups that to the young Andy were mysterious and utterly interesting. He would imagine himself as a grown man leaning with his elbow on the counter at the triple A, filling his pipe and saying casually something that would make the pretty women laugh. The other grownups Andy knew did not make such references. At times he would be aware, and this made him proud and troubled, that as his uncle Andrew’s bosom friend he knew him as he was not known to the family’s other grownups. He knew that Uncle Andrew would say anything whatsoever that he thought of. And old Andy knows that Uncle Andrew was likely also to do anything whatsoever that he thought of.
His knowledge of Uncle Andrew so filled Andy’s mind that he had to stop and stand still a while just to think. The problem
