Читать книгу Wild Card Quilt - Janisse Ray - Страница 13

Uncle Percy

Uncle Percy was sixty-nine when I returned to live next door. He was not a man to take risks, although it was not fear that kept him on the farm, I think, but a blindness to alternatives, having lived so well and been so loved in his birthplace. Here Percy was master of circumstance. He had imprinted on the life of a farm and was never able to ponder another life. He graduated high school at sixteen and joined the Air Force, a four-year stint that was to mark him as much as farming had. Its stories would occupy him all his life and form the lens through which he saw everything. When he was discharged, he went to the city, as all rural folks were being encouraged to do, to help rebuild the country. After six months at a factory in Jacksonville, Percy returned to the farm. I found his valise in the attic, the only relic up there—never to be used again. In that postwar atmosphere, which lured rural people to industrial centers to “be productive,” many would have considered Percy a failure. But not his parents.

Percy became the boy-child, so common in Southern families, who stayed. He moved back into his childhood room at the farm and lived there as a member of his parents’ household for most of his life. He married once, briefly. Uncle Percy was over fifty when he took up with a young divorcee new to town. He moved a doublewide trailer next door to Grandmama and married. During their brief matrimony his wife bore him a son, who after the divorce came on occasional Saturdays to visit. After the divorce, Uncle Percy moved back into the farmhouse with Grandmama; Grandmama’s sister, Aunt Linnie, made the trailer her home for a few years. Neither before nor after his ill-fated marriage had we known Uncle Percy to date, or to socialize in any way independent of church.

Short and slight, he was at all times well shaven and trim, never slovenly. He would have to announce that he’d gotten a haircut because I could not discern any change. He smoked like a winter chimney, constantly. When I first moved into the house, where Uncle Percy had not lived in almost a decade, I washed a yellowish film of nicotine off the ceilings, walls, and furniture. Entering his trailer was like crawling into the attic of a bar. Smoke had permeated and jaundiced the carpet, the curtains, the rugs, the pillows. Although I never liked it, he would light cigarettes in my house when he was visiting, and because he was its owner I couldn’t protest too loudly.

Uncle Percy’s day went like this: when he woke, he opened the doors if it wasn’t winter. He fed the horde of feral cats outside the back door. There were twelve or thirteen of them, skittish, bone skinny, and often with ears or eyes infected. They suffered only Uncle Percy to approach or pet them. “Say you like the cats?” I heard him joke to someone once. “You can take you home a sackful.” Unspayed and untreated, they bred fervently among themselves, introducing a few sickly kittens to the pride every season. Uncle Percy’s only obligation was to feed them.

Next he made himself a breakfast of sorts—usually a slice of toast and a cup of thick, black, instant coffee. He was never a big eater. Then he came out to his front steps, under the water oaks beside the trailer, and sat smoking. When I returned from ferrying Silas to school, he would be there, and I would spend a few minutes with him.

“Anything that grows here, they’s a pest waiting for it,” he would say, and talk about the worms in the peaches. Or cutworms at the pepper starts. Because he sat so much, watching, and because he loved birds, Uncle Percy saw things I never saw. He would tell about a barred owl that had flown last evening onto that very limb there and watched him. Or the fox that had crossed the yard at a run. Mockingbirds fighting. Nighthawks. Blue grosbeaks returned.

What drove me most crazy was how fast my life was—even in the country—and how slow his was. I would pack a day full, top to bottom. Maybe it’s a disease, the great desire I have for this world to be better. I know that faith is the evidence of things hoped for, and that faith without works is dead. Every day had an impossible list, and every item on the list was backed by a dream, a scheme. Uncle Percy would frustrate me with his refusal to lift a hand to make life better. Around him things disintegrated. But every morning, unless I was too busy to feel guilty, I crossed the unraked sand yard that separated our dwellings, sat on the wrought-iron bench outside his door, and talked of the world-changing events that had occurred in twenty-four hours.

“Did you hear about a wreck last night over at the school crossroads?” he asked.

“No. But come to think of it, I heard a siren.”

“’Bout nine o’clock?”

“’Bout then, yes.”

“That was probably it. I haven’t heard who was involved, they said a car and a truck.”

“That makes two accidents over there in the last month. We’re gonna have to get a caution light up.” That was me saying that. Then there was a long silence while we listened to nuthatches pecking in the water oak and watched a male cardinal flaming on the power line. I was thinking about the caution light.

“I read in the paper the Gardners have put up Christmas lights all over the place. They say thousands. They let people drive right through the yard.”

“Let’s ride over there one night. That would be fun. We can ride around a little and look at Christmas lights. I’ve seen some pretty ones other places. I have to remember where.”

“JoNell from church said to me she puts up a lot. She invited me to come by and see them.”

“Okay.”

Uncle Bill, seeing us, stopped to chat. The men talked about the fuss over at the church. Baptists don’t ordain women preachers. The Sunday school superintendent was a woman, and the men wondered if that was too immoderate, too impious, to allow. Some of the church said nothing was wrong with a woman being Sunday school superintendent, but the old-timers didn’t like the idea one bit.

Sometimes my uncles would tell me stories. “People used to think Ten Mile Church was haunted,” Uncle Percy said. “Remember that, Bill?”

“You mean when they kept seeing the ghost there during bad weather?”

“That’s right.”

“I remember hearing that one.” Uncle Bill chuckled.

As Uncle Percy told it, one night one of the Tillman boys was riding his mule home when a bad storm came up. He decided to take refuge in the church, but as he climbed the steps a white form appeared at the window casement, bearing horns and a long white beard, illuminated eerily in a flash of lightning. The young man’s heart almost stopped beating, and he bolted from the porch, back into the rain, and rode his mule home at full gallop. The next morning, a group of his neighbors went to the church to try to decipher what he’d seen.

“Turns out there was a white billy goat up in the church.” Uncle Percy laughed.

“It was scared of lightning and thunder,” Uncle Bill said.

“I heard Mr. Henry Eason say one time, with the advent of paved roads and electric lights, there ain’t near as many ghosts as there used to be,” I said.

“That’s the pure truth,” Uncle Percy replied.

I loved their stories, the fabric of their lives, which was the cloth from which my own was sewn, and reluctantly I excused myself to get to edits, phone calls, assignments, research, and press releases. I had only the hours until school was dismissed to do my work. I would do three or four things at once. I never talked on the phone without occupying my hands with a mending basket or a bowl of cracked pecans. When a friend bought us a cordless phone, I would take notes or search for papers or address envelopes while I talked. Sometimes I washed dishes and hung laundry and cleaned, holding the phone with my shoulder, getting the housekeeping done. I would get so thoroughly out of breath from the work I could barely converse. So much needed to be done. The phone seemed to ring constantly.

Uncle Percy’s phone almost never rang, and when it did it was either a wrong number or our neighbor Roger down the road, who liked to keep up with goings-on. Uncle Percy never made calls. He was not a man to reach out, nor did he demand much from life. He did not travel. He did not read. Each day was a tintype of the last. He was as extreme in his quiescence as Hemingway had been in his ardor to eat life’s marrow. Percy nibbled at the crust.

Two tasks Uncle Percy accomplished with great joy and dedication. He mowed grass and he attended church. Nobody could match his faithfulness at either.

He worked at the mowing like a job, and he cut on the same schedule as the barber cut his hair. We have an immense yard, maybe an acre when you subtract the houses and outbuildings, studded with peach trees and pomegranate bushes and bird feeders and a gas tank for each house and two mailboxes beside the road, his and mine side by side, and the sum of antiquated sheds and buildings.

To mow the entire yard took four or five days. Uncle Percy would mow in the morning, have dinner, then mow some in the afternoon, every day until the yard was done, and then he got a few days’ rest before he decided it was time to start over. Many days I have written with the blare of the lawn mower outside, closing windows to block the noise. Often Percy circled round and round the office window where I worked, and sometimes he came to the window and called to me to say he was going to town for a certain part, or to tell me something he had seen. On off days, he performed chores attendant on grass mowing (sharpening the blades, buying the gasoline). Keeping the lawn mower in working order took hours and hours.

Often on Sunday mornings I passed Uncle Percy on the back way to church at Spring Branch, through the dirt lane of Dub Baxley Road, I jogging my two miles while Silas yet slept, he with the car windows rolled tight, pulling on a cigarette with a fury; he would be unable to smoke during the two hours of service.

After church he heated a TV dinner and in the afternoon he napped. The times I felt most free, unwatched, were the times he slept or while he was away at church, as if I could live life unscrutinized by this uncle who loved and accepted me but did not understand me. Why didn’t I eat meat or go to church or have a husband? Why did I drive a truck and let Silas run wild and have long hair? Why didn’t I have a normal job? Yet those first two years back, Uncle Percy was significant in my life. Although most of the territory available to us he could not enter, or consider, he took care of me. He guarded me. He was what I had, and our relationship was simple and inelegant.

On Sunday night church convened again, and on Wednesday night prayer meeting, and on Tuesday evenings he surprised me by participating in visitations, going with the preacher to visit the sick or elderly. “He was as faithful as I’ve ever seen,” the pastor said to me. “Curious” was the adjective I heard used most often to describe him, not meaning inquisitive but queer, quaint.

He hated to spend money. Though he could have easily afforded a new riding lawn mower when the old one coughed its final shake, he pieced together a frame from neighbor Danny, Uncle Bill’s son, and an engine Daddy found.

Once the water pump tore up and Uncle Bill came to help him fix it. Uncle Bill was like a brother to Percy. Neighbors all their lives, they had grown up together, gone to church together. Uncle Bill farmed Uncle Percy’s land, and they saw each other every day. It was nice watching the two of them work. Uncle Bill was vigorous, with a dogged will to see a thing done. Uncle Percy was almost frail. They talked of the Sunday night service as they worked; a visiting minister had spoken.

“I thought he’d never hush,” Uncle Percy said.

“I’ll be honest,” Uncle Bill said in innocence. “It wasn’t the lengthof the service. His talk was over my head.”

First cousins, these two men had known each other a lifetime. Their existences centered on the comings and goings of the community; events like a water pump breaking or a hard rain that dropped three inches or Sadie being sick marked significant moments in their lives.

Intrigued, I observed their friendship as closely as I could. I could see how utterly they respected and loved each other, although they would have never used those words. The words they used were “toadstrangler,” “hay baler,” “stud,” “pigweed,” but they meant so much more. With each other, Uncle Percy and Uncle Bill were unerringly polite and flexible, so that a casual observer would not understand how very much they meant to each other, and each to the entire community.

I realized then that the two men, like our other quiet and unassuming neighbors, possessed a great dignity. Since birth they had been vital and esteemed members of this small society. Here, they had never been anonymous and never would be; they were not only accepted but were highly regarded. They had gained the authority that comes with a lifetime in a place.

I know, too, the danger of silence, as well as of leaving things unnamed and unrecognized. By understanding what you feel as love, by naming love, you claim it. By claiming a thing, you give it life. Then when something happens to yank it away from you, you are prepared for the sorrow that befalls. You are prepared to create anew that which is beloved. Then you will do whatever you can to keep it alive.