have forbidden him to talk about it, but it was a story that was known
because he had told it.
I can imagine a night of hilarity, Uncle Andrew and Buster Simms and
Yeager Stump out among 'em, women and whiskey on hand, Uncle
Andrew talking, the others laughing and egging him on. He is conjuring
up the most outrageous scene he can think of he and his buddies crowding into that chastely fragrant room like a nightmare, the sudden light
revealing Momma-pie in her nightcap, sans teeth, sitting up in bed, clutching the bedclothes to her bosom. I can imagine the tale repeated and
improved at every opportunity as if it had actually happened, the work of
alcoholic incandescence and a refined sense of impropriety.
But I know too that Mr. Stump was right: A lot of the things they thought of, they did. Their taste in women ran simply to the available;
their pleasures were restricted only by the possible. In his times of breaking out, which apparently were the times he lived for, Uncle Andrew
granted an uncomplicated obedience to impulses that men of faith and
loyalty like my father struggle against all their lives. Men who obey those
impulses surely invite their own destruction, and I think there were
moments when Uncle Andrew knew this.
But obviously not all are destroyed. Yeager Stump, for one, enjoyed
life far beyond the conventional three score years and ten. Even at the
end, when he was housebound, he continued to enjoy life. Miss Iris Flynn,
devoted as always, kept him supplied with good bourbon. On one of her
visits, she handed him the anticipated bottle and exclaimed about its
lately increased cost. "Yes," said Mr. Stump, "maybe they'll finally charge
what it's worth."
Whether or not Uncle Andrew invited the destruction he in fact
received is at least a disturbed question, and perhaps an unanswerable
one. But I did not even know it was a question until one day -I was
grown by then - I said point-blank to Elton Penn: "Why did Carp Harmon kill Uncle Andrew?"
Probably Elton was no more comfortable with my curiosity than Mr.
Hardy had been, but he gave me a straight answer. "Well, the way I heard
it, your Uncle Andrew propositioned Harmon's daughter there in the
store where the ones that were tearing down those buildings would go
for lunch."
It was not as though Elton and I were two people merely interested in
the pursuit of truth; we both knew the hardship that that story would
have presented to my family. We did not pursue the subject further, partly
because of the pain that surrounded it, partly because I thought the
explanation credible and had no more questions to ask. I believed that if
he had thought of doing so, Uncle Andrew would have propositioned
Carp Harmon's daughter in the store, devil take the witnesses. He would
have done it because he thought of doing it and because he enjoyed the
outrageousness of it and because he relished the self-abandonment of it.
From there, I supposed, the story had gone on to its conclusion according to the logic of anger.
The year following my grandmother Catlett's death, I returned with my
wife and baby daughter to live through the summer in the old house.
Grandma's things were still there, put away in their places, just as she had
left them, and it fell to me to dispose of them. Because she had known no
extravagance in her life, she had saved everything salvageable: string,
pieces of cloth, buttons and buckles, canceled checks and notes, bits of
paper covered with now meaningless computations and lists, letters and
cards, clippings from newspapers - anything that, within the terms
and hopes of her life, had seemed valuable or potentially useful or in
some way dear.
Among all else she saved were twenty or so letters from Uncle Andrew.
Most of these were written on the stationery of hotels in southern
states, mostly in South Carolina. All of them show a wish to be a good
son, and I have no doubt that this was a wish that he felt
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