AT FIRST LIGHT HE WAS UP as was his custom and in the dewy coolness he went up thé slope behind the tenant house following the meandering line of an old rail fence he himself had built long ago. At the summit he paused to catch his breath and stood leaning on his walking stick peering back the way he’d come. The slope tended away in a stony tapestry and the valley lay spread out below him in a dreamy pastoral haze and mist rose out of the distant hollows blue as smoke. The sky was marvelously clear and on this July morning each sound seemed distinct and equidistant: he could hear cowbells on the other side of the woods, a truck laboring up a hill on some distant road. These sounds and sights reminded him of his childhood long ago in Alabama, and they caused a singing in his blood and a rise in his spirits, he could hear his heart hammering strong and fierce as when he was a boy. He was alive and the world alive with him and he had come back to it without either of them being changed.
He entered the cool dappled green of the woods going downhill now and when he came out of the trees into the light again he was in Thurl Chessor’s pasture and approaching the barn and house. He went on past deceased tractors and rusting mowers and old mule-drawn planters like museum artifacts.
He was suddenly and against his will assailed by memory. It came to him that he was a repository of knowledge that was being lost, knowledge that no one even wanted anymore. The way the earth looked and smelled rolling off the gleaming point of a turning plow, the smell of the mule and the feel of the sweat-hardened harness and the way the thunderheads rolled up in the summer and lay over the hills like malignant tumors and thunder booming along the timberline and clouds unfolding in a fierce and violent coupling and seeding in the furrows a curious gift of ice that lay gleaming in the black loam like pearls.
He remembered laying out all night as a young man and trudging woodenly behind the mule the next day, sleep-robbed and weary, jerky as a puppet the mule was controlling with the plowlines.
He shook these thoughts out of his head and went on. He could see Thurl walking back toward the house from the pig lot with a feed bucket in his hand. Thurl was his contemporary and he had known him forty years but they had never been close. Thurl was not a very good farmer but he had managed to survive. Thurl did not have a head for business, an eye for the small detail. He was apt to leave a tractor out in the weather with the intake filling with rainwater and pine needles then curse the folks in Illinois or wherever that made it and wonder why it wouldn’t start. On the other hand, Meecham thought ruefully, he was not living in a tenant shack with Lonzo Choat reared back in the main house like the lord of the manor.
Chessor put the bucket on a slab shelf and turned and studied Meecham with no surprise. Well, I see you’re back. Run off, did you.
Yeah.
Are they after you?
After me? Hellfire. It was a old folks’ home, not a chain gang. Why would they be after me?
I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it. Where’d you sleep last night? Did Lonzo make you down a pallet on the floor?
That’s mainly why I come down here. I need to use your telephone. I need to call Paul and see if I can’t get this mess straightened out. I’ve got to get Choat out of there.
You’ll play hell doin it. Or doin it quick anyway. He’s got a foot in the door now. You get him evicted legal the law won’t make him move for thirty days. They’re not goin to throw him right out.
I need to use your telephone anyway. It’s long distance but I got money.
That’s all right. It’s in the front room where it always was.
He spoke with a young woman who would make no commitment as to Paul’s whereabouts. He was put on hold and treacly music began to play softly in the background. He was on hold for some time then she came back on the line. Mr. Meecham is engaged right at the moment, she said.
I’m fairly engaged myself, the old man said. You get him on here. I aim to clear this mess up and no mistake about it.
I’m sorry, sir. Mr. Meecham is tied up right now. His time is very valuable.
If I hadn’t sold calves and pigs to send him through law school it wouldn’t be worth fifteen cents. You get him on this phone.
There was the dawning of knowledge in the woman’s voice. Are you Mr. Meecham’s father by any chance?
There’s rumors to that effect.
Well, I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t understand. He’s on his way to court but I’ll have him paged. He has a beeper. Give me your number and I’ll have him return your call in a moment.
Meecham read her the number and cradled the phone. Paul’s got a beeper, he thought to himself. He was unsure exactly what a beeper was but he was vaguely impressed nonetheless. He tried to call Paul’s face to mind but it was the child Paul had been that came swimming up from the depths of memory and the circles the adult Paul moved in were as strange to them both as some continent across the waters. He sat staring at the telephone as if he expected it to perform some bizarre and clever trick he had taught it.
He picked it up on the first ring.
Dad?
So you got you a beeper, the old man said.
Dad, what is this about?
I want them folks out of the house and I want them out today.
What?
That Choat bunch. Layin up there sleepin in your mama’s bed and eatin out of her dishes. Looks like you’d be ashamed of yourself. I want em gone.
Where are you calling from?
Where do you think I’m callin from? Thurl Chessör’s place, they’ve done broke my phone or somethin. Are you goin to get them out today or not?
There was a pause. What are you doing there? You’re supposed to be in the nursing home in Linden.
Supposed to be? I’m supposed to be where I damn well please. Nobody tells me where I’m supposed to be, nobody ever did. What is this mess you’ve cooked up?
There was another pause, this one longer, and this time Paul’s face did come to mind, like a slowly developing photographic plate, the thin face filled out with rich food and prosperity, perhaps tanned from the golf course, the pudgy fingers massaging his temples as if the old man was giving him a headache.
This is getting too complicated for me, Paul finally said. At any rate it’s too complicated for the telephone. Use that phone to call a cab, and go back, to the home. I’ll come down there at — a pause again and the old man knew Paul was looking at his watch — five o’clock and explain everything about the sale.
Sale my ass. You can’t sell what ain’t yourn.
Well, obviously we need to discuss it, but as to what I can or can’t do, I’m your legal guardian and the trustee of your estate. When you started acting erratic after Mama died I got worried about you. I figured you were a danger to yourself, and the court—
I’ll be a danger to a whole hell of a lot more than myself unless you get your ass on the ball and unscramble this paperwork. I’ll do it myself, I’m not penniless. Do you think you’re the only lawyer that ever hit a golf ball?
Five o’clock, all right?
The old man slammed the phone so hard Chessor glanced at it sharply as if it might have broken. Meecham was lightheaded with rage. Black dots swam before his eyes like a swarm of gnats and he felt dizzy and strange, as if his very soul was packing up to flee his body. It seemed to him that he had scraped and cut corners and done without just to send Paul to an expensive school where he’d learned a trade that was doing him out of what he had taken a lifetime to accumulate.
He sat on the porch with Chessor drinking morning coffee and trying to think what to do. He had to formulate a plan.
Well? Chessor asked.
The old man sipped his coffee and sat staring across Chessor s yard toward the pear tree. The yard was littered with a motley of broken and discarded plunder, and dogs of varied and indeterminate breed lay about the yard like fey decorations some whitetrash landscapist had positioned there with a critical eye.