“You say you explained our arrangement?”
“Yes. I wanted it clearly understood, and I thought it was only fair.”
“Exactly how clear do you suppose his understanding is? It seems to me that the reasonable implications of the arrangement would seem to be very different from the truth.”
“Well, it’s not my fault if he jumps to wrong conclusions. The important thing is, he was kind and considerate and felt that it was our business entirely, just as the Greek did.”
“I’ll say one thing for you. You’re certainly building up quite a reputation for me in the neighborhood.”
“You shouldn’t be so egotistical. You imagine that everyone is paying attention to what you do, but it’s very doubtful, in my opinion, that anyone cares in the least. Besides, writers are supposed to be rather immoral. It’s expected of them.”
“Is that so? It’s interesting to know that you’ve suddenly become an authority on writers.”
“Are you beginning to feel quarrelsome? You sound like it. I only wanted to surprise you with a Christmas tree that I paid for with my own money, and now you’re behaving as if I’d done something wrong. I think it’s very small of you, if you want to know the truth. It’s rather depressing, you know, when everything you do turns out to be wrong.”
“I didn’t mean that at all, and you know it. I wouldn’t think of depriving you of the right to buy a Christmas tree with your own money. I suppose it’s only fair that you should contribute something now and then. We’ll decorate the tree together Saturday night.”
“I’d like that. Really I would. It’s been a long time since I’ve helped to decorate a Christmas tree. Perhaps it hasn’t been so long, actually, but it seems like a long time, so much has happened since, and so it comes to the same thing.”
“You’re right there. Something may seem a long time ago when it really hasn’t been so long at all. It’s a kind of perspective. When I was a boy, we had an evergreen tree in the front yard. Every year, a week before Christmas exactly, we strung colored bulbs in the tree and lit them every night until Christmas was past. It wasn’t too many years ago, but it seems forever.”
“Were you actually a boy once?”
“Of course I was a boy. Do you think I was born a man?”
“It’s crazy, I know, but it seems to me that you must surely have been born the instant we met. You must have been born in one instant and have walked instantly afterward into the Greek’s for a cup of coffee...”
He had often had, as a matter of fact, the same queer notion about himself. Not that he had, specifically, been born full-grown outside the Greek’s on the night of reference, but that he had been born suddenly in various places at various times, and that everything he remembered before that time and place, whenever and wherever it was in a particular instance, was somehow something that had happened to someone else. Now, standing at the window and watching the soldier’s bell rise and fall in largo tempo, he began to think of the past, the way from another time to this time, and it seemed to him, as it always did when he tried to review the pattern of his life, that the pattern had color and richness and variety and sense in two places at two times, and these places and times were signified by three people he had loved, of whom one was dead and the other two, so far as he was now concerned, might as well have been.
There was, in the first time and the first place, his Uncle Andy Harper. There was also an Aunt Edna, Uncle Andy’s wife, but she was never in Henry’s mind more than a kind of shadow of Uncle Andy, existing only because he did and having in recollection only the substance she borrowed from him.
Uncle Andy was a tall man, lean and tough as a wolf, with a long nose projecting downward from between a pair of the softest, most dream-obsessed eyes it was possible to imagine, and many folk thought that his eyes were his most remarkable feature, but these were the folk who had never become familiar with the touch of his hands. His hands were very large, with long thick fingers, padded on the palm side with the thick callus of hard work, and you would naturally have thought, looking at them, that their touch would be heavy, inadvertently brutal, but this was not so. The touch of the hands was as light and as gentle as the most delicate touch of the white hands of a fine lady, and it had the effect of a minor miracle, an impossible effect of its observable cause.
Henry first became aware of the light, miraculous touch of the heavy hands at the age of five when he was ill of influenza, and this was less than a year after the deaths of his father and mother in an accident on a highway six hundred miles away, when he had come to live with Uncle Andy and Aunt Edna on their farm about a hundred miles southwest of Kansas City, Missouri. He had wakened from a feverish sleep with the feeling that his fever was being drawn from his forehead by the soft magic of cool fingers, and he had thought at first that it was his mother who was sitting beside his bed, but it had turned out to be Uncle Andy. From that moment he had understood his uncle’s vast depth of gentleness, and he had always afterward loved his uncle completely and quietly, with unspoken devotion, which was the only kind of love Uncle Andy wanted or would accept.
Uncle Andy was a puzzle to his neighbors and the despair of his wife, and this was because he declared himself to be an agnostic and maintained his position against all persuasion and prophecies of divine retribution. Enlightenment had its limitations in the area in which they lived, in the time they lived there, and it was not understood how a man could be so good, as measured by his faithfulness to his wife and his attention to his proper affairs, and at once so contaminated by the devil, as measured by his adherence to the devil’s gospel. The truth of the matter was, Uncle Andy’s formal education had ended at the eighth grade, but he had continued to read widely in a random sort of way, taking what he could find anywhere he could find it, and after an early experience with Colonel Bob Ingersoll, he had come, in the twenties, under the influence of Clarence Darrow and H. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis, and the greatest of these, because of a communication of gentle pessimism, was Darrow. One of the rare times Uncle Andy had become very angry, which was long before Henry’s time, was when a Baptist minister from Fort Scott had tried to argue that William Jennings Bryan, who had just died of gluttony, had been specifically spared by God just long enough to confound the greatest agnostic of his day at the famous Scopes trial in Tennessee. Uncle Andy had pointed out that God had used damned poor judgment in his choice of counsel, since Darrow had made a bigger monkey of Bryan than Scopes had tried to make of man’s ancestor.
The years on the farm were good years for Henry, although they later became, in the recollection of them after he had gone away, obscured and unreal with incredible rapidity by events that came between him and them. One of the things Henry learned, which was knowledge that filled him with adolescent sadness, was that Uncle Andy, in spite of being a successful farmer with no problems at the bank, considered himself a failure. He was not a failure, of course, but he considered himself one because he had been unable to do what he wanted most to do, which was to set down on paper some of the things he had seen and thought and felt and done, and he would not even allow himself the consolation of thinking that he might have been able to do so if only he had a better chance.
“The test of a Milton is that he act like a Milton,” he said to Henry one summer night on the screened-in back porch off the kitchen. “I read that somewhere. I think it was Mencken wrote it. Anyhow, it’s true. If I had it in me to do what I want to do, I’d do it, but I haven’t got it. It’s a great sadness, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”