So it was from Uncle Andy that Henry acquired his curiosity and his reading habits and, later, his need and hunger to express himself. He read voraciously, as Uncle Andy had, and for years without discrimination. Dickens and Charles Alden Seltzer were equally acceptable to him, and if he recognized the superiority of the one, it did not prevent him from enjoying the other, and when he eventually encountered the massive, indiscriminate hunger and thirst and bellowing of Thomas Wolfe, it was like a revelation of divine despair. By that time, he was wanting to write stories himself, and he began to try. It was much more difficult than he had imagined, and it seemed to him unbelievable that it could require so much time and effort to fill a single page of lined paper with words that had never before been set down in the sense and order he gave to them.
In spite of his wide reading and his hunger, which was more emotional than mental, he was no better than a mediocre student at the high school in town. This was not because of inability, but rather because of a stubborn resistance to any kind of direction that was contrary to his natural interests. He read, but he read mostly the things he wanted to read, conceding only enough attention to assignments to get him by without disgrace and without distinction. Literature he loved, and history he accepted, but mathematics and science were barely tolerated. Finally, in due time, he graduated and received his diploma, and in the summer following his graduation Uncle Andy died, and was gone from the earth, and the earth was changed.
The morning of the day of that summer, Henry was up early, and the hours ahead of him seemed bright and clear and filled with the certainty of quiet and rich experience. After breakfast, he was standing behind the bam, looking off beyond the fields and pasture to the stand of timber along the creek, when Uncle Andy drove around the barn on the tractor.
“Where you going, Uncle Andy?” Henry said.
“Down to the far field at the southwest corner of the property,” Uncle Andy said. “It’s been lying there fallow since plowing, and I intend to disc it.”
“Where’s the disc?”
“It’s already down there. I’ve only got to drive the tractor down and hook on. You like to come along?”
“Well, not unless you really need me.”
“I don’t need you, but you’re welcome to come along for the ride. You got a loafing day planned out?”
“I didn’t plan to do much. I thought I’d go down to the creek.”
“You want to take the car and go into town?”
“No. Just down to the creek.”
“You go ahead and do what you like. I’ll be back around noon for dinner.”
“Okay, Uncle Andy. See you later.”
This was almost exactly what was said, and the reason Henry remembered it so clearly, the small talk that didn’t amount to anything, was because it was the last conversation he and Uncle Andy ever had, and it came back to him word for word afterward with all the importance and enormous significance of being the last of something there would ever be. For quite a while he felt guilty, as if he had somehow deserted Uncle Andy just when he was needed most, but he knew, really, that it probably wouldn’t have made any difference if he had gone, because he almost certainly wouldn’t have been in any position to prevent what happened, it surely happened so fast. Anyhow, that was later, and this summer Saturday morning he went on down across the fields and pasture to the creek, and he spent the morning down there, lying under the trees and watching the dark water and thinking about what he would do with the rest of his life and wondering if he could ever become a writer, as he wished, or if he would finally have to do something else instead.
He got back to the house a little before noon, and Uncle Andy wasn’t there, and he still wasn’t there by one o’clock. He and Aunt Edna had planned to go into town for the afternoon, and Aunt Edna was frantic with worry, because Uncle Andy wasn’t the kind of man to forget a plan or to go deliberately back on one. Finally, to satisfy Aunt Edna, Henry went all the way across the farm to the southwest corner, the fallow field, and he found the tractor stalled against a post at one end of the field, and Uncle Andy lying back in the field on the plowed earth. The disc had gone over him, and the only thing that later helped a little in the memory of it was the assurance of the doctor that Uncle Andy had clearly suffered a heart attack, which had caused him to fall off the seat of the tractor, and that it was probable he hadn’t ever felt what happened to him.
After Uncle Andy was buried and gone for good, except the little of him that could be remembered, Aunt Edna asked Henry if he was interested in working the farm for a livelihood, and he said he wasn’t, so Aunt Edna let it on shares to a good man with a wife and two sons. She moved into a cottage in town, and Henry went up to the state university on a shoestring in September, and it was there and then that he met the other two of the three people he had loved most. One was a boy, and the other was a girl, and he met the girl through the boy, whom he met first.
Going to the university on a shoestring the way he was, there wasn’t any question of social fraternities, anything that cost extra money, and he found a room in a widow’s house that was down the hill a few blocks from the campus. There were four rooms for men students on the second floor of the house, a community bath at the end of the hall, and Henry’s room was the smallest of the four, overlooking the shingled roof of the front porch. One night of the first week of his residence, he was lying on the bed in the room with his text on World Civilization spread open under his eyes, but he wasn’t having much luck in reading his assignment because he was feeing pretty low and wondering if, after all, he shouldn’t have chosen to work the farm. The door to the hall was open, and after a while someone stopped in the doorway and leaned against the jamb. Looking up, Henry saw a thin young man with a dark, ugly face under a thatch of unruly, brown hair.
“You Harper?” the young man said.
He asked the question as if there were no more than the slightest chance for an affirmative answer. At the same time he gave the impression of caring very little if the answer was affirmative or not.
“That’s right,” Henry said.
“Mine’s Brewster. Howie Brewster. I live down the hall.”
Howie Brewster came on into the room, and Henry got off the bed and shook hands. The hand that gripped his was surprisingly strong in spite of a suggestion of limpness in the way it was offered. Immediately afterward, without an invitation, Howie Brewster sat down on the bed and took a half-pint of whiskey out of the inside pocket of his coat.
“Have a drink,” he said.
Henry shook his head. “No, thanks.”
“What’s the matter? You one of old Bunsen’s goddamn heroes?”
“I don’t even know who old Bunsen is, and I’m no hero.”
“Honest to God? You don’t know who Bunsen is?”
“I said I don’t. Who is he?”
“Football coach. I thought you might be one of his hired hands. You look like it, if you don’t mind my saying so. You’re big enough. You got good shoulders. I should have known you weren’t, though. If you were, you wouldn’t be living in Mrs. Murphy’s goddamn Poor House. They take better care of the heroes. How come you are living here, by the way? Can’t you afford anything better?”
“No. Can’t you?”
“I can, as a matter of fact. My old man would stand the tariff of one of the frats if I’d live there, but I wouldn’t live in one of those fancy flophouses with all those bastards for a thousand a month.”
“Why don’t you rent a better room or an apartment or something?”
“I know. You think I’m a goddamn liar. That’s all right, though. I don’t mind. You can think whatever you please and kiss my ass besides.”