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.
Keeping the Old School Open
On a Sunday afternoon, my son, Silas, and I were putting up our last sign eight miles north of town, on the edge of U.S. Highway 1 where the road to the school crosses. Across the road lay cotton field.
“Where would the most people see the sign? There at the corner or along the highway?”
“I think here,” Silas said. “It stands out better.”
Silas, nine, struggled with his end of a four-by-eight sheet of plywood. We dropped the wood and Silas took up the posthole diggers, which were a good foot longer than he, and started grubbing a hole beyond the right-of-way in Dave Sellers’s clearcut.
I looked out at what was left of a forest. A year ago, this had been fifty acres of mature longleaf pine, with evidence even of red-cockaded woodpeckers, the endangered bird that nests in old-growth
