A World Lost: A Novel (Port William) Read Online Free PDF Page A

a bitch!" And the car would buck out of the driveway
and up the low rise like a young horse. He treated all machines as if they
were recalcitrant and uncommonly stupid draft animals. When the car,
under his abuse, finally learned its lesson and began to run smoothly, he
would look over at me, screwing his face up and talking through his nose
-in the style, probably, of some cabdriver he remembered: "Where to,
college?"
    "Oh," I would say, laughing, "up to the Crayton Place, I reckon."

    Of the two farms, Uncle Andrew much preferred the Crayton Place,
where Jake and Minnie Branch lived-and so, of course, I preferred it
too. The Bower Place was perhaps a little too close to Grandpa Catlett's;
also the tenant there, Jake Branch's brother, was a quiet, rather solitary
man who thought mostly of keeping his two boys at work and of staying
at work himself. But at the Crayton Place, what with Jake's children and
Minnie's children and Jake's and Minnie's children and whichever two or
three of Minnie's six brothers Jake had managed to lure in (or bail out of
jail) as hired hands, together with the constant passing in and out of more
distant relations, neighbors, and friends, there was always commotion,
always the opportunity for talk and laughter and carrying on. Some
rowdy joke or tale could get started there and go on for two or three
days, retold and elaborated for every newcomer, restlessly egged on -
over the noisy objections and denials of whoever was the butt of it-by
pretended casual comments or questions asked in mock innocence. Minnie never knew the number she would feed at a meal. I have seen her put
biscuits on the table in a wash pan, three dozen at a time.

    Perhaps Uncle Andrew had some affection for farming. He had, after all,
been raised to it-or Grandpa, anyhow, had tried to raise him to it. But
he was unlike his father and my father, for whom farming was a devotion
and a longing; it was not a necessity of life to him. He saw to things, purchased harness and machine parts, did whatever was needed to keep
men and teams and implements in working order, and helped out where
help was needed. But what he really loved was company, talk, some kind
of to-do, something to laugh at.
    When our association began, I appointed myself his hired hand at a
wage of a quarter a day. Since I was not big enough to do most of the jobs
I wanted to do, I tended to spend the days in an uneasy search for something I could do to justify my pay. I served him mostly as a sort of page,
running errands, carrying water, opening gates, handing him things.
Occasionally he orJake Branch would dignify me with a real job, sending
me to the tobacco patch with a hoe or letting me drive a team on the hayrake. But Uncle Andrew never let my wages become a settled issue. Sometimes he paid me willingly enough. Sometimes I would have to argue, beg, and bully to get him even to acknowledge that he had ever heard of
the idea of paying me. When the subject came up in front of a third
party, he would say, "It's worth a quarter a day just to have him with me."
That confused me, for I treasured the compliment and yet felt that it
devalued my "work."

    One day when he and I were helping Jake Branch set tobacco on a
stumpy hillside, a terrific downpour came upon us. R. T. and Ester Purlin,
two of Minnie's children from her first marriage, and I were dropping the
plants into previously marked rows, and the men were coming behind
us, rapidly setting them in the rain-wet ground, all of us working barefoot to save our shoes. When the new hard shower suddenly began, we
all ran to the shelter of the trees that grew along the hollow at the foot
of the slope. Uncle Andrew and I stood beneath a sort of arbor made by
a wild grapevine whose leaves had grown densely over the top of a small
tree. For a while it was an almost perfect umbrella. And then, as the rain
fell harder, the foliage began to leak. The day was chilly as well as wet,