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

and Uncle Andrew was wearing a canvas hunting coat, which he now
opened and spread like a hen's wing. "Here, baby," he said. I ducked
under and he closed me in. For a long time I stood there, dark and dry in
his warmth, in his mingled smell of sweat and pipe tobacco, while the
rain fell hard around us and splattered on the ground at our feet.

    In the winter when nightfall came early, he would often stop by our
house as he was going home. He would come in and sit down. My father
would lay aside the evening paper, and they would talk quietly and companionably, going over the stages of work on the farms, saying what had
been done and what needed doing. Uncle Andrew would have on his
winter clothes: an old felt hat, corduroys, the tan canvas hunting coat,
and under that a lined suede jacket with a zipper. He would not take off
his outdoor clothes because he was on his way to supper and did not
intend to stay long. I would climb into his lap and make myself comfortable. Perhaps I appeared to be listening, but what I was really doing was
smelling. There was the smell of Uncle Andrew himself, which was a
constant and always both comforting and exciting, but on those evenings
his clothes gave off also the cold smells of barns and animals, hay and tobacco, ground grain, wood smoke. Those smells charmed me utterly
and saddened me, for they told me what I had missed by being in school.

    "Take me with you in the morning," I would say.
    And he would say, "Can't do it, college." Or, in another mood, he
would give me a hug and a pat. "I wish I could, baby, but you got to go to
school."
    For children his term of endearment, which also was Grandpa's, was
"baby." He called me that when he felt tender toward me, as he often did,
nearly always when he was drinking but often too when he was not.
    He might have wanted a boy of his own, I sometimes thought, and
maybe I was the kind of boy he wanted. At school I took to signing myself
"Andrew Catlett, Jr." Sometimes it seemed unfair to me that I was not
his son. I wanted to be a man just like him.
    I liked his rough way of joking and carrying on. Often when I showed
up at his apartment, he would say in his nasal slang, "Hello, bozo! Gimme
five!" And we would do a big handshake.
    His term of emphatic agreement was "Yowza!" Or he would say, Aw
yeah!"-pronounced as one word: 'Aw'eah! "which was both affirmative and derisive. He could make one word perform lots of functions.
    Anybody dead and buried, especially any of Aunt Judith's relatives,
was "planted in the skull orchard."
    Anybody licked or done in had been "nailed to the cross."
    His threats to Henry and me, even when somewhat meant, were
delivered with a burlesque of ferocity that made us laugh: "I'm going to
stomp your bee-hind!" he would say. "I'm going to rap on your dingdong! I'm going to cloud up and rain all over you! I'm going to get you
down and work on you!"
    He would sometimes put on Henry's or my straw hat, much too small
for him, insert an old magnifying lens in his eye as a monocle, look at us,
and say, "Redwood fer dittos, college!" What that meant I do not know; I
don't know even if those are the right words. That was what it sounded
like. Wearing the "monocle" and tiny-looking hat, speaking sentences
imitated, I suppose, from somebody he had run across somewhere away,
he could transform himself, sometimes a little scarily, into somebody we
had never seen before. Leering and mouthing, carrying on an outrageous blather of profanity and nonsense, he could make us laugh until we were
lying on the floor, purged, exhausted, aching, and still laughing.

    We had a mongrel bull terrier bitch named Nosey that he did not
especially care for. Somebody told us we ought to bob her tail. As we did
with all out-of-the-way propositions, we laid this one before Uncle
Andrew
    "Uncle Andrew, do you know how to cut off Nosey's tail?"
    "Why, hell yes!" he said, opening his pocketknife, "I'll cut it off right