Moving
on the Earth
Ken
Craven
Nathaniel walked
on into the fall of the year, gathering twigs and thistles and cockleburs on
the ancient winter frock coat his father had worn when he walked in the
fields. He moved deliberately through
the wasted, scrubby knob farms that lay to the east where James said the land
was so damned poor with juniper and man-high anthills that jackrabbits carried
packs when they crossed it.
Nothing and no one stopped him. Sometimes he walked right through tenant
yards and cabins, striding through hog killings and marble games and wood
chopping and the putting up of jams and jellies and whatnot. Before people had time to react, he was out
of the yard and the house and into a field or down a road or railroad
track. There were some small eruptions—whup! what! this one or that one starting to take
offense—before people sensed that from this gaunt, bearded strider with the
wide eyes there was none. Most saw that
he was a man of troubles and let him be.
Once in a while he would stop in a house or barn—walking right through
kitchens or milking pens—and pick something up, a pan or a sickle, and turn it
over in his long fingers as if he’d never seen anything like that before. Children and dogs gave way quietly, showing
neither fear nor threat, guessing he was bout some serious and necessary
business. When women looked up from
their shucking or sewing or soap making, they saw sorrow trailing from him like
broken cobwebs.
Sometimes he was gone from home for a few days—sleeping
in ditches and barns, Aunt Ish said, like he had no home, like a common
tramp—and some Salt River farmer, figuring someone ought to fetch him where he
belonged, would take him by the arm and haul him into Bardstown and leave him
by the slave auction block beside the court house, where he would stand like a
penitent, staring across the square, until someone got word over to Woodlawn
and James, clicking his tongue, would come for him. Other times the monks at Gethsemane would see
him cross their lands, a stalking partner in their silent work, his gangly arms
swinging slow and his thin hands dangling from his wrists; or he would go
thirty miles the other way, to the big mother house at St. Catherine’s or the
priory of St. Rose, and the nuns or Dominican priests would see him—ghastly and
sallow and so miseried of face that he rivaled the big Jesus hanging in the
apse—standing up in the middle of the aisle during the consecration, his arms
at his sides, his head bowed, “as if he was trying to find a place to turn
himself in,” James said, “and I wish to hell he would. I’m tired of hauling him around like a sack
of feed.” “He’s walking it out,”
Jefferson on the dock at the feed store said, “whatever it be, whatever they
done to him over in that place, him and God walking it out.”
When he had first come back from France it was still deep
summer—mindless days when the land steamed in haze, warm nights when people
slipped out in their yards to sleep on quilts under big moons—before the late
thunderstorms brought the creeks back up.
They didn’t know he was coming. The foreman at the section house sent a
colored boy up the road to say Marse Nathaniel was come home from over there and was sot down on a bench where the milk train from Louisville left him.
When James got down there the foreman said the train had put him out like a
piece of freight, the baggage tag was still tied to one of his button holes,
and he was just sitting on the bench, staring off somewhere. Miss Carrie came over to help James clean him
up and after struggling with him for a day—handling his arms and legs was like
folding and unfolding a large scarecrow—they laughed and cried at the same
time, hugging each other and the bearded ragdoll brother and cousin and joking
about where to prop him up next. James
said put him in the cornfield to get them crows out but then he choked and went
to the barn, cussing every rock on the way. For a while Miss Carrie stayed and
sat by her cousin’s side and did her piece work. After coming over to James’s porch and trying
this a few days and spooning soft-boiled eggs into Nathaniel and watching them dribble
down his shirt front, she would sit by his side and do her piece work as
neighbors walking down the street waved with that attitude that says what, I
don’t know, Carrie told James, but I hate the worrisome solicitude. Go home and take care of your own, she
hissed, with all this flu going around, you’ll soon enough have troubles of
your own. After a few days, she tried
putting some of his books in his hands but he let them fall on the floor. She played the mandolin and sang songs and
fussed at him, “Nathaniel, you could at least speak or look at me.” But he stayed where he was, staring into some
other place.
It puzzled them that Nathaniel showed up at the station
wearing what looked like mission barrel hand-me-downs instead of his army
uniform. And if he was sick or wounded,
how come he wasn’t in some hospital?
There were no answers. James went
down to the county newspaper but all he could find out was that the hospitals
in Lexington and Louisville were choked with veterans and influenza victims and
he came back home more disgusted that he usually was. Maybe, someone said, he was already in a
hospital and they put him out too. He
can walk, can’t he?
For weeks he sat wherever James put him. He would eat enough to keep bone and fat together,
he would do his necessaries, James told Dr. McCarty who was too busy with the
flu to do more than nod, but he would not speak or give any sign that he
heard. When led, he went; when stopped,
he stood or sat. His face was a mask and
his eyes in a deep study. But when the
late summer rains came and the creeks swoll out of their banks he suddenly got
up in the middle of the “worst straight-down flood of the goddamned century,
walked out of the house and into the fields behind the tobacco warehouses,
moving like he had somewhere to get,” James told the farmers at the sorghum
mill. “At the first I tried to stop
him. I’d throw him down in the street
and Carrie would get ahold of him. He
wouldn’t fight us but when we let go, he’d spring up and walk away from us like
a shot, rain notwithstanding, sense notwithstanding, not a damn thing
notwithstanding. So we followed and watched him for a while and then let him
go. He stopped for horses and Fords and
trains, so we figured somehow he knew what he was doing.”
“Or,” he added, looking down at his boots and tugging his
ear, “so I reckon.”
Nathaniel walked.
He walked from first light until after dark, getting drenched in the
heavy cloudbursts that ended the parched summer and drying out in the sun like
the stubbled fields and dirt roads. Carrie saw him pass the L&N section
house by Aunt Sukey’s spring three times in one day, each time from a different
direction. He walked steadily through
late August and September but he would stop sometimes in barns and on people’s
porches and sit, looking away somewhere as if he were expecting something, until there were bowls of soup in his hands
or shawls on his shoulder where this one or that one would coax him by a stove
to steam off his clothes. He still said nothing. One man found him fallen in a ditch by the
cheese factory and “howling out these long despairing wails that sounded like
no pain I’d ever want to know.” So they said to each other, the ones that heard
him. But quiet, guarded, nodding, they
let him be, and tended him as much as he would let them.
In October the hunting for rabbits and quail started and
more than one hunter told of the wild-haired, wild-eyed man in a long coat who
walked up and snatched the shotgun from their hands and threw it away. James followed this trail for a while,
explaining, making peace, talking it out on his haunches with a piece of straw
in his mouth.
Then there was a silence.
After a week during which no one came forth or brought Nathaniel back,
James went looking, cussing and snorting.
He went east and west, asking, but no one had seen his brother. The goldenrod was blooming in the meadows,
and heavy washboard clouds made him look up and shiver. Got to get him laid up for the winter, he
found himself thinking. Finally he went
south and east through Gravel Switch to see if the Prophet—his new name for his
brother—had gone back into the knob country.
At last he found him in a colored shanty town by an unused railroad
siding.
The tale James told the stove sitters at the McCabe
General Store in Woodlawn was, generally, this: that he heard a strange white
man “with the promise” in a long coat and beard was living with the niggers and
figured, yes, why the hell not, he’s done everything else. It was a Sunday when he got there, a cold November day with a little sleet
tatting on the shanty roofs, and the first thing he saw when he opened the door
to the little church was Nathaniel sitting up next to the preacher and the
barrel stove, slapping his hands on his knees and singing in a croaky baritone,
“Walking in Jerusalem Just Like John,” and smiling around. When the service was over, “Nathaniel came
out with niggers handing all over him and petting him like he was Jesus
himself.”
“I walked up and said, ‘Nate, time to go home now,’ and
he looked at me right in the eye for the first time since he got back, and said
‘this will do for now, Brother James, this will do for now.’ And then, just
after I got back in the T, he came over and patted me on the leg. ‘My books,’
he said, ‘please send my books. And give
my love to Carrie.’”
That was it, James told them in Woodlawn. “I reckon he
knows what he’s doing down there. But
anyhow, he’s got a warm place for the winter even if he is eating hog parts and
drinking chicory like any jig.”
©Copyright 1992 Ken
Craven
