The Early Posthumous Work

Not As I Recall

19 Not As I Recall Jerry was my mother’s sister’s husband, and I knew him only distantly , for he and my aunt lived up north while I grew up in Texas, so I only saw him on two long vacations my mother and I spent at “the farm,” a few hundred acres in southeast Pennsylvania where he raised corn and hay and a small herd of Black Angus cattle. I was eight and later ten or eleven on those vacations, so while I saw little of him in fact, I saw a great deal of him in imagination. In some sense, then, what follows is not true. But in some sense it is. My father was a brilliant and demanding man whom I had always loved dearly; my uncle was like him in some ways but not in others. Jerry was a little older than my father, about fifty-five, tall, on the gangly side, with a penchant for browns and flannel shirts, and in his strong, tanned hands and his light eyes and his reserved, wry smile, I saw an ease as sublime as it was unfamiliar. Other men I knew were edgy, tightly wound. Jerry looked like a farmer, or at least what I knew farmers were supposed to look like, in all the folklore concerning farmers. He was wise, gentle, and kind. Jerry died sixteen years ago, and I had lost contact with him for twenty years before that. My acquaintance with him was all a child’s acquaintance, so what I have of him now is a few memories and images. His hands, for instance. Twelve or fifteen cats 20 The Early Posthumous Work lived on the farm—house cats, strays, barn cats, and Jerry’s cat, a big, scruffy old orange and white tom short an eye and half an ear. Evenings, the cat would settle in his lap as Jerry sat out on one of the porches in a rocking chair, and I can still see his hands’ slow, automatic work, his hard fingers deep in the fur of the sleepy cat’s bull neck. His voice, too, was special, a deep voice with a smile in it. I knew irony, but the irony I knew, even when it was friendly, was unmistakably a weapon. This was a musing sort of irony which he was giving away to whomever he was talking to. He liked foolishness and play. He had grown up an orphan, in a home for boys, and so he probably knew a lot about nonsense and had a fine appreciation for it. Or maybe Jerry just figured that about half of everything everybody says is nonsense, an idea I understood much later. His voice had an authority, too, when he chose to use it, to explain to a Texas city boy why we were turning the hay that morning, or how to handle his .22 rifle, or how to distinguish different breeds of cattle, or why I was not to bother my aunt. When he said something, I listened. But more often, he listened. The .22 was one of a closetful of guns, but as far as I know Jerry seldom used them except when his nephews were up from Texas. He may have hunted in the winters, or when he was younger. In any case, guns were part of the exotic aura of the farm. At home we didn’t have guns, though my friends’ fathers and older brothers did. I stood beside the corn crib, shooting at a line of empty coffee cans. Jerry would stand behind me and to one side, coaching, and I thought he was the Rifleman or Buffalo Bill. I suspect now that he only saw what I wanted him to be and obliged. Back home I spent much of my free time out of doors around the yet-to-be-developed bayous and fields of the raw Houston suburb where my family lived, but it was a suburb, nonetheless. The rolling fields and thick woods on my aunt and uncle’s farm were better, with tractors and cows and barns and clear springs where the water just bubbled out of the ground. No doubt in Steven Barthelme 21 some measure Jerry got blended in my imagination with the wonders of his property. He wasn’t really even a farmer, except to me, and to himself. I spent my weeks on...