Burley Coulter’s Fortunate Fall

It has been a long, long time since old Uncle Bub Levers was called on to pray at the Bird’s Branch church for the first and only time in his life, when he stood up and said, “O Lord, bless me and my son Jasper. Amen.”

The Lord must have thought that was a good idea. For with His help, maybe, Jappy Levers grew up and got himself educated for a lawyer. When he hung out his sign in Hargrave, he wasn’t Jappy Levers any more. He was J. Robert La Vere, Attorney-at-Law. That might not have been all put-on. Some say that La Veres was what the Leverses were before they turned up around Port William. People in Port William don’t say things they haven’t heard of. They never had heard of La Veres. They had heard of Levers.

With the Lord’s help maybe, maybe not, Mr. La Vere got to be a rich man. Getting rich, you know, does not always meet with everybody’s approval. There was always somebody, or several bodies, in Port William who would tell you confidently that Mr. La Vere got rich by finding out where the money was and helping himself to a good deal more than his share. In fact they didn’t know, and I don’t know. To find out how such things are done, you will have to ask somebody besides me. Maybe you can do like Mr. La Vere, who gaveth the credit to the Lord, at the same time keeping a good deal of it for himself, the Lord maybe not minding, maybe.

Anyhow the Lord either did or didn’t bless Mr. La Vere with the money he scraped together by the time he was forty-five or so, when he bought the biggest house in Hargrave with front-porch columns two stories tall. After Uncle Bub died Mr. La Vere kept the old Levers home place out on Bird’s Branch, and as the chances came he bought other farms hither and yon.

So he was right smart of a big deal and on the downward slope when he topped himself off by taking to wife, as Wheeler Catlett put it, the elegant, accomplished, and beautiful Miss Charlotte Riggins. Miss Charlotte was from somewhere off. She could have been rich herself for all I know, maybe, maybe not; but she did come up in the world by changing her name from Riggins to La Vere and setting up housekeeping behind the tallest front porch in Hargrave.

How Mr. La Vere and Miss Charlotte hit it off as a loving couple is anybody’s guess. I somehow never quite could imagine it myself, so I will leave it to you. But Mr. La Vere lived long enough that, by the time he died, Miss Charlotte had taken on all his dignity and become a great lady.

By the time Mr. La Vere departed, Miss Charlotte’s hair had turned mortally blue, but she wasn’t exactly an old woman yet. If widowhood hadn’t suited her so well, and with all her goods and money, surely somebody would have married her. I reckon I might have married her myself, maybe, if she had ever asked me.

Mr. La Vere died at about the start of the Depression or a little before, and Wheeler Catlett, who was a wingshot of a young lawyer then, settled the old man’s estate, nearly all of it directly onto Miss Charlotte. At about the same time the tenant on the old Levers place gave it up, and Wheeler traded with Grover Gibbs to be the new tenant. And so Grover and his wife Beulah and their children moved into the old Levers house that was the Gibbs house then until Grover retired onto the Social Security.

Grover was one of my old running mates, so from then on I was party to the doings of Miss Charlotte and to her, what do you call it?—relationship, I guess—with Grover. Grover was probably the ideal man for the place; Wheeler...