A World Lost: A Novel (Port William) by Wendell Berry Read Free Book Online Page A

Cuz!"
    And then they would laugh. Sometimes they started laughing before
they had said anything.

     

6
    The first apartment that Uncle Andrew and Aunt Judith lived in after
they moved to Hargrave had no bathtub. Uncle Andrew loved a bathtub,
and so he would sometimes come around to our house after supper to
have a soak. That was one of the times when he and I would visit. I
would perch on the lid of the thunder jug, as he liked to call it, and he
would lie in hot water up to his chin, and we would talk. Or I would just
sit and watch him, for in everything he did he fascinated me. Unlike my
father, who was in all things thrifty and careful and neat and who bathed
vigorously like a man grooming a horse, Uncle Andrew filled the tub full
and bathed expansively, as if the tub were an ocean and he a whale. He
would bask at length in the hot water, and then he would soap and rinse
with a great heaving and sloshing and blowing and making of suds.
    On one such evening, when I must have been about six or seven, I confided to him that I had fallen in love with the older sister of one of my
friends. I said that I wanted to get her off by herself somewhere - a lonely
back road, say -where we could be unobserved. I was going to say that
I would then declare my love. I had given a lot of thought and effort to
the planning of this event, but I lacked confidence; I wanted the counsel
of experience. But I got no further than that detail about the lonely back
road. For a while it looked as though Uncle Andrew might drown in the
extremity of his glee.
    'Aw'eah! Aw'eah!" he said as he laughed and whooped and splashed. "Now you're getting right, college! Now you're cooking with gas! You
got your mind properly on your business! You going out among 'em!"

    It astonishes me a little yet to realize how characteristically he did not
qualify himself. I had spoken as a small boy, and he had responded unreservedly as a man, as himself. I must have loved him almost absolutely to
have so confided in him. And was I hurt or disappointed when he received
my confidence with such rowdy approval, infusing my shy daydream
with a glandular intensity from another vision entirely? Not in the least,
as far as I remember. I was bewildered, certainly, but was happy as always
to have pleased him and to be carried away on the big stream of his
laughter. And now, of course, I am delighted.
    Later, he would quote me to his cronies. Buster Simms would lean to
glance in at me where I sat beside Uncle Andrew in the car. "Duke, is he
looking at the girls yet? Is he transacting any private business?"
    And Uncle Andrew would declare solemnly, without looking at me,
"Why, he's got a girl! And he tells me that his business with her calls for
the strictest privacy." And he would go on. Wishing he would stop, I yet
listened in fascination, understanding vaguely that they spoke of a destination at which I had not arrived but to which my fare was already paid.
    Thus, though I was as innocent as Adam alone, I became aware of
the sexual aura that surrounded Uncle Andrew.
    He was never apart from it. He was always playing to whatever woman
was at hand, whether it was Minnie Branch, wearing a pair of Jake's castoff work shoes and with her brood in tow, or Miss Iris Flynn, who was in
fact Yeager Stump's girlfriend, or Aunt Roxanna, Grandma's tall and lean
oldest sister-anybody, so long as she was a woman. Or rather, he did
not play to them; he lived to them, acknowledging them, requiring them
to acknowledge him, as inhabitants of the same exuberantly physical
and sexual world. How they responded he did not care, so long as they
responded, which they invariably did. They scolded, scoffed, huffed,
smiled; they reached out to him; they looked straight into his eyes and
laughed. Of particular interest to me then, and still, was Uncle Andrew's
friendship with Minnie Branch, for of all the people in that overflowing
household on the Crayton Place, I