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

Yeager Stump later told me, he would do-anything he
thought of. He would lounge, grinning, in his easy chair and talk outrageously, as if merely curious to hear what he might say.
    I was in the third grade when the teachers at our school asked the
students to ask their fathers to volunteer to build some seesaws on the
playground. Henry and 1, knowing our father would not spare the time,
brought the matter before Uncle Andrew.
    "Well, college," he said, "I'll take it under consideration. Tell all the
women teachers to line up out by the road, and I'll drive by and look 'em
over. It might be I could give 'em a little lift."
    He had, I am sure, no intention of helping with the seesaws; he never
had been interested in a school. But Henry, who was in the second grade,
dutifully relayed the message to his teacher. I remember well the difficulty of hearing Henry's teacher repeat to my teacher Uncle Andrew's
instructions. As I perfectly understood, our teachers' outrage was not
necessarily contingent upon Henry's indiscretion; Uncle Andrew would
have delivered his suggestion in person if the circumstances had been
different and it had occurred to him to do so.
    At times he seemed to be all energy, intolerant of restraint, unpredictable. His presence, for so small a boy as I was, was like that of some large male animal who might behave as expected one moment and the
next do something completely unforeseen and astonishing.

    One morning we went to the Bower Place only to find Charlie Branch
stalled for want of a mowing machine part. We started back to Hargrave
to get the part, Uncle Andrew driving complacently along at the wartime
speed limit, and I chinning the dashboard as usual. We got to a place
where the road went down through a shallow cut with steep banks on
both sides, and all of a sudden Chumpy and Grover Corvin stepped into
the road in front of us. Chumpy and Grover were just big teenage boys
then, but they were already known as outlaws and bullies; a lot of people
were afraid of them. They wanted a ride, and by stepping into the road
they meant to force Uncle Andrew to stop. What he did was clap the
accelerator to the floor and drive straight at them. His response was as
instantaneous and all-out as that of a kicking horse. He ran them out of
the road and up the bank, cutting away at the last split second. We drove
on as before. He did not say a word.

     

5
    While Uncle Andrew farmed and did whatever else he did, Aunt Judith
and her mother busied themselves with the care and maintenance of the
Hargrave upper crust. Aunt Judith's mother had been born a Hargrave, a
descendant of the Hargrave for whom the town was named, and so Aunt
Judith was virtually a Hargrave herself. By blood she was only a quarter
Hargrave, but by disposition and indoctrination she was 100 percent, as
her mother expected and perhaps required. The two of them belonged
to the tightly drawn little circle (almost a knot) of the female scions of
the first families of Hargrave - a complex cousinship that preserved and
commended itself in an endless succession of afternoon bridge parties.
At these functions everybody was "cud'n" somebody: Cud'n Anne,
Cud'n Nancy, Cud'n Charlotte, Cud'n Phoebe, and so on. Theirs was an
exclusive small enclosure that one could not enter or leave except by
birth and death. My mother, for example, was excluded for the original
sin of having been born in Port William - an exclusion which I believe
she understood as an escape.
    This feminine inner circle had of course a masculine outer circle to
which Uncle Andrew pertained by marriage and in which he participated
(being incapable of silence, let alone deference) by snorts, hoots, spoofs,
jokes, and other blasphemies. He was particularly intrigued by the fervent cousinship of the little class that he had wedded, and he loved to enlarge it by addressing as "cud'n" or "cuz" any bootblack, barfly, yardman, panhandler, dishwasher, porter, or