Chapter 5: The Half Book

The Half Book

Rand shut my grandfather in the back room of the house he was living in then, and locked it from the outside, and left him in there eleven days. On the twelfth day Elias Hollis came out with his hands shaking and nothing in them, and the medicine he had been taking off a spoon came up out of him that same week and did not come back.

Years afterward he told me Rand had known the whole time he was lying when he promised to give it up out at the burying ground. He said it made no difference. He said the promise was not the part that worked.

What Rand owned and how he lived I know the way anybody knows the bottom of a well, from the top of it: a forked willow wand, a length of number nine wire bent at both ends, a hand auger, a spade, and a way of standing on a slope with his head down that my grandfather copied for the rest of his life and never once explained to me.

He taught him to find water. He taught him to read ground, which is two names for one thing if the man doing it is any good, and a name for nothing at all if he isn’t. He taught him faces as well, which is a different trade and pays better in a small town.

Whether the wand worked I cannot tell you. In that country at that time a man with a forked stick cost a dollar and a half, and a driller cost a year of a rancher’s money, so when the stick went down and the hole came up dry forty feet later, the rancher cursed the ground, and when it came up wet, he told that story for twenty years and put the man’s name in it. That is how a name gets made out here.

It took him three years to get clear of his debt to Rand and four to have anything of his own. He put a table on the square in town on Saturdays and said his prices out loud: a dollar and a half to be told where your well ought to go, two dollars to be told where your father ought to have been put. Cora thought the second one was ugly and told him so, and it was the steadiest money either of them had ever had.

They were married by a justice in the county seat, since she had no people who could get there and he had a dead father and a mother he did not speak about. Their son came in the third winter and they named him Walter, and the boy was quick and loud and could read a feed store price list before he could ride.

Rand had taken the black breath square in the face out at that burying ground, and it went down into his bones and stayed there, and it took four years to finish him. Toward the end he could not get from the bed to the window, because his legs would not take the order. In the last week he had my grandfather sit in a chair beside the bed and handed him the book.

It was half a book. That is not a figure — it was half of one, the back of it gone, and gone by tearing, a hand’s width at a time, and old tearing at that, older than anything else I have ever owned. Rand called it The Book of Hollow Ground. Hollow ground was what he called that whole country: the ground with holes in it, and something under the holes. He said what was left to it was small arts — where the water is, where the graves are, how to keep the two apart — and that Elias should keep it by him as a keepsake. That was his word. Keepsake is what you give a man so that he remembers you. It is not what you give a man to use.

The half that was gone he never spoke about in front of my grandfather, and my grandfather never raised it with him. What I have of that half is my grandfather’s version and nothing else. In the years since I have asked two men and one woman who would have known something about it, more times than was good for me, and I have never had the same answer twice.

For a long while he did not study it at all. Then he did. He kept it in the drawer with the chalk line and read it after Cora was asleep, by the lamp, and he never read it in the daytime where anyone could come in on him. By then there were men in three counties who would have told you Elias Hollis could find a well site on ground that had been gone over twice by better men, and one man from the state who came down to look at a spring on a place of his and left saying it was luck. He picked graves for the Methodists and the Catholics and for two families who did not go to church at all, and he began to do well, and better than well. He bought the corner lot and the truck. He also had most of it in the ground and not in the bank, which my grandmother Cora did not forgive him for entirely, and which turned out to be the right place for it under the circumstances.

My father, Walter, read at the state school up the valley and came home full of ideas about how the country ought to run and no patience for how it did. The war came and he did not wait to be called. When it was over he stayed in, which I think surprised everybody including him, and the Army sent him around the desert Southwest and twice to California, and he married my mother in a town I have never seen, and I was born the first of August at a post that had three hundred people on it and no trees.

My mother wanted to put August on me. My grandfather said no. He said a man named August gets read at a card table and loses money under it, and he said put Nate on the boy instead, because a man playing cards keeps an eight in his hand — he doesn’t play it, he doesn’t show it, he keeps it. It may not even have been a good card joke. He told it about nine times in my life and it was funnier to him every time, and nobody called me August past the month I was born.

We lived in quarters, and then in a rented half of a house, and then in quarters again. I went to seven schools in nine years, and I could tell you the names of the posts and not one thing about what my father did at any of them. I know what the inside of his footlocker looked like. I know he folded his socks a certain way, and that he would not sit where he could see the door.

It started the year I turned seventeen, with an inquiry. I will not try to name the board, because I never once heard anybody in that house say the word for it out loud without the room going quiet after it. It was money, said one version. It was worse than money, said the other. My mother used the first one and never the second, and my father used neither. He was three times called back to answer, and then he came home and was relieved of his duties, and the Army took the quarters back, and we came home — home meaning the town where the Hollises had a name, which is worse than a stranger’s town, because the name had already been spent there.

I was eighteen the spring that finished. Two men came with a list and went through the house from the front. They took the cabinet my grandfather built the year he married, and the two guns, and my grandmother’s trunk, and the truck out of the yard. I stood in the yard both days and did not ask them one question. My grandfather was in that yard too, and a man made him stand up beside the things in the road where the neighbors could get a look at him, and he stood up and let them, which I understood even then was worse to him than losing the truck. He was old and he had been sick all winter and he had spent forty years telling other people where to put their dead. He went that same spring. He was taken to the city and burned, since there was no money for a plot and nobody left in that town who owed him anything, and the ashes came back in a tin box, and Cora kept the box on the shelf over the stove for the rest of her life.

The book was the only thing that came through it.

He got me out into the yard while they were still working the back rooms. He had it under his coat, wrapped in oilcloth and tied with wire like a sack of nails. He put it in my hands and he was quick about it — up on the shed with you, flat under the tin, and don’t tell your mother, and don’t tell your father either. It’s half a book. The half you have is the half I kept. Get the rules in your head and then go do something else with your life. That is every word of the conversation, and I have been over it about a thousand times and have not gotten one more word out of it.

So the book sat under the tin on the shed roof, and the men with the list never went up there, and when they were done with us there was nothing left in that house worth going up for.

There were three roads out of that town if you were eighteen and your father’s name was on the county’s mind. You could go west with a harvest crew and come back in the fall with wrecked hands and a little cash. You could stay and take a job at the mill, which meant the next forty years, and also meant every man you worked beside knowing what your father had been. Or you could go see the recruiting sergeant in the next town, who was taking men that year and would take one with a bad name if he could pass the physical and keep his mouth shut. There was a war on. It came up on the evening news in our house every night, and not one of us had been to it, and every boy my age in that line was going.

I went to the sergeant. I did not go home and tell them for two weeks, and when I did, my mother asked me one question about where, and my father looked up from his paper and asked me none.

Nobody came down to the depot the morning I left. Marcus Barrett was there, though, with his brother’s duffel bag and a pack of cigarettes he had been saving for a month and no opinion in the world about any of it. They had called him Tank since the fifth grade, on account of fifteen pounds of him that would not come off. He looked at me coming across the gravel and said the Army was going to be the best thing that ever happened to the two of us, and then he said, Jesus, don’t look at me like that, and we went in and put our bags down and waited.

The book was in the bottom of that bag, wrapped in the same oilcloth and tied with the same wire, and it stayed there.
The moment I keep returning to isn’t the eleven days behind that locked door. It’s the yard afterward. Elias has the half book under his coat, wire and oilcloth like a sack of nails, and he hands it off fast — up on the shed with you, flat under the tin, don’t tell your mother, don’t tell your father either. Then he says: get the rules in your head and go do something else with your life. He means both halves of that, I think, and I’ve never been able to settle which one cost him more.

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