James Agee - A Death In The Family

Finally Andrew stood up straight from the fire and they all looked at his despairing face, and tried not to demand too much of him with their eyes. He looked at each of them in turn, and went over and bent deeply towards his mother.

"Let me tell you, Mama," he said. "That way, we can all hear. I'm sorry, Mary."

"Dear," his mother said gratefully, and fumbled for his hand and patted it. "Of course," Mary said, and gave him her place beside the "good" ear. They shifted to make room, and she sat at her mother's deaf side. Again her mother caught her hand into her lap; with the other, she tilted her ear trumpet. Joel leaned toward them, his hand behind his ear; Hannah stared into the wavering hearth.

"He was all alone," Andrew said, not very loudly but with the most scrupulous distinctness. "Nobody else was hurt, or even in the accident."

"That's a mercy," his mother said. It was, they all realized; yet each of them was shocked. Andrew nodded sharply to silence her.

"So we'll never know exactly how it happened," he went on. "But we know enough," he said, speaking the last word with a terrible and brutal bitterness.

"Mmh," his father grunted, nodding sharply; Hannah drew in and let out a long breath.

"I talked with the man who found him. He was the man who phoned you, Mary. He waited there for me all that time because he thought it would help if-if the man who first saw Jay was there to tell one of us all he could. He told me all he knew of course," he said, remembering, with the feeling that he would never forget it, the awed, calm, kind, rural face and the slow, careful, half-literate voice. "He was just as fine as a human being can be." He felt a kind of angry gratitude that such a man had been there, and had been there first. Jay couldn't have asked for anyone better, he said to himself. Nobody could.

"He said he was on his way home, about nine o'clock, coming in towards town, and he heard an auto coming up from behind, terrifically fast, and coming nearer and nearer, and he thought. There's somebody that's sure got to get some place in a bad hurry" ("He was hurrying home," Mary said) "or else he's crazy" (he had said "crazy drunk").

"He wasn't crazy," Mary said. "He was just trying to get home (bless his heart), he was so much later than he'd said."

Andrew, looked at her with dry, brilliant eyes and nodded.

"He'd told me not to wait supper," she said, "but he wanted to get home before the children were asleep."

"What is it?" her mother asked, with nervous politeness.

"Nothing important, Mama," Andrew said gently. "I'll explain later." He drew a deep breath in very sharply, and felt less close to tears.

"All of a sudden, he said, he heard a perfectly terrifying noise, just a second or two, and then dead silence. He knew it must be whoever was in that auto and that they must be in bad trouble, so he turned around and drove back, about a quarter of a mile, he thinks, just the other side of Bell's Bridge. He told me he almost missed it altogether because there was nothing on the road and even though he'd kind of been expecting that and driving pretty slowly, looking off both sides of the road, he almost missed it because just next the bridge on that side, the side of the road is quite a steep bank."

"I know," Mary whispered.

"But just as he came off the far end of the bridge-you come down at a sort of angle, you know…"

"I know," Mary whispered.

"Something caught in his lights and it was one of the wheels of the automobile." He looked across his mother and said, "Mary, it was still turning."

"Beg pardon?" his mother said.

"It was still turning," he told her. "The wheel he saw."

"Mercy, Andrew," she whispered.

"Hahh!" her husband exclaimed, almost inaudibly.

"He got out right away and hurried down there. The auto was upside down and Jay…"

Although he did not feel that he was near weeping he found that for a moment he could not speak. Finally he said, "He was just lying there on the ground beside it, on his back, about a foot away from it. His clothes were hardly even rumpled."

Again he found that he could not speak. After a moment he managed to force himself to.

"The man said somehow he was sure he was-dead-the minute he saw him. He doesn't know how. Just some special kind of stillness. He lighted matches though, of course, to try and make sure. Listened for his heartbeat and tried to feel for his pulse. He moved his auto around so he could see by the headlights. He couldn't find anything wrong except a little cut, exactly on the point of his chin. The windshield of Jay's car was broken and he even took a piece of it and used it like a mirror, to see if there was any breath. After that he just waited a few minutes until he heard an auto coming and stopped them and told them to get help as soon as possible."

"Did they get a doctor?" Mary asked.

"Mary says, 'Did they get a doctor.' " Andrew said to his mother. "Yes, he told them to and they did. And other people. Including-Brannick, Papa," he said; "that blacksmith you know. It turns out he lives quite near there."

"Huh!" said Joel.

"The doctor said the man was right," Andrew said. "He said he must have been killed instantly. They found who he was, by papers in his pocket, and that was when he phoned you, Mary.

"He asked me if I'd please tell you how dreadful he felt to give you such a message, leaving you uncertain all this time. He just couldn't stand to be the one to tell you the whole thing-least of all just bang like that, over a phone. He thought it ought to be somebody in the family."

"That's what I imagined," Mary said.

"He was right," Hannah said; and Joel and Mary nodded and said, "Yes."

"By the time Walter and I got there, they'd moved him," Andrew said. "He was at the blacksmith shop. They'd even brought in the auto. You know, they say it ran perfectly. Except for the top, and the windshield, it was hardly even damaged."

Joel asked, "Do they have any idea what happened?"

Andrew said to his mother, "Papa says, 'Do they have any idea how it happened?' " She nodded, and smiled her thanks, and tilted her trumpet nearer his mouth.

"Yes, some idea," Andrew said. "They showed me. They found that a cotter pin had worked loose-that is, it had fallen all the way out-this cotter pin had fallen out, that held the steering mechanism together."

"Hahh?"

"Like this, Mama-look," he said sharply, thrusting his hands under her nose.

"Oh excuse me," she said.

"See here," he said; he had locked a bent knuckle between two bent knuckles of the other hand. "As if it were to hold these knuckles together-see?"

"Yes."

"There would be a hole right through the knuckles and that's where the cotter pin goes. It's sort of like a very heavy hairpin. When you have it all the way through, you open the two ends flat-spread them-like this…" he showed her his thumb and forefinger, together, then spread them as wide and flat as he could. "You understand?"

"No matter."

"Let it go, son," his father said.

"It's all right, Mama," Andrew said. "It's just something that holds two parts together-in this case, his steering gear-what he guided the auto with. Th…"

"I understand," she said impatiently.

"Good, Mama. Well this cotter pin, that held the steering mechanism together down underneath the auto, where there was no chance of seeing it, had fallen out. They couldn't find it anywhere, though they looked all over the place where it happened and went over the road for a couple of hundred yards with a fine-tooth comb. So they think it may have worked loose and fallen out quite a distance back-it could be, even miles, though probably not so far. Because they showed me," again he put his knuckles where she could see, "even without the pin, those two parts might hang together," he twisted them, "you might even steer with them. and not have the slightest suspicion there was anything wrong, if you were on fairly smooth road, or didn't have to wrench the wheel, but if you hit a sharp bump or a rut or a loose rock, or had to twist the wheel very hard very suddenly, they'd come apart, and you'd have no control over anything."