But to say just this doesn’t seem like enough. There’s more to a man than the day, and the way he died; there’s his whole life, no matter how dull or unimportant, before that. I’m too young to know much about John’s life firsthand. I knew him only when he was an old man. But when I was a little kid, I’d somehow get my hands on a stack of photograph albums, kept religiously by the Willson women who have carefully collected stray Sunday afternoon pictures, report cards, and scrawled drawings from as far back as anyone would care to remember. In these albums there are pictures of the Calibans too. This is how I knew John, although when I began to look at the albums it wasn’t for John’s sake, rather the old funny clothes, and the square black cars he once tended and drove, and before them, the horse-drawn buggies. The first picture of John is when he is a boy, about fourteen, in front of a brand-new buggy. He is wearing a white starched shirt, which bulges rigidly because his chest is thrust way out. If you don’t know better, you’d think he owns the buggy, but he doesn’t. It belongs to the General. John drove, sitting high on the seat, never having to crack the whip, steering the matched team gently, the reins loose in his hands. He’d just begun to drive the buggy for the General, because John’s father, First Caliban, was already too old, nearly sightless and sat in front of his cabin at the Willson Plantation smoking a pipe and resting. And John, still in his teens, though a man when he drove or tended horses or fixed buggies, is driving now. Glittering on that chest is a diamond stickpin the General had just given him for his birthday; he wore it when he died.

Then you’ll see him with more, newer buggies, and then cars, and finally you’ll come to a picture of him in front of a square-nosed Packard with a great shining grill. He stands with a little boy, who already wears glasses, whose head is too large for his spindly body. Behind the glasses there are great, hard brown eyes, with more in them than should be there. That’s Tucker. And soon Tucker is in front of the cars alone, for John is already too old to drive or crawl beneath and now tells the boy what to do—what to tighten, loosen, or adjust—all John can do is tend the flowers in the garden of the house in the Swells, still as proud when they bloom as he would be if they were his own.

And now I really knew him.