A Place on Earth (Port William) (10 page)

"Well, then, Wheeler," he says to mend their dispute, "I reckon we're
going broke then."

Wheeler laughs. `No we're not, Jack. We're going to do fine. Don't
you worry."

Old Jack slaps his hand down onto Wheeler's knee. "You're all right,
son."

To tell the truth, Old Jack loves Wheeler as much as he would have loved his own son if he had ever had one-maybe more. Loves him stubbornly and strictly by his own rules, but devotedly and generously nevertheless. He has been seen more than once sitting on the back bench of
a courtroom, grinning and crying shamelessly as a child while Wheeler
makes his closing speech to the jury.

"Listen to that boy," he says. "He's a shotgun. Lordy lord."

The room was Virgil's. It was hers and Virgil's. Now it is hers.

But not hers. And this house is not hers.

When she and Virgil married they came here to live-a short time,
they thought, until their own house would be built. They had made their
plans.

And then, soon, Virgil was called into the war. Both her parents were
dead. She stayed on, to wait.

"They want you to stay here," Virgil told her. `And I do."

"You're welcome here. You know you are," Margaret and Mat told
her.

She knew she was. She could not have refused them if she had wanted
to.

Margaret and Mat made her welcome. They did all that was possible
to make it easy for her to be there. She stayed, feeling that she belonged
because Virgil belonged.

In the still room, Virgil's and hers, not hers, she lies in bed, looking up
into the dark. She is not sleepy yet. With the bigness of her pregnancy
she is uncomfortable any way she lies. It will be difficult to sleep.

Below her own window she can see the elongated shape of the livingroom window printed in yellow light on the yard. Mat is still down there.
At this time on most nights they would all still be there in the living room,
still talking. Now, divided in separate rooms, they have made themselves
lonely-to think alone, as now they must.

Virgil was gone more than a year and a half, and then, in the last summer, he came home for two weeks. He had to leave again. For her, that
short time of his presence was nearly as painful as his absence. It began
nothing, ended nothing-a brief touching, an interruption of his ab sence, in which there seemed little to be said, nothing to be planneda troubled bearing of the nearness of his departure. She loved him; she
would be with him a few days; she would live beyond them, as she would
have to, remembering them. A certain amount of happiness was possible for a little while; she would see to it that he knew nothing but her
happiness. After that she would wait again. It was simple enough. She
would do what she had to do. Wait. She had learned to do that.

"I'm getting better at it every day," she told Virgil. "I'm a champion
waiter."

"You're a champion waitress," Virgil said.

She never wasted a chance to smile. And it seemed to her that there
was a finer reality in her bogus happiness than in her sorrow. It was a gift
to Virgil-what she could give him; she kept him from knowing what it
cost her. And, curiously, this bogus happiness became the source of a
real happiness-fugitive and small, but triumphant in a way, and precious to her.

One afternoon, two days before he had to go, they filled a picnic basket and walked out across the ridges in the direction of the river. They
stopped on the point of the farthest ridge. At the end of a long gentle
slope, the ground tilted upward again and made a small grass-covered
knoll over the woods on the bluff. From there they could see the bottoms in the long bend of the river, and for miles on either side of them
the valley lay open and broad.

They stood together at the top of the knoll, looking.

"This would be a fine place for a house," Virgil said. "What do you
think?"

"Yes. The loveliest place."

"Then right here is where I'm going to build you a house."

"Build us a house."

"I'll build you a house. And then you can give me back half of it. If
you want to."

She laughed. She still remembers the sound of her laughter. "Yes. I
want to. I'll give you all of it. And you can give me all of it."

`And that's the way it'll be. We'll give this house to each other. We'll
pass it back and forth, like a kiss."

`After the war?"

`After the war. And now too."

He picked up a flat rock and laid it down on the center of the knoll.

"There's the front doorstep."

He found more stones, and, pacing out the dimensions, marked the
boundaries of an ample house, its rooms and doors.

Watching him as he moved back and forth in the imagined courses of
walls, she was happy. She was happier than she remembered being.
Beyond his absence, it began. She could see it.

He finished his design, and stood in the middle of it, smiling, looking
at her.

"Come in."

She came in.

They gathered wood and built a fire. A little later they spread their
picnic and ate. Afterward, while the fire burned, they sat on in the light
of it, talking. At dark a soft wind had got up; it made sound now in the
woods below them.

When Virgil was a child, he told her, Mat took him and Bess out to
where he was having a new barn built; they had wanted to watch the carpenters, and pestered Mat until he let them come along. The framing of
the barn had been completed, but the roof and the siding still had to be
put on. They stayed through the afternoon, playing with wood scraps
and watching the carpenters. And then, shortly before quitting time, it
began to rain. Mat came hunting them and, taking their hands, hurried
them inside the barn.

"Let's get in out of the wet."

And he brought them in, and stood there, his face extravagantly serious, while the rain poured down on them between the open rafters.

"Daddy, we're getting wet," Bess kept saying. She would look up at
him, her eyes begging, pointing down at the wetness of her dress.

Mat looked down at her. His hat brim had filled with water, and when
he tilted his head it poured down like a veil in front of his face. "It's lucky
we got this barn built in time," he told her. "We'd have drowned if it
hadn't been here."

And then they had to give in to his joke and laugh. They stood there
in the warm rain, holding hands, laughing, until the shower went by.

Now, as by some return of that free joyfulness, he had made this house that was no house, and had given it to her. It was no house that
was their house. Strangely, it had made them glad. After what had been
their estrangement-in the seeming futility of talking or hoping, in the
nearness of Virgil's departure-their desiring of this house was like a bet
made, making the thought of winning possible. In this house that was
the hope of house they gambled toward what might be.

Hannah was happy. Her sadness that he would leave again was still in
her, and was not changed. But also she was happy, and now her happiness seemed to her to exist apart from her sadness, and to be as great.

As the fire burned out the dark grew. Hannah gave herself into the
possession of this house of theirs. There, in the dark, away from the
other house where she had spent her waiting, its walls were nearly real.
It made a new belonging imaginable. The fire had opened a space of
light which was the space of a house-which remained, though the fire
had not. Her house was as near her as his hands touching her, the weight
of him.

In his absence their child grew in her. She no longer felt herself to be
waiting, sorrowful and mute, on the edge of Virgil's absence. Her body
seemed to turn around a new center. The thought of Virgil's coming
back enclosed her and she enclosed his child. Everything leaned inward
around the child, the beginning, in her, of both their lives.

But now she is afraid.

How long?

The grass may grow a mile in the imagined boundaries of their house.

Company gone, Mat stayed on in the living room, smoking and reading
the paper. He heard Margaret and Hannah first talking in the kitchen
and then stirring around, preparing for bed. Now the house is quiet. He
folds the newspaper, moves over to his desk, and turns on the lamp. He
takes a sheet of white letter paper out of one of the drawers, and searches
among the pigeonholes until he finds a packet of photographs.

The last letter from Virgil asked for pictures of Port William and the
house and the farm. He was forgetting what they looked like.

On the Sunday after Virgil's letter came, Mat and Hannah spent the afternoon taking the pictures. They made an excursion of it, driving and
walking here and there in the town and on the farm, deciding what Virgil would want to see, pleased to be doing what he had asked.

Mat takes the photographs out of the envelope and lays them separately on the desk, making an orderly arrangement of them.

The first was taken from the walk in front of the house, looking down
the street into the town. To the right of the picture Old Jack is on his way
up the street to the hotel.

"Stand still, Mr. Beechum," Hannah called. "We want to take a picture
for Virgil."

"Good God," Old Jack said. "He don't want to look at me." But he
stood still and let them take the picture.

Looking backward from the same place on the walk, there is a picture
of the house, the maple branches and their shadows brittle and clear
against the white front.

By the time Hannah had taken this second picture and wound the
camera, old Jack had crossed the street. He walked up to Hannah and
laid his hand on her shoulder and patted her.

"You get in it yourself, honey, and let Mat work the machine. What he
wants to see is you." Old Jack waited to make sure she had understood.
And then he smiled. "You're a pretty thing. If I was way off over yonder
I'd want to see you."

And so Mat took the camera and Hannah stood on the porch steps
and smiled for Virgil and Old Jack, and they took the picture again with
her in it.

There are the photographs, arranged now on the desk, making a
departure from the town and a return to it. Out of his remembering and
knowing Virgil would be able to give them colors, movements, sounds,
odors, histories. In his mind these small images would grow like planted
seeds, become heavy in their dimensional depths, sizes, brightnesses.

Missing. From among these things.

Mat gathers the photographs and puts them back in their envelope.
The sheet of paper lies on the blotter, filled with bright light. He picks up
his pen. He writes the date. He writes "Dear Virgil." But then he lays the
pen down and leans back.

My dear boy, today we have had grievous news.

For several minutes this sentence shapes and reshapes itself in his
mind-the compulsion and limit of what he is able to think. The words
form, particularizing his fear and grief as on a point, and then dissolve
into the whiteness of the page.

My boy. We have had grievous news.

He puts the photographs and writing things away. He gets his hat and
coat from the rack in the hall, and turns out the lights.

He leaves the house and starts down into town. A light is on in Old
Jack's room at the hotel, the only one he can see still burning. While Mat
is looking, the old man walks out into the center of the room, undressed
except for his cap and underwear. He stops and stands still a minute, facing the window, leaning on his cane, scratching the back of his head. And
then he moves out of the frame of the window and turns off the light.

Now all that part of the street is dark. No stars are out. It is clouding
up again.

Margaret sits by her window in the dark.

She has unpinned her hair, and is brushing it with slow long strokes.
Her hair falls dark over the shoulders of her gown.

Mat has gone out. The house is quiet and dark.

She brushes her hair, gathers it, and, drawing it over her shoulder,
braids it in a heavy braid.

With the day's last possible task finished, she sits quietly, overhearing,
as if deep in her body, the sounds of outcry and of weeping. She
expected this. She knows it has gone on through all the afternoon and
evening, and only now she has become still enough to hear.

The house fills and brims with its quiet.

The brush lies in her lap. She rocks slowly in the chair. The rockers
make a quiet creaking and tapping on the floor.

Her eyes have become used to the dark. Her gown, the white pillows
on the bed, the white closed fronts of the buildings down along the
street draw a little light now and are pale.

In the quiet of the house she waits, as though, divided from Virgil by
half the world, she might hear him breathe.

Her waiting seems not so strange to her. She waited, after his birth, to
hear him cry. She has waited, even in her sleep, to hear him wake. Here,
in this house, she has waited for him to come back from a thousand
departures.

He was born out of her body into this absence.

She will hear every footstep, the opening of every door.