A Place on Earth (Port William) (14 page)

"No, Uncle Stanley's still in charge. I'm just his second-in-command.
I'm going to be the shovel specialist."

"How come the old man to give up his job?"

"Well, he says he's getting too old for it. Says he can't hardly get out of
them graves once he gets them dug."

They laugh.

"Uncle Stanley hasn't wintered too well," Big Ellis says.

"He says he won't be around many more winters."

"Did he say that?"

"He said he can't stand many more like this last one."

Burley turns to Uncle Stanley and raises his voice:

"I expect the old boy'll be around a long time yet. Bothering the
women. How about it, Uncle Stan, can you still take up on the bit?"

`Aw, ain't no good at all, Burley. Them days are gone."

Jayber tilts the chair back, and begins lathering Big Ellis's face.

Now that he has regained his audience, Uncle Stanley goes into a long
reminiscence of his younger days-his dog days, he calls them. And
winds up:

"Oh lordy lordy lordy lordy. But not anymore."

"That's not what I heard, Uncle Stanley," Big Ellis says. "Some of
them was telling me about you." He laughs and looks over his stomach
at Burley. "Said they seen a bunch of young girls walk past Uncle Stanley's house a Saturday or two ago, and there was Uncle Stanley marching
up and down the top of that road bank, nickering like a stud horse, and
that cane just whirling."

He looks up over his stomach at Uncle Stanley, who is pleased out of
his mind, and then drops his head back and laughs, splattering white
flecks of lather up into the air over his face.

"You'd better be still," Jayber tells him, "unless you want your throat
cut."

But Big Ellis is so tickled now at the picture he has made of Uncle
Stanley that Jayber, laughing too in spite of himself, has to wait again.

As soon as Big Ellis finishes laughing he is immediately sorry to have
made fun of the old man. And so now he will try to make up for it: "I saw
Billy when he came over today, Uncle Stan."

Uncle Stanley wants to hear that again, clear. He leans over and puts
his hand behind his ear.

"Says which?"

"I saw Billy when he came over in his airplane. He came right over my
barn and then on over to Grover's place."

That's all it takes. That's the word. Billy! If Billy ever so much as hinted
that he would like to bomb his grandfather's house, Uncle Stanley would
get right up and walk out, and stand on the other side of the road with
his hat over his heart and watch him do it. It seems to him that he and
Grover and all their forebears back to Adam have lived only for these
minutes when their Billy comes roaring over the town in his bomber. He
dreams of this brilliant young man leaning his head and elbow out the
window of his huge flying machine, swooping like a hen hawk over all
the little towns of the world-majestic and glorious as a railroad engineer and the Archangel Michael rolled into one.

"Yes sir! By dab, by grab, God durn, I seen him myself."

He goes out the door on the crest of his wave.

And they resume.

"That old boy of Grover's didn't have brains enough to hold his ears
apart, did he?"

`Aw, they've educated him since he got to flying."

"They may have trained him. They haven't educated him."

They laugh, and then Big Ellis, his voice so gentle and generous as to
allow even Billy Gibbs a place on earth and in Port William, says: "Well,
a fellow ought to think the best he can of a fellow oughtn't he? Old Billy,
he was a little chuckleheaded and wild, but that's just a boy, ain't it?"

Suddenly-whether because Big Ellis said "was," or because his words
recovered Billy Gibbs himself, their neighbor and fellow man-suddenly
the war is around them again, as though it has come up in the dark to
crowd the walls of the little room. They become silent. And a thought
runs among them like a path, and joins them and divides them: What if
he dies? What if he is sent away tomorrow and never comes back?

And now they feel the raw night leaning against the lighted small
room, and they know with a terrible certainty that one will not explain
the other. In this dimly lighted place they sit divided, filled with thoughts of struggle and of darkness. They contemplate the death of Billy Gibbs,
as though it already exists and awaits him.

Mat Feltner comes in blinking from the dark street, and stands at the
stove. They greet him, and he replies. He unbuttons his coat and pushes
his hat back off his forehead.

"Nathan gone back, Burley?" Big Ellis asks.

"This afternoon."

"He was over to see Annie May and me the other day. We appreciated
it. They're going to send him back across the water, ain't they?"

"He thought they might. He didn't know."

"That's a long way from home. Fellow like me wouldn't know what
to do there, even if there wasn't a war. But I reckon a young man like
Nathan, he'll do all right, won't he? Told me he was even learning to talk
like them."

"Yeah. I guess in a way it's giving him a lot of chances."

"Take a fellow like me and put him across the river, and I'm lost. Ain't
you?"

Jayber finishes shaving Big Ellis and sets up the chair, and turns it so
Big Ellis can see himself in the mirror.

"How's that?"

"I wish I'd been born rich in place of pretty. What I owe you, Jayber?"

"Sixty cents."

"Is that double?"

"That's half-price."

"I'll match you for it."

"You match me. All right."

Each of them flips a coin and slaps it down onto an arm of the barber
chair.

"Heads."

"Heads it is. Keep your money."

"Naw, I'm going to pay you anyhow.
"

"Why, I'm not going to take your money. You won."

"That don't matter. I want you to take the money. Come on, Jayber. I
just done that for a joke."

Big Ellis's world is turning slowly upside down. For the sake of friend liness and fun, he is persistently in and out of trifling wagers on the fall
of a coin or the length of something or the weight of something. `A fellow has to have a little sport, don't he? A little fun?" But he never means
to win.

Big Ellis tramps along with the coins held out in his open hand, backing Jayber around the barber chair.

"Take your money and go on."

`Ain't going to do it."

And then Big Ellis, who would be a match for two like Jayber, picks
him up by the waist and holds him and puts the money in his pocket. He
takes his coat and hat, and goes out the door putting them on.

"Good night to you fellows. Thank you, Jayber."

And they hear him start his car and gun the engine, and the car lurch
out onto the road.

Jayber climbs back into the chair.

They're silent a few minutes. As soon as they cease to talk they are
surprised at how deep the silence is. Except for them the town is asleep.
The light has gone out in Burgess's store. The silence in the little shop is
also the silence of the town and of the whole dark countryside. In it the
only living thing might be the fire stirring and breathing in the stove.

Though his hands are warm, Mat holds them out into the heat over
the stove.

Jayber stretches and yawns, a long-drawn 0 with a grunt at the end.

Burley asks, "What have you heard from Virgil, Mat?"

It was coming. It was bound to come. He might be speaking out of a
well, his voice sounds so strange to him: "He's missing. We had the notice
today."

He feels as though he has run to the edge of something and jumped.

Burley and Jayber say nothing for a moment. But their silence turns
toward him, and is an admission of the difficulty and insufficiency of
what they will say.

And then they say that they are sorry. Their concern touches him and,
as though still falling, he feels himself caught in what they are saying,
and hears the sound of his own voice speaking among their voices,
becoming familiar again.

He mentions what room he believes there still is for hope. He hopes.

The others agree. So long as a man doesn't surely know, he has to
hope. And that is more difficult than to know the worst surely.

Burley knows that. It has been hard for him to free Tom's death from
the hopeless hope that he may still be alive. So far away as he died, it is
hard to quit hoping that it may be only a long confusion and a mistake.

Jayber sits quietly in his chair, keeping the shop open for them, their
talk his gift. Finally, as the subject changes, he takes part again.

The light has been out two hours in Milton Burgess's store. Mat and
Burley hate to leave the lighted warm room and start home by themselves.

Finally they have to.

From the first week of January, when his lambs begin coming, until the
end of bad weather, Mat keeps watch on the barns, seeing to the lambing of ewes and the calving of cows. Whatever is born will be born into
his wakefulness and his care. He makes his first round in the dark of the
mornings, his last at midnight. He is out of the house at night nearly as
much as in the daytime. The smell of the barns stays in his clothes. In
the dead of winter, in the time of the long sleeping of most things, he
becomes more wakeful than ever.

It is a weary time. The days will string together for weeks in a row,
never divided by enough sleep. There are freezing nights when his feet
break through a crust of ice into the mud on his first round after supper,
and on his last round the tracked mud and manure at the barn door
are frozen hard. There are thawing nights of heavy rain when he walks
ankle-deep in mud, and nights of snow when the tracks he made going
to the barn will be filled by the time he starts back. And there are nights
sometimes when there will be a difficult birth, and he has to wake Joe
Banion to help him, and the two of them work on into the second half of
the night, their hands chilled and numbed by the birth-wet, their feet
stinging in their shoes.

In the winter the country sleeps, withdrawn from summer. And Mat, in his growing weariness, will be aware of that rest. Sometimes his head
will fall forward and for a few minutes he will sleep an oblivious sleep, at
the table after a meal, or sitting in his chair in the living room.

From nightfall until midnight his weariness seems to grow less, and
he sits with the family in the living room and talks until the others go to
bed. And then he has the quiet to himself, and he sits by the fire, reading
or figuring or planning, passing the time between his rounds. This is the
easiest and pleasantest time of his day, and the most precious to him.
Going his night rounds, walking among the barns and the animals in the
light of the lantern, the weather and the moon working their changes,
he hungers for the births and lives of his animals, as though the life of his
place must be held up by him, like something newborn, until the warm
long days will come again and the pastures begin to grow.

In spite of the difficulty and weariness, be goes about his work with
greater interest and excitement than at any other time of the year. This
is the crisis of increase-what he was born to, and what he chose. When
he has made sure of the life of whatever is newborn-when he has done,
at any rate, all that can be done-he is at peace with himself. His labor
has been his necessity and his desire.

Mat goes up the hill, walking in the room of light the lantern makes. The
ground appears to dip and waver under the swinging light, and every
track is filled with shadow. Beyond the light of the lantern he can see
nothing. He goes now as by the inward pattern and usage of his life.

He comes to the fan of tracked mud in front of the barn and, raising
the lantern, picks his way to the doors, and slides them open a little to let
himself in. The sheep raise their heads and get up, but they are used to
his coming and only step slowly out of his way as he moves among
them. Shadows leap up around his light. As he moves the barn seems to
sway and rise within itself. The ewes' breath smokes above their heads.

In one of the back corners of the barn he finds an old ewe stretched
on the bedding, her breath coming in grunts. She lifts her head to look at
him, but makes no effort to get up. A newborn dead lamb is lying near
her, not completely free of the birth sack. Mat knows that this second labor prevented her attending properly to the lamb she had already got
born. He should have been here earlier. In spite of the circumstances of
the day, he thinks with guilt of his failure. His mind has fallen short of its
subject.

But now the consequence requires his mind of him. Taking a piece of
twine from his pocket, he ties the lantern to a tier rail above his head,
and then brings a small hinged gate and pens the ewe into the corner
where she is lying. He takes the dead lamb out of the pen and puts it by
the doors so he will remember to carry it out. He beds the pen with fresh
straw, making himself a clean work place. Already it begins to simplify. It
is an act already complete in his mind that he goes about. There is no
hesitation and no hurry in his movements. Where nature and instinct
fail, he begins with his knowing. He desires the life of what is living. He
requires the life of the body suffering to give birth and the life of the
body suffering to be born. Nothing else is on his mind now.