A Place on Earth (Port William) (15 page)

Moving gently and slowly, he straightens the lamb's head and forelegs,
and delivers it, wet as a fish, into the air. He holds it up a moment-a
limp, dangling thing-to make sure its nose is clear, and then touches
it to the ground. It begins to struggle and to breathe. It comes tense and
alive in his hand, wobbling its head, reaching down with its legs. It struggles against its weight, and breathes in the cold dung-smelling air.

Mat feels a kind of magician's triumph. His trick is the trick of the life
of a thing, almost as liable to fail as to succeed. His labor is a labor of joy
whose joyfulness depends on this precarious result.

He takes hold of the ewe and lifts her to her feet, and she remains
upright, head hanging and dazed, loins caved. He carries the lamb to her
flank and works the tit into its mouth. As soon as it takes hold and begins
to suck he scratches its wet rump with his finger, in imitation of the way
the ewe would normally lick and nudge. It becomes more eager, shaking
its tail and butting weakly at the udder.

Satisfaction comes into Mat, pressing up into his throat like laughter.
Once the trick is set working, the longer it works the better it works. Its
own strength and purpose come into it now, and he becomes less necessary to it.

When he puts the lamb down the ewe turns to it and begins licking it,
snuffling and bleating quietly and anxiously as she tends to it. Mat takes the lantern and a bucket and brings water from the well, and brings an
armload of hay.

He hangs the lantern overhead again, and sits down to watch. He is
far from sleep now. He does not think of going back to the house. He
holds himself and his thoughts near to these things that his work and
care have made familiar again. He sits there on a bucket, his elbows resting on his knees, his hands clasped together, conscious only of the nearness of this place: the ewe and lamb in the lighted pen, the flock sleeping
and stirring in the dark behind him, the cold night air on his face and
hands.

He wakes in the dark, unsure how long he has been asleep. He wakes
without movement except for the opening of his eyes. For the moment
he thinks of nothing. And then from the kitchen on the other side of the
house he hears a footstep light and hard on the linoleum. He realizes
with relief that he has slept all the way through the night. He reaches
across the bed and feels the warmth where Margaret lay asleep minutes
ago. The footstep in the kitchen is followed by the sound of the coffee
pot scraping on the top of the stove, and by voices-Margaret's and Nettie Banion's. For a little while longer he lets himself lie quiet. As if by
some movement of his mind during the night, the uneasiness of the day
before has left him. It is as if without his will his mind has turned and
opened toward the new day. There is, deep in him, an acceptance of time
as persistent as time. He wakes on the rising of the morning. The future
bears down, and as in hard times before he feels in himself the determination to let it come.

He turns the covers back and gets up.

A fuzzy paleness drifts into the room from the lighted doorway at the
other end of the hall. He opens the shutters to close heavy darkness and
the sound of rain coming down hard and steady onto the yard and the
walk along the side of the house. It has been raining for some time; the sound is that of water striking water. He shivers at the sound and at his
apprehension of the wetness of the day. Under such a rain, he knows, the
surface of the whole countryside will be a sheet of water moving down
onto the loaded streams. He thinks with a kind of panic of how briskly,
in a more seasonable year, he would have things moving by now, with
the spring coming and the crops to get ready for. This season he will be
beginning late, in loss. It rains into Virgil's absence. The sense of loss has
carried his mind out of the house into the wind and rain over the soaked
fields.

By noon on Tuesday Virgil has disappeared from the knowledge of the
whole town. The news has gone its rounds among the gathering places,
and has quietly set the young man's life into the past tense of the town's
consciousness. The town has begun to speak and think of him by the act
of memory alone. To speak of him in the present tense becomes the private observance of his family-the enactment of their hope.

Wherever Mat goes among the gatherings of his neighbors he feels
himself surrounded by an embarrassment, which both he and they are
powerless to relieve. Though he is troubled by this at first, it becomes
understandable to him. Virgil's absence, which was once only an absence
from the place, has become a vacancy in their minds. They are suddenly
barred from the usual forms of politeness; they can no longer ask him
about Virgil or offer him their greetings to be passed on. And so, except
for the casual give and take of crop talk and weather talk, they have
nothing to offer Mat but silence. He accepts this, and as time goes on he
will accept it more and more gratefully.

He is most sharply aware of this estrangement in his meetings with
Frank Lathrop. In their long bearing of the absence of their sons, and
their waiting, Mat has finally gone beyond what either of them had dared
admit was possible. He has become the proof of what they most feared.
The anticipation of loss that once bound them has been replaced by a
reality of loss that divides them. In himself, Frank Lathrop is divided
between a kind of shame at this inequality of fortune and a gratitude for
it-neither of which he can acknowledge to himself, let alone to Mat.

Now it is only with Burley Coulter that Mat feels at ease. Telling his
news that night in the barbershop, he felt it was to speak to Burley that
he had come. Common knowledge went between them as a bond. During the following days, in casual meetings on the street and at the card
game, they seldom speak of those absences that are most in their
thoughts, but they accompany each other into their talk with trust.

Early Wednesday afternoon Brother Preston leaves the parsonage and
walks across town to the Feltner house. He walks quickly and attentively,
sidestepping the puddles. The town is shut against the weather, and quiet
except for the sounds everywhere of water dripping and running. He
meets no one along the road. There is no sign of life at the Feltners'
either.

Stepping up onto the porch, he closes his umbrella and props it beside
the door. Leaning against the wall, he removes his rubbers and places
them side by side next to the umbrella. He draws a small black leather
Testament out of his coat pocket, faces the door, and knocks. His knock
is itself an act of ministerial discretion; the sound is perfectly modulated,
both quiet and loud enough. As he waits he continues to face the door,
standing erect, lifting himself slightly forward now and then onto the
balls of his feet, patting the little Testament with a sort of correct casualness against the palm of his hand.

Footsteps approach from the back of the house, and Margaret Feltner
opens the door. Her apron is caught up in one hand, and he knows she
has been at work in the kitchen. In a movement of understanding, his
imagination sees her wiping her hands on the apron as she hurries along
the hall toward the door. He takes off his hat.

"I'm sorry to break in on your work."

"That's all right. We were just finishing up the dishes."

She smiles, greets him, moves aside from the entrance in welcome.
The openness of her welcome is a little disconcerting; she is putting him
at his ease-which is not why he has come. He senses that she has anticipated him, foreseen his coming and his purpose, but greets him now on
her terms, not his.

She takes his coat and hat, hangs them up on the hall tree, and leads
him into the sitting room.

He goes to the chair she offers him.

"Make yourself at home a minute. I'll go take this apron off."

"Mrs. Feltner," he says, and she stops. "I hoped I'd find all of you at
home is why I've come so soon after dinner. Is Mr. Feltner here?"

"He's out at the barn, I think. We'll call him. There's not much he can
be doing."

Again he feels headed off. Her offer seems again an act of her own
generosity, in no way a concession to his reason for coming.

He sits down as she leaves. Her footsteps go back along the hall. Again
in his imagination he sees her: her hands reaching behind her as she
goes, untying the apron. He sits erect in the chair, holding the Testament
in his lap. The attitude of his body seems to isolate him from the room,
to hold out to it a formality alien to it. Some part of his presence is withheld from it; he might be sitting in the tall-backed chair behind his pulpit.

Margaret's footsteps enter the bustling noises of the kitchen, which
he now realizes to have been continuous since he came in.

"Net," he hears her say, "would you call Mat? Tell him we've got
company."

Out of the sound of her voice-not speaking to him now, remote
from him-and out of the look and atmosphere of the room where he
sits, there comes to him the sense of the completeness of this household,
the belonging together of Mat and Margaret Feltner, the generosity of
these people, in which there is maybe no need for him. He feels himself
alone here. He is alone in his mission which, whole in itself, surrounds
him with its demands, and isolates him. Uneasiness coming over him, a
swift tremor, he thinks of the burden of his duty. And then, as though
under the pressure of his own hand, he knows his old submission to the
mastering of this duty, and knows he will do it.

He stands as the footsteps approach the room. Hannah is with Margaret now. Greetings are exchanged again, and they sit down, he in his
chair, Margaret and Hannah together on the sofa, facing him. They talk
with a determined pleasantness about trifles-all of them conscious that
they are delaying, waiting for Mat to come, that they digress from their
feelings and from the purpose of the visit.

Nettie is on the back porch, calling Mat. She has difficulty making him hear, and calls several times before she comes back into the kitchen,
slamming the door.

His mind only half-occupied by the conversation, the preacher
watches Hannah. She is wearing a clean white smock, the sleeves turned
back from her wrists. Her heavy hair is drawn neatly back from her face.
She is a beautiful girl; he has thought so often before. And he thinks so
now, as always a little startled to find that he does so emphatically think
so. He watches her face, alert for some sign of what she must be feeling,
but he discovers nothing. Her face is composed and quiet. He both
wishes and fears to know her thoughts.

And he watches Margaret. He believes that he sees in her face the
marks of her grief for her son-but no sign that she expects to be comforted, or asks to be. To the preacher she also seems to be a beautiful
woman. But hers has long ago ceased to be the given beauty of a girl; it
is beauty that she has kept, or earned, through all that has troubled her
and aged her. In all she says there is an implication of Mat's presence in
her life, an assenting to it. To Brother Preston, it is as if something in her
leans in waiting, not for him to begin the business of his visit, but for
Mat.

They hear him come into the kitchen. He stops at the sink to wash his
hands, and then comes on through the house.

"Don't get up," he says, entering the room and stepping over to the
preacher's chair.

Brother Preston, leaning forward, takes the hand that is held out to
him. The hand is hard, weather-roughened, communicating the chill of
the outside air. The brief tightening grip of it is an announcement of
welcome, which doesn't, today, put the preacher at ease.

"I'm sorry to take you away from your work."

"You needn't be. There's not much we can do you'd call work."