A Place on Earth (Port William) (16 page)

And so they begin again, speaking now of the weather, the delay of
work, the rising river. The preacher feels himself drawn again, helplessly,
into the stream of pastime conversation, which moves by no force of its
own but by a determination in all of them against silence. He speaks and
listens with an increasingly uncomfortable sense of his own hesitation,
feeling at every turn and shift of the talk that he is failing again the duty
that brought him.

Mat's coming has added something implicitly formidable to the un certain pleasantness of the gathering. Now, in the faces of all three of
the Feltners, there seems to Brother Preston to be a secrecy preserved
against him. They have, none of them, made any acknowledgment of
what they must know to be his reason for coming. It is as though their
very grief is an affirmation of something that they refuse to yield to him.

At last, taking advantage of a break in the conversation, he begins,
straightening in his chair and leaning forward a little, his eyes moving to
the eyes of each of them:

"My friends, I've come because I know of your trouble."

He is surprised by what seems to him to have been the forcefulness of
his voice. It is as if some barely perceptible stirring has moved among
them, as at the first rising of a wind among tree leaves.

Now Margaret Feltner lifts her hand out of her lap and touches the tips
of her fingers lightly to the side of her face.

But he has begun and he goes on, hastened, like a man walking before
a strong wind, moved no longer by his intention but by the force of what
he is saying. His eyes have become detached from his hearers; he might
be speaking down from his pulpit now, looking at all, seeing none. But
beneath the building edifice of his meaning, he is aware of something
failing between them. It is as though in the very offering of comfort to
them he departs from them. And now he is hastened also by an urgency
of haste. He feels that the force of his voice is turning back toward himself, that he is fleeing into the safe coherence of his own words, away
from those faces shut between him and their pain. He speaks into their
silence like a man carrying a map in a strange country in the dark.

At the beginning Mat only half listens. He sits, staring out the window,
like a boy in church. But knowing what must be the difficulty of the situation for Margaret and Hannah, his attention is drawn to them, and his
separateness from the voice of the preacher is destroyed. He watches the
two women, sorry for them, determined to bear with them, as dumbly
as he has to, what must be borne. It is of the loss, accomplished or to
come, of Virgil Feltner that the preacher is speaking. And Mat's fear,
which he has kept silenced until now, begins to take its words. It is the
fear of the loss of his boy, his good and only son-the preacher's voice
seems to search it out. The preacher's voice, rising, rides above all chances
of mortal and worldly hope, hastening to rest in the hope of Heaven.

In the preacher's words the Heavenly City has risen up, surmounting
their lives, the house, the town-the final hope, in which all the riddles
and ends of the world are gathered, illuminated, and bound. This is the
preacher's hope, and he has moved to it alone, outside the claims of time
and sorrow, by the motion of desire which he calls faith. In it, having
invoked it and raised it up, he is free of the world.

But in this hope-this last simplifying rest-giving movement of the
mind-Mat realizes that he is not free, and never has been. He is doomed
to hope in the world, in the bonds of his own love. He is doomed to take
every chance and desperate hope of hope between him and death, Virgil's, Margaret's, his. His hope of Heaven must be the hope of a man
bound to the world that his life is not ultimately futile or ultimately
meaningless, a hope more burdening than despair.

It is from this possibility of meaninglessness that the preacher has
retreated. So that the earth will not be plunged into the darkness, he has
lifted up the Heavenly City and hastened to refuge in its gates. And Mat,
in the very act of leaning toward that restfulness, turns away from it to
take back his pain. His mind seems to steady and move out again to its
surfaces. He watches Hannah and Margaret, anxious for them, sorry for
their sorrow. He is conscious again of the room, the window, the wet
street opening into the town. The buds on the maple trees leaning over
the road have grown big. He notices this as he always notices it for the
first time in the spring, with an involuntary pleasure, saying to himself
that he is surprised to see it happen so early.

The preacher sits with his head tilted so that the lenses of his glasses
reflect the window In his rapt intent face the opaque discs of light look
exultant and blind.

Mat and Margaret seem to look at him now with a peculiar kindness,
nodding their heads, not so much attentively as indulgently. He feels that
he has become again the object of their generosity, that they are offering
to him, out of some kind of hospitality, the safe abstraction of his belief.
They are releasing him from the particularity of the time and place, and
of the life he is talking about.

Concluding, preparing to leave them, he looks again at Hannah. She
sits at the end of the sofa, beyond the light of either of the windows,
looking down at her hand which lies beside her on the cushion. She reminds him of some white-petaled delicate bloom. "Surely," he thinks,
"the people is grass."

He stands up abruptly.

"I must go."

Mat helps him into his coat and walks out onto the porch with him.
They make the small sentences of leave-taking while the preacher puts
on his rubbers and opens his umbrella. They shake hands.

"Come back," Mat says. "Thank you."

He stands on the edge of the porch while Brother Preston goes down
the steps and starts out toward the street.

Coming into the house again, he thinks: "Well, that's done. That's
over."

The living room, as he goes back into it, holds the quiet of a Sunday, as
though the voice of the preacher is still present in it. Margaret has got up
and is moving about in the room, halfheartedly and needlessly straightening the furniture and the papers on Mat's desk. Hannah is sitting as
before. He goes over to her and reaches down to pat her shoulder.

'All right?"

"I'm all right." She nods, smiles.

And then as though suddenly jarred, she cries aloud like a hurt child:

"No! I'm not all right! I'm not!"

Margaret comes to her and holds her while she cries. Against Hannah's hair Margaret's face is turned to Mat. Their eyes hold them there a
moment, admitting their sorrow for the girl and for each other and for
themselves.

And then Mat turns and goes. In his life he has made this movement
time and again, this turning away from himself or his loved ones, leaving
them to bear what they must. With his children, time after time, he has
come to this turning away.

His mouth set, thinking "If it has to happen, it'll have to happen," not
daring to think what he means, he goes out of the house and turns down
the street toward Jasper Lathrop's store.

Passing under a low maple branch, he breaks off a twig. He feels the
softening bud at the tip of it, tastes the cold, bitter taste of the sap. And
then, hating to waste it now that he has broken it off, he sticks it into the
band of his hat.

Swollen by the wet weather, the door binds against the sill. Brother Preston shoves hard to open it, and the sound of its breaking loose falls like
a long plank into the empty church. But entering, shutting the door
behind him, he does not make a sound. He stands just inside the vestibule a moment, letting the quiet of the place come to him. To his right,
within reach of his hand, the heavy bellrope hangs down, the lower foot
and a half of it polished and darkened by Uncle Stanley's hands. It drops
straight into the vestibule from the arm of the bell up in the steeple, the
hole drilled for its passage through the ceiling worn whopsided by the
rope's sawing through it, and the rope at that place fretted to half its original thickness. At the end there is a big club of a knot which Uncle Stanley can just reach, and which is just out of reach, it is hoped, of the members of the intermediate Boys' Sunday School Class.

On either side of the vestibule a door opens into a high narrow room,
stark in its proportions and furnishings. Uncle Stanley has been in to
clean up in preparation for the Wednesday-night prayer meeting, and
everything is in a state of neatness and order which now, in the quiet,
seems to deny its dependence on the likes of Uncle Stan. Unviolated now
by any presence but his own, the old church seems to Brother Preston to
stand erect and coherent, enclosing him.

As though the racket he made opening the door signaled a division
between the church and the town, the sanctuary is now filled with quiet.
He might be moving across the bottom of a deep pool. Tiptoeing, not
making a sound, he comes on down the aisle and sits on a bench near the
pulpit and directly in front of it.

He came away from the Feltner house grieved by the imperfection of
his visit. It was not, as he had hoped it would be, a conversation. It was a
sermon. This is the history of his life in Port William. The Word, in his
speaking it, fails to be made flesh. It is a failure particularized for him in
the palm of every work-stiffened hand held out to him at the church door
every Sunday morning-the hard dark hand taking his pale unworn one
in a gesture of politeness without understanding. He belongs to the governance of those he ministers to without belonging to their knowledge,
the bringer of the Word preserved from flesh. But now, sitting on the hard bench in the chilled odors of stale perfume and of vacancy, he feels
that he has come again within the reach of peace. On the back of the
bench in front of him, like some cryptic text placed there for his contemplation, are the initials B.C. in deeply cut block letters four inches
high. Leaning forward, his finger absently tracing the grooves of the initials, he bows in careful silence while his mind seems to stand in the pulpit above him, praying as always: "Our gracious and loving Heavenly
Father, we are come into Thy Presence today with our burdens, our
troubles, our sorrows."

The afternoon goes on, and he continues to sit there, his mind coming slowly to rest. He leans back, his hands folded and idle in his lap.
Showers come and pass over without his hearing them.

The outside door clatters and slams, and footsteps tramp in. The vestibule door is bumped open, and Uncle Stanley appears at the head of the
aisle. In one arm he carries a load of kindling, in the other hand a gallon
bucket of corncobs soaking in coal oil. Loaded as he is, Uncle Stanley
manages a whole chorus of gestures which greet and exclaim and apologize. Peeping over his load, waving the bucket of cobs, he shuffles down
the aisle, his walking cane, hooked into his hip pocket, trailing on the
floor behind him like a tail.

"Go right on, Preacher," he yells. "Go right ahead. Don't mind me.
Keep right on a talking to Him. I know you got it to do. Byjuckers, if you
can squeeze it in anywhere, you can tell Him about me."

He drops the wood with a racking crash down against a leg of the
stove. He opens the fire door and lays in cobs and kindling, and douses in
coal oil from the bucket. He tosses in a lighted match, the fire ignites,
and the crackling of the flames is immediate and steady. In all this he
makes a large avoidance of looking at Brother Preston or speaking to
him, leaving him to his prayers.

He goes out, and returns carrying two buckets of coal which he places
beside the stove. He adds more kindling to the fire, throws in a few
lumps of coal, and goes to the nearest bench and sits down, still wearing
his hat. He has gone about his work, and now sits and rests, with utter
familiarity toward the place. His attitude intimates that he is a fire builder
by profession, the best in the trade, and that his skill and responsibility
require a certain indifference to all other considerations. A large chew of
tobacco is actively at work in his jaw.

Not wanting to appear unfriendly, Brother Preston comes back and
sits near the old man-trusting that, by keeping a distance of four or five
feet between them, he can hold the conversation to an exchange of formalities and then leave in a few minutes. But he is exactly as much mistaken as he was afraid he would be. Uncle Stanley gets up and spits into
the stove, and then sits down next to him and claps a hand down onto his
knee.

"Yessir! By grab, last thing I'd want to do is break in on a fellow's praying. I reckon there's plenty of need for it around here. I reckon I ought to
know that. But I had to get that fire to going for the prayer meeting
tonight. Take the damp outen this air." He laughs knowingly, slapping
the preacher's knee again. "Take their mind off of their old bones while
you say your say to 'em. We all got our calling. You got yours and I got
mine. And we go about 'em and get along. Ain't that right, Preacher?"

"That is so, Mr. Gibbs," Brother Preston says.

March 9, 1945

Dear Nathan,

I've laid off to write to you every day for the last four, but it has been
hard to get around to. I've been hoping for some good news to tell you.
But none has happened.

I was in the barbershop the night you left, and Mat Feltner was there
and told us that Virgil is missing in action. I've been studying the last four
days whether I ought to tell you about it or not. I know you'll be sorry to
hear it, but my guess is you would want to know it anyhow He was a
good boy.

I talk like he's dead for certain, which there ain't any reason to believe
yet. But in town I notice it's coming mighty easy to most to talk about
Virgil as if missing means dead. You don't hear Virgil is. You hear Virgil
was. It's understandable. It's simpler to go ahead and think the worst and
get it over with, and hard for most people to hold out much for people
they're no kin to. But Mat and them are holding out. I hand it to Mat. He's
just himself, the way he always has been, as far as he's letting anybody
see. He come up to this a man. And I reckon will go through it a man.