A Place on Earth (Port William) (17 page)

I never been what you would call close to Mat. In spite of knowing him right onto fifty year. He hasn't been the kind you would need to
worry about, for his sake or yours either. He has minded his business and
stayed at his work. Has known his place, as they say. But the last four
days he has been on my mind. I have the feeling that I'm holding out for
him. In my mind I stick with him and hope his boy is alive. That's sympathy, I reckon. And we've come to it a hell of a way. By what has happened to us we're set apart kind of, and made to know each other.

Wednesday afternoon, after the news had pretty well got around, I
seen Brother Piston going in up there at Mat's. And I says to Jayber, "I
know the speech he's going to make." And so would all of us. He come
and said all that to me after we knew Tom was dead. And none of it quite
fit. You could say that he didn't have too good of an idea who he was talking to. While he was having his say I sat there and thought my thoughts.
Here in a way he'd come to say the last words over Tom. And what claim
did he have to do it? He never done a day's work with us in his life, nor
could have. He never did stand up in his ache and sweat and go down the
row with us. He never tasted any of our sweat in the water jug. And I
was thinking: Preacher, who are you to speak of Tom to me, who knew
him, and knew the very smell of him?

And there he sat in your grandaddy's chair, with his consolations
and his old speech. Just putting our names in the blanks. And I thought:
Preacher, he's dead, he's not here, and you'll never know what it is that's
gone.

The last words ought to say what it is that has died. The last words for
Tom ain't in the letter from the government, and they won't be said by
the preacher. They'll be said by you and me and the rest of us when we
talk about our old times and laugh about the good happenings. They
won't all be said as long as we live. I say that a man has got to deserve to
speak of the life of another man and of the death of him.

The difference between people is what has got to be taken notice of.
There's the preacher who has what I reckon you would call a knack for
the Hereafter. He's not much mixed with this world. As far as he's concerned there is no difference, or not much, between Tom Coulter and
Virgil Feltner. Their names fit into the riddle he thinks he knows the
answer to. I wouldn't try to say he ain't right. I do say that some people's
knack is for the Here. Anyhow, that's the talent I'm stuck with. For us it's
important to keep in mind who Tom was. And for Mat and them I judge it's important to know who is meant when they speak of Virgil. We don't
forget them after somebody who never knew them has said "Dead in the
service of his country" and "Rest in peace." That's not the way these
accounts are kept. We don't rest in peace. The life of a good man who
has died belongs to the people who cared about him, and ought to, and
maybe itself is as much comfort as ought to be asked or offered. And
surely the talk of a reunion in Heaven is thin comfort to people who
need each other here as much as we do.

I ain't saying I don't believe there's a Heaven. I surely do hope there is.
That surely would pay off a lot of mortgages. But I do say it ain't easy to
believe. And even while I hope for it, I've got to admit I'd rather go to
Port William.

As Jayber says, when we seen Brother Piston go in up at Mat's, the
worst thing about preachers is they think they've got to say something
whether anything can be said or not.

Well, it's been raining right along since you left. The ground, you
know, was soaked while you was here. So every drop that has fell has
gone in the river. The river has got way up. It's into most of the bottoms.
And the creeks are still running out big. And the radio says more to come.

Night before last Anvil Brant sent word up here by his son-in-law that
he had a sow and nine pigs he wanted to sell to me and your daddy. So
yesterday morning we got in the pickup truck and went down. When we
got there Anvil's wife said he was out to the barn. And we could see why.
There Mrs. Anvil was with her children, and there was her and Anvil's
oldest girl with her children, children and grandchildren looked like all
running about the same age, and looked like four or five in each set, and
all of them been fastened up there together since the rain commenced.
And there was Mrs. Anvil, with her hair sticking out right stiff in several
directions like a frozen floor mop, and one child sucking and one hanging onto her arm and one standing under her dress so you couldn't see
nothing but its legs, standing there in pee smell strong enough to make
your eyes water, slapping here and there and yelling at them all to be
quiet, taking three or four minutes to tell us Anvil was down to the barn,
anyhow she reckoned he was, she hadn't seen him since breakfast.

We walked out that little rise the house and buildings are on, and
found Anvil sitting in the back door of the barn. One of the older boys
was there with him, and his dogs, and we could see right off that things weren't much more comforting at the barn than they were at the house.
The river was up into the bottom there in back of the barn, and between
there and the trees on the river bank was nothing but about three hundred yards of muddy water, with here and there a willow or a few dead
horseweeds or a cornstalk sticking up out of it. And you just knew, as
soon as you saw how things were, that Anvil had been coming out there
to the barn every morning for the last three or four to watch it rain and
watch it rise, and know he was doing nothing because there was nothing
he could do. We went in the upper doors and walked down the driveway
and spoke. I says, "How's it coming, Anvil?" "Up, by God," he says. I says,
"How're you coming?" "Drownded out, by God," he says. "Britchies legs
rotted off plumb to the knees." We sat there with him and the boy until
nearly dinnertime and talked, none of us having anything better to do.
And we wound up buying the sow and pigs. For more than they was
worth. To your daddy's way of thinking, you don't what you would call
trade with a man who is hurting. I know it has got hard for you to know
your daddy, but he has that kind of rightness about him. He's very
straight in his dealings.

Anvil didn't figure the river would get into his house, but I expect it
surely was in his barn by this morning. They say the Ohio has got into a
few of the houses down at Hargrave. And the rain falling right on.

March 10

Still raining. Off and on all night, and pretty hard and steady since before
day. When the rain lets up you can hear water running anywhere you
stand. The mud is a foot deep around the barns here, and the barns are as
wet inside as out. We put down a little dry bedding every night, but it
gets tramped out of sight in a few minutes.

Anyhow, it's raining and I've got nothing to do for a while but sit here
and write to you. Which I aim to do, because once the weather fairs up it
won't be easy to find the time. I'm writing at the table by the front window in the living room. The rain coming down steady outside, and a
good fire going in here. When I look back I don't see many wet weather
mornings in my life when I've been sitting inside and doing something
quiet. And in a way I wish there had been. I notice that every now and
then I do something I wish I'd done more of, that I've lost a lot of chances
for.

I've quit minding to write as much as I did at first. When you boys was
first in the army it give me some trouble. I don't reckon I'd wrote much
more than my name for thirty years, and I did have an awful time trying
to keep what I had to say inside of what I could spell. But finally it got so
it come tolerably easy. I've got the habit of it now, and when I'm working or walking to town and soon, I think of a letter to you that says
what's taking place. It's company for me.

The weather is throwing us behind in our work. Every day we lose,
the loss gets a little more on our minds. We've got plant beds to burn and
ground to break and the barns to clean and so on and so on. When the
weather does fair up things are going to break loose around here in a
mighty hurry. I was thinking about it while I was eating breakfast, and
kind of dreading it. You know how your daddy will come untied the first
day the sun shines. He'll be just like a fox. One minute he'll be laying
quiet, and the next minute in a dead run, and you'll have to look mighty
quick to see the difference.

There hasn't been many times this morning when you could see from
here to the yard fence, but the rain has nearly quit now. A good deal
more water in sight today than yesterday, so it must of rose considerably
during the night. The bottoms are all under water as far as I can see in
both directions. There's water from the foot of the hills on this side to
the foot of the hills on the far side. Looks from here like the water is up
to the window sills of the old Traveler house in the big bottom on the far
side, and there's a car sitting in the front yard with just the roof and windows showing.

Awful as it is, I have to say that a flood can be about as interesting to
me as anything ever I run into. As soon as I see the backwater get into the
bottoms I want to be out on it in a boat. You remember. And I finally did
get around to it yesterday afternoon. I was in the barbershop toward the
end of the morning, after I got done writing to you, and just happened
to mention to Jayber that all morning it had been awfully easy for me to
imagine that you could have some luck if you was to go fishing. And for
some reason Jayber jumps right up and says "Let's go" -which he never
did want to do before in his life. He turned around that old paper clock
of his that says "Back at 6:30," and locked up, and we got a pound of
cheese and a box of crackers from Milton Burgess, and went over the hill.
I had my boat chained up on the porch of the old cabin, and the water was nearly up to the joists, so all we had to do was just roll her over and
slide her into the river. About fifty foot from the porch we caught her in
a long eddy and went just shooting up through the trees along the bank.
We went over the road at the creek bridge, and across the backwater, and
right on up into the big woods in the creek bottom. We tied the boat,
and sat up there inside the woods and fished in the rain all afternoon. We
are cheese and crackers and smoked and talked and caught fish.

We carried what we caught back to town and fried them up atJayber's
little living place over the barbershop. It's not but a little bit of a room,
and he's got everything he needs fitted into it just perfect. And you never
seen the like of books he's got up there. I've known Jayber mighty well
for a long time, and I never knew he read books. But he tells me he's read
some of them books as many as several times. Some of the authors was
ones I'd heard of. You've got to hand it tojayber for the way he's held his
learning and not let it go to his head. When he seen I was interested, Jayher told me that books has meant a lot to him, and there's some of them
he puts a great deal of stock in.

I thought about you all along while the good times lasted, and wished
you was here. Afterwards, while I was walking home, I was thinking
about you, and our old times fishing and keeping batch down on the
river. I can remember whole conversations that we had back in those old
times. Them was good times, I says to myself, and one of these days
we'll have them again.

Well, according to what they say I ought not to write you anything
but cheerful news, and I see I've wrote little enough of that. There ain't
but mighty little to be had around here right now, so it's hard to write
much of it. Unless I lie. And I think I ought to save lying for when we need
it worse. And I don't aim to ever start lying to you. If I lied to you who
would I have for company then?

I think a lot about you, and a lot of you.

Your uncle,

Burley

In the latter two-thirds of his life Mat Feltner's cousin Roger Merchant
has memorialized his father as a cultivated and enlightened gentleman
farmer-which Mat knows the old man never was, never thought of
being, and would have refused to be if he had thought of it.