A Place on Earth (Port William) (2 page)

This book has had an editorial history sufficiently humbling to its author.
I began it in January, 1960, and it was published by Harcourt, Brace and
World in 1967. Dan Wickenden, then editor at Harcourt, helped me with
patient intelligence to shorten and improve my unwieldy manuscript.
But as I recognized after publication, the book was not satisfactory. Later,
Jack Shoemaker of North Point Press offered me the opportunity of a
new edition, to be published in 1983, for which I made many cuts, some
large, and a lot of editorial changes. For this Counterpoint edition of
2001, thanks once more to Jack Shoemaker, I have made a good many
further changes, both to improve the writing and to correct geographical and historical discrepancies between this and my other books about
Port William.

The seed bins are empty. The counters and rows of shelves along the
walls, stripped of merchandise, contain only slanting shadows and the
slanting rainy light from the front windows. The interior of the store has
been reduced to a severe geometrical order over which the light breaks
without force, colored but not brightened by the white of the walls, the
pale green of the counters and shelves. Its swept surfaces outline precisely the dimension of its silence and emptiness, but the strict order and
cleanness of the room make it a silence that seems actively expectant of
sound, a carefully tended emptiness anticipating an arrival. In the back,
near the entrance to a small screened-off area once used as an office, a
black iron safe stands against the wall. When Frank Lathrop cleaned out
the store after his son jasper went into the Army at the beginning of the
war, he left the door of the safe ajar for fear that if he closed it he would
never be able to work the combination to open it again. He did not foresee that he would ever want to open it again, but at the time the precaution seemed necessary, consistent with the careful neatness in which he
had left the place.

The four men who sit at the card game in the makeshift office feel the
vacancy of the larger room as a condition of the smaller, which, like the
seepage of wind through the back wall, subtly qualifies their presence there. All afternoon the sound of rain on the tin roof has pecked and
swiveled through the hollow building, constantly changing in force and
inflection, but never ceasing, until it seems to them the very presence
and noise of emptiness. They have got used to the sound; consciousness,
attentive to the details of the game, has overridden it, but at the back of
their minds it persists. And the rain itself has persisted for days into the
beginning of March, making the dawns sluggish, the evenings early and
sudden, so that they have come to think of time as a succession of nights
rather than days.

A large desk, its cover pulled down and locked, stands at the end of the
room farthest from the door. On its top are several neatly marked boxes
of accounts and receipts, and a radio playing so quietly that the music is
no more than a series of stuttering accents like the far-off rattling of a
snare drum. Between the desk and the heating stove at the opposite end
of the room jasper Lathrop's meat block has been placed to serve as a
card table. The two windows in the back wall look out on a narrow lot
covered with dead weed stalks, chicory and poke and burdock, and the
lighter brown napping of foxtail and wild oat. In the center of the lot
there is a disjointed heap of weather-blackened crates that Frank Lathrop
once intended to burn; but on the day, a week or so after jasper's departure, when he set the store in order and shut the building, he felt his duty
to his son was more finished than he wanted to believe. The act of burning seemed too final, too suggestive of a conclusion he was unable to
face. In the three years that have gone by since then, the crates have
stayed there, and now in the steady rain they have the look of permanence, the stack of them monolithic and at ease, an indelible feature of
the casual back view of the town. At the rear of the lot, built sidelong to
the fence, is the small carpenter shop of Ernest Finley. Black coal smoke
comes from its chimney, twisted off the bricks by the wind and driven to
the ground, turning delicately amber as it thins. The carpenter's pickup
truck is parked in front of the door, and through the afternoon the men
at the card game have heard the measured sounds of his hammering and
sawing. Beyond the shop a broad pasture swags down to a creek branch
and tilts up again, gently, to the top of a long ridge. A flock of sheep, heads
down against the rain, straggles toward the barn at the top of the ridge
for the night feeding. Beyond the ridge is the opening of the river valley.

The light is still strong in the room. The card faces turned up on the
hacked surface of the meat block are still white and exact. Outside the
windows the gutter drips, also exact, as steady and half-heard as a clock
ticking. The sounds of voices and automobile engines out on the street
reach back to the room only occasionally and faintly. The smoke from
Mat Feltner's cigar, which he has balanced fire-end out on the edge of the
block, rises in a straight thin shaft a yard high, then scrolls out beneath
the ceiling, clouding bluely down again into the light at the tops of the
windows. Mat taps the fingers of his left hand against the seat of his
chair, repeating the same rhythm half a dozen times, and then stops; the
nervous rapidity of the sound seems to him to have communicated his
uneasiness, and he glances at Frank Lathrop and then at Jayber Crow and
Old Jack Beechum to see if they might have noticed. But they are occupied with their cards. He hooks his thumb into his belt.

He sits with his feet drawn back to the sides of his chair, his hat pushed
back off his forehead. He is a fairly big man, and although his hair is
white his body is still solidly composed, without excess or diminishment.
The whiteness of his hair emphasizes the prominence of his features,
the green of his clear eyes. Except for a slackening in the flesh of his
cheeks his face has retained its angularity and firmness. It is a flexible,
expressive face, deeply lined around the mouth and eyes, so that now in
its apparent calm it seems near to both humor and sorrow. So far only his
hand has betrayed him.

It is his turn to play. He draws from the deck and looks down to study
his cards, his metal-rimmed reading glasses set a little low on his nose; he
discards and leans back, taking up the cigar again.

Nobody else moves.

"Jayber, it's your play, ain't it?" Frank Lathrop says finally.

"Let a man think."

"Hell," Old Jack Beechum says, "a mule could've thought by now."

Jayber plays. They play out the hand, and Frank Lathrop gathers the
cards and shuffles and deals. Mat arranges his cards and tilts his chair
back against the desk. He and Frank and Jayber wait quietly, watching
Old Jack.

The old man holds the cards clumsily in his huge hands, fumbling
them from one semblance of order to another with the forceful deliber ate movements of a man laying bricks-a man building a spindling
unwieldy tower of bricks that constantly requires the addition of one
more brick to balance it upright. The earflaps of his corduroy cap have
come untied; they flail out at warped angles from the sides of his head,
dangling their strings, like the wings of some disgruntled bird. He
reaches out, turning his cards face down against the block, and looks
aggressively at the others as though to answer an insult.

"Your turn, old mule," Jayber Crow says. He grins as he speaks, but
speaks with a patience that amounts almost to gentleness.

Old Jack draws a card from the deck, stares at it, deciphers the message, and swats the meat block with it. He rolls his chew of tobacco over
his tongue into the opposite jaw and clamps it there and turns away,
aloof and silent; the movement abruptly repudiates his involvement in
the game, dismisses his opponents and the game itself as finally as if he
had gone out of the room.

They know that when his turn comes again they will have to call him
back.

Mat looks out the window at the crates tumbled together in the lot; the
leafless weedtops poke through them, jerking and wavering in the wind.
The pile of them, like the vacancy of the store, is a fact of the war; it
remains for the same reason that he and Frank together have allowed the
store to remain empty; they've foreclosed no possibilities. But now the
boxes cluttered together in the rain seem to Mat to insist upon his own
disquiet. His anxiety has become, after the first violence of its onset,
more a physical state than anything else, a remote vibrance of numbness
clenching and unclenching in his body as acutely as pain. The feeling is
intensified by a vague awareness that, if he examined it, it would declare
itself to be an extreme and desperate fear; but he has resisted any
acknowledgment. He feels simply that he is bracing himself to confront
an actuality not yet apparent-which, in loyalty to his son and his son's
life, he cannot allow himself to anticipate.

When he went to the post office shortly before noon to get the mail,
there was no letter from Virgil. There had been none from Virgil for more than three weeks; but they had hoped, he and Margaret and Hannah, that there might be one on Monday. But he carried the mail home
folded in the newspaper without looking at it, hastening then, in the
presence of the fact, to qualify his hope, admit beforehand that he would
be disappointed, to say that although he had hoped, he had expected
nothing.

When he stood on the back porch a few minutes later, looking at the
envelopes of what mail had come, he realized that he had failed to prepare himself, his precaution had spared him none of the force of his disappointment. It was not until he thumbed through the mail a second
time that he noticed the government envelope addressed to Hannah,
and felt change pass over his head like a chill. He picked the letter out
from among the others, as though to dispose of it. And then he laid it
down again, straight, with the others inside the newspaper, and he began
an almost soundless whistling under his breath.

It is in his mind forever, that moment. For what seems a long time he
stands as though deep in thought, though he is not thinking, the thin dry
thread of his whistling crossing the edges of his teeth. His fingers tap
nervously on the underside of the troughed newspaper. And then he
thinks of Hannah and Margaret, and steps back into the angle between
the wall of the house and the enclosure of the back stairway so he cannot be seen from the window. He leans against the stair door, looking
out across the yard.

Rainwater has collected shallowly beneath the maple trees, making a
large irregular pool stretching from the walk along the edge of the porch
to the lilac bush beside the gate to the chicken yard. The rain is falling
slowly in large drops so that the circles it makes striking the surface of
the pool remain intact. For a moment at the center of each circle the
black branches of the trees are mirrored perfectly, and then distorted
and fragmented as the circles interlink and subside and renew. Across the
fence in the chicken yard seven or eight hens stand together under the
eave of the tool shed.