A Place on Earth (Port William) (26 page)

From the top of the ladder, among the branches of the apple tree, Mat's
horizon is enlarged. Along the crest of the eastward ridge he can see the
line of white canvases covering the plant beds that Burley and Jarrat
Coulter sowed five days ago. They make a single stroke of whiteness,
drawn exactly along the horizon between the blue of the sky and the
ridge, which, in the same five days, has become green. Down the gentle
fall of the ground behind him is the town, which he turns toward and
turns away from again and again as he goes about his work. The roofs are
still visible, their angles sharp, among the treetops stippled with buds.
Northward he can see the opening of the river valley, the folds of the
upland on the far side, woods and fields dear in the sun. Feeling the limb
on which the ladder is propped spring against his weight as he moves,
Mat prunes the tree. He likes this work-the look of his hands moving
and choosing, correcting, among the tangle of the branches. The orchard
is one of the works of his life.

On the ground under the tree Joe Banion is gathering up the cut twigs
and branches as Mat lets them fall, loading them onto the wagon. The
black clear shadows of the branches tangle over him like a net as he
moves. On the edge of the wagon bed, his sheepskin coat buttoned a foot
off-center, Old Jack sits watching them, keeping them company. They weren't at work there a quarter of an hour before Joe said, "Well, we
going to have help, Mr. Mat. Here come the old boss." Sure enough, there
he came up along the row ends of the garden and into the orchard. And
until now he has sat there holding the team, driving the few feet to the
next tree when Mat and Joe move.

It's a little past the middle of the morning; the early chill has gone
out of the air. The town has become quiet. The children are shut in the
school, the men gone to the stores or the fields, the women to the
kitchens. The voices of cackling hens in Mat's henhouse and barn come
brassy and loud into the quiet, and from beyond the turn of the hill
comes the bleating of sheep. From the wagon Old Jack's voice follows
the turnings of his mind-sounding both comforted and comfortable,
one of the sounds of the place come back into the open.

The garden gate opens and shuts, and this time it is Hannah they see
coming up along the row ends toward the orchard. She walks heavily
over the uneven ground, leaning backward a little against the weight of
the child. The wind blows her skirt and her hair as she walks.

She does not come near them, but goes into one of the upper corners
of the orchard where late yesterday afternoon Mat pruned a peach tree
and left the branches lying. She waves as she goes by, and they wave
back. They watch her as she moves through the clutter of branches,
gathering the budded shoots. By an awkward stooping and bending she
picks them up one at a time, holds them up to look at them, their graceful slendering weighted and knobbed with buds, and lays them into the
crook of her arm.

Old Jack sits studying her. "She's a mighty fine girl."

"She is," Mat says.

Old Jack shakes his head. `Ay, Lord!"

They hear the sound of an engine in the air and, looking up, find a
small army plane coming fairly low over the town.

"Look a yonder!" Old Jack says. "Yonder's one of them flying machines." A second follows, the look and the sound identical to the first.
"God Amighty, there's another'n!"

One after another they come, spaced evenly, a considerable distance
apart, their sounds building and fading in steady rhythm. The three men
stand looking up, Old Jack braced on his cane like a tripod in the middle of the wagon bed, Joe by the mule's heads where he went to quiet them,
Mat on the ladder in the top of the tree. They count. Four, five, six. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twentysix. And when the twenty-sixth one carries its sound away, and none follows, they watch them out of sight.

The morning goes on. Mat's mind has been drawn away from his
work into the uneasiness of the sky, empty of all sound now He thinks
of the young men enclosed in that deathly metal, their fates made one
with interlocking parts and men and events. He feels a cry toward them
grown in him, unreleased. It is a long time before his mind will content
itself again to take back the tree and his own hands busy in it. Below he
can hear Joe Banion:

"How'd you like to fly one of them things, Mr. Jack?"

'Ay, Lord! I wouldn't do it."

"You and me, boss man. You and me."

As he always does when the first outside workbegins in the spring, Ernest
felt a little reluctant to give up the orderly enclosure of the shop. And so
he was glad enough to spend most of the morning getting ready-lugging his ladders and rope tackle and jacks and tool boxes out of the shop
and loading them on the truck; setting the shop to rights, sweeping it
out, putting tools away, feeling the place settle around him and grow
still.

When he came up opposite the Crops' house, a few minutes before
noon, he eased the truck out across the bottom to what, two weeks and
two days ago, had been the outside end of the footbridge. He turned
the truck around and killed the engine, and ate the sandwiches he had
brought.

During the fifteen or twenty minutes he spent doing that, and the five
minutes he spent smoking a cigarette afterwards, the place began to
make its claim on him. It took him only a few seconds to foresee in some
detail how he would have to go about the rebuilding of the bridge; after
that his mind was free to take in the look of the place. Except for the
singing of birds and the steady rippling of the creek, the little valley was quiet. There were no human noises anywhere. For a while he remained
half alert for the sound of a voice or a door or an engine-one of the
habits of his winter work in town. But he grew used to the peacefulness
of the place. He quit expecting anything but the natural sounds. The
silted bottoms, he saw, were beginning to show a faint scaling of green,
and along the banks of the creek, running clear now over the rocks, the
muddied limbs of the willows were putting out new leaves.

Almost without his realizing it, his thoughts going ahead of him, he
has begun his work. The butt of the cigarette still burning in the corner
of his mouth, he fishes a pair of rubber boots out from behind the seat.
He sits down on the running board and puts them on. He places the
crutches under his arms and, moving around the truck, takes a coil of
half-inch rope out of one of the tool boxes, and starts up along the creek.

He makes his way with some difficulty into the swift water of the
ford. The water comes nearly to the tops of his boots, caving them in
coldly against his feet and legs. He is aware, almost as soon as he begins
to move against the push of the current, of the absurdity of wading swift
water on crutches. His gratitude that nobody is there to see him, and
then his fear that somebody may come, make him ridiculous to himself.
He crosses the creek, feeling his way over the uneven stones of the riffle
with the crutch ends, and goes down the shallows along the far edge
until he comes to where the bridge dangles in the trees. When he has fastened the rope to the loose end of one of the cables and weighted the
free end of the rope with a rock and thrown it over to the other bank, he
wades back across.

Using a block and tackle, he pulls the bridge out of the trees and
across the steam and into place. He locks the pulleys and walks to the
top of the high bank and stands there for three or four minutes, studying
the job now that he has it out where he can look at it. The snarled skein
of wood and cable and wire that he has hauled tense between the banks
has not even begun to resemble a bridge. The footboards have been broken and split, some of the crosspieces knocked out or broken, the handwires wound and tangled through the mess of the rest-and the whole
thing, crusted with silt, bearded and swatched with drift, twisted two full
turns. But the beginning is there, made. While he watches, a kingfisher lights on one of the strands of the tangle, perches a moment, sees him,
startles, flies off down the creek. "I'll finish her by sundown," he says to
himself. And he goes back to the truck for his tools.

Until after sundown, until the bridge is a bridge again, and looks like
one, curving its perfect curve between its fastenings, he does not stop.
He untwists and splices the broken cables, binds them back around the
trunks of the two trees from which they were torn loose, rebuilds the
steps up to where the end of the footboard will be laid. He goes into it
then, building his way across, wedging his way into the mess of it, leaving it made and straight behind him. Fixing as he goes, crawling back and
forth for materials over what he has finished, he attaches the crosspieces
and lays on and nails down the footplanks. And over his bent back the day
moves toward the end of its own curve. He hurries at his work, excited
by his high balancing out on the thing he has made, feeling the echo of
every hammer stroke rock back under him along the taut cables-and
excited by knowing that a bridge is what it is. There comes to be something deeply pleasing to him in the idea of a bridge-not, maybe, the
first mark a man makes on the earth, but surely one of the first marks
made by a neighborhood-and he hastens toward its completion. Long
before he is done, he already knows how it is going to be, and he is driven
on by an appetite for the finished look of it.

The sunlight goes out of the valley, rising up along the sides of the
hills on the eastern side. The ground begins to cool. His mind begins to
take leave of his work. He gathers his tools from the ground around the
finished steps and goes back to the side he began on, walking without
the crutches and having to move slowly with his load to keep balanced.
At the other end he puts the tools down, and takes up his crutches. For a
moment he stands there, looking at the bridge and the water under it.
Finished, he is let down now into his tiredness. He lights a cigarette,
smokes it a moment with deliberate pleasure, and turns and begins loading tools and rope and usable scraps back into the truck.

Hearing something, a footstep maybe, he looks across the bridge at
Ida standing on the top step at the other end of it. She is wearing a plain
faded cotton dress, and a sweater that he knows at once belongs or did
belong to Gideon. She is smiling in reserved greeting to him, in expecta tion of what from him he does not know. She steps up onto the end of
the bridge, and he feels the inwashing sense of the presence of her body,
kept waiting inside that coarse, worn sweater of Gideon's.

"Can I come across now?"

"Yes. Come on across."

She comes out onto the bridge, giving her weight to the flexible
strength of it, following down into the curve of it. And then, for the first
time all day, he thinks of this woman's drowned child, and his remembrance flinches inside him. He is suddenly nerved tightly as one watching a tightrope walker. And he sees that a hesitance grows in her as she
comes on toward the place where she knows Annie was sitting during
the last half hour she lived. To Ernest she seems to force herself up to
that place, and then past it. And once past it, she is all right. She comes
on, the footboard rocking slightly under her.

He is standing beside the steps, and as she comes to the end of the
bridge he reaches his hand up. He would not ordinarily have done so
opening a thing-not, especially, hold out his hand to a woman nearly a
stranger to him. But she takes it. And sensing the strength in that arm
levering over the bar of the crutch, she looks at him. It is a look that he
knew to anticipate-a look of surprise and of a sort of dismay, as if the
only thing more odd than a cripple is a cripple of great and capable
strength who smells and sweats and works and wears out pretty much
the way everybody does. But Ida does not withdraw. She gives her weight
to his hand, and steps down.

"Thank you."

And again she looks at him, this time with such immediate and open
candor, such accepting of him as he is, that he feels himself made natural, made as if whole, by her look. It is as though she has reached into
him with her hand. He turns and starts back to the truck.

"Lord, you sure did get it done fast. I thought, the mess it was in, it
would take a week."

"Well, it wasn't too much trouble. Once you get started into a thing
like that it'll usually turn out very well."

"I declare, it's nice to have it up again. I ain't been on this side of the
creek in I don't know how long."

She is walking along beside him now, a little ahead of him-a woman not yet thirty, strongly and a little thickly made. Her face still keeps some
of the prettiness of her girlhood, her hair pulled back out of the way and
gathered and pinned. She walks with the naturalness of a woman who
has gone a great deal on foot, and without the self-consciousness of one
who has ever tried deliberately for grace-so calmly a woman of her
own kind and place and way that she seems hardly aware of herself, and
so quietly belonging to Gideon that the idea of him seems as near her, as
much touching her, as his old sweater. Ernest is aware that she has given
no thought to how she may look to him. His hand keeps the memory of
the feel of her hand, nearly as hard as his own.