A Place on Earth (Port William) (28 page)

When Hannah lay down for a nap early Sunday afternoon, Mat had not
come in to dinner, but an hour or so later, when she wakes up and goes
into the living room, he is there, obviously waiting for her, sitting with
his feet propped on the desk, hat and jacket still on. He grins at her.

"How're you feeling?"

"Fine."

"Well, Margaret's gone to visit Mrs. Burgess a while. I reckon she's
in for two or three hours' talking about rheumatism." He gets up. "I
thought we might farm a little this afternoon, you and me, since you're
feeling fine."

`All right," she says, "Good." She cannot, somehow, make her voice
sound as glad as she is. But when he has helped her on with her coat and
they are starting out the door, she puts her hand into his.

"Now you're talking," he says.

It is clear to her that this excursion has been on his mind since morning and that he has been looking forward to it. And she is grateful. It is
good to be going farming with him, getting out of the house. A wind,
high up, carries the overcast swiftly across the sky. The sun comes
through. They stop while a bright patch of sunlight passes over and beyond them, and they watch it sweep rapidly on over the ridgetops.

While they get into the truck and go along the road toward the barns
on the far place, there are a few minutes of silence between them, a little
awkward.

But once they are through the gate, starting back the gravel road
along the backbone of the ridge, they are among Mat's reference points.
And he begins to talk, pointing out jobs of work that he has done lately
or is doing or planning to do. One thing reminds him of another.

"This barn here," he says, "my daddy built it when I was a boy. I remember walking over here from town to watch the carpenters. An old
fellow by the name of Walter Stovall built it. He had three or four grown
sons and they all worked together. They were good carpenters, all of
them. It was poplar lumber they had to build with then."

He gets out and helps Hannah out. "You can't get lumber like that any
more, maybe never will again." He gestures upward with his hand. "I
reinforced the loft and put on a new roof when Virgil was thirteen or
fourteen years old. It was about the first man's work he ever did. I sent
him over here with Ernest and they did it together. It would worry me to
death trying to get any work out of him then, but he'd work for Ernest. I
saw how that was and remembered how it was with me. Mighty hard to
get a boy to come to it right under his daddy's hand. I don't know why."

There are cows and calves scattered over the lot in front of the barn,
others lying down around the door and inside the driveway. These get up
and move slowly out of the way as Mat and Hannah step up to the doorway and into it.

"Well," Mat says, "I do know why. By the time a boy gets big enough
to work, his daddy's already been his boss for a long time, and not always
an easy one. They've already pretty well tested each other, and know
each other's weaknesses and flaws. There are a lot of old irritations all
ready-made. And then a man teaching his own boy gets misled by pride.
What he does wrong looks like your failure as much as it is his, and so
you don't correct or punish for his sake, but yours. The way around itor the way my daddy took with me and I took with Virgil is to let him
work with somebody older than he is, like Ernest, that you know he
admires."

"Was he bad?" Hannah asks, "When he was a boy, I mean."

"Fairly," Mat says, and grins. "Though it's hard for me to tell how to judge a boy's behavior. He wasn't any worse than I was, I'll put it that
way. Nor any better, I reckon. He did a good many things he ought to
have got a whipping for. And did, and got a few he didn't deserve,
which"-he opens his hands and folds them slowly, one in the other,
behind his back-"I wish he hadn't."

"He told me several times that you were a good father."

"Did he? I'm glad he said that. I'm glad you told me."

They are standing inside the barn now, looking out through the doorway. Mat makes a vague abrupt movement with his forearm and hand,
whether to dismiss the foregoing part of their conversation or to begin
the next, she cannot tell.

"When he came home from college after his last year, I asked him,
`What are you planning to do?' Lord knows, I'd wanted to know a long
time before that, and he'd mentioned wanting to farm before, but the
time to ask and be told never had come until then. And I was worried a
good deal, because I wanted him to come home here and take this upor wanted him to want to-and was afraid he wouldn't. And was afraid,
too, that he'd see what I had on my mind. But I held right steady, watching him, and he said, `I want to stay here and farm with you."'

There is a pause now, while Mat seems to steady and gather himself.

"I'll never forget it. I'd have liked to just stop everything right there and
celebrate. But I knew we'd only come to the beginning, and you don't
celebrate at the beginning-even at the risk of never celebrating at all.

"I said, All right. I'm going to lend you a thousand dollars. You take
that, and the old cattle barn over yonder, and those two fields between it
and the road-and let's see what you can do. When you're not working
for yourself, you can work by the day for me.' There were hard times
then, and it nearly emptied me to get him the thousand dollars. But I did
it. It was enough money to put pressure on him, which I aimed to doand then, of course, stand pretty close behind him, to see that he didn't
get too badly into trouble.

"Well, he made it do. He never let me in on it at all. He saw my game,
and was proud. And I waited, sort of keeping to the other end of the
place, to see what he would do-scared again, of course, that he'd make
some bad mistake. And then one morning he said to me, `Come look at
my cattle.' And I came over here with him, and we stood out there in the lot and looked them over. He'd bought six or seven cows and calves and
a pretty good bull, and they were all right. He hadn't broke any records,
in judging or buying either, but they were all right. It was a fair start.
There are forty-five head of these cows now, and the quality of them has
improved right along."

He raises his arm and points.

"Look. There's one you ought to recognize. That's the newest one.
She's the one you and Virgil brought from Indiana that night in the truck,
not long after you were married. Don't you remember?"

"Yes," Hannah says. "I do."

Mat turns and goes on back into the barn, Hannah following. He
opens the door to an empty stall. "I'll put some feed in now You stand
inside there, honey, where you can watch and won't get tramped on."

He empties several buckets of ground corn into the troughs and calls
the cattle, and then goes up a ladder into the loft and begins filling the
mangers with hay. She can hear him walking back and forth in the loft,
the forked hay sliding over the floorboards and dropping down into the
mangers. The cattle crowd to the troughs, latecomers throwing their
heads up and wedging their way in. The calves, forgotten, play or stand
or lie in the open spaces. For the time being, the old cows are held at the
trough by pure violence of appetite. Hannah can hear them breathing,
their rough tongues sweeping the bottoms of the troughs.

She feels a strange, threatened happiness. They have talked easily
about Virgil for the first time in a month. Mat has told her things about
Virgil that she never knew. She feels herself surrounded closely now by
this place of his life, his love for the placid hungry lives of cattle.

Mat comes down, goes into the feed room, and comes out with two
big buckets. Turning them upside down against the front of the stall, he
helps her to sit down on one of them, and he sits on the other.

"You oughtn't to be standing up so much," he says. "I should have
thought of it before."

"I wasn't tired. I'm having a good time."

"Good. Well, you tell me what you need. Don't wait for me to think
of it." He leans forward, putting his elbows on his knees and lacing his
fingers.

"I remember the first crop of his own that Virgil ever tried to raise. He broke about two acres out back there on the ridge, and fenced it and
laid the rows off to suit him. I'd told him as much as I knew about it, and
let him go. Well, you know this is difficult land to farm. So much of it
steep. Hard to keep it from washing. I expect I've seen half the topsoil go
off of some farms around here in my time. More, maybe. We've been
slow to have enough sense to farm this kind of land, and lack plenty yet.
My daddy hurt some of these hillsides badly in his time. Made some bad
mistakes. I tried to learn from his, and went right on and made some bad
ones of my own. Anyhow, Virgil broke his ground farther over the brow
of the hill than he should have. Like a boy, you know. Didn't stop in time.
But he got his rows laid off about right, and got his crop out-and I didn't
say anything, hoping he'd have luck and get that mistake free. Thought
I'd show him later what he'd done wrong, soon as I could do it without
hurting his feelings.

"But there was an awful rain one night after his crop had been out, I
guess, two weeks. I heard it begin and lay awake listening to it, knowing
what was bound to be happening. And the next morning I said, `Let's go
look at your crop.' So we went, and walked all the way around it. It was
hurt. Bound to have been. There's no way to plow sideling ground so it'll
hold in a rain like that. `Virgil,' I said, this is your fault. This is one of
your contributions to the world.' That was hard for me to say. And he
took it hard. I saw he was about to cry. And bad as I hated to do it, I let it
work in him while we stood there and looked. I knew he was hating the
day he ever thought of raising a crop, ready to give up. Finally I put my
arm around him and I said, `Be sorry, but don't quit. What's asked of you
now is to see what you've done, and learn better.' And I told him that a
man's life is always dealing with permanence-that the most dangerous
kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary. That,
anyhow, is what I've tried to keep before myself. What you do on the
earth, the earth makes permanent."

He laughs, and looks at Hannah. "Every time I make a mistake, that
gets more painful to believe."

He shifts his position on the bucket, letting his eyes go back to the
feeding cattle.

"I think of the pain I've given to my children. Especially to Virgilnow. You hope for a realization in them, finally, that the pain is given out of love, inept and blundering and blind and wrong as it can sometimes
be. I don't worry so much about Bess. She's had a family of her own long
enough to know the terrified love you can sometimes have for your children. But Virgil I feel like I owe an accounting to. There's maybe only
weakness in it. You want your good intentions recognized, even the
failed ones. You want it known by the ones nearest you that your good
intentions are a real part of your life, and your love for them."

His eyes move over the ranked backs of the cattle, attentively, though
Hannah cannot tell whether he is thinking about them or not. She studies his face, seeing in it something she has never seen there before, an old
man's sorrow for the imperfection of his life and of his fatherhood. She
understands suddenly how a young man might be borne up, might justify everything, by the hope of perfection-and, growing old, must realize that he has done nothing perfect. She knows that Mat has allowed her
to see, as Virgil never was allowed to, the pained underside of his severity. And she feels, as Mat must, the tragedy in the possibility that Virgil
will never see it. She would like to be able to say something comforting,
but realizes that she cannot. She cannot comfort even herself.

Still watching the cattle, as though nothing else has been said, Mat
says, "Whenever I can, I take a Sunday afternoon and do what we're
doing now-go to each barn and feed, and then sit down and watch the
stock eat. It's a way to take time enough to see what I'm doing, and get a
little pleasure out of it."

"You haven't been getting much pleasure out of it lately, have you?"

"No. For the last two or three weeks I've been here and seen them and
fed them and gone before they could hardly get to the troughs. There's
no satisfaction in that. And I tell you, if a man doesn't farm for his own
satisfaction, he'll have a hard time finding another good reason to do it."

"But you do like it?"

"There's not any other life for me. That's why I wanted Virgil to have
it, I reckon-I knew if he wanted it, it would be a good life for him. I'm
not saying it's not hard. But I can tell you that all my life, in spite of the
worst, I've been inspired by this place, and by what I foresaw or hoped I
could do in it. I've lived my life the way a hungry man eats."

Mat stands up.

"I'm about to forget the main thing."

He grins at the curiosity that comes into her face, but does not tell her
what the main thing is. The resemblance between him and Virgil is suddenly strong. She watches him go into the feed room with his bucket
and come back. He helps her up and opens the door to the next stall.

"Here's a family I thought you'd like to see."

Inside there is one of the cows, gaunt from giving birth, the afterbirth
still hanging. And in the corner, on the clean straw, her calf is lying
asleep, curled tightly, making a nest of itself.

"Oh," Hannah says, and lets herself clumsily down beside the calf.
"Look how little," she says. She lays her hand gently on the red and white
hide. The cow comes over and smells her.

Mat puts feed into the cow's trough, and brings fresh water, and then
he squats down beside Hannah.

"Is it a boy or a girl?"

`A boy. A bull."

"He's so clean."