A Place on Earth (Port William) (29 page)

"He was pretty messy at first, but she licked him clean."

Mat strokes the calf's back briskly, roughing the hair. The calf wakes
up, lifts its white head and looks at them, and then puts it down again.
The white-lashed eyes stay open.

`And gentle. He's not afraid of us at all."

"Well, his mammy's not, which helps. But that's the wonder of anything newborn. He's clean and unworried and not afraid. And dinner's
ready all the time. Here. Feel his hoofs. See. They're already hard. When
he was born, they were soft, like gelatin."

"I never thought of that, but I see how necessary it is."

"It's all pretty well worked out. I'm always a little surprised every time
I see it happen. He's a nice calf. See how well marked he is?"

"He's very nice. It's a nice idea."

'Which idea?"

"The idea of something newborn." She smiles.

"One of the best."

He helps her up and then picks up the calf and stands it on its feet.
"Stand up there, old chap. Let's see how you are."

The calf balances shakily for a moment, its legs looking too weak, its
head too heavy. Mat turns him loose. Unsure whether its legs are for propping or walking, the calf starts toward the cow. It reaches her finally,
tries to nurse between her forelegs, nudges, blunders, staggers, collapses
into a mess of legs, straightens itself, gets up, finds the tit at last. They
hear its mouth smacking as the milk starts to come. Hannah laughs with
pleasure and relief.

"If he can find his way back there a few more times," Mat says, "maybe
he'll learn the way."

He picks up his bucket and opens the door. "Well, let's go. We've got
the rest of the rounds still to make." At the door he stops and turns
around, looking back once more at the cattle. "When he went, you know,
he wanted me to sell them-not trouble myself with them. I wouldn't
do it, and I'm glad I didn't. They're here."

It is still clearing. When they come out of the dark barn the whole
ridge is in sunlight. The green ridgetops before them are sprinkled heavily with dandelions, the woods along the draws and bluffs beaded with
leaf buds. In thickets scattered over the slopes of the river valley are the
clean white and pink of wild plum and redbud. The shores of the river
have turned pale green with the new leaves of the willows. The shadows
of clouds slide rapidly over the face of the country, dimming it, leaving it
somehow brighter than it was.

Farther back there is another barn, a tobacco barn, where Mat has
wintered a little bunch of steers. Leaving the truck where it is, he and
Hannah walk toward this second barn. Mat is pointing out various
houses and farms in the valley, and saying who used to live there, and
who lives there now. Two or three times, as their perspective on the valley changes, they stop and look.

"When I was a boy," Mat says, "the showboats used to come up the
river in the summertime. You'd hear the calliope commence playing, and
then you could hear the people holler for miles on both sides. And that
night, when the show time came, they'd all be there, as many of them
as could rake up the ticket money. We'd talk about it afterwards for a
month."

When they come to the barn Hannah stays outside, and Mat goes in
alone. She walks on out along the top of the ridge, the sun on her, miles
of sunlit country blooming around her. She is comforted by all that Mat
has said to her, and by the country filling with spring.

She turns to the side, going through a gate and down the slope above
the bluff into a small patch of woods in a shallow draw. Here over the
dead leaves of the last year, the sunlight is webbed with the shadows of
branches. On the far side of the little woods there is a white thicket of
wild plum, and there are several redbuds at the woods' edge, brilliant
against the dark trunks of the taller trees. And blooming out of the dead
leaves there are bloodroot, trillium, trout lilies, Dutchman's-breeches,
twinleaf, yellow and purple violets. Everywhere the fern leaves are uncurling. The May apples are coming up, the two leaves creased and
bronze, bent and furled downward from the round flower-bud like a
young animal folded to be born. The buds overhead stain the light.
Through a rocky trough in the center of the draw runs a clear stream,
dropping from one mossy ledge to another, the sound of it filling the
grove. On the ridge above her, she can hear Mat calling the cattle. She
wanders slowly over the dry leaves, picking violets.

And then it is not long before she hears him calling her. She answers
him, and shortly sees him coming in among the trees, the netting of
their shadows falling over him.

"Well, haven't you found a nice place!"

"Isn't it? Look at all the flowers."

"Yes. And a pretty bouquet."

The little branch keeps up its steady chattering over the rocks. They
stand without talking.

Finally Mat says, "It's a mighty nice place to have to leave. But I guess
we'd better do it. Are you rested? You feel all right?"

She nods. They begin the limb back up over the ridge. Mat takes her
arm. They step a little formally now, he supporting her, she holding her
bouquet.

"I'm a great one for places. This farm's just full of places I've picked
out to spend a day sitting in, if I ever get time to do it. Cool places or
quiet ones, with water running or an overlook. I've thought of some of
them nearly all my life. And looks like I've never had time to sit down
and be still for very long in a one."

"Whoo," she says.

She stops to rest and Mat stops beside her.

"Getting steeper all the time, ain't it?"

She laughs. "Much steeper than it was coming down." But she feels
too heavy. She looks up at the rest of the climb with dread. She has got
herself into a pretty foolish predicament for a woman eight months
gone.

"You just rest all you need to," he says. "Take your time. You'll make
it all right."

"Of course," she says. She looks straight into his eyes now and laughs.
"I'm not worried. Think of all the calves and lambs and things that you've
helped get born."

"Oh, Lord," Mat says, "that's different."

They both laugh.

"I can go on now," she says.

`All right. Let's angle around and over the point. That'll be longer, but
not so steep."

He goes beside her, giving her his arm to lean on. They go slowly, taking a gradual upward slant along the face of the slope. High up, clear of
the trees, the valley lying open again below them, they stop again to rest,
standing facing the valley.

"Oh, I've been here before," Hannah says. "Virgil brought me here
once to show me where he'd like to build a house." She stops, confused,
having said that.

They turn a little away from each other, cautious.

"Well, ain't it a nice place for one," Mat says.

Around her she can see the stones Virgil laid down that night to mark
the corners, scattered out of alignment now, but still there. The fear of
great loss comes over her, the great wanting of what may be lost. She
turns around and starts up on the slope. Mat catches up and takes her
arm. They go on, without talking and without stopping, to the truck.
Mat helps her in and gets in himself.

"How you making it?" he asks her.

"Better now. Much better."

They look at each other now and smile, having made it so, for one
time at least.

Old Jack opened the door of the woodshed for the first time on a warm
afternoon two weeks ago. And since then he has made it his place. When
he first looked into it, it was full of cast-off furniture, scrap lumber, old
fruit jars, tin cans, rusty tools, an old mattress, the smell of mildew

He spent odd hours of three or four days cleaning it out, burned all
that was burnable, stacked the rest neatly in a corner, swept the floor
boards and walls, left it open in the warm afternoons to air. The results
of his work, he admits, are not very impressive. The old shed is far gone.
A man could take a broom handle and knock it down. Still, he finds the
neatness he has made in it satisfactory. As in his room in the hotel, there
is nothing here to show that he has appropriated it. He has put nothing
in it except a little order. Between him and the ramshackle building there
is only the pleasure of sitting in it on warm days, looking out at the big
pasture behind the town. Sometimes he sleeps there, the sun shining in
on him. Mrs. Hendrick has seen him going back there, has even made a
little habit of watching his comings and goings from the kitchen window, but he always uses the back door of the woodshed, and so she has
no certain idea what he is doing. She will, she supposes, sooner or later
go out and see, but she tells herself she will have to wait and do it sometime when he will not see her-not that it would make a whit of difference to him, even she knows that, but she has a secret little flair for detective work, also plenty of curiosity that she could not satisfy so well in
Old jack's presence as she can in his absence. She did get alarmed at the
smoke he made, but so far she has-wisely, she thinks, and virtuouslyheld her peace.

Now Old Jack picks up a rusty scythe and, chipping and pecking with
the end of the file, begins flaking the rust off the blade. What he is going
to get around to today is the weeds. Already in the lot behind the hotel,
growing up green among the last summer's dead stalks, the weeds have
begun to come. He whets the edge of the blade with the file, leaving the
metal bright.

It has been a long time since he went to work early in the morning.
Though he did not think he had, he has forgot the delicate flavors of the
satisfaction he used to get out of that. The best of it, it turns out, is unre callable. The realization fills him with a sense of loss that would be hard
to bear if he did not have the scythe in his hand. He tests the cutting
edge with his thumb, and is satisfied. The sun is just getting up into the
branches of the old locusts around the woodshed and along the back
fence.

He starts a narrow swath along the crumbling foundation of the
hotel, cutting the creeper stems off at the ground as he goes, leaving the
weeds, the green and the dead together, lying down behind him.

He gets tired quicker than he thought he would-though he has not
been working at what you would call an old man's pace. He goes back
and pulls the creepers loose from the weatherboarding. By the time he
does that he is short of breath, a little staggery. He goes back to the
woodshed and sits down.

His weakness saddens him. He can remember when a little job like
this would just be something to do after supper some night. But he might
as well admit it: it is not anymore. And he will have to mend his licks. He
will have to get back in that old man's gait, and stay in it, if he aims to get
anything done at all. "Where's the fire at, old man?" he asks himself.

He whets his scythe and goes back. He is startled by the change he has
made. He has done more than he thought. He can change the look of
the world still. A kind of inspiration comes into him, the familiar lifting
of the thought of what can be done here by a man. He finishes his first
swath, and starts a new one. But now he is working more slowly-a pace
he thinks maybe he can stand for an hour or two.

He is in the middle of this third swath when the kitchen window
opens with a clatter and Mrs. Hendrick puts her head out.

"Mis-ter Beechum! You've got no business to cut them weeds! If I
want them weeds cut, I'll cut them myself!"

Old Jack accepts the challenge. He stops, and looks at her as if she is
farther away than she is.

"Me and weeds never have lived in the same place together, old
woman."

He goes back to work, same pace. She goes straight to the telephone
and calls Wheeler Catlett. And while Old Jack goes on slowly and happily at his work in the back lot, Wheeler is pleading his case with Mrs.
Hendrick in the hotel dining room.

"Could you see that he was doing any harm, Mrs. Hendrick, by cutting those weeds?"

"Yessir! He's doing harm, my opinion, cutting them weeds. Them's my
weeds."

"Well, Mrs. Hendrick, it's good for the old fellow to have something
to do. And I'd think it would be to your profit to have those weeds cut."

Mrs. Hendrick's voice becomes tremulous. "He never even asked, is
what I mean, Mr. Catlett. That's what's so insulting to me. Just went out
there and sharpened my scythe and went to cutting them weeds just like
he owned the place. Just a cutting and a cutting, and a calling me `old
woman."' She wipes her eyes with her apron. "Sometimes a widow
woman, seems like, just don't have no place to turn. If he'd asked me, Mr.
Catlett, I'd have let him do it."

"Well, Mrs. Hendrick, now that he has begun, won't you be so kind as
to let him go on? Don't you think that would be best?"

"I reckon so. I just hope there won't no more trouble come of it, Mr.
Catlett."

When Wheeler comes around the hotel, Old Jack's back is turned to
him. "Good morning, Uncle Jack."

Something's up, Jack knows right away. Whenever Wheeler comes in
the morning, something is up. 'Why hello, Wheeler. How are you,
honey? I was just cutting a few of these weeds. The damnedest mess of
them ever I saw. Just look a here," he says, gesturing around him, "what
that old woman has let grow up right in her door."

"Shhh!" Wheeler says. Old Jack always refers to Mrs. Hendrick as
that old woman," though she is at least twenty years younger than he is.
"Uncle Jack," he says, "don't call her an old woman-at least not to her
face."

Old Jack smiles and lays his hand on Wheeler's arm. "Don't you worry
about that, honey. Me and her get along."

By the evening of the next day-working a while and sitting a whileOld Jack has finished the weeds on Mrs. Hendrick's lot, and has made a
good beginning on the weeds behind the store. It looks fairly good, he
thinks, a big improvement.