A Place on Earth (Port William) (31 page)

Your uncle,

Burley

For the last time until next winter Mat has fed the herd of cows. Now,
while they eat, he walks out across the barn lot and the small pasture in
which the cows and calves have been kept all winter. It's a bright clear
morning, the first of May. From the ridgetop where he walks, he can see
the white mist in the valley just beginning to rise into the sunlight and
dissolve. Beyond the trampled close-eaten winter pasture the grass is
heavy and green along the ridge and on the slopes above the woods. He
opens the gate.

The winter, which has kept him going the rounds of the barns twice a
day and more, is all behind him now, and Mat feels his life changing. As
though this finishing has cleared the way, he can foresee the long hot
days of the summer, when the stock will no longer be so dependent on
him but the crops will. And from somewhere still far off in those long
weeks, he feels the approach of suffering for him and his house.

Virgil has been missing now for nearly two months, and in all that
time he and Margaret and Hannah have never spoken of the probability,
growing stronger every day, that Virgil is dead, or worse, that they may
never know. And along with everything else, Mat feels lonesome for Margaret and for their old life.

Lately he has returned many times to the thought of Gideon Crop's
vigil over the floodwater. It has become a kind of waking nightmare in which he wanders, imagining all that a man might be moved to by hopelessness and hope at the edge of a dark flood in which his best is lost.
Often in the midst of these visions he will hear himself curse or groan.

Out of his understanding of that horror that speaks so to his own, he
manages to find time every day or so to see Ida Crop, taking Margaret
with him sometimes, other times going by himself. He has become dependent on her, as if her survival of her loss is a lesson to him that he will
have somehow to learn.

Once, after she had made some mention of Annie, he asked her:
"How do you stand it, Ida?"

And she said, "You're thinking about your boy, ain't you, Mr. Feltner?"
She was looking away toward the creek. "I don't know," she said. "Sometimes I just have to sit down and bawl." She gave him another one of her
studying looks. "What I wish, I wish she was buried somewheres close in
a little grave."

He nodded. He realized that this was familiar to him.

"I tell myself that when Gideon gets back it'll be better."

She amazes Mat, and encourages him, though he comes on the pretense of encouraging her. Beyond her pain and endurance and will, it
seems to him that there's a hopefulness in her that is almost calm. It
comes, he thinks, from the knowledge, not just that she is young enough
yet to have more children, but that other women will get with child,
other children will be born, it will go on. It seems to Mat that this must
be one of the powers of women. He does not have it in him.

The cattle have leaned up the feed he put in for them and are drifting
out again into the sunlight. The cows have shed their winter hair and
their close summer coats shine in the light. Mat goes into the barn and
drives out the stragglers. Beyond the doors, working back and forth, he
gathers the herd and starts it toward the gate. The cows are fat, their
calves vigorous and in good flesh. Looking at them, he feels the satisfaction of success. The winter has been met and dealt with; ahead of them
now is the grass.

Coming closer, the cows see that the gate is open and they go toward
it at a trot, no longer needing to be driven. They enter the pasture and
begin to graze. Mat closes the gate and leans on it, watching. The only
sound now is that of the grass tearing.

Before Ernest finished taking down the lower part of the old barn, seeds
had already begun to sprout out of the dirt floor that the roof and walls
had kept dark for years. Since he took off the roof, the work has gone
slowly, involving much moving of ladders, a lot of temporary propping
and shoring up as he worked around the weakened corners, days of great
painstaking and difficulty in freeing and letting down the heavy timbers
of the framing. And there have been rainy days when he could not work
at all. But at last the whole lower half of the barn has been torn down,
and Ernest has begun siding up the open end of the half still standing.
Around the carefully sorted and stacked piles of old lumber and roofing,
the weeds have begun to grow tall.

As soon as he finishes the barn, he will paint it. After that there will be
the other jobs of repair and maintenance that Mat has asked him to do.
On Mat's visits to the little farm the two of them have gone the rounds of
all the buildings, looking them over, deciding what ought to be done for
the preservation of each one.

Every morning Ida brings him water in the half-gallon vinegar jug,
and sees to it that he carries it back with him, freshly filled, in the afternoons. And every day at noon he goes up to the house and washes and
sits by himself at the table while she brings the food to him as she did the
first day-though in the mornings he still shows up at Dolph Courtney's
at opening time and buys his customary packet of sandwiches. He cannot bring himself to give up either Idas company, such as it is, or her hospitality. And because he is a man deeply in the habit of secrecy about
himself, he cannot bring himself to give up his deceptions. When he
knows that she will be feeding the Coulters or Mat or any of the others
who are helping with the work of the place in Gideon's absence, he finds
it easy enough to go back to town at noon on the pretense of needing
materials or tools.

He has misgivings at the thought that she feeds him by her own troubling and providing even though the work he is doing there is not necessarily for her. Aware of the delicacy of the question, and made awkward
by it, he has asked several times if there is not some way that he can repay
her for her kindness to him. And each time she has scoffed at the idea.

"I've got plenty of canned stuff in the cellar," she told him once, "and
meat in the smokehouse. Somebody just as well be eating it."

Now and then when he sees she needs it, he will buy some staple such
as salt or coffee or flour and bring it to her, and always she will take it
with simple thanks and the observation that she was needing it, as if the
whole business is perfectly natural and even ordinary. It would delight
him to bring more, to buy and bring by the armload, but he knows
that to buy more where there is already plenty would seem ridiculous
to her.

Nothing has passed between them except her hospitality, the same as
she would offer to anybody who might come there to work-not just
her hospitality, as she offers it, but Gideon's as well. Or you could say that
it is not her hospitality that she offers at all, but only Gideon's, her offering of it being necessarily more meticulous because he is not there to
offer it himself.

But during the weeks that Ernest has been at work there, eating in her
kitchen, studying her ways and looks and movements, she has come into
his mind. In spite of her careless old dresses, her apparent unconcern
about her looks, there is a certain beauty that she has, and a certain dignity and strength that draw him toward her. Wherever she moves at her
work, in or out of his sight, he is aware of her. A kind of imagining sight
and touch carries his mind to her against his will. He imagines himself
living there with her, doing such farming as his lameness might allow. In
this dream of his, his shop is lifted intact out of Port William and set
down in place of Gideon's old toolshed under the oak tree. Except for
this holding on to the idea of the shop, one of the emotions of his dream
is surprise at the ease with which his old life can be given up.

That her mind is not on him at all-that except for what she would
think of as a decent and necessary kindness toward him, her attention
is turned away from him, as though she is always listening for the
approach of somebody else-this makes him all the freer to cultivate his
dream.

There are times when he realizes vaguely that he is trapped, endangered, like an animal that has crept through a narrow opening and fed
until it has grown too large to escape. The orderly interior of his shop is
remote from him now, of little use to him. In these moments of under standing, he knows that something behind him in his life is being
destroyed. Even if he could escape and make his way back to it, it would
no longer serve.

Old Jack never did have any trouble waking up. Now out of the light
sleep of his old age he wakes more easily than he ever did. And he is
hardly awake before he is up, cap already on, standing in the middle of
the floor, scratching his stomach and getting his bearings. Unhooking
his cane from the bed, he goes to the window and looks out. Above the
pale whitening of dawn in the east the morning stars are bright. It will be
a clear day.

Beyond the window the town is quiet. There is not a light burning
anywhere. As usual he is the first one up, and he likes the feeling of that,
has liked it all his life. Most of his days have begun in that silence, and it
is still one of his needs. He slept with the window half-open and he opens
it wide now and, turning back into the room, puts on his clothes. He
makes his bed in the dark, and instead of sitting at the window to wait
for daylight to come as he usually does, he goes out the door and starts
down the hall.

Wheeler has promised to come by for him early this morning and
take him out to spend the day at his farm. He has been planning this with
Wheeler for a couple of weeks, but for various reasons it has had to be
put off until now. Wheeler has a case to try in Frankfort today, so he will
not have to go much out of his way. Jack could just as easily have asked
Mat to take him, but Wheeler is his lawyer, not Mat, and he sees Mat
every day anyhow.

At the top of the steps he can hear Mrs. Hendrick snoring in her
room. He rakes his cane along the balusters lightly, and hears her stop
and groan and turn over.

He decides not to bother with waking her. Let all the day be good.

He goes on down the stairs and back along the hall and through the
kitchen and out the back door. Going out near the fence, he urinates,
making of the necessity an opportunity to look at his garden, which is
growing well. He cleaned it of weeds yesterday, and that cleanness and the dewy freshness of the morning seem to him to go together. In the
grey light the young plants in their rows show dark against the ground.

He goes back into the kitchen and turns on the light. Pawing around
in the old refrigerator, he finds bacon and eggs and, lighting the coal-oil
stove, makes himself a breakfast, cooking plenty and helping himself to
a bowl of cold biscuits that he finds in the dish cabinet. The bacon is not
well done and the eggs are too greasy, but he eats heartily, offsetting the
grease with half a dozen biscuits and a lot of water.

Last night he had Dolph Courtney make him some baloney sandwiches for his lunch today. He gets the packet out of the refrigerator now,
turns off the kitchen light, and goes to wait on the front porch. The daylight is getting strong, though it will still be half an hour or so until
sunup. Things have begun to stir at Mat's, and up and down the street
other houses have begun to show signs of life. Old Jack goes over to the
edge of the porch and looks out the road toward Hargrave. He imagines
that Wheeler is on his way. He lets his mind leave Wheeler's house down
at Hargrave and come up the road toward Port William at what he thinks
is about thirty-five miles an hour, careful to observe all the landmarks as
they go by. By the time his mind comes up out of the river valley and
starts across the ridge to Port William it is making at least sixty, though if
he knew it he would never let it go that fast. He lets it drive in over at
Mat's to take some message from Wheeler's wife, and then back out and
pull down in front of the hotel and park itself under the shade trees. But
Wheeler still has not come in sight. Old Jack looks and listens out the
road, but does not hear a thing. The east has begun to redden ahead of
the rising sun, and he knows she will be right on up. He takes out his
watch and-considering that it is late, and that how late does not
matter-puts it back without looking at it. He has not spent a full day at
home since he moved to Port William last fall, and now that the day has
finally come he grieves for every lost minute of it. Standing there, watching the sky redden, thinking of how much daylight is already behind
him, he is overcome by a kind of sad panic. He decides he had better call
Wheeler's house to see if he has left.

On the wallpaper over the telephone he has written in strokes an inch
high:

WHEELER CATLETT

OFFICE 7-2854