A Place on Earth (Port William) (33 page)

He goes through the lot gate and, following a pair of wheel tracks
worn in the grass, walks out along the broad back of the ridge. The
tracks turn after a couple of hundred yards, cross a shallow swag, go
through a grove of big white oaks, and come to a second gate, which
opens into the broken field where he expects to find his tenant.

When he first comes into the field there is no one in sight. He sits
down on a sled up the fence a few rods from the gate, and rests and waits.
Before him lies the long, evenly worked strip of crop ground, sloping
gently toward the woods on the lower side. Looking up and down the
length of it, he sees nothing at first except a few black birds walking over
the newly stirred earth. And then over the rise to his left a team of three
horses, two blacks and a bay, comes into sight, stepping at a brisk pace,
their heads nodding, a brown plume of dust rising behind the harrow as
they draw it along. As they come nearer down the long field, Old Jack
can hear the harness creaking, the rattling of the trace chains and the
metal tripletrees. Now and then the disks of the harrow grate on a stone.
The horses stride powerfully over the loose ground.

Knowing a good team when he sees one, Old Jack comes wide awake.
He sits, leaning a little forward now, on the edge of the sled. He grins
and shakes his head.

'Ay, Lord!" he says.

You can see that there is no deadhead sitting behind that team of
horses. The man is driving, not riding. And though Jack has not heard
him utter a word, the horses move in a way that shows they know exactly
who they have behind them and what he expects.

With a great rattling and creaking and loud breathing the big team
draws down toward Old Jack, and then even with him.

"Whoa! Whoa, boys!"

The tone of the young man's voice is full of praise. He speaks as he
might speak to three other men well known to him. The horses stop and
stand. The young man turns to old Jack, grins, raises his hand.

"Good morning, sir!"

He loops the reins over a lever and steps off the harrow, hurrying
toward the sled. Old Jack, seeing how he hastens at his work, gets up and
goes out across the harrowed ground to meet him-in a kind of panic
trying to remember what his name is.

"How are you, Mr. Beechum?"

For the life of him, Old Jack cannot think of the young man's name.
Usually it does not matter to him what somebody's name is. But he has
begun to think a lot of this young fellow, and he would like to call him by
name.

"I'm all right, son. You're working a good team of horses."

"They do pretty well," the young man says.

But Old Jack can see that he knows they do better than pretty well,
and that he recognizes the value of the compliment and appreciates it.
Old Jack was a fine horseman and teamster in his day, and it is clear that
the young man knows that.

They talk briefly about the weather and about the prospects for the
crops. Old Jack asks a question or two, and the young man answers. He
is a lean, hard-muscled fellow, clean-cut, with the curious ability to look
neat in dirty work clothes. Respectfully and good-humoredly he fulfills
what he considers to be his duty to his landlord, explaining what he has
done and how he has done it and what he plans to do and what his
thoughts are about the work of the farm. And beneath the pleasantness
with which he does this explaining can be felt his confidence in his own
work and his own judgment. A good head. Old Jack gets the impression
that his opinions and approval are not being asked for, and instead of
being angered by the young man's independence as he would have
expected, he finds that he is delighted. It is a meeting of two of the same
kind. While he was taking the measure of the younger man, his own
measure has been taken. That tickles him. When his last question has
been answered, he raises his hand.

"You go right ahead. Satisfy yourself, and you'll satisfy me."

Old Jack never said that to anybody before. He looks at the young
man, wondering if he understands, and sees that he does.

The young man nods. "I thank you."

Starting back toward the harrow, he says, "Well, will you be around a
while, Mr. Beechum?"

`About all day, son," Old Jack says, waving. "I'll be talking to you."

He watches the young man swing up onto the harrow seat and take
the reins in his hands.

"Come up, Prince! Dan!"

The horses step at once into the pace they were going in when they
stopped. The young man does not look back. As though no interruption
has taken place, the great hooves lift and fall, the harrow disks slice
through the ground, the plume of dust rises into the sky.

Old Jack stands and watches until the man and team reach the end of the field and make the turn and start back, and then he goes to the sled
again and sits down. The terms of an unexpected happiness have begun
to work themselves out in his mind, the possibility of an orderliness in
his history that he has not dared to hope for, a clean transition from his
life to the life of another man. It is as though he has come to a window
looking out onto a lighted country where before was only darkness.
While the young man makes the long rounds of the field, the old one
continues to sit there on the sled and watch.

After a while he sees the wife come through the gate carrying a water
jug. Seeing him, she comes on up the fence and offers him a drink, which
he accepts and thanks her. She smiles.

"He went out this morning and forgot to bring it," she explains. "I
thought he might be thirsty."

"It's a fact, honey," Old Jack says. "He might."

He cannot remember her name either.

When he has drunk and thanked her again, she takes the jug and goes
out across the worked ground to meet her husband, who stops the team
and takes a long drink. Putting the top back on the jug, he says something to her. Old Jack is too far away to hear what he says, but he can see
his white teeth as he smiles. The wife does not come back to where Old
Jack is, but goes directly to the gate. As she looks at him and waves, going
out, he raises his hat to her and bows.

After she goes, the sun growing warm against his back, he drops off
to sleep, leaning forward a little over his hands, which are folded on the
crook of the cane.

When he opens his eyes he is looking at the ground between his feet.
And then, as often when he wakes up after sleeping in the daytime, he
feels go through him the ache of panic, afraid he has slept through something he should have been awake for. He raises his head. The field and
the sky dazzle and sway in the brilliant light. A crow is calling loudly in
the woods. He cannot at first realize where he is, and when he does his
reasons for being there appear strange to him. He feels as though he is
falling from a place where he has kept himself dangerously balanced.

And then he sees the team coming toward him a long way up the
field, sits forward, and watches attentively, studying the motion of the
horses and the harrow, the steady rising and spreading of the dust cloud behind them. And gradually the familiarity of these things comes back
to him. The field steadies and grows quiet under the daylight. He begins
to hear the small sounds made by the harrow. The band of freshly
worked ground along the edges of the field has grown wider.

He is suddenly ashamed of himself for sleeping while right before his
eyes a good man is at work. He does not want to be sitting there when
that young man comes by, does not want the young man to see that he
has waked up and wave to him, cannot stand the thought of himself
waving back as though he does not mind being useless. He gets up and
with a show of purposeful haste, which he does not feel and which disgusts him by its falseness, goes to the gate and lets himself through.

He finds himself now in the predicament of hurrying off toward the
barns without the slightest notion of what he will do when he gets there.
He supposes there were several more things he planned to see to, but it
is annoying to have to think of them now only to save face, and his
annoyance keeps him from being able to think.

But before he has gone much farther, his mind has completely
changed its subject. He has left the wheel tracks and begun to wander,
though he keeps the same general direction. He goes out through the
grove of oaks, down across the small wet-weather stream at the bottom
of the swag, and up the opposite slope to the high point of the ridge.
Now and again he stops and stands a long time, looking. He is studying
his land, the shape of it, the condition of the growth on it, with the interest in it that he has had all his life.

When he gets back to the barn lot he takes another look around,
measuring the work there against his new estimate of the workman.
There is little that needs doing. Such small evidences of neglect as he can
find are attributable to the hurry of the spring work. He finds a loose
board in the granary door, and nails it tight. He does a little straightening
up in the harness room, though it is not really necessary. He finds a couple of hoes and an axe and a scythe that need sharpening, and he sharpens them. He cuts a few weeds that have begun to grow up along the lot
fence. Hearing the ringing of loose trace chains, he looks up and sees the
young man coming in with the horses. He looks at his watch and then at
the sun. It is dinnertime.

He hurries to put his hoe away, and to open the lot gate ahead of the team. He gets it open just in time and the horses come through without
having to stop. The young man is riding the lead horse, the bay one, and
leading the others. As he rides by Old Jack he smiles and raises his hand.

"Thank you, sir!"

"That's all right, son."

Taking the horses on around to the well in front of the barn, the
young man jumps to the ground and begins pumping water into the
trough. Old Jack stands in the barn door and watches. Seeing the good
team of horses drink after their hard morning's work makes him happy.
They drink a long time, pausing now and then to raise their heads and
stand with a far-off gaze in their eyes, mouthing the cool water. When
they are finished the young man leads them into the barn and puts them
in their stalls.

"Give them plenty of corn," Old Jack says, not to be bossing, but as a
tribute to the horses.

When the young man comes out of the barn, Old Jack is making himself comfortable on an upturned bucket beside the well, his lunch packet
on his lap, a can of fresh water on the ground at his feet. He is about to
untie the string on the packet when the young man stops him.

"Mr. Beechum, come on to the house, now, and have a bite with us."

"Naw. I thank you, son. I can make out fine on what I brought."

"Well, we wouldn't want you to do that. We were sort of looking for
you to eat with us, and I expect there's plenty fixed."

Old Jack figures that is not entirely true, but he accepts, glad to escape
the baloney. He gets up and puts the packet back on the shelf in the barn.

They go together across the lot and through the yard, where the
morning's wash is drying on the line, and up onto the back porch. The
young man opens the screen door, and Old Jack goes ahead of him into
the kitchen.

"Hello! Come in! How are you?" the young wife says to him.

"Fine. Fine, thank you," Old Jack says to her, again bowing and smiling. `And how're you?" Because she is young and pretty and is kind to
him, he speaks to her with the indulgent tenderness with which he would
speak to a little girl.

He looks at the table and sees that it is, sure enough, set for three. As
he washes and dries his hands, he takes a look around the kitchen, find ing it a good deal changed from the way he remembers it-though he
has to admit that it looks nice the way it is, better certainly than it did
during the years after his wife's death when he did his own cooking in it,
letting the windows and the paint grow dingy and the finish wear off the
linoleum. Again, as in the morning-while he stands there pretending to
look out the window, and the young man washes-he feels a mixture of
pleasure and pain, only this time the pain is different and more intense.
Around the barns and in the fields all has been scrupulously kept as it
was when he left it, because it had been left in good shape and because
he has licensed no changes. But here, clearly, where an old life deteriorated and came to an end, a new strong one has begun. Though he
doubts that he will ever have occasion to see for himself, and knows that
he does not want to, he imagines this change to have taken place in all
the rooms of the house. The thought saddens him and freshens in his
mind all his old feelings toward his wife and his daughter. There in the
old kitchen in which he has eaten nearly all the meals of his life, he feels
the loss of what has gone by and he wishes he had not come.

But now the cheerful voice of the young wife is asking if he wouldn't
like to sit down. The meal is ready.

He and the young man go to the table. The wife finishes bringing the
food and sits down with them. They pass the dishes to Old Jack, urging
him to take as much as he wants of everything. They are doing all they
can to put him at ease, trying to relieve the awkwardness they feel in
their understanding that this house is his home, though he has come
back to it as its guest. Young as they seem to him, they do put him at ease.
Their manner toward him is respectful, but without any of that selfeffacing humility which as landlord he has learned to expect, and to distrust.

The meal is ample and well prepared, and Old Jack eats with the keen
pleasure that good company and the work of a good cook always give
him. He compliments the wife on her cooking, and compliments the
husband on his wife, calling the young couple "son" and "honey." He has
racked his brains but he cannot remember their names.

While they eat the young man asks how long it has been since a crop
was raised in the field he has been working in during the morning.
Telling him, Old Jack is reminded of the last crop grown there-a good one-and he tells about that. Prompted by the young man's questions
and his interest, Old Jack remembers and tells more about his younger
days than he has thought of in a long time, in the course of the conversation twice filling and emptying his plate.