A Place on Earth (Port William) (35 page)

Margaret's head is again bent over her work, and he watches her now,
for several minutes as intent on the movement of her hands as she is.
Finally, leaning forward, he says: "I wish somebody would come out and
tell us something."

"I'm sure they will, if there's a reason to."

He looks at his watch. It is only two o'clock. He gets up again and
stands at one of the windows.

Years ago Anvil Brant's old father, having come in his last years to the
troublesome habit of waking up hours before daylight, sat in Burgess's
store listening to a conversation about spring weather and the lengthening of the days. "Days and nights both getting longer," he said. "I can tell
it." Mat remembers that now and laughs and tells it to Margaret. "I know
what he meant," he says.

"Morning will come," Margaret says, "it always does. And the baby
will be born."

"It won't be as long as it has been, anyhow," he says, but that doesn't
comfort him. "Well," he says, "I believe I'll go see if I can find some coffee somewhere."

"Do you think you'll find a place open?"

"Oh, I expect so," he says, doubting it, but determined to go. "Do you
want some coffee?"

"I suppose not. Maybe I'll go to sleep."

What he is hoping is that while he is gone the baby will be born, and
that he will come back to find all well and the waiting finished. Once
down the stairs and out the door, he walks rapidly through the sleeping
streets of the town, the silence broken only by the cries of the invisible
nighthawks still circling in the air over the trees and the roofs and by the
echoing beat of his own footsteps.

He comes to the main street and turns along it. The lights are brighter
here and more frequent. From time to time, a car or a truck passes. Mat
walks nearly the whole length of the street, finding no place open. He
is nearly ready to turn around and start back when, just before the
approach to the bridge, he sees a lighted sign: MORT'S DINER.

Going in, he sees at the end of the counter a waitress in a soiled white
dress, sitting on a high stool, head propped on her right hand, sound
asleep. He is still standing in the door, holding the screen open. So as not
to embarrass her he lets it slam behind him. Looking at the signs on the
walls, pretending not to have seen her, he notices that she wakes and,
hurriedly picking up a wet rag, begins mopping the top of the counter.
He goes over and sits on one of the stools opposite her.

"Good evening," she says. "What for you?" She looks and sounds like
she must have been asleep a long time.

"Hello." He smiles. "Long nights, aren't they, to have to work by yourself?"

She studies him a moment, and then says: "Well, he ought to be here
before long. He usually comes right about this time."

Irritated at first to have been cast so automatically in that role, Mat sees
that the girl's assumption implies a compliment to herself that she must
need-she is remarkably homely, and sleepiness does not improve her.
Careful this time not to smile at her, he says: "I'll have a cup of coffee."

She fills a cup for him, slides it across the counter, and pushes sugar
and cream toward him. She sits down again, propping her head up as
before with her hand, though now her eyes stay open. On a shelf behind
her a small radio is playing dance music, turned low

The coffee is both stale and strong, the taste of it a shock.

"Pew!" Mat says to himself, setting the cup down. But to the girl he
says: "Now there's something to wake a man up. You'd have trouble
sleeping through a drink of that."

She merely looks at him, her face long, bony, blank. Whether the look
is meant to express indifference or suspicion, or is just empty, he cannot
tell.

The music fades off the radio. The clipped neutral voice of an announcer comes on with a news report. Though Mat listens, especially to
the war news, when it is over he cannot remember anything that was said.

He realizes how tired he must be. His mind, though almost unbearably wakeful and restless, is failing to connect one time to another. That
he is there in the diner, staring down into his half-emptied cup, seems
strange to him, hardly believable. His own two hands seem to have
reached into the circle of his vision out of a dream.

Deliberately, he forces his mind back to Hannah and the baby about
to be born, maybe already born. And he goes back to the hospital, hastened by imaginings of what may have happened during his absence.

When he steps into the waiting room, Margaret is sitting with her
eyes shut, her head leaned against the chairback. At first he supposes that
she is asleep, and he walks quietly. But she sits up and opens her eyes.

"Were you asleep?"

"No. Resting."

"Has anything happened?"

"No."

"Have you heard anything?"

"Not yet."

He looks at his watch. It is a quarter after three.

He sits down, the quiet of the room grows round him again, and it is
as though he never left. He only feels tireder, more exposed to what is
happening and will happen. For the first time all night he admits into his
mind the awareness of the pain surrounding him in the rooms of the
hospital. He submits to the fact of it, nerves bared to it, knowing that it
surrounds him in ever-widening circles that finally take in the world.
Over the roof the nighthawks circle and cry, their voices like small stones
striking together under water.

Without expecting to, he falls asleep. The familiar ache sits on his
shoulder now like a red bird, not moving.

He dreams he is at work, harrowing a broken field. He can see nothing. He can see a cloud of bright dust rising thickly from the disks of the
harrow. He can smell and taste the dust. His eyes are gritty with it. And
then the dust seems to draw in and around him until he can no longer
see it. He becomes aware of the compactness of his body. He can see his
hands holding the reins as he drives the long, slowly shortening rounds
of the field. He can see all the surface of the worked earth. He is aware
of a point like an eye in the center of the field that his circling will finally
bring him to, and where it will end. The dust rises around him again,
blotting his sight, to become what next he does not know.

It grows dark. He is aware of water near him, and trees around him,
the sound and feel of a cold rain falling steadily, though he can see nothing. For a long time he has been walking in this dark place, stopping to
listen, and going on. Unable to see, never knowing exactly where he is in
the double strangeness of a familiar place made strange, he must cover
all the great dark breadth of the water with his listening, though he
expects to hear nothing. He is without hope. He may never have had
hope. But he is torn by such grief and love for the child lost or dead that
he does hope.

Now in the darkness the sound of the laboring of a powerful engine
seems to approach him and grow louder. Now he feels beneath his body
the lurching and swaying of a heavy machine. For some time he cannot
bring himself to realize who he is or what he is doing. And then there
comes a little more light and he does see. With the blade of a bulldozer
he is trying to scrape up enough dirt from a frozen, rocky slope to fill a
grave. The grave is as big as a field. Young men, soldiers, lie in rows in it,
awaiting the covering earth. They lie on their backs, unspeakably submissive to the approach of the great machine. He has a hurt in his shoulder, but whether it is a wound or the claws of a red bird perched there,
he cannot tell. He knows with sorrow who he is. He knows that there is
a face among all those of the dead that he cannot bear to see. The engine
pulses steadily on.

"Mat."

He knows that the voice calling him is outside the dream.

"Mat."

It is Margaret's voice, near, but outside. Now her hand has taken hold
of his arm.

"Mat! Mat, wake up!"

He thrusts himself forward, opening his eyes, breaking through, and
out, into the room. Margaret is leaning over him, her hand still on his
arm.

"Mat?" she says.

" Hm?"

`Are you awake now?"

"Yes. I believe so."

Elbows on knees, he rubs his hands over his face.

"What in the world were you dreaming?"

"I declare, I can't remember," he says, lying. "I can just remember it
was a bad one."

Out on the river, half a mile or more away, he can hear the engine of
a towboat laboring up against the current. Though he is awake, he still
feels the dream near him, and the sound of the engine still carries its fear.

It slowly fades into the distance, and he sees that the dawn light has
begun to grow, drifting through the windows into the heights and corners of the room, dimming the lamp. He grows aware that the birds are
singing. The trees, the streets, the air over the town are filled with their
voices. They seem to spend themselves recklessly in singing, as though
willing to die of it. He gets up, goes to the window, and stands looking
out. He can see two rows of houses set back to back, their yards and gardens fenced in neat rectangles, big shade trees growing in them so that
not far off he can no longer see the ground but only the billowing green
treetops, broken into here and there by the slants and angles of roofs. In
the nearest garden there are flowers blooming, irises and peonies, purple
and pink and white. The people in the houses seem not to have wakened
yet. As far as he can see up and down the street there is no one in sight.
Thin shelves and strands of mist stretch over the back lots and among
the roofs and the still tops of the trees. As he watches, the mist slowly
takes the stain of the rising sunlight.

And then, into the forgotten room behind him, he hears a door swing
open.

"Oh!" Margaret says.

He turns, blinking to accustom his eyes to the dimness, and sees,
lying half upright in the doctor's gloved hands, naked and red, still wet
from the womb, a newborn child.

"Look, Mat," Margaret says. "It's Hannah's baby. A little girl."

Mat is looking, afraid to open his mouth, not knowing whether he
would laugh or cry. The baby works legs and arms helplessly in the air,
twists its body, manages a weak yell, and keeps yelling. The joy he heard
in Margaret's voice swells in Mat now, leaving hardly room for breath.

Dr. Markman, hair in his eyes, a day and night's growth of whiskers
on his face, stands there holding the baby, grinning like a fisherman.

"It's Hannah's baby," Margaret said.

Nor did Mat call it or think it Virgil's. Tenderness for Hannah cried out
in him too at that moment, and he thought of her.

But from those words, it seems to him, though j oy crowded upon him
for a while, he began a second descent into sorrow that carried him down
more steeply than the first.

Though in his joy he spoke of Virgil to himself, he did not speak of
him to Margaret or to Hannah. He does not dare to risk the possibility
that Virgil is alive, because he does not dare admit the possibility that he
is dead. There is a shame in that, and it has killed his joy.

Going to Hargrave with Margaret to bring Hannah and the baby
home, Mat feels a growing premonition of dread. He can foresee the
coming days as clearly as if they had already happened. The life of the
house will change, accommodate itself to the needs of the new life, and
then in a few days the new will be learned, what once was unexpected
will become a habit-and they will go on as before. Mat dreads that
leveling-off. He has begun to look forward without hope.

On the drive home he keeps mostly silent. Margaret and Hannah are
in good spirits, happy in the thoughts and plans that surround the child.
Mat is aware that his silence must be noticeable to them, must seem unkind. But fated to go down into the intelligence of death-already
going down-he feels himself beyond the reach of all that might lift him
back. All the force of his life seems to have withdrawn into his own body,
to survive or perish there beyond the help of anyone but himself. Beside
him, lying in the crook of Margaret's arm he can see the baby's head,
covered with bright down. Aware as he is of the potency of hopelessness
and death in himself, the sight of that head is almost more than he can
bear.