A Place on Earth (Port William) (38 page)

On the Thursday of the second week of July, Andy and Henry Catlett
come to the Feltner house for a visit. Their usual early arrival having been
delayed this summer by first one adult circumstance and then another,
they carry their bundled clothes into the house with an impatience born
of the certainty of missed excitements.

"Well," Henry says, dropping his bundle at the foot of the stairs,
"where's Uncle Ernest?"

`At work," Margaret tells him. "Way down there on the creek."

"where's Grandad?"

`At work too. I don't even know where."

"Take those clothes upstairs and put them away," Bess says.

They do as she says, and then come back down and kill time listening
to the women's conversation in the living room. But that is tame and disappointing compared to what they hoped to be doing by now. They sit
there, settling deeper and deeper into the bitter sense of having come
too late.

Finally, as their mother is getting ready to leave, they hear the rumbling of a wagon out toward the barn. Margaret glances at them and
smiles, giving permission, and they head for the back door.

When they come to the barn, Joe Banion has just driven his team and wagon into the lot, and stopped to go back and shut the gate. The boys
call to him, and he grins and raises his hand.

"Hello, buddies."

He shuts the gate. They run up to him.

"Let us go with you. Where you going?"

`Just over yonder to the wagon shed to put away the wagon." He
laughs at the disappointment in their faces, and says, "But I reckon you
can ride with me that far."

"What you going to do after that?" Henry asks.

"Going to unhitch the mules."

He climbs slowly up onto the wagon and helps them up after him.

"Let me drive," Henry says.

`Ain't going far. Just over to the shed."

"Well, let me drive just that far."

Joe hands him the lines. "Now you let them go slow and do what I tell
you.

Henry clucks to the team. "Come up."

They don't move.

"Come up! What's the matter with them, Joe?"

"They ain't used to you, buddy. I expect they don't believe what you
say."

Henry shakes out one of the lines and swats the off mule hard across
the rump.

"COME UP, you son of a bitches!"

In a second or two a good many things happen. The mules throw their
heads up and plunge forward. Andy falls backwards, rolling, onto the
bed of the wagon. Joe lurches back two or three steps, and then stumbles
forward, grabbing the lines with one hand and Henry's arm with the
other.

"Whoa, Jack! Whoa now! Sit down, Henry!"

The mules run the length of the lot, the wagon bouncing and pounding and rattling behind them. Joe manages to get control of them as they
come near the fence, and he brings them around, making a long turn,
settling them down to a trot, and then to a walk, and finally bringing
them to a stop about where they started.

"Whoa now."

He turns and looks down at Henry, who is sitting pop-eyed on the
boards behind him.

"Now, buddy, that don't do. And you know better. We all like to got
killed. The mule ain't going to stand to be insulted that way-specially
not by a stranger."

"I ain't any stranger," Henry says. "He's my grandaddy's mule."

"That Jack mule don't care who your ancestors is, boy. He ain't no
respecter of persons. President of the United States whap him for no
reason, he'd better have his ass close to the wagon, `cause he's going to
travel."

"You said ass," Henry says.

"Well, what was that you called them mules?"

Joe drives across the lot and backs the wagon into the shed and gets
down to unhitch, the boys crowding up beside him.

"Ge' back! Ge' back!" Joe says, cross sure enough now

"We ain't doing anything but watching."

`And you liable to see something, too. She show you the bottom of
her foot. Now you all behave or I'll have to tell Mr. Mat."

He knows that Mat's displeasure is more fearful to them than the possibility of being kicked, and so he knows he will not have to tell on them.

They get back, and stay out of the way while Joe does up the lines and
leads the mules to the barn and waters them and takes their harness off
and puts them in their stalls.

At quitting time Burley Coulter comes down from the tobacco patch,
bringing his team to the barn, riding one mule and leading the other. He
comes through the gate and around the barn to the cistern. The mules
walk up to the water trough and lower their heads, and Burley drops to
the ground. He looks at Andy and Henry, and grins.

"Hello, boys."

They tell him hello, grinning back, expecting him to say something
funny. There is something fine, Andy thinks, in the way he stands there,
one hand still holding the mule's hame, and takes off his old felt hat and
scratches his head with the same hand and puts the hat back on-goodhumored and at ease, done for the day.

The mule standing next to Burley has raised his head, and stands gazing out across the lot, his muzzle dripping. Burley gives him a little nudge with his elbow. "Drink!" The mule wearily lowers his head again and
drinks. "He knows when his daddy's talking to him."

The boys giggle. "You ain't his daddy," Henry says.

"Well, I am. But he got most of his looks from his mother." He looks
at Joe. "I seen you all was having a race down here," he says. "Who
won?"

Joe shrugs and shakes his head. "That Henry there can tell you. Don't
ask me."

"That Henry," Burley says, "he's a driver."

"I'd really have got them going," Henry says, "if Joe hadn't took away
the lines."

"You'd have got them going, all right," Joe says crossly. "You'd have got
us killed, and hard telling what else."

Duty-bound to keep Henry reminded of the seriousness of his
offense, Joe makes a final attempt to frown. But watching the face of the
little boy, which since the mules ran off has been big-eyed with startlement and impudence, he begins to struggle to keep his mouth straight.
His eyes begin to fill at the corners with a little glistening. And suddenly
he seems to wilt, bending over and slapping his knee, and then rearing
back. They watch him, Burley with amusement and the boys with relief,
knowing that his laughter implicates him and he won't be likely to tell on
them now-if he ever meant to, which they doubt.

And now they all laugh, allowing it to be as funny as it was. Joe tells
what Henry said, and how he swatted the mule, and how the team
started, and how scared he was, and how he got them turned and then
stopped, and how Henry looked. And Burley tells how it looked to him
from up on the hill, and describes the motions each one made. The boys
stand there, laughing, looking from one of the men to the other, proud
to have been in such a famous escapade, and knowing better than to
show it. If they were to seem too cocky about it, they know, the laughter
would stop, and Burley or Joe would have to say in a dutifully sober tone:
"Well, it's damn lucky nobody got killed. You boys ought to be careful."

In the midst of the laughter, Joe throws up his hand and says: "Shhh!
Mercy sakes alive, here comes the boss!"

Not wanting Mat to learn what has been going on, though not wanting either to admit that to the boys, Joe and Burley get busy in a hurry with a burlesque of caution that makes Andy and Henry laugh again. Joe
starts out to the gate to call the milk cows. Burley leads his team back
into the driveway and begins taking their harness off. The boys go down
across the lot and open the gate for Mat, who looks up the hill and sees
them and waves.

He has unhitched the mules and is walking behind them, the slack of
the lines looped in his hands. Shifting both lines into one hand and stopping the mules as the boys run to him, he hugs first Andy and then
Henry.

"Hello, Andy! How're you, hon? Hello, Henry boy!"

"We've come to stay, Grandad," Henry says.

"Well, good! I'm glad you have."

Burley is putting his mules into their stalls. Mat does up the lines and
waters his team, and for a few minutes there is a steady hustle of activity
as Burley helps to unharness Mat's mules and put them away. Joe drives
the cows in and Burley and Mat put in hay and corn for the teams.

And then they are finished. In the silence they can hear the mules eating their corn, the ears rattling in the troughs.

"Well, Mat," Burley says, "looks like you got about all the help you
need now"

And Mat smiles and says, in what seems to the boys a very loving and
proud way: "Yessir. It looks like I have."

The four of them stand in the driveway, looking out at the red sunset,
Mat holding the boys' hands. And then Burley slips his hat off and
scratches his head in that way Andy admires, and settles his hat back on,
and lights a smoke. "Well, Mat, I'll see you tomorrow. Take it easy, boys."

After Virgil went to the war, Andy, as soon as he learned to write, wrote
him letters, and Virgil replied-letters full of the familiar old foolishness, and promises of fine things they would do when the world got
straightened out. And he sent him a soldier's hat, a knife, and other odds
and ends picked up with a fine sense of what would be of interest.

Andy got into the habit of thinking, whenever he was displeased or
lonely, and whenever he wanted to do something he was not big enough to do by himself, that if Virgil were there it would be different. Virgil, in
his absence, became the hero of the boy's daydreams-the embodiment,
in perfection, of whatever power he lacked at the moment. In all the
conflicts Andy got into with his teachers and playmates and parentsand there were quite a few, for he has always been a moody, headstrong
sort of boy-he imagined Virgil as his defender, the dealer of whatever
justices and vengeances his injuries required.

But the letters stopped, and he was told that his uncle was missing in
action-which meant, his mother said, that they were all worried about
him, but maybe everything would turn out all right. Andy took that to
mean that there was not much to worry about. It had been his experience that most grownups' worries were without consequence. He
adopted a certain caution in speaking of his uncle to his playmates, and
he developed a new curiosity in observing the grownups of his familywhich revealed nothing to him except that they were all filled with an
anxiety that they tried to keep hidden from each other and from him.

And then, not long ago, after he had made some idle remark about his
uncle, Bess took him aside and told him that they believed now that Virgil was dead. They had no reason to hope that he might be alive. She
ended by saying that he should not tell Henry. He was old enough, and
should know, but Henry might not understand.

But Andy does not understand either. He is in the bewilderment, the
bad luck special to children, of experiencing the effect without any of
the clarification or relief that might come with some understanding of
the cause. For weeks he has felt himself surrounded by the grief of the
family, but he has not yet felt any grief of his own. He has continued, in
a sort of guilty secrecy, to believe that Virgil is somewhere and somehow
still alive. And he has kept on praying for his safe return.

Lying in bed in the dark, he is aware of the presence of the grief of
the household, and aware of the difference between that and the pleasantness of it, so familiar and comforting to him, and kept there, he
knows, partly for his own sake. His consciousness widens slowly out of
the bounds of the room and the house into the night overlying the
world. And he feels himself to be present, placelessly, in all the far and
wide of that darkness, filled with a vague troubling over all he feels but
does not know.

At last tiredness seems to place and shape him there in the bed in the
room. The sweet familiarity of the house presses around him again, and
he falls asleep.

"Come in," Aunt Fanny says. She is sitting in a rocking chair behind the
cold drum stove, rubbing an ointment of some kind on her fingers. She
looks up inquiringly at them, squinting hard through her round brassrimmed glasses, blinded by the brightness of the doorway until they shut
the door, and then she raises her hands and opens her mouth in a broad
show of pleasure and surprise.

Awww, well I declare to goodness, if it ain't Miss Bess's little boys!
How's your mother, honeys?"

"Fine," Andy says.

`And your daddy's fine, I reckon, too? Well, ain't that nice. Sit down,
children, and talk to me. Let me look at you. My, ain't you growed! I'm so
glad to see you. Yes indeed! Just a while back I say to Joe, `Well, now it's
summer and I expect little Andy and Henry'll be to see me, if I live and
nothing happen and all go well with the world!' She gives a long cackle
of laughter and says, "Yes indeedy."