A Place on Earth (Port William) (39 page)

The boys sit down together on a wicker settee placed between the
door facing and the side of an iron bed, both of them a little abashed and
awed having come into a different kind of life, though it is familiar to
them from many other visits.

Aunt Fanny is Joe Banion's mother, older than anybody knows. She
sits a little wearily in her chair as old women often sit, her short, squat,
ample body bunched into the angle of seat and back like a heap of cushions, her bowed knees set wide apart. Her hair has been gathered and
braided into perhaps a dozen short erect grey pigtails. Her mouth contains only a few widely spaced amber-stained teeth. Her lower lip bulges
slightly with the snuff packed inside it. A coffee can, her "spit-can," is set
at the end of one of the chair rockers at her feet. Her shoes work shoes,
probably a cast-off pair of Joe's -have been so ventilated for the easing of
corns and bunions as to have the look of sandals. Her long dress reaches
to the tops of her shoes, and over it she wears a starched white apron. She is a woman of much pride. Her manners, though peculiarly her own,
are impeccable. She is an accomplished seamstress, and the room is filled
with her work: quilts, crocheted doilies, a linen wall-hanging with the
Lord's Prayer embroidered on it in threads of many colors. In the house
she is nearly always occupied with her needle, always complaining of
her dim eyesight and arthritic hands. Her dark hands, though painfully
crooked and drawn by the disease, are still somehow dexterous and
capable. She is always anointing them with salves and ointments of her
own making. The fingers wear rings made of copper wire, which she
believes to have the power of prevention and healing. She is an excellent
gardener. The garden beside the house is her work. She makes of its small
space an amplitude unlike anything else in the town: rows of vegetables
and flowers-and herbs, for which she knows the recipes and the uses.

That is the daylight aspect of Aunt Fanny. But there is a night aspect
too. And to Andy the garden, the quilts on the bed, or the quilting frame
always seem threatened, like earthquake country, by an ominous nearness of darkness in the character of their maker. Aunt Fanny has seen
the Devil, not once but often, especially in her youth, and she calls him
familiarly by his name: Red Sam. Her obsessions are Hell and Africa, and
she has the darkest, most fire-lit notions of both. Her idea of Africa is a
hair-raising blend of lore and hearsay and imagination. She thinks of it
with nostalgia and longing-a kind of earthly Other Shore, Eden, or
Heaven-and yet she fears it because of its presumed darkness, its endless jungles, its stock of malevolent serpents and man-eating beasts. And
by the thought of Hell she is held as endlessly fascinated as if her dearest
ambition is to go there. She can talk at any length about it, cataloguing
its tortures and labyrinths in almost loving detail. Her belief in Heaven is
just as firm, but she simply depends on that and lets it go. It is Hell that
draws her mind to its tightest focus, and entices her into the depths and
rhapsodies of prophetic vision. Next to Hell, she is drawn by visions of
the End of the World and the Judgment Day. And what most frightens
the two boys in her talk of these things is not so much the horrors themselves as the old woman's delight in them, as though in telling of them
she affirms, beyond any power of small boys to doubt, that these truly
are the foundation of the world. She seems to give a respectful credence
to the statement that God is love, only to hurry on to explore with real interest the possibility that God is wrath. She can read from the Book of
Revelation with a ringing of conviction in her voice that can make the
Creation seem only a stage-setting for the triumphant thunderation of
the End. Stooped in the light of a coal-oil lamp at night, following her
finger down some threatening page of the Bible, her glasses opaquely
reflecting the yellow of the lamp, her pigtails sticking out like compass
points around her head, she looks like a black Witch of Endor.

She possesses a nearly inexhaustible lore of snakes and deaths, bottomless caves and pools, mysteries and ghosts and wonders. One of her
stories can populate a month of nightmares. There have been nights
when, after listening to her, Andy and Henry have been unable to go the
dark way home by themselves, and Joe has had to hold their hands and
lead them up the hill toward the happy lights of their grandad's house.
But though they are frightened by her ominous knowledge, they are as
fascinated as she is by the dark spaces between days and stars that she
opens toward them and fills with the designs and impendings of dire
purpose.

But her daylight aspect is as bright as the other is dark. Now, as she sits
there in the chair among the substances of her life, anointing her hands,
the world seems firm enough around her. Her dark company of visions
and devils and spirits seems to have withdrawn from her and from the
daylight like so many bats and owls.

"How's your rheumatism, Aunt Fanny?" Andy asks.

Aw, honey, it's bad." She laughs, as though to affirm that hers is a
faithful pain and can be depended on. "Oh yes, it don't get no better. This
ointment just keep it from getting worse."

"Well, I'm glad it's not worse."

"Oh yes, just bad, not worse. I rub my hands and put heat on them,
set with them in the sun, and they stay so I can use them. I say to Joe a
while back, `Well, if I live and nothing happen and all go well, I believe
they'll last me.' That's what I say, and I believe they will. Eyes too. Old
eyes and old hands. Old feet too, and old knees. Old everything. But I
believe they'll all last me, long as I'll need them. I pray so, and trust the
Lord. All you can do, honeys."

She laughs again, and screws the top back on the jar of ointment, and
gets heavily up.

"What're you going to do this morning?" Andy asks. He is suddenly anxious. Sometimes she is too crippled to do anything, and it is always
disappointing to have the good possibilities held back by old hands or old
feet or old knees. But this morning the prospects are better than he
hoped.

"I been thinking I'd go on a ramble."

"Can we come?" Henry asks.

"You mind and behave, you can come."

"We will."

"No squibbling and squabbling, I mean. And you walk behind me so
you won't be trampling up everything before I can get to it."

`All right."

They follow her into the kitchen, where she ties on a faded blue sunbonnet and hunts up a basket and a sharp paring knife.

"I'll carry those for you," Henry says.

"Or I will," Andy says.

"I'll carry it, I expect," Aunt Fanny says. "You all just keep busy watching yourself."

She loops the handle of the basket over her arm, and they set out,
pulling the back door shut behind them and going through the still long
shadow of the house into the open daylight.

Aunt Fanny moves at a slow, hobbling, off-balance gait which seems
unlikely to carry her as far as the yard fence. But it does, and is, if not
fast, indomitably steady.

She goes along a cow path down the steep side of the hollow behind
the house, and across the rocks of the streambed, and up the other side,
giving a great shaking to the saplings she catches hold of to help herself
along. The boys follow her uneasily, expecting her to give up what seems
the enormous effort of the going and turn back.

But she advances steadily, leaving one yard and then another of the
steep path behind her. And by the time they have come out of the trees
into the sun again on the far side, and turned and followed the edge of
the woods some distance around the point of the next ridge, the boys
have begun as usual to accept, as she does, that her old feet and old knees
will last. By now their shoes and the hem of the old woman's dress are
wet with dew.

They walk a little behind her, respectfully staying out of her way. She
leads them in long slow zigzags between the fringe of the woods and the open pasture on the ridge, now and then stooping and cutting and dropping into the basket some herb or mushroom or flower. She makes no
attempt to cover the ground thoroughly: when she zigs she apparently
gives no thought to the possibility that it might be better to zag.

"Why do you want to skip so much?" Andy asks her. "Why don't we
go down there?"

"That ain't how you ramble," she says. "You got to be getting and
going both at once. You ain't supposed to get everything, but just only
enough. Take some and leave some."

`Aunt Fanny," Henry says, "I thought those old toadstools were poison.',

"Some is, some ain't. Them bad ones you want to stay away from. I
heard about a man ate one of them once. They say he just died painful.
Whooee! Say he died screaming the Devil was coming after him. Seen
him!"

For a moment the story seems to cast a shadow over them, as though
a dark tree has suddenly grown up beside them. But she hushes and
moves on. They leave the shadow then, and when Andy looks back he
sees only the sunlight shining there. Ahead of him, the sun bright on her
bonnet, Aunt Fanny walks, studying the ground.

She seems to see everything. Invariably she sees what she is looking
for before the boys can see it, in spite of their efforts to be of use. It is as
though over a spot of the ground where nothing is she bends, and miraculously there is something-a white round mushroom, and she cuts it
off and drops it into the basket, cackling gaily at the boys' amazement.

Watching her, Andy is again aware that hers is a kind of life different
from any other that he knows. He is made happy by her pleased easy taking of the good things that the world provides without effort, that nobody else wants, that most do not even see. Aunt Fanny's basket, as it
slowly fills with the clutter of her discoveries, comes to have for him the
excitement of a chest of treasure found in a cave. That these things have
grown out of the ground into their secret places apart from anybody's
intention, and that she takes them familiarly and freely without attempting to take them all, that they are the harvest of a ramble and not a
search or a labor, all this bespeaks a peaceableness between her and the
world.

In their zigzagging between pasture and woods they gradually turn
the curves of the long S of their ramble, going around the point of the
first ridge and up along the wooded hollow on the far side, and then
crossing the hollow and going down around the point of the next ridge.
They scare up two or three rabbits. Once, ahead of them, they hear a
squirrel barking, and hear the rushing in the treetops as it retreats deeper
into the woods. In the open pasture on one side of them the meadowlarks are singing, and on the other the patches of underbrush along
the edge of the woods are stirring and rustling with the movements of
redbirds and towhees and sparrows. Aunt Fanny walks steadily on, here
and there stooping and cutting and naming and dropping into the basket
a sprig of this, a few leaves or a bloom of that.

At last they turn straight up the side of a ridge and go through a gate
and past the cattle barn on the far place and through another gate, and
down the next slope. They can see the river valley below them now.

Above the woods on the bluff there are two tall stone chimneys and
the heaped foundation stones of a house. This was the first house that
Mat's people built and lived in after they came to Kentucky. The last
member of the family to live there was Mat's Great-Aunt Milly, who,
crippled by some childhood disease, died there, an old maid, when Mat
was about fifteen. After that, until it was torn down a generation later, it
was lived in by one or another of the Negro families who worked on the
place. Aunt Fanny was born and raised in a cabin that used to stand
behind the house, and later lived for a while in the house itself.

"Here we are where you used to live," Andy says to her, hoping for a
story.

But she only says, "That was long gone years ago," and laughs as if to
convey her familiarity with the darkness that has swallowed all that time.

They continue their rambling down through the ragged, half-dead
locusts of what used to be the yard, and make a sort of loop on the hillside below the house site, skirting the upper edge of the woods. The basket filled at last, they sit down to rest on the hearthstones of the eastward chimney, leaning back into the cool, stony-smelling shadow.

'A mighty fine place to rest yourself," Aunt Fanny says. "So pretty and
nice."

"Tell about you all sitting on the porch," Andy says.

"old porch," she says, gesturing with the paring knife, "used to go all
the way across the back of the house. And a mighty fine setting place
too. After the hot days we'd go out there and set till bedtime. Be a breeze.
And we'd talk, and now and then see the lights of a steamboat on the
river and hear it whistle. Mighty fine to do. Oh yes, I remember them old
gone times. I can see them clear."

She subsides, and pokes with satisfaction into the contents of the
basket.

"Tell about Aunt Milly's ghost."

She glances up and is silent for a moment, as if examining her memory for a good starting place.

"Well, not long after Miss Milly died, the house we was living in
begun to leak and get in bad shape. And Mr. Mat's daddy Mr. Ben says,
Ain't got money to fix it now. Move in the big house.' So we moved in.
And wasn't long after that till we begun to hear things at night. Hear them
crutches walk. Be laying in the bed at night, and all quiet, and here they'd
come, down out the old attic, step at a time down the stairs, and on
down the next stairs, just like they used to sound when she was alive and
walking on them. And then they'd just wander, in and out the rooms, out
on the porch, and up and down. We nailed the attic door shut, and here
they come again same as ever: thunk-a-tunk. And sometimes it'd sing: