A Place on Earth (Port William) (40 page)

`And it d go on that-a-way, singing in all the colors there was, whoo-
ing like a hoot owl:

To Andy, again, there seems to have grown up beside them a dark
tree, veiling the sun. And within that darkness he seems to see as with
an owl's vision the hobbling wraith of his great-great-great-aunt in its mournful wandering in the old house-and to sense beyond the house,
in a windy, ever-deepening darkness, the tireless walking of Fee Fo.

When Aunt Fanny intones the mournful drawn-out singing of the
ghost, Henry shudders.

"Didn't that scare you?" he asks.

"Didn't that scare me! Lord, honey, you wake up in the middle of the
night, and you hear that thunk-a-tunk and that singing, it'll make the
hair stand up offen your head! It sho will!" She laughs, and the little boy
shudders again. "When you shiver like that," she says, "somebody's walking on your grave."

"I haven't even got any grave." Henry says. "I ain't dead."

"Well, maybe you ain't got one yet that you in, honey, but you got one
that you going to be in."

The darkness of the old woman's knowing hangs over them, and they
fall silent, the boys wanting to know more, yet dreading the answers
too much to ask the questions. Andy wants to ask her about his Uncle
Virgil-is he dead? Was whatever grave he may have come to appointed
to him in his childhood, or when he was born, or at the beginning of the
world? But he knows that her answer will be one he will have to struggle
with. And he does not ask.

Aunt Fanny gets up presently, and they start home. Again they seem
to Andy to move out of a dark place back into the sunlight.

The ramble over now, they go by the straightest way. Aunt Fanny puts
the paring knife in the basket, and sets the basket on her head. The dew
has dried long ago. The waverings of heat have begun to stand over the
fields.

When they come back into the dimness and wood-smoke smell of
the kitchen, Aunt Fanny hangs up her bonnet, and they sit down at the
table. The boys watch as the old woman brings the cluttered gatherings
of their ramble finally to an orderly harvest. Piece by piece she sorts out
the contents of the basket. When she gets done she has lying on the
newspapers spread out before her a bouquet of flowers, two or three
small piles of herbs, a small clutch of mushrooms like a nest of eggs. She
sits there looking a moment, and then gets up and puts the flowers into
water, and goes into the next room and sits down with snuff and spit-can
to rest.

The boys remain with her, sitting again on the wicker settee, hoping to prolong the pleasure of the morning. But she seems to them to accept
the end of the ramble too complacently, talking now of sleeping a few
winks after dinner, and of the cool of the afternoon when she will go out
to work in her garden. And gradually the excitement leaves them, and
they begin to wish to go, only kept there by politeness. They stay until
the ringing of the dinner bell calls them up the hill to eat.

As they walk up through the blossoming pasture toward the barn, the
look of things seems changed. As always, the old woman's talk has alerted
them to the presence somewhere of their graves, to the welling up of
death and night into the world. The coloring of the day seems to stand
tremulously on the surface of a darkness from which neither it nor they
will ever go free.

Late Monday morning, August sixth, the president announces that on
the day, before an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Mat, who
was at work in the garden, happened to come to the house with a bucket
of tomatoes just as the news came on the radio. And so with Margaret
and Hannah and Nettie he hears most of the story, the correct voice of
the newsman reciting what there is to tell, standing the event nakedly
among them in the room, leaving it there without explanation or comment. Or at least, in the silence after the radio is snapped off, such explanation as was given seems overwhelmed by the event itself.

After he finishes his work in the garden, he hitches his team to the
mowing machine and goes until sundown in the unending rounds, cutting the weeds and tree-sprouts that rise against him year after year in
the opened fields.

Better than any other work he loves the mowing. He goes through
the long afternoon, watching with a kind of ardor the tall growth in its
flowing backward fall over the chattering teeth of the cutter bar, the
slow uncovering of the shape of the long ridge. It is, as always, one of
the heights of his intimacy with the place, and he does not flag in his
attentiveness. When the sun has reddened and cooled and come down,
throwing deep shadows into the hollows, he turns the team toward the edge of the field, and speaks, stopping them. He throws the machine out
of gear and, getting stiffly down, raises the cutter bar and bolts it upright. He takes up the reins again, lifts himself back onto the seat, speaks
to the team, and the iron wheels begin to turn in the direction of the
barn, soundlessly for the first time in hours, over the cushion of mowed
grass.

And through all that time he has been followed by the unfinished
knowledge of the bomb and the destroyed city He has felt his mind
borne, like a man in a little boat, on the crest of history, in a violence of
pure effect, as though the event of the war, having long ago outdistanced
its cause, now escapes comprehension, and speeds on. It has seemed to
him that the years of violence have at last arrived at what, without his
knowing it, they had been headed for, not by any human reason or
motive or wish but by the logic of violence itself. And all the events of
the war are at once altered by their result-though he cannot yet tell
how or how much.

The next afternoon Mat and Joe take the two boys and walk back on the
ridge to help Jarrat and Burley clean up the barn there in preparation for
housing the tobacco crop. They scrape and rake and then sweep the dirt
floor, making the place safe for the coke fires that will be used to cure the
tobacco-in the process moving and rearranging the tools that have
been stored there in the course of the summer's work, and the troughs
and gates and pens that will be used when the sheep are fed and sheltered there during the winter. They work steadily but-since the crops
have long been laid by-without hurry. With a sort of conscientiousness
they allow the boys to play at the work, knowing that earlier or later in
the year such indulgence is not possible. When one of the boys gets in
the way, they get him out of it with a patient kindness that becomes one
of the pleasures of the afternoon: "Better work over yonder on that side
now, old chap." "Let me get a hold there, honey boy. That's still a little
above your breakfast."

After one heavy lift Burley sings:

And does a dusty double shuffle down the driveway that gets the boys
so tickled that even Jarrat laughs. And then, as if reluctant to give up the
free high spirits of that laughter, Joe shuffles and stomps around his
broom handle, singing:

The afternoon is hot, and they go out now and again to rest at the
shady end of the barn and breathe the clean breeze there. They talk and
smoke, easing themselves, feeling ahead of them the hurry and strain of
the harvest.

"Not many days until we'll be into it," Jarrat says at one point. "Be
here before we know it."

And that is the theme of their talk. The sense of time passing. The
sense of the future as a reality they will not quite accept until it is upon
them.

Tired after the hot day, they have been sitting quietly on the front porch
since supper, Margaret and Hannah in the swing, Henry in Mat's lap,
Andy on the floor with his back against one of the posts. The katydids
have begun their annual life, and in the twilight the sugar maples in the
yard are filled with their singing, a harsh foliage.

"What are they saying, Grandad?" Henry asks. He knows, but being a
questioner he likes the question.

"Some say Katy did," Mat says. "Some say Katy didn't."

"Why?"

"Some are katydids, and some are katydidnts."

"What do they care if she did or not?" Andy asks.

"It's one of the eternal questions. You're liable to ask it yourself one of
these days."

"I don't know what you mean," Henry says.

"I do," Andy says.

"You do not."

`Andy," Mat says, "if you go up to one of those trees and lay your
hand against it just lightly they'll hush."

"Why?"

"I don't know. They will."

"Is that true?" Hannah asks.

"Try it."

And so Hannah and the boys leave the porch and go across the yard to
one of the larger maples. Andy lays his hand against the trunk, and in the
throbbing canopy of the singing there opens a globe of quiet the size of
the tree. Andy steps back and stands with Hannah and Henry, looking
up. Mat and Margaret sit watching them. For some time, while the katydids in the tree start singing and again Andy lays his hand on the trunk
and stops them, nobody speaks. And then Margaret asks: