A Place on Earth (Port William) (43 page)

"Dang tootin!" Uncle Stanley says. "Man just up and put a end to hisself
that way! Crazy. Bound to been!"

He is sitting on the lower lip of Ernest Finley's grave, his feet dangling
in the hole. To his right the top of Jayber Crow's bald head can be seen at
intervals as he straightens to throw out a spadeful of dirt. The grave is
nearly as deep as it needs to be; they have been at work-or Jayber hassince early in the morning. On the headstone of Ernest's mother's grave,
the nearest neighbor to the one he is digging, Jayber has put his hat and
shirt, giving it the rather startling appearance of a man rising out of the
ground.

It is a sweltering day and the ground is hard. The shade of a tall cedar
a little to the west of the grave is still turned tantalizingly in the wrong
direction. Jayber's earth-stained undershirt is soaked with sweat. He
hasn't grown used to the work of gravedigging, and maybe he never will.
Nothing in his experience as scholar and barber could have prepared him
for the agony involved in loosening and spading out that much dirt.

"Six feet is a lot deeper than I thought it was," he confessed to Uncle
Stan from the bottom of the first one he dug.

"By grab," Uncle Stanley said, "things look different from down there,
don't they, son?"

And that is the truth. There is a suggestiveness about the whole business that, though it seems not to affect Uncle Stanley, Jayber has never
become immune to. Each time, as he digs his way down and grows
tireder, he grows bluer. And today the mood is intensified by a particular
sorrow, for as well as anybody did, Jayber knew Ernest and liked him.

He is tired now and hot and full of the misery of mortality, and about
one time in three as he heaves the loaded shovel upward from the floor
of the grave he makes an utterance which much against his will sounds
like a groan.

At the foot of the grave Burley Coulter is standing in his best clothes,
his face set in disinterested amusement at the argument that has been
going on, to his knowledge, for at least half an hour. He cleaned up and
walked in to town in the middle of the morning with the intention of
going to Mat's house. But when he came by there the house was quiet,
nobody in sight; he grew doubtful after all that the family would want to
be bothered with outsiders at that time of day. And so he walked on past
and out the road to the graveyard, where he knew he would find Jayber.

"Bound to be crazy," Uncle Stanley says, "feller do that to hisself. It's a
dad-burned insult to humanity."

"Oh," Jayber says, "if you haven't got the most unpardonable old
mouth!"

"Says which?"

"I said, are you sure about that?"

"Durn right!"

Burley would really like to go on back to town. He is never very comfortable in Sunday clothes anyway, especially not in the hot sun watching somebody else work. His plan was to come out and talk a few minutes with Jayber, finding out-if Jayber knew-how Mat and his people
were, and then go back to town and eat a sandwich at Dolph Courtney's,
and then go to Mat's.

But since he came up and said good morning, he has not said another
word. He was prepared neither for Jayber's low spirits nor for the antagonism between Jayber and Uncle Stanley-two good reasons to be sorry
he came and to wish to be gone. But he has stayed. Coat slung over his
shoulder, hat pushed back, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled above his
elbows, his tie loosened, his collar slowly wilting, he has stood there in a sort of fascination at the goings on, with a perishing hope that things
will take a turn for the better. At one point he intended to stay until the
job was finished, so he and Jayber could go to Mat's together. But now he
has about decided not to wait.

"He said," Uncle Stanley says, with a downward backhanded wave in
Jayber's direction, "he said he thought we'd just as well quit after the sun
got hot, and finish up early tomorrow morning in the cool. But I told
him, dad whack it, that ain't no way to do. In this work you're dealing
with the Powers, by grab, and you can't diddle around with them. Why,
what if somebody else dies tonight? And somebody's liable to."

"It could be you," Jayber says. `And what about that?"

"Maybe two of them will. And then look at the digging piling up on
you. Says which?"

"I said, Well, if you aren't going to kill yourself, that's one we don't have
to worry about."

"You dad-blamed tootin," Uncle Stanley says. "I ain't."

This quarrel has been in progress a good deal longer than the half an
hour that Burley has been listening to it. It began, in fact, at the moment
Jayber made the first cut into the sod. The old man sat down with his
back against a headstone.

"I been studying about it," he said, "and be durn if I can see why that
young feller wanted to kill hisself."

"is that a fact?" Jayber said, thinking that would make an end to it.

But in the course of his studying about it, Uncle Stanley had evidently
discovered in himself a righteous argument against suicide, and he
wouldn't let it drop.

"Be durn if I think he had any right to do it."

"Well, it was his life, wasn't it?"

And that started it.

"It weren't his to put any such of an end to."

"How do you know that? And what right do you have to say that he
didn't have that right?"

"Because I believe it. It may be Scripture, I reckon. If it ain't, it ought to
be."

"Well, maybe he believed another way."

And so it has gone. Ignoring the obvious futility of it, Jayber accepted the challenge. And untouched by all the shrewd and telling logic of Jayber's questions, Uncle Stan has insulted both Ernest's life and Jayber's
intelligence with as much passion as if suicides were threatening to overthrow the government. And Jayber has continued to ask the questions, at
first with an exasperated patience, and then, as he dug deeper and grew
tireder and sadder, with anger.

"If you're so hot on suicide," Uncle Stanley says, "why don't you just
take that there rock and knock your blame selfin the head? I'd have to say
you had a point then. Go on! Bust your durn head!"

Jayber straightens up in the hole and points his finger at him.

"One thing, old man. Just remember one thing. You can only speak
for yourself. You never know what the other man has to go through."

"Well," Burley says-he has had all he can stand, he is leaving now"we've all got to go through enough to kill us."

Much of the Feltners' house has been rearranged to make space for
the coffin and flowers and undertaker's furnishings in the living room.
A large part of the furniture belonging to that room has been carried
out and crowded into other rooms or stored in outbuildings. This was
accomplished before midnight last night, Burley and Jayber and Frank
Lathrop helping Mat with the work. And toward noon today the coffin
was brought in, flowers were placed around it, and a number of folding
chairs set up. The effect of all this, because it seems to substantiate the
greater and subtler change, is as persistently disturbing as if it had been
the result of some natural calamity.

Against custom-against the ill-concealed wishes of the undertaker,
who was proud of his work-the coffin has remained closed. "It seems
best that way," Margaret said. And that was all she said.

Early in the afternoon, as the day grew hotter and the house more
crowded, Mat invited the men to come out on the porch, where there
was a breeze. And they have sat there until now, smoking and carrying
on the allusive conversation of men who know much in common. Now
there are only five of them-Mat and Old Jack and Burley and Jayber and
Wheeler Catlett-the rest having gone home to eat or do their chores. The stillness of suppertime is beginning to settle over the town. The five
men on the porch, all friends and comfortable with each other, have
ceased to talk, each occupied in that wide quiet with his own thoughts.
Through the openings among the treetops they can now and again catch
sight of hurrying swifts.

Across the street Frank Lathrop's door suddenly is flung open, and
Frank appears, doing a sort of dance across his porch. He seems headed
for the street, but as he reaches the edge of the porch, coming aware of
those watching him, he stops and, looking sheepish and confused, turns
and walks back into the house.

All five of the men on Mat's porch have watched him with the same
sense of improbability. Now that he has gone back into the house, none
of them says a word, mystified and embarrassed at the impropriety of
such a display then and in that place. The sight of Frank dancing for joy,
oblivious to the mourning he danced in the face of, will stay in Mat's
mind a long time.

But Frank's behavior does not go long without an explanation. Less
than a minute later a door slams somewhere down in town, and they
hear a young strident voice crying:

"It's over! It's over!"

And that voice is quickly joined by others. Doors are thrown open,
footsteps run in the street. From the lifting of that first voice, the commotion in the town builds toward a crest it will not reach for hours.

Nobody has to ask what it is all about. Even those who failed to hear
the bulletin on the radio recognize it at once, as though they have waited
for it familiarly for four years.

Within fifteen minutes after the first shout, crowded automobiles
have begun to come in from the countryside. In front of the stores the
street has begun to fill with erratically parked cars and trucks and milling
people. And the bells have begun to ring-dinner bells, the church bell,
cow bells-their sounds finally meshing into one sound beating and
quaking in the air. Frank Lathrop comes out of his house again, and
without looking across at Mat's house turns down the street, soon disappearing into the crowd. The makings of a bonfire have begun to pile up
in the street in front of Jayber's barbershop.

Against that tumult Mat's house holds its quietness. Like everybody else the men on the porch are grateful that the end has come, but they
do not speak of what they feel. Perhaps Ernest's silence makes too heavy
a claim upon them. Or perhaps if Mat should openly welcome the event
they would speak gladly of it, would quietly celebrate it there among
themselves. But Mat is thinking, with maybe more bitterness than he
could disguise in speaking, of what this would mean to him if he could
now expect Virgil to come home.

The noise of the crowd seems to rise into the air over their heads and
remain there and accumulate like smoke. But except for its racket, the
crowd is orderly and peaceable, perfectly contained by the one aim of
making as big a to-do as possible. As nightfall approaches there begin to
be cries of "Light her up! Let's have a light!"

Jayber gets up. "Mat, I hate to go, but I reckon if they're going to light
that fire I'd better."

"That's all right, Jayber." Mat walks withJayber out to the steps. The
fire has been lighted. The flames are already high, casting a flickering
globe of light over the crowd. "I expect you'd better, too."

Burley's starting to get up now. "I'd just as well be going myself. It's
getting late."

"Stay, Burley, if you will," Mat says. "We'll have some supper in a little
while, and there's plenty for you."

So Burley sits down again, and in a few minutes Bess comes to the
door and calls them to supper. As they get up and start into the house,
they can hear somebody beginning to tune a fiddle.

And long before their quiet meal is finished they hear through the
open kitchen door two guitars spring into a wildly pacing beat, and then
the curving and looping figures of the fiddle. Presently a cracked breathless old voice begins calling a dance.

"That's Bill Mixter and his boys and Uncle Stanley," Burley says.

At the head of the table Old Jack eats without looking up and without
joining the talk. Though he has been at Mat's since morning, he has
hardly spoken three sentences, and much that has been said to him he
has not heard. He has been preoccupied, despondent, as if, added to all
the other deaths he has known, Ernest's makes too many.

His silence makes them aware of him. Margaret, who is sitting on his
right, lays her hand on his arm.

"Uncle Jack used to be quite a dancer," she says. "He used to never
miss a dance."

That makes a claim on his attention and he smiles and shakes his
head.

`Ay, Lord! I could work all day and dance all night. I had a good bay
mare then that I used to drive to a buggy-a steady sensible thing, and
you could trust her. I've woke up many a Sunday morning, sitting in the
buggy with the reins in my hand, and that mare standing at the barn
door."

They laugh. As though following a change of meaning in what he has
told, he shakes his head again, and goes on. "I had a lot of music in me
then. I couldn't stay still where it was. Couldn't stay still if I knew there
was some somewhere I could get to." He pauses. "But that was a long
time ago."

But then as if hurrying to qualify the sorrow of that, unwilling to
imply to them that that ought to stand as his judgment on his life, he
looks at Hannah and smiles.

`And the pretty girls," he says. "I've always had a great admiration for
pretty girls."

When the meal is over the men go back to the porch. Now they can
see the dancers around the fire-figures in silhouette, or lighted by the
wavering light of the flames, and against the faces of the buildings their
enormous wildly leaping and prancing shadows. When the women are
finished with the dishes they come out too, to be in the breeze there.
Nobody pretends to ignore the celebration, simply because it cannot be
ignored, it has so filled and claimed the town. But watching that bright
scene, lifted and moved and contained by the hurrying beat of the
music, they are conscious of their separateness from it.