A Place on Earth (Port William) (44 page)

Smoking one of Mat's cigars in the quiet, Burley is beginning to have
trouble keeping still. In spite of his loyalty to Mat and his persistent good
intentions, Ernest's death has moved far out of the center of his attention. What he is thinking about is Nathan: If he has lived until today he
will be coming home. He will be here. As Burley has sat and thought
about Nathan coming back, an exultation has grown in him. The music
has begun to get into his head, and his mind is wandering. Where he
wants to be is down there where they are dancing, where he can find somebody to talk and laugh with. Half a dozen times already he has
caught himself grinning and patting his foot. In a sort of dutiful shame
at the vagrancy and disloyalty of his mind, he has so far made himself
stay on. But he is beginning, by the same involuntary running of his
thoughts, to supply himself with good reasons for going.

He has been here since noon, and that surely is long enough. Mat and
his people probably would be glad if he did go. The house has been full
of company all day, and Mat and them surely will be glad to see the last
one go. Also he is tired, and he really ought to go on home and get some
rest-after mixing around just a minute or two down there in the crowd.
Also he is making himself a living insult to the dead just by sitting there
and wanting so badly to leave.

At last he picks up his hat from the floor beneath the chair, and stands
up.

"Well.. ."he says.

"Don't go, Burley," Mat says, and Wheeler says, "Burley, don't be in a
hurry."

"Well," he says, lying desperately, "I got a thing or two needs seeing
about out home."

He is staring intently down at the hat, which he can hardly see in the
darkness, fussing at the shape of it with his hands.

Understanding his need to escape, or just sensing his discomfort,
Margaret comes to his rescue: "We understand about that, Burley. I
appreciate your coming. All of us do."

"That's all right, Mrs. Feltner." He goes to the steps and starts down.
"I'll see you folks."

He walks off down the dark street toward the dancers and the fire. As he
goes farther away from Mat's house and his mind comes free of the
embarrassment of his escape, he walks faster, free to do what he cannot
resist.

On either side of the fire the road is choked with the dark bodies of
automobiles that have simply been driven as far toward the dancing as
possible and stopped. There is something exciting about the massive dis order of the cars jammed in the road, the light of the flames glancing off
fenders and hoods. The crowd claps and shouts and talks and laughs,
massing in toward a circle surrounding the dancers who surround the
fire. From that tightly pressed and vividly lighted circle the crowd frays
outward into the dark, smaller groups and couples scattered along the
walks under the trees and in the spaces between automobiles.

As Burley passes voices begin to call to him-"Hey, Burley!" "Come
over here, Burley"-offering a drink maybe, or a good place to sit and
watch, or some bit of talk. But he only raises his hand to these without
stopping, not bothering even to make sure who is talking. He is impelled
toward the very center, toward the music and the fire. He cannot rest
until he gets there.

Now he can see the musicians standing on the bed of a truck turned
at a right angle off the road in front of Jayber's shop, making a high platform just at the edge of the circle of bystanders. Bill Mixter and his two
boys and Uncle Stanley are on the truck bed under the shadowy and
greenly flickering foliage of the sugar maples. The three musicians stand
in a close triangle, their heads inclined inward. Bill Mixter bends a little
forward over his fiddle, his eyes hidden under the visor of his striped
cloth cap. The two sons, slats of oiled hair loose over their ears, stare
fixedly ahead at the same invisible point over the crest of the fire. They
have been playing almost without letup for an hour or more. They are
sweating, beating their rhythms with their feet on the worn boards, listening to themselves, paying no attention whatever to the dancers or to
the crowd. Uncle Stanley is four or five feet in front of them, as near the
edge of the truck bed as he feels safe, beating his hands, patting his feet,
uttering the calls and songs at the top of his voice. He is as much aware of
the crowd as the musicians are oblivious to it. He is in a state approaching transport-in his element. Now and then he does a shuffling turn,
his feet flying in a way that threatens to snap his spindly old legs, and the
crowd laughs and cheers. He sings:

And got it all greasy."

The crowd whoops.

"Yes!"

"Sing it, Uncle!"

"Swing your partner and promenade!" he says, and steps back with a
wide sweeping gesture of his right arm as though turning the dancers
around the fire.

"Haw! Look a thar now!"

After watching the labor on the truck bed for a few minutes Burley
pushes on to the very edge of the crowd around the fire, and only then is
able to stop with the sense of arrival. He is restrained from hunting a
partner and going on into the dancing by a doubtfulness of the propriety
of that so soon after leaving a place of mourning, but he is also aware of
being fifty years old. He has not danced for a long time. And so he just
stands, as near to the dancing as he can get without being in it, feeling
the impulse of the music sway in the crowd around him. It comes into
him too, and he begins clapping his hands and patting his feet. He has
loosened his tie, and now he takes off his coat and hangs it over his left
shoulder. His hat, as usual when he is resting or enjoying himself, is
pushed back off his forehead. He is grinning, forgetful of everything.
The music has departed from its occasion. Simply present and sufficient,
it has freed itself of beginning; it involves no premonition of an end. It
only continues, in profound union with the dancers-pulsing and urging, turning, whirling, tramping, and circling-the ground, the air, the
dark leaves of the trees, the glancing firelight brought to a tranced obedience to it.

With a few sharply declarative strokes of Bill Mixter's fiddle, seeming
to tie a swift bowknot in the air, it stops. The silence hangs in the air and
then descends slowly over the crowd. While it lasts they hear Bill Mixter
laugh quietly and, turning to look, see him and his boys putting their
instruments down. Bill Mixter walks over to the edge of the truck bed to
take a cup that somebody is holding up to him over the heads of the bystanders. The crowd begins to murmur, loosening and dividing within
itself.

Let down from the music, the scene becomes ordinary. As he looks
around him, it seems to Burley that he is in a place altogether different
from where he thought he was. The crowd is made up mostly of women
and girls and boys, and men his age and older. The young men, who
ought to be the force and grace of it, are not there. Among the dancers,
who still stand resting where the music left them, are a number of pairs of girls and young women who have been dancing with each other. It
looks to him more aimless than he thought. Some that are not here
never will be. And what does it mean? Has what they are celebrating
happened yet? Or will it ever?

There has come to be a fierceness in his thoughts, and no happiness.
No, this is not where he was headed, or where he thought he was headed.
He turns, and finds he has been standing in the midst of a group of
school-age girls, who have been much amused by the involvement of
such a grey head as his in such regardless exuberance. Thinking of it, he
finds it amusing himself. He grins.

"Hello there, girls. You all look mighty pretty tonight."

They giggle, backing out of the way to let him pass.

He wanders through the crowd, watching for Jayber, making two
slowly widening turns around the fire. The music soon starts again, but
it is as though it plays now in a more distant place, and he is headed away
from it, outside the crowd that forms and tightens again around the circling dancers. Coming by the truck where the musicians are playing, he
pauses and studies the bunch of men gathered in front of Jayber's shop.
About every third one there, he estimates, has had more than enough to
drink, and the rest have had plenty.

"Uh-huh!" he thinks.

Grover Gibbs wheels out into Burley's path and gives him a prolonged
vacant grin, as though trying to hold his attention until he can think of a
greeting suitable to the occasion. Finally he gives up and executes a
knowing wink.

"Howdy do, Grover."

"Mighty fine, old friend. Mighty good. Glad to see you, Burley, old
friend."

He lands a great clap of affection on Burley's left shoulder blade. Burley steps around him and starts on. "I'd say you're feeling friendly,
Grover."

"I do," Grover says. "Yes sir! Yes sir!"

Burley goes around the corner of the barbershop, and there finds
Whacker Spradlin with his wagon and cream can. Whacker stands, in his
usual perfection of drunkenness, between his wagon and the wall of the
shop, swaying to the music.

"Uh-huh!" Burley thinks, not now in the tone of making a discovery,
but of finding that things add up as expected.

He goes on past the stairway that climbs the outside of the building to
Jayber's living quarters, beginning to be certain now that he is close on
the track. But certain as he is, it still scares him when a hand reaches out
from behind the building and takes hold of his arm.

He feels a bottle pushed against his breastbone, and Jayber's voice says:
"Take a shot of that, pistol. It'll do you a certain amount of good."

A piercing giggle follows that statement out of the shadow, and Burley recognizes the silhouette of Big Ellis against the white of the wall. He
is glad to be with them. Comfort comes over him. He holds the bottle up
against the sky.

"Why, hello, Mammy," he says, and drinks.

"We were looking for you," Jayber says.

"Well, I thought you'd never find me."

Big Ellis giggles.

"How're you, Big Ellis?"

"Fine. Better. Glad to see you, Burley."

Burley corks the bottle and hands it back. "Thanks."

"Well, just hold onto it," Jayber says. "When we want it, we'll ring."

Big Ellis laughs. "Jayber says this is penthouse style. When we want
anything, we ring."

"Well, kind of keep your eye on me," Burley says. "I ain't used to this
high society."

He leans against the wall, holding the bottle by the neck until whoever wants it next will ring for it. It was a large drink that he took, and he
feels the heat of it spreading through him. The celebration is far behind
him now. Where they are it is quiet. They have ahead of them the dark
slant of the pasture, and above them in the blackness the tremendous
blooming of the stars. As Burley looks up, one suddenly loosens itself
somewhere in the depths of the black, and falls. It makes a brief streak
on the sky, so quick, so short, so arbitrarily placed that he immediately
forgets where he saw it. For a moment that seems to matter a great deal.
And then, as he recovers the sense of himself there where he is, it quits
mattering.

The next one who wants a drink turns out to be him. He rings.

"By all means," Jayber says.

Burley drinks, and again feels the warmth sink into him and spread,
opening slowly, a lethargic summer blossom.

After a protracted silence Jayber begins to talk.

`As I was saying," he says-and Burley will never know whether he
was saying it earlier or just thinking it-"drinking is not ordinarily
accomplished in circumstances most conducive to its highest development and enjoyment because of the preponderations of conglomerations of commotions commingling with assorted distractions indigenous to those places in which it customarily takes place-which is to say:
bars, roadhouses, bootlegging establishments, et cetera, et cetera, all of
which encourage the forgathering together of sundry rowdies, roughnecks, spongers, fiddlers, weepers, know-it-alls and big talkers, who create a concoction of meaningless distractions enough to give a sober man
the headache, which if he is sober he'll perceive immediately, forthwith,
and at once, not to say suddenly, that this is not a satisfactory place even
to get drunk in-you got, that is to say, to be drunk to stay in such a
place, even though it's no kind of a place to be drunk in, which you'll
perhaps understand better if I explain ..."

Big Ellis rings, and Burley passes the bottle.

"Believe I'll just have to greet her as she comes by," Jayber says, hardly
interrupting himself.

And he greets her and passes her on, and goes on talking.

Burley tries dutifully to listen, though it seems to him that he must
have begun listening too late and has not caught up yet. He seems to
have been delayed by astonishment at such a stream of talk beginning to
flow so fully and without warning right there next to him. He does not
see that it makes any sense. He thinks it may, if he could just catch up.