A Place on Earth (Port William) (45 page)

He rings. The bottle is passed. Jayber greets her going by, and continues:

"... book I've been projecting for some considerable time to be titled
The Esthetics of Sin, by which (the sin of the title) I mean not the larger
ones invented and propounded and promulgated by Moses, brought
down from some mountain whose name I, at the moment, forget-a
sign, I suppose, that I'm aging-but those small ones, made sins perhaps
only by being so insistently so called by the clergy, so called perhaps only by virtue of the fact that they are so pleasant, or at least so lively, as to
threaten distraction from the Protestant thought of Heaven-the aforementioned Heaven being, as is well known, inhabited only by dead people, or perhaps a few missionaries and their wives, a great conjugal conflagration occurring there nightly, I assure you-the sins presently under
consideration being, to wit: loving, drinking, thinking, playing or singing or dancing for no pay and only pleasure, being idle when not sick,
loving the world both as it is and as it might be-et cetera, et cetera-
these having been, though certainly not neglected among us here, certainly not much refined, I intend to include in my book a chapter on each,
defining, praising, prescribing, and elaborating upon the whys, whens,
whethers, wheres, hows, and who-withs-for have I not seen with mine
eyes the half-baked marriage feasts-for is not the abuse of the mortal
the abuse as well of the immortal, and the abuse of life the abuse of life
everlasting, and the abuse of the earth the abuse of Heaven?-for is it not
upon this dust that the word and the law tread and leave their tracks?and is it not upon this little that the great shall be lifted up?-Sinai-Sinai
was that mountain's name..."

He goes on, almost without inflection or pause. There comes a time
when this sentence untangles itself out of Burley's mind and goes on,
leaving him quiet where he is. He experiences a moment of amazement
at it-at the abundance and rapidity and strange force of it. The little
sense he has been able to catch from it has seemed to him true and eloquent. But he hears it depart with relief. Listening to it has been a great
strain on him. If it had stayed tangled up in his brains much longer it was
going to give him the headache.

He stands propped against the back of the shop in blissful immobility,
seemingly without the effort of standing, as though hung by his collar
from a hook in the wall. He looks up at the stars. It seems to him there
are more now than there were. And into his deep quietness come moments when he parts from the feeling that they are "up there," and he
feels himself and the shop and the town to be up there too, the world
one of them, among them. Now and then he sees one fall. Now and then
he or Big Ellis will ring and the bottle will be passed, and Jayber greets
her as she goes by. Sometimes the bottle comes to Burley when he does
not remember ringing at all.

At some point in Jayber's sentence the bottle gets metamorphosed
into the maid of the penthouse where they are staying. And every time
she passes in the hall Jayber pleads with her to lay down that pile of dirty
sheets and come away to a better land. But she will only give him a little
kiss on the mouth and go on wherever she was going. And once in his
talk Jayber sings, his voice very sweet and quavery as though he is not
thinking of the maid at all, but another girl far away:

Later Burley comes aware that Jayber has fallen quiet, not finished
with that sentence surely, but just for the time being washed ashore by it.
Later still, seemingly without having intended to, or making any effort
at all, they are all three standing in a row at the front corner of the shop,
looking out into the street. The crowd is smaller now, but the fire is still
burning, the dancers are still dancing, and the musicians play on as before. Uncle Stanley is singing in the same strident voice:

Standing in the shadow against the wall of the building, Whacker is
still swaying ponderously to the music as though the whole festivity is
run by a pendulum hidden secretly among its works, and he is it.

The better part of the remaining crowd having by now come under
the influence of Whacker's merchandise, there is a great deal of loud
laughter, all conversations are being conducted in shouts, everything
moves by plunges and jolts. Dancers, swinging, launch their partners out
into the crowd, never to find them again, and continue dancing, alone or
with some bystander snatched out of the crowd at random.

"Gentlemen," Jayber says, "we cannot pursue our high aims amid this
tumult."

And the three of them turn and trot around to their place at the back
of the building, feeling they go high at each step, floating and gliding like
balloons between kicks at the ground. They ring and drink to celebrate their return, and stand in their old places and watch the stars, and watch
the stars fall.

"You can't remember where they fall from," Burley says.

"It don't matter," Big Ellis says. "You don't have to put 'em back."

"Well, it just looks to me like a fellow ought to keep track of something like that. Kind of sad that he don't. He can't, I reckon. But it's sad. A
whole star fall spang out of the blooming sky, and not a word in the
paper, not a monument, not a plaque, not any kind of a notice at all."

"Don't matter. Plenty of them up there. Keep track of one that's still
hanging."

"Most of those stars," Jayber says, "are many light-years away-I forget just how many, and a light-year is how far light can travel in a year,
and I think that's about a trillion or so miles or so, and ..."

"Light don't travel," Burley says. "It just shines wherever it's at."

"It does travel. You just can't see fast enough to see it."

"If it ever moved I'd see it."

"Well, where does it go when it goes out?"

"Hah!" Burley says. "Where? Where does a fire go when it goes out?"

"That's what I mean! Where does the beam of a flashlight, for instance, go when you turn it off?"

"That's what I mean! Where does music go when it stops playing?"

Big Ellis is finally getting uneasy about the tone of the conversation.

Jayber sure is a mighty smart fellow," he says, "ain't he, Burley?"

"That's right," Burley says. `All right. I agree. No question about it,
light travels. What do you do about it?"

"Nothing," Jayber says. "Nothing you can do. You just know it because
you have to, because you know it travels and you know it goes, and you
know it flies about a trillion miles a year through all that blackness on its
way from there to Port William, that is to say right here, where we're at,
to wit, and the light of some maybe never has got here yet, and we're
looking at the light of some maybe that burnt clean out and black a hundred years ago. And them that we see falling perhaps fell and went out a
long time before we saw the light of them falling, for it's farther up there
than your eyes will believe ..."

"Hush, Jayber," Burley says. "Don't talk like that. It's too sad. Don't
say no more. Let's just be right here where we are."

"Right, colleague," Jayber says.

And then a thought comes to Burley that seems to have been
approaching him, and that he seems to have been waiting for, ever since
he came. Now that it has come it seems to clarify a great deal, and is a
relief to him.

"What we're celebrating is celebration," he says. That started out to
be clear, but did not wind up clear. Somewhere before the end his statement came apart like a flimsy basket and let most of his meaning spill
out. "We're not celebrating any happening or anything," he says, `but
just celebrating.

"We're not shellerbrating any thing," he says, "because of how things
have of being what they are. They ain't over apt to stay celebrate-able.
Because they ain't."

"Which is to say," Jayber says, "as aforesaid. And to wit."

"Because," Burley says, "to cellerbreak things ain't hardly barrelable
because they won't always stay cellerellable."

`And the celebration of celebration," Jayber says, "will make celebrities of us all. You really had the cerebral horsepower behind that one, old
chap."

"I thank you," Burley says. "I 'preciate it."

They fall silent again, and except when one of them rings and the bottle is passed they stay still for a long time.

And then Jayber, raising his hand toward the stars pontifically as to
bless the universe, intones:

"Et ceterah. Et ceterah."

And they are quiet for a long time after that.

After a while they turn up again at the edge of the street. The town is
deserted, quiet, and, except for the embers of the fire, dark.

"I declare," Burley says. "I believe the dance is over."

`And nobody told us," Jayber says.

"I be durn," Big Ellis says, saddened and amazed.

Detached from thought or motive so that they learn what they are
doing with surprise, Burley and Jayber are out in the street doing an
Indian dance around the fire. They dance silently, staggering, but with
great solemnity and pomp. They hear a whoop from Big Ellis, and hurry
back over to the shop.

"Look at this little fellow I found here," Big Ellis says.

In the dark against the side of the building they make out the hulk of
Whacker Spradlin, sitting flat on the ground.

"Passed out," Burley says. "Passed clean out. Such as never seen
before."

Jayber nudges Whacker with the toe of his shoe. No response. He
shoves the big straw-hatted head and it falls forward. He lifts one arm
and then the other and lets them fall; they lie where they drop. He kneels
on Whacker's stomach and lifts the brim of the straw hat and looks into
his face. He draws Whacker's two heavy hands together and laces his fingers over the bib of his overalls, and pushes his head back against the
wall and covers his face with the hat.

Straightening up, swaying forward and back, Jayber peers down at his
work, and turns gravely to his associates.

"He's dead, gentlemen."

Though Whacker quite audibly and visibly breathes, the longer they
look at him the clearer it seems to them that he is dead. There is something about the way he sits with his straw hat stuck over his face, loudly
breathing, yet clearly and indisputably dead, that is surely one of the funniest things ever seen in Port William. For several minutes they weave
and stagger and laugh, slapping their knees and each other's backs. Jayber then strikes a tragic pose and beckons them to hush. Accompanied
by giggles that leak out of Big Ellis as if under high pressure, he
declaims: