A Place on Earth (Port William) (8 page)

She made, finally, a kind of household pet of him, made a child of
him, and he submitted painstakingly. She fixed special treats and desserts
for him. In the years between Dave's death and her own she crocheted a
set of doilies for his room.

He remembers the heavy day, after her death, that he spent burning
the leftover odds and ends of her life that she had carefully preserved in
the closets and the bureau drawers: postcards and letters from people
whose names he had forgot and hastened to forget again, photographs of
people dead before he was born, whose names he never knew. Though
he wanted none of it, though he lightened himself by getting rid of it,
there was an awesome finality in the burning of those things, dear to her
for reasons that would never be known again in the world.

Since his father's death and the boys' departure, and even more since
the death of his mother, Burley has devoted himself to Jarrat-not
because Jarrat ever has required devotion of him, but because he is
touched by Jarrat's loneliness, and in the absence of so many is lonely
himself.

Jarrat lives for work. He has grown nearly silent. If Burley wants to
talk, he has to wait for a chance to go elsewhere. But he and Jarrat have
continued to work together, and there has been a great deal to be done
and always more to do. During the past two years, in addition to farming
their own places, they have sharecropped on Mat Feltner's. Jarrat took this new work. Burley knew, simply because the acreage became available-and because he is, within the limits of his strength, unable to let
the opportunity of a crop go by.

Burley has made himself Jarrat's friend. Though Jarrat will never
acknowledge any dependence on him, Burley has made himself dependable. He has been, as he never was earlier in his life, faithful to their
work, not for his own sake, but for Jarrat's. In these years of their loneliness devotion has become Burley's habit. He has become more gentle as
Jarrat has become more hard.

Now, as he comes up to the yard, Jarrat is waiting for him, standing on
the stone walk between the back porch and the cellar house. He is past
fifty now, and looks older-all leather and bone and lean meat, taller and
leaner than Burley, a little bent in the shoulders. His face, beginning to
hollow in the cheeks and temples and around the eyes, is covered with a
week's growth of nearly white beard. His mouth is cleanly shaped, firm,
and tightly, deliberately, closed. His eyebrows are coarse, heavy, completely black; below them his eyes are set deep and have a peculiar fixity
of gaze.

He is wearing an old hunting coat, soiled and stained and frayed. His
large hands hang down at his sides, the knobbed heavy bones of his wrists
showing beneath the coat cuffs. His hands are scarred and hardened,
weathered to the color of an old saddle. Jarrat's face invites no sympathy; to Burley, all the humanness and vulnerability of him are in his
hands, and he is always touched by the sight of them. For three or four
years, Burley knows, Jarrat has been unable to sign a check. His hand has
become incapable of performing the small movements of his name, can
scarcely grasp and hold steady so small an object as a pencil. It is the
peculiar adaptation of his strength that he can do small work only clumsily or not at all, but manages the roughest and heaviest labor with grace
and seemingly without strain.

He stands midway of the walk, awkwardly waiting. He asks, "Did he
catch the bus?"

"Yes."

"You got him there all right. And saw him off."

"Yes."

Jarrat is looking down at his feet. He nods. And then, as though he
had been not waiting but passing on some errand, he goes out the gate
and starts home.

Burley walks up the steps and onto the porch. He wipes his feet on the
piece of old carpet beside the door and goes into the kitchen.

He lays a fire in the cooking range and lights it. Once the blaze has
caught, he goes to the living room to build up the fire there, and then
goes out along the path to the barn to do his feeding.

When he leaves the barn, the sun, just before setting, shines out of a
breach in the clouds, and below him the valley is suddenly filled with a
transparent mist of rich light. He stops to look. A window in a house he
cannot see, on a ridgetop three or four miles away on the other side of
the river, catches the sun. His clothes are still damp from the rain; his feet
are wet and cold. He stands there, watching the light, thinking suddenly
of spring.

Back in the house, he gets out a pair of dry shoes and a change of
clothes. He stands in front of the stove in the living room, taking off his
wet clothes and putting the dry ones on. He waits there, holding his
hands over the top of the stove, until he is warm.

The house has become dark. He goes through the cold hall to the
kitchen and turns on the light and begins preparing his supper. He goes
about his work in about the same way as his mother would have gone
about it.

Usually his housekeeping seems to him to be too painstaking, even
wasteful, for one man living alone. At times he has thought it would be
better to move his bed down to the kitchen and live in the one room
with the one fire, as Jarrat has always done, and close up the rest of the
house. But he has never been able to bring himself to the change. He follows the old habits of the household, keeping at least the three rooms
alive. And he keeps Nathan's room clean and waiting, refusing to accept
loneliness as the culmination of anything. He knows better than to hope
outright for the return of anybody, but he is careful to leave the possibilities open.

When his meal is done with and the kitchen is set to rights, he goes
back to the living room and sits and smokes in his chair beside the stove. The room is furnished sparely and to Burley, despite his own presence in
it, it feels deserted. There is a checkered linoleum on the floor, a small
carpet in the center of it in front of the stove. Besides Burley's rocking
chair, there are four straight-backed chairs, a sofa, and a table under the
front window. On the mantel behind the stove a stopped clock stands
between two glass vases. Between the clock and the vases are pictures of
Tom and Nathan in their uniforms, and an enlarged photograph of the
family taken by Jarrat's wife in the year before her death. They are standing in a row in the yard in front of the house. It is Sunday, or else they
have dressed up especially for the picture-he cannot remember. The
two little boys, at either end of the row, are grinning, looking into the
camera. Jarrat and Burley, almost unrecognizably younger, stand with
the boys beside them and the old people between them; they have their
hands behind them, their feet apart, their eyes squinched against the
sun; Jarrat, self-consciously, is smiling. The grandmother stands with her
hands clasped in front of her, her feet placed together at a prim angle, in
what was considered graceful posture in the time of her girlhood.
Beside her, peculiarly apart from her, and from all the rest of them, old
Dave is leaning forward over his cane. He might be there alone for all the
deference he pays to the presence of the others. He is as tall as Jarrat, and
as lean, his white hair uncombed. He is wearing a white shirt and tie and
a dress coat of an old-fashioned cut which fits him too tightly across the
shoulders, but his pants are work pants, without creases. The set of his
face is stubborn. He has submitted only grudgingly-only, finally, at the
insistence of his pretty daughter-in-law-to the taking of the picture. He
stares straight ahead.

They look into the room: the living faces of the dead, the different
younger faces of the living, more perishable than the paper of the photograph. Jarrat's young wife was the first to die, leaving Jarrat and the
two boys to become what they would not have become if she had lived,
changing all the possibilities. And old Dave held on to his life as if nothing was less obvious and less certain than death-until a simple sleep,
like a child's, pried his fingers loose. And the old woman died, among the
gathering of her memories, as though she died into a death she had
already lived in for years.

And Tom is dead. And Nathan is gone again, bound to them now only
by the thin strand of departure.

Burley leans forward, opening the door of the stove, and throws in
the butt of his cigarette and empties the ashes out of his hand.

He picks up a newspaper and looks at it a moment. But it is yesterday's paper-he forgot to get the mail when he came in. He puts the
paper down and turns on the radio, and then, anticipating with a kind of
fear the breaking of the silence, turns it off again.

He gets up and walks to the window and, shielding his eyes from the
light in the room, looks out. There are no stars. The wind has quieted
and the overcast, he imagines, is thickening again. He stirs the fire and
sits back down.

For a long time there is only the sound of the fire burning, the occasional shifting of the coals. Occasionally, marking the silence into long
spans, he hears the cracking of the floors and walls as the house contracts and settles into the night cold. He is thinking of Tom.

Tom had been a bulldozer operator with a battalion of engineers, following the invasion into Italy. One morning they were sent up into the
mountains where a battle had been fought the night before. The field
was strewn with the dead of both armies, and Toms outfit had orders to
bury them. The area was still under threat of counterattack, and they
were to do their work in a hurry. The ground was stony and thin and
frozen, covered with a layer of snow With considerable difficulty, Tom
scooped out a long shallow grave. The bodies were laid in quickly, side
by side in the naked grave, and he began covering them. He replaced the
dirt he had moved, and to make the burial as deep as possible he began
scraping up dirt from the area around the grave to mound over it. It was
desperate work. Twice he became confused about the dimensions of the
grave and dug out the bodies he was trying to cover. The forward movement of the heavy machine rolled them out of the pit before he could
stop.

Now, grown still in the chair, the warmth of the stove around him,
Burley doesn't know if he is awake or asleep. Cold in his mind, he digs in
the skimpy dirt, moving back and forth on the narrow shelf of the
mountain. Beneath him he can feel the shove and pitch of the machine, the sound of the engine alternately straining and idling. Looking down
as if from a height, he sees the unfinished long mound of a grave. Under
the mound are the dead, lying side by side in their torn uniforms, a single
long rank of them, facing up into the raw dirt. He scrapes at the frozen
ground, loosening only handfuls at a time, and pushes it onto the
grave-to make the dead safe there, to be done with them, to hide them
forever. He is in a terrible hurry, and there is not enough dirt.

He uncovers a face. Tom's. The boy lies on his side, his right arm
crooked beneath his head. His eyes are shut, the dirt against his cheek
like a blanket.

He wakes up. The house and the fire tick on into the silence. He sits
still, trying to recover his presence there in the familiar room. It is time
he was going to bed. But he puts on his hat and coat, and picking up his
lantern at the kitchen door, starts back along the road to town.

The lobby of Mrs. Hendrick's hotel, considering its public intention, is a
cramped small room. The ceiling is too high for the length and breadth
of it. Light from the one-eyed ramshackle fixture in the ceiling thins and
dims, reaching down into it. In a steep diagonal across the back wall of
the room a stairway goes up to the second floor.

Beneath the stairway, divided from the rest of the room by a short
counter, there is a small triangular alcove, which was the office of the
establishment in its more or less flourishing days. The alcove contains
a double row of empty pigeonholes. The counter bears a frayed inkmarked green blotter, a crusted inkstand and pen, a small nickel-plated
bell. None of this has been in use for years. Now all the business of the
place can be transacted well enough in and out of Mrs. Hendrick's snapping change purse, but she has maintained the little office as an appearance or reminder of her better days. The lobby is furnished with three
wicker chairs and a wicker settee. They sit there empty, in conversational arrangement, offering hospitality in the empty room.

The dining room is a little better than twice as long and half again as
wide as the lobby. Four ample tables stand in a row down the center of
the floor. Light fixtures hang by cords from the ceiling at either end of the room, but only the most distant one is lighted. At the far end of the
room a door opens into the kitchen, showing beyond it a large black
cooking range. The table nearest the kitchen is the only one with a cloth
on it.

At this last table Old Jack and the two lady boarders are seated. The
old man sits at the end of the table toward the front of the building. At
the opposite end is Mrs. Hendrick's empty chair. The old ladies sit, facing
each other across the table, on either side of the landlady's place. The
plates of the three women make a small close triangle, leaving as much
of the table's length as possible between them and old Jack. The old
ladies have woolen shawls drawn around their shoulders, and Jack still
has on his coat and cap. The meal is nearly finished. The old ladies have
stopped eating, and are leaning toward each other, talking almost in
whispers. Now and then they glance down the table at Old Jack, but
covertly, so as not to violate their pretense that they are unaware of his
presence. As their glances at him show, their exchange of womanly confidences is a little thrilled at its surreptitious occurrence in the presence
of the old man.

Old Jack is still eating. He has heaped his plate full for the second
time, and has no more than half finished it. He eats with the forthright
assistance of his left thumb, with a great wielding of his elbows. Whatever the old ladies say to each other at mealtimes, it always has a tacit reference to the old man's table manners. At the moment there is a trickle
of gravy on its way down his chin; sooner or later, they know, ignoring
his napkin, he will wipe it off on his sleeve.