A Place on Earth (Port William) (9 page)

Mrs. Hendrick is standing just out of reach of his left elbow She is
holding out, vaguely in his direction, a nearly empty meat platter. She
has been standing there for a full minute, waiting for him to notice her,
her face set in a twist of impatience. Jack continues to eat, concentrating
on the space between his plate and his mouth.

She pokes the plate at him. "Do you want any more of this meat, Mr.
Beechum?"

"Naw'm," Jack says. "You can take that away, Suzy. I'm done with it."

Mrs. Hendrick's name is not Suzy. None of the three women is named
Suzy. But Old Jack simplifies matters by calling them all Suzy.

One of the old ladies giggles in confidential outrage at the other.

Mrs. Hendrick makes hard rapid tracks to the kitchen with the meat
platter. She comes back and scrapes up the old ladies' dishes and her
own, and carries them to the kitchen. Her steps peck brittlely back and
forth over the floor. She brings in the coffee pot and fills the triangle of
cups at the ladies' end of the table and sits down again. She passes the
sugar and cream to her lady boarders.

Old Jack finishes eating and pushes back his plate. Mrs. Hendrick gets
up and hustles around the table, her heels again picking out the thin hard
code of her martyrdom. Sometimes she gets furious at Mr. Hendrick
for having died and left her alone, and poor, and dependent on these distresses. She brushes Old jack's crumbs into his plate and takes it out to
the kitchen. She pours his coffee and sets the cream and sugar by him,
and goes back to her place.

The old man scoops in three heaping spoonfuls of sugar and pours in
cream until his cup fills to the brim. He stirs, slopping the coffee out into
the saucer. Holding cup and saucer unsteadily in his big hands, he pours
the saucer full, and blows on it and drinks. He finishes the coffee in five
saucerings, rapidly, with a loud mixture of breathing and blowing and
guzzling, and gets up, scraping his chair backwards, scrubbing his mouth
on his coat sleeve. He unhooks his cane from the corner of the table.

He looks at Mrs. Hendrick and gives her a large smile. There is a blunt
obtrusive kindness in his expression, utterly unaware of the displeasure
that she has been at such pains to make obvious.

"I thank you, Suzy. And good night to you."

He turns and goes, walking heavily the length of the dining room and
out the door, leaving his chair pushed back at an angle from the table.

Jack's departure, as far as the two old ladies are concerned, is as disturbing as his presence. His leave-taking is absolute. The turning of his
back completely dismisses the entire circumstance of the meal and its
company-themselves. He bears away from the table a filled belly, but
beyond that not a thought. The set of his head and shoulders, the
momentous stomping and hobbling of his gait, suggest that he has never
looked behind him in his life. He seems to participate unequivocally in
the continuing deaths and completions of things. His knowledge is as
forthright as his hunger. He speaks of the approach of his own death as
much as a matter of fact as he speaks of the approach of Tuesday. He accomplishes everything as if he is both aware and willing that every
breath he draws will be the last of its kind. To the old ladies there is something obscene in it. They exchange a series of self-conscious glances-as
after a near stroke of lightning.

From where they sit they hear his cane and his footsteps thumping
slowly up the stairs.

At each end of the hall a bulb the size of a walnut gives a thin weak
light shadowing the offsets of the doorways. Into the half-dark of the
hall the rooms exhale the cold musk of emptiness. Jack goes into his
room, leaving the door open so that a little light drains in from the hall.
He feels his way to the light switch, and turns it on. The room contains
only an iron bed, a tall bare-topped chiffonier with a peeling oval mirror,
a large rocking chair. That the bed is made up is the only sign that the
room is lived in. Old Jack's coming has changed nothing.

He shoves the rocking chair over to the window and hooks his cane
over the arm of it and sits down. He leans back.

The room contains his sleep. It is there, waiting for him, folded in the
iron bed. But he has to prepare for it. He has to get his mind ready for it
beforehand. In the last few years, since he has become too old to work,
he has slept a light short sleep. A sleep too easy to wake up from-his
mind is always just barely submerged under it, as though he is looking
up at light through an obscuring thin film of water. Unless he is careful
he will wake up in the night and think of his fears.

Most of all he is afraid that before he dies he will be sick and unable to
attend to himself. Death does not worry him so much. He has no time
for the solemnity usually attributed to it, but it is a fact, at least, and can
be considered and dealt with. He thinks of dying as a kind of job that
will have to be done, and, as he tells Wheeler Catlett, he can do it. But
the thought of sickness makes him afraid. He fears living on past sickness into dependence on other people. He dislikes the uncertainty of
these thoughts. He has lived all his life loving solid objects, things he
could hook onto with his hands and pull. He has loved to feel in his
hands the thrown-back weight of his body.

Other times he will wake up thinking of the imperfections of his life.
He will lie there, remembering his mistakes and stupidities and errors of
judgment, furious at himself, furious and sickened at the impossibility of correcting the past. These recollections return to him like old pains. And
once they start they come at him one after another. They are worse than
nightmares; he cannot wake up from them, and he cannot go back to
sleep.

And so he sits up by his window each night, waiting to need to sleep.
He waits to go to bed until he feels he can trust his sleep to last until
morning.

He goes to bed a good deal later now than he used to. But he has kept
his old habit of getting up early. Long before dawn these winter mornings he will be out of bed and wide awake. After he puts on his clothes he
draws the covers back over the bed. And then he turns out the light and
feels his way to the rocking chair and sits down. When daylight comes
he will be there at the window, waiting for it.

A single set of footsteps goes along the walk in front of the hotel, and
farther down the street somebody is talking loudly in front of one of the
stores. A door slams somewhere off in the town. Below him in the
kitchen Mrs. Hendrick is rattling the supper dishes.

Up the street he can see lights in Mat Feltner's house. Wheeler Catlett
is there for supper, he remembers. For a few minutes he considers going
over to Mat's to pay a visit and talk to Wheeler. He thinks a lot of
Wheeler-admires him, in fact, a good deal more than he aims to let
him know. He imagines going in and sitting down and talking a while
with Wheeler and Mat. They are fine men, and have good heads on
them. And he would like to see Wheeler's little boys. Wheeler has taught
his sons to call the old man "Unde Jack."

"Uncle Jack," the littlest one said, "you've got tobacco juice on your
shirt." That tickled Jack. And Wheeler's embarrassment tickled him
even more. That littlest boy of Wheeler's would walk right up and tell
Franklin D. Roosevelt he had tobacco juice on his shirt. Old Jack's face
creases into the shape of a large laugh, and he snorts. He thinks a lot of
those boys of Wheeler's. Every Christmas he buys a little something to
give them. Wheeler appreciates that.

He would like to hear Wheeler say something about the war. Jack
stays troubled about the war. There is too much dying. Too many young
men dying. He mistrusts what he reads in the papers. The war is more
serious, it seems to him, than the papers make it out to be.

It may be necessary to use up the lives of young men; Jack will agree
to that. He has no liking for defeat. But after a choice has had to be made
between terrible sacrifice and terrible defeat, it is a time of mourning.

The newspapers add up the deaths of young men as if they were
some kind of loan, an investment in something.

What is dead is gone.

He reaches into the bib pocket of his overalls and takes out a small
notebook in which there is a carefully folded newspaper picture of the
President. He opens the picture and looks at it. The President sits there
behind his great desk. His eyes look direct and straight out of the picture
so that they seem to focus on Old Jack.

The President's face is sober and tired, sorrowful. The strain of the
war shows in it, the burden of knowing of so many deaths. It would take
a lot of strength to know so much.

A great man, with a powerful head on his shoulders.

Jack thinks how it would be to sit in Mat Feltner's living room, and
talk with Mat and Wheeler and Franklin Roosevelt. It would be brilliant.

"Mr. President," Wheeler says, "how much longer do you think it'll
last?"

"I don't know." The President looks straight at Wheeler. "It's a hard
proposition. We'll have to fight them until they quit."

That's a responsible answer, Jack thinks. He has to say so. "That's
right," he says. "Go to it. By God, we're for you, sir."

"Thank you, my friend," the President says.

It is too late, now, to go over to Mat's. They would not be expecting
him. He will see Wheeler later in the week, anyhow.

Saturday afternoon, or maybe Friday, the two of them will drive out
to spend a couple of hours or so seeing to things on Old Jack's farm. And
then maybe they will go on over to Wheeler's daddy's place, as they do
sometimes, and visit a while there. Or go somewhere to look at a farm
that Wheeler will be thinking of buying-and spend a while pointing
out and describing to each other what could be done by way of improvement. Or maybe-it could be any day-Wheeler will have a case to try
in one of the counties upriver, and will stop by and pick up Old Jack and
take him along. They usually ride all the way to the courthouse without
talking much, Wheeler's briefcase and maybe a law book or two on the seat between them. There's too much going on inside of Wheeler then.
It is as if, while they are on the way to the trial, Wheeler's mind and his
nerves are drawing down like the spring of a steel trap. And with
Wheeler-who, in Old Jack's opinion, has a mind like a steel trap-that
is a mighty formidable thing to see happening. Because once he stands
up in one of those courtrooms, with the judge and the jury and the
opposing lawyer and the plaintiff and the defendant and the crowd of
courthouse regulars and loafers and idle farmers and the framed portraits of four or five generations of judges all looking at him, Wheeler's
intelligence shines. Whether he wins or loses, Wheeler shines, Old Jack
can see that. Every point Wheeler makes has the clean sound to it of a
good axe chopping into a locust stump. And Old Jack, in his seat in the
back of the room, says `Ah!" On the way home, after Wheeler has got
limbered up and relaxed a little, Old Jack will slap him on the knee and
tell him: "You're all right, son. You've got a powerful head, and that's
fine. Mighty fine."

He folds up the President's picture and puts it back. He thumbs
through the notebook until he finds a clean page; and then he takes a
short pencil out of his pocket, and begins to write down a column of
figures.

That pocket in the bib of his overalls is Old Jack's place of business.
That is where he keeps his old silver pocket watch and his notebook and
pencil; he tells Wheeler he uses the pocket to hold what he has got left of
his mind. He and Wheeler both know that he's still got a shrewd head on
his shoulders, but they let on as if he would have no mind at all if he had
no pocket to put it in.

It is true enough that the old man no longer has any memory for figures. And all his accounts and receipts are kept in a file in Wheeler Catlett's office in Hargrave. He does his figuring in the notebook by guess,
estimating and imagining what he cannot remember or never knew, and
coming up invariably with a monstrous error in the result. But he has the
habit of figuring, and so he figures, night after night, sitting by himself in
his room, chewing furiously at his cud of tobacco, his imagination freewheeling among wishes and guesses, going up one side and down the
other of what he presumes to be his farm accounts.

This is his farming, the remnant of habit and fascination from his life's work, which he claims he has died out of now, all except his mind. He
relishes his ciphering. The figures come into his mind smelling of barns
and grain bins and tobacco and livestock. His figures grunt and bleat and
bray and bawl. This is the passion that has worn him out, and made him
old, and is still a passion. As he labors over it, the notebook becomes as
substantial in his hands as a loaded shovel.

Scratching and stabbing with the pencil, he makes a column of figures representing his guesses as to what his earnings have been since the
first of the year, and his predictions of what he will have earned by the
year's end. Beside that column he makes another, guessing and predicting his expenses. He adds both columns, and subtracts expenses from
earnings. If the margin of profit strikes him as too small he begins again,
and repeats the operation, increasing the earnings and economizing on
the expenses, until he comes up with a figure that suits him. The next
night he does the same thing, disregarding all the figures he has already
made. And then, while they make their weekly drive out to the farm, he
reads off his latest figures to Wheeler.

"No, Jack," Wheeler says. "You can't make that much."

And then they have an argument. Old Jack argues. And then Wheeler
argues. And when Wheeler stops the car in front of the barn they both
figure in the notebook.

"Lord no!" Wheeler says.

It is an argument that neither of them ever wins. Jack never admits
that he has lost, but he can never bring himself to think that Wheeler has
lost, either-not for a minute. What he does believe, what he keeps very
firm in his mind, is that between him and Wheeler it does not matter
who wins, which is to say that between them the idea of winning is not
a very important idea. As a matter of fact, nothing would trouble him
more than to beat Wheeler in an argument.