A Place on Earth (Port William) (12 page)

He pushes the door wider open with the point of his cane, and then
grabs the doorjamb with his free hand and climbs into the shop.

'What do you know, Uncle Stanley?"

Uncle Stanley cannot possibly have heard, but according to his theory
of social procedure, this is the time for a greeting to be offered and
accepted. He bites into the air four or five times as though pumping himself up. And then he yells back, at the top of his voice, and as pathetically
and sickly as possible at that volume:

"Fair to middling, Jayber, by golly. But, by dab, ain't it been a awful
winter?"

Jayber's first inclination is to kick the chair around and help himself to
the comfort of a private grin. But remembering that the mirror is behind
him, he wipes his own face straight with the back of his hand, and waits.
The old man has said exactly what Jayber and nearly everybody else in
Port William could have predicted last week that he would say, for the
second article of his theory holds that all greetings surely must take the
form of a question about his health. But the townsmen, who know his
theory, take pains to avoid the question, knowing he will answer it anyhow. With the exception of Brother Preston and two or three helplessly
well-intentioned female members of the church, it has been ten years
since anybody asked Uncle Stanley how he feels.

Now that the greeting is done with, he removes his grin and sits
down. He looks up at Jayber out of the bristling of his whiskers and eyebrows, and bites off some more air.

"Yessir, by golly, it's been a hard winter. It's been hard on the old bugger, by golly. I was just telling the madam here the other night, by dab, I
believe it's weakened me. I believe it's aged me."

Jayber lets himself laugh now, and says loudly, "It's not the cold that's
getting you down, Uncle Stanley. You've just been too active at night for
an old buck."

That's flattery. Uncle Stanley grins. His mouth draws open like a rubber band; you could loop the corners of it over his ears.

`Aw-aw now, Jayber, that time's done gone." But he shakes his head,
and then nods. "I've seen the time, though. I call back forty, fifty years, I
could work all day, by juckers, and wench like a tomcat all night." He
laughs in sincere admiration. "With the best of them. By grab, I didn't
know what a night's sleep was. When I heard the roosters crow I just
come home and et breakfast and went to work. But not anymore. It's
done gone by."

"I can't believe that, Uncle Stan. Some of them told me they hear you
romp and stomp and bellow like a bull all hours of the night."

"Haw. Too late for that, Jayber. If I was still able to bother any women
it wouldn't be the madam. When Grover was born that about fixed it
between me and her. Said all that foolishness might be a pleasure to me,
but wasn't nothing but suffering and trouble to her. Said, by grab, I could
just sleep in the back room. By juckers, I've put up with her all these
years for her conversation. And can't hear what she says a third of the
time. Hard on a man! By dab by grab."

Mrs. Gibbs is a stout member of the Port William church and sings in
the front row of the choir. She was the only one of the congregation
who voted outright against hiring Uncle Stanley to be janitor. For maybe
forty years nobody has seen the two of them together in public. If Uncle
Stanley is sitting out on the front porch, Miss Pauline will be sitting on
the back porch. She keeps house for him and cooks his meals and sits
down at the table with him, but only because it's her "duty as a Christian," not because she wants to. Otherwise they live like strangers who
happen to have rooms in the same hotel. She has forced Uncle Stanley to live behind her back, and he probably forced her to force him, and she
probably forced him to force her to force him, and so on and so on; it's
just as well to accuse time and the world and Port William, which are
also, and just as uncertainly, to blame. Since the first few years of it, the
marriage of Uncle Stanley and Miss Pauline has been an armistice, likely
to break into hostilities any minute. Neither of them makes any bones
about it. Whenever the question of increasing Uncle Stanley's wages or
of giving him a little "token" at Christmas is put to a vote before the congregation, Miss Pauline votes against it. And Uncle Stanley is apt to publicize, in the normal course of his conversation, at the top of his voice,
anything from the trouble Miss Pauline is having with her bowels to the
events of their wedding night.

Once the old man gets started there is no telling when or where he
will stop. As long as he is doing all the talking he is certain, for a change,
what the conversation is about, and he aims to make it worth his trouble.
Jayber listens to him, usually, with a growing sense of guilt and alarm. If
there was anybody else in the shop it would be mostly funny, but always
when he is the only one in the audience Jayber feels himself helplessly
implicated in what the old man is saying. He never intends to get him
started. He will be carrying on what seems a harmless conversation, with
the best intentions in the world, and then all of a sudden Uncle Stanley
will have taken off into some outrageous confession-not just spoken,
published. And Jayber feels like somebody who intended to light a cigarette and set the town on fire. The old man has no secrets, no concern
for privacy, no wish for dignity, no notion of responsibility that might
stop him or make him lower his voice. It is not that Jayber fails to be
amused and even tickled at what he says, and not that any particular thing
he says is not in one way or another more amusing than disturbing; but
running along with the amusement is the nearly terrifying certainty that
there is no limit to what he might say, or would say if he knew how. Once
that awful mouth of his loosens up and starts running, anything is possible. Nothing has any value except conversational. Nothing is worth anything except as it maintains the sound of his own voice bubbling up into
the silence of the world. Listening to him, Jayber sometimes thinks that
the words don't come out of his mouth, but disappear into it. That
mouth is an abyss that the whole world and the planets and stars might be sucked into and vanish forever. He can be heard distinctly, in calm
weather, fifty or seventy-five yards in all directions, advertising at a shout
the failure of everything to mean anything.

In the face of Uncle Stanley's devouring garrulousness, as confirmed
and free a bachelor as he is, Jayber always finds himself taking up the
defense of marriage. Not so much the defense of any particular marriage-not, by a long shot, of Uncle Stanley's-but of marriage itself, of
what has come to be, for him, a kind of last-ditch holy of holies: the possibility that two people might care for each other and know each other
better than enemies, and better than strangers happening to be alive at
the same time in the same town; and that, with a man and a woman, this
caring and knowing might be made by intention, and in the consciousness of all it is, and of all it might be, and of all that threatens it. At these
times it seems to Jayber that, of all the men in Port William, he's the
most married-not in marriage, but to this ideal of marriage. He is
bound in this way, as he is bound, beyond his friendships and his friends,
to an ideal of friendship.

These are the last remainders of Jayber's ideals. He holds to them
against the possibility that life will mean nothing and be worth nothing.
He is a despairing believer in these things, knowing that everything fails.
The ideal rides ahead of the real, renewing beyond it, perishing in itunreachable, surely, but made new over and over again just by hope and
by the passage of time; what has not yet failed remains possible. And the
ideal, remaining undiminished and perfect, out of reach, makes possible
a judgment of failure, and a just grief and sympathy.

In Port William, or beyond it or above it, Jayber imagines a kind of
Heavenly City, in which each house would be built in a marriage and
around it, and all the houses would be bound together in friendships,
and friendliness would move and join among them like an open street.
His living in Port William has been a bearing of the descent of the town
from that ideal-as though at the end of each night, out of his mind and
his desire, he gives painful birth to the new real morning and the real
town-as though he watches the descent of all things from Heaven, like
a snowfall, into the aimless gap of Uncle Stanley's mouth. But he is also
the adulterer of his marriage, the servant of opposite houses, faithful to
both and unfaithful to both-slipping away from his Heavenly City, to which he has sworn his devotion, to become the lover of all the perishing lights and substances of Port William and of the weather over it and
of the water under it. After so long, it seems to him that he is the native
and occupant of both places, and passes freely between them, and in
serving either serves both.

Tonight Jayber has ceased to listen to Uncle Stanley. He sits looking out
into the dark street and at the light in Milton Burgess's store, letting his
mind run. Out of kindness, he pretends to be listening, nodding his head
now and then in a movement he intends to be ambiguous, but which he
knows Uncle Stanley will take for encouragement.

The old man runs down finally, and Jayber lets him be quiet a few seconds to make sure. Then, with his voice carefully noncommittal, he says:

"Well."

"Says, which?"

"Well!"

"Yessir!" Uncle Stanley says.

He's quiet for nearly a minute, and Jayber sees that he is getting down
to his business, whatever it is. He looks out the window, slowly opening
and shutting his mouth, thinking over what he has to say. When he turns
back, he prods Jayber's shin with the point of the cane and says, "I've got
a proposition for you, Jayber. I've been trying to get a chance to talk to
you all day."

"What's on your mind, Uncle Stanley?"

"Well, I got a j ob to offer you. Keeping care of the graveyard. Preacher
told me to find somebody to do it."

"You mean dig the graves?"

"Well, that's part of it."

`About all of it, ain't it?"

"Well, some of the time. But in the summer you've got to cut the
grass. And ain't so many dies in the summertime. In the winter just about
all of it's digging the graves. Mud, or ground froze hard as a bull's horn,
by grab, and every kind of weather, and ain't hardly enough pay to make
it worth the trouble. But it's a job, and there's a little money to it, and every little bit helps if you want to look at it that way. I quit looking at it
that way. And, by grab, I quit, I did."

"How come you've quit?"

"How's that?"

"What did you quit for?"

"Why now, by gob, preacher and that undertaker come up day before
yesterday wanting me to go out there by myself in that rain and dig two
graves in one day. I says, `By grab, I won't do it. I'm too old. I can't do it.
All I can do to dig one grave in a day.' `Well now,' preacher says, `Mr.
Gibbs, perhaps you ought to try.' `Try nothing,' I says, I did. `You look at
that ground out there. That ground's so wet you could dig a grave with a
bucket as quick as you could dig one with a shovel. That's a job of work.
I reckon you don't know a job of work. But I do. Because I've done several.' `Well,' preacher says, `what are we going to do?' 'Do?' I says. `We're
going to get somebody to help me dig them graves or they ain't going to
get dug, and you can just keep them corpses until I get around to 'em,
that's what we're going to do.' `Mr. Gibbs,' he says, `you was hired to dig
them graves.' Made me mad, he did. I says, `Now look a here, they've set
around here for six weeks in a row and ain't a one of them died, and now
here two of them ups and dies in one day. It ain't right, and I quit."'

"Did you dig the graves?"

"Well, I dug one of them two. Preacher got them big old boys of Siler
Smith's to dig the other one. By grab, you ought to seen it. Them big old
idiots wallowing and tromping around in that mud. They'd dig out a little hole and it'd cave in on them; and they'd throw out a shovelful of mud
and a shovelful would run back in. And them a fighting it like killing
snakes and cussing till you'd a thought they'd a woke up everybody there.
Even I could hear them. I got mine dug and went home about the middle of the afternoon, and they'd just got theirs down about waist deep.
Some of them said the preacher and that undertaker finally had to come
in to help them, and they was all out there with a lantern still digging
when midnight come."

Uncle Stanley has to stop and laugh.

"Well, they dug a pond, shaped sort of like a funnel. I know just how
it happened because I made the same mistake myself when I was new at
the work. When you dig one of them holes in the mud, if you don't be careful about tramping around the edges of it, and don't watch what
you're doing when you cut down the sides, to do it just so, well it'll
widen out at the top quicker than you can deepen it at the bottom.
When the preacher and the undertaker and them boys got done gauming around in it and tramping around it and falling into it and climbing
out of it, that grave must have been eight foot wide. And tracked and
tramped and muddied around the edges till it looked like where a sow'd
had pigs. They throwed the dirt out on the downhill side because it was
easier, and it rained a hard one before daylight, and there wasn't nothing
to keep half the hillside from draining right into the hole, and she filled
plumb to the brim. That undertaker was there half the morning unrolling that imitation grass of hisn, trying to make a kind of shore to it, so
the family and friends of Mrs. Brewster wouldn't notice they was attending one of them naval burials. He let on he didn't see me coming, on
account of the words I'd had with him and the preacher the morning
before, but I walked right up like the sun was shining and we was the
only friends each other had. `Well,' I says, the Jordan's running a little
muddy this morning, ain't she?' He went right on about his work like he
never heard me. I says, `Is this going to be a baptizing or a funeral?' He
tried not to say anything, but I see it coming up in him, and finally he had
to let it out. `You'd look a damn sight better with your mouth shut,' he
says. `I'm just here waiting for the boat,' I says. And then I let up on him
and give him a hand. We bailed out the hole, but the rain wouldn't quit,
and it was filling up again.