A Place on Earth (Port William) (13 page)

"Well, Grover come down by the house after the funeral, and he said
in spite of all the talk and flowers and artificial grass it still looked more
like a boat launching than a burial. `You've heard of crossing to Jordan's
other shore,' I says. `Well,' he says, `if that's how it's done, Mrs. Brewster's on her way. Go look.' I put on my coat and went up. That undertaker had just bundled all his muddy grass and trappings into the hearse
and gone back, and nobody was left in the graveyard but the preacher.
He was standing there in the rain with his hands in his pockets watching
Mrs. Brewster's coffin. It was floating just as dandy as you ever seen. He
was as glad to see me as if we was both preachers. It showed all over his
face. He thought I'd just walk up and pull out a plug or something, and
everything would be fine. But I knew it wasn't no simple matter, and I wanted him to know it, so I just happened up to the edge of the grave
like a casual bystander and took a long look. I says, `Well, well, well,
you've got a right smart little problem here.' I says you. He looked across
at me like I was an angel fresh out of Heaven. What're we going to do,
Mr. Gibbs?' he says. He says we, so I taken it up. `Well,' I says, `we could
catch her and tic her up until the water goes down. Or,' I says, `if it don't
go down, we could load her with rocks and try to sink her.' And right
there's when the wobbling shaft jumped off of the bobbling pin. It come
a little closer to him than I meant it to, to tell you the truth. He'd got his
mind all made up to hire me back, I seen that. But I'd done ruined it and
made him mad, and I swear to you, Jayber, I done it more or less by accident. But there wasn't no undoing it, and I just had to stand there and
watch him swell up. He was mad enough to drown me and bury me right
in the same water hole with Mrs. Brewster, but he didn't want to be illmannerly. I thought he'd bust. I says to myself, `Now you're going to hear
it.' Because if I ever seen a thirty-minute cuss piling up in a man I seen it
then. But finally he says, just as even and quiet: `Mr. Gibbs, after you get
done filling these here two graves, perhaps you can find someone else to
take your job.'

"It wasn't that I hated to lose the work and the little dab of pay I was
drawing out of it, but I did hate to end on hard feelings. So I said very
friendly: `Well now, Preacher, it won't be easy, because you don't find a
man that can dig a grave just anywhere you look. There's sleights to every
trade, Preacher,' I says, `by grab, and there's sleights to this one. You and
that undertaker, now you all thought poor old Uncle Stanley didn't have
no more brains than it took to bend his back, and that he'd been doing
this work all these years without learning anything about it. But now
you all can see from this here mess that it takes considerable know-how
to do the job the way it ought to be done. Now it's a job that ain't going
to be easy to fill, but I'll look around, Preacher, and I'll find you a good
man. And no hard feelings.'

"But he never softened. `Thank you very much, Mr. Gibbs,' he says,
`by grab, I'll appreciate it if you'll find someone right away.' I says, `Now
Preacher, there'll be some things he won't understand how to do right
off, but I'll stay around with him and oversee his work and learn him
how to do a good job for you. And no hard feelings, by grab,' I says.

"`That'll be perfectly fine, Mr. Gibbs,' he says. `Well,' I says, `do you
want him to keep care of the church too, or just the graveyard?' 'Just the
graveyard, for now, will be all right,' he says.

"So I've been studying about it, Jayber, and I figured you was the only
one with enough brains and time that could use the money. The work's
hard, but it ain't what you'd call steady. Sometimes everybody'll be alive
for three or four months in a row"

"What did you do about Mrs. Brewster?" Jayber asks.

`Aw, me and them old boys of Siler Smith's, we bailed the water out
again and rolled in a few mudballs.

"Well, what about it, Jayber? You want to take this job? I've got to find
somebody. You was the first one I thought of and I thought you might
appreciate it."

`Are you sure the preacher won't hire you back, Uncle Stanley? Don't
you reckon he'll change his mind if you go and ask?"

`Aw now, Jayber. He won't. I done tested him out. Well, to tell you the
truth, I did go ask him, by grab. I went to his house last night, and I asked
him. I even told him the madam wanted me to have the j ob again. But he
said he'd just stick to the understanding we'd worked out.

`Anyhow, Jayber, I'm too old to do it much longer. It's just getting
more than I can do."

"Why, Uncle Stanley, you just said you dug a grave by yourself in half
the time it took the Smith boys and the preacher and the undertaker to
dig one."

'Aw, I can still dig them all right, Jayber, ain't no worry about that. But
I'm getting so derned old that when I get one dug I can't hardly get out
of it."

The old man falls quiet, and confusion crosses his face like a shadow.

"Let me think," Jayber says.

"Says which?"

"Let me think!"

Uncle Stanley perks up and keeps watch while Jayber thinks.

The idea of extra money is foreign tojayber's way of life. For a minute
he doesn't know what in the world he would do with it. But he knows
that in the back of his mind there has been, not exactly troubling him,
but asking for his attention, the question of what he'll do with his old age. He has been a little uneasily on the lookout for an ending to his life.
Until now he has silenced the question with the reply that he will just
barber right on through to the end. But now, for the first time, here is
another possibility.

Jayber would like to fish. He would like to become a fisherman. Suddenly and surprisingly the whole vision blooms before him. It becomes
imaginable and desirable and even possible in a single stroke. Put a little
money aside every week, and before too many years he could build a
small house on the river bank. The land would not cost much, would be
practically worthless except for such a use as he would have for it, and he
would build the house himself out of used lumber. He would stay there
and fish and be quiet until the end of his days. He would cease being a
public man and become a private man. He would fish in the river as
though that was the highest calling that had ever come to a man. And he
would fish in his mind. He would have a boat-he could see it, painted
green, floating lightly as a leaf among the willows at the foot of the
bank.

"I'll tell you what, Uncle Stanley. I'll take the job. And then I want to
hire you to stay on as supervisor. I'll do the work and you can furnish the
know-how, and we'll split the money."

`And now," he says to himself, "you've started something."

He has, he realizes, changed his life. He has, from the moment just
past, begun to live like a man possessed by an idea and a plan-a man
who suddenly knows what he will do for years ahead if he is able-a
man possessing not only a life, but a death. He has changed beyond anything he could have imagined a minute ago. But also, for the first time
since he made up his mind to leave the university, he is uncertain that he
wanted to do what he has done.

But there is no uncertainty in Uncle Stanley. He is delighted. This is a
realization of his highest ideal: a position of authority with half-pay and
no work. He would not ask more of Heaven.

"Well, Jayber, I was going to offer to stay along with you and learn
you the sleights of it, and see to it that you don't get into any problems."

He saws his cane across Jayber's shin.

"But that proposition you just made, now, by grab, that was mighty
kind. It was white, by grab."

Jayber starts to say something, but he does not have a chance. Uncle
Stanley is going to do all the talking. They are partners now. They are a
team, and Uncle Stanley is the leader. Now that he has said yes, Jayber is
to have nothing more to say.

"Next one dies, now, that's our start," Uncle Stanley's saying.
"Preacher'll let you know and you let me know, and we'll start in. Maybe
tomorrow you ought to come and let me show you where I keep the
tools and give you a key to the shed."

Every new idea is better than the last. Uncle Stanley never realized
what great authority he had until he lost it, and now he has had it given
back to him. It is a resurrection. He thought he was a goner, but now his
life is twice as abundant as before.

He goes into a discourse on the sleights and subtleties of gravedigging, a discourse on method: how to dig a grave in the rain, in the
snow, in mud, in clay, in rock, in hard ground, in soft ground, on sloping
ground, on flat ground, on top of a rise, along the edge of a drain, in
frozen ground, in hot weather, in cold; how to dig them big, how to dig
them small; what to do with the dirt; how to fill, how to mound, how to
sod, how to set a tombstone; what to do with wilted flowers. His erudition and eloquence surprise him. He knows things he did not know he
knew. Gravedigging becomes the science and art that explains the world.

Still pretending to listen, Jayber gets up and sweeps the floor and sets
the place to rights and begins stropping his razors. He is a fisherman,
thinking of the river, biding his time.

A car pulls off the road in front of the shop. The door slams. The shop
door opens and Big Ellis comes in. He stands inside the door nodding
and smiling at Jayber and Uncle Stanley. It has been several weeks since
Big Ellis has been to town, and Jayber is surprised to see him.

"Who dug you up?"

Big Ellis laughs as freely as a child.

"The woman run me out. Said not to come back until I got some of
this hair and beard cut off. Said it was like living with a horse."

"Paying customer?"

"she let me have a little money."

"You mean I'm really going to collect? Let me see your money."

Big Ellis pulls a handful of coins out of his pocket and holds them out.

"Welcome, sir."

Jayber brushes off the barber chair. Uncle Stanley is still talking. When
Big Ellis came in the old man just waved his arm at him as though he was
passing by, and went on with his lecture.

"What's he talking about?"

"He's giving me a lesson."

"Oh," Big Ellis says. He begins unbuttoning his overcoat. His hair has
grown out over his collar, and he has at least a week's growth of whiskers.

"I'll have to charge you twice for cutting all that off."

"Well, it's the woman's cream money. Go ahead."

The thing about it is that Big Ellis means it, the woman's cream
money or not. His face, the smile widening on it to showJayber that anything he wants to do will be all right, is the most pleasant and agreeable
single object in the neighborhood of Port William. Smiles and laughs
have wrinkled and creased it like an old leather glove. Big Ellis wants to
please. He wants everybody around him to be pleased. That is his weakness and his nature and his passion. If he offers you a cigarette he means
for you to take the whole pack. If you happen to be at his house when
mealtime comes, you eat, and while you are reaching to the meat platter
Big Ellis will spoon you out another helping of beans and his wife will
refill your glass.

He gets into the chair and Jayber pins the cloth around his neck.

"What kind of lessons is he giving you?"

"Gravedigging lessons."

Big Ellis gets tickled and Jayber has to wait.

"Have you gone into that business?"

"I've just contracted to take over Uncle Stanley's job. The graveyard
part of it."

Uncle Stanley has just finished saying that if you strike bedrock you've
got to blast. And now he is telling how to set the charges. A few years
back, after he got so deaf, he remembers, he let off a blast on one side of
the hill while they were holding a burial on the other side. You got to be
careful about that.

Burley Coulter comes in.

"Look whds back," Jayber says. "What do you know, Burley?"

"Not much. What do you fellows know? How's everything over at
your house, Big Ellis? You haven't been out much lately."

"Pretty good," Big Ellis says. "Well, a fellow just as well stay home,
hadn't he? Weather no good. No money. No place to go. Jarrat ain't working you too hard?"

"Not much he can do."

"You find any sand and plaster up there in my head, Jayber, don't be
surprised," Big Ellis says.

`All right, I've got over being surprised at what I find in people's heads.
What're you doing with sand and plaster in yours?"

"The ceiling fell in over home the other night. If it hadn't hit me in the
back of the head, it would've hit the woman right square in the face."

Burley hangs up his hat and sits down.

"We're going to have some more rain, ain't we?"

"Looks like it. I'd have thought it would've cleared and frosted maybe."

"This keeps up there's going to be water in the bottoms."

"Well, everything happens for the best," Big Ellis says.

Usually such a remark would either end the conversation or change
the subject. But this time, to Jayber's surprise, Burley takes it up, and in a
tone that does not leave room for argument:

"It don't do any such of a damned thing."

"What I mean, the Lord knows best, don't He?"

"Well," Jayber says, "He'll have the final say, anyhow. So if there's a
flood you all just as well go down and fish in it."

"Hanh?" Uncle Stanley says.

"Burley," Big Ellis says, "we've got a new graveyard man in Port
William."

Jayber takes a bow.

"You?"

"Who else in this town has both brains enough and time enough?"

Burley laughs, and they can tell from the sound of it that he is sorry
for his shortness with Big Ellis.

"You've gone into business. Port William's a corpse factory, and now
you're the foreman."