A Place on Earth (Port William) (18 page)

The truth about old man Griffith Merchant is that he lived on his land
like a blight, troubled only by the slowness with which it could be converted into cash, unable to see or care beyond his line fences. If Armageddon had blazed to those boundaries and stopped, he would have
noticed it only to think that be had been rightly spared. But Roger"born a idiot," as his father once took occasion to remark, "and educated
a fool"-has believed otherwise. By luck, defect, or determination, he has
thought himself the descendent of gentleman farmers and one himself.

He has lived by himself for forty years in the slowly collapsing house
built by his grandfather, half log and half stone, on a point overlooking a
wide creek valley to the south of Port William. The foundation under
the log forepart of the house has been caved and splayed by groundhogs
tunneling under it, and by dogs digging after the groundhogs. The yard-
thickwalls of the stone L are buttressed by locust poles wedged at uneven
angles against them. The house and outbuildings haven't been painted in
half a century. Bees hive in the cornices. Maple seeds sprout knee-high in the gutters. A rambler rose has completely overgrown the steps and posts
of the front porch, live runners threading heavy meshes of dead growth.
In the garden, briars grow as high as the fence posts. The wall of an outbuilding near the garden fence has burst, spilling an avalanche of tin cans
and bottles down the slope. The barn provides shelter, but no longer
confinement, only for an old team of mules, kept to validate Roger's
assertion that he has in his "latter years" restricted himself to "a little
light fawming"-though there is not a complete set of harness for either
of them on the place.

In the last decade Roger has made a slow retreat from the opening
cracks and leaks and bucking floors of the front rooms, and now lives
entirely in the stone kitchen. That room is large and tall, in summer cool
as a cellar and dim from the heavy shade of the maples in the yard. In the
back of the room there used to be an enormous fireplace, now walled up
and plastered, replaced by a tall, black cooking range. In a corner is an
old kitchen cabinet whose doors customarily stand open, showing a supply of store-bought canned goods, mostly soups of various sorts, porkand-beans and Vienna sausages and sardines, boxes of crackers and cookies. A broad table, at which a numerous family or a crew of field hands
might be fed, stands in the center of the room. The room is filled-all its
horizontal surfaces littered and heaped-with plunder that Roger has
salvaged from the front rooms as he has needed it: a walnut fourposter
bed of excellent make, an outsize rocking chair, a half-dozen or so splitbottom chairs, a chamber pot, a grindstone, a hand-cranked Victrola, a
five-shovel tobacco plow. Hanging from nails around the walls are various articles of clothing, a hat or two, a pair of fairly new half-swinny
mule collars, a double-barreled shotgun, and a minnow seine. Against
the chimney there is a pile of ear corn for the Dominecker hens that
roost on the back porch.

Surrounding this center, taking in ridge and bluff and creek valley, lie
seven hundred acres of land, plundered by old Griffith Merchant in his
lifetime, ignored by Roger in his. All the farming done on it now is done
by tenants, who vary in number from two to four, and whom Roger may
see three or four times a year. His only dealing with any of them is
through an old lawyer in Hargrave, who arranges for their coming and going, and collects from them Roger's half of the proceeds from the sale
of their crops. And the tenants, in turn, pester the lawyer in order to
secure minimum supplies and to keep their houses and barns standing.
Each of them raises a few acres of tobacco and corn, and is allowed to
keep a few hogs or cows. Except for their shrinking islands of cropland,
the place is overgrown with bushes and trees. Some of it Roger has never
seen; much of it he has not seen since his boyhood; most of it, if taken to
it, he would not recognize. In all his life he has built nothing, added nothing, repaired nothing. For twelve years Whacker Spradlin has kept him
supplied with whiskey, making the seven-mile round-trip from his place
to Roger's in all weather, as faithfully as the prophet's raven.

When Roger drinks his aim is prostration. His fits of drunkenness
extend to remarkable lengths. He has been known to go for months
without getting out of bed except to answer what he calls "the physiological summons." He has been known to lie dormant through the coming and going of a whole summer.

His trips to Port William are becoming less and less frequent. When
he goes he drives a 1927 Ford, which since 1927 he has driven something
less than three thousand miles, mostly back and forth over the same
three and a half miles of road. Spangled with sparrow dung and rusted,
the car wears as a hood ornament a cow's bleached skull with a four-foot
spread of horns, the anonymous gift of some generation of Port William
boys. Roger has never driven the car out of low gear. So far as he knows,
that is the only gear it has. When he is asked-as he has regularly been
asked for eighteen years by the boys of Port William-how he likes his
car, Roger replies: "It is slow, sir, but powerful."

It's a taxing kinship that Mat has with Roger Merchant. It has been, if
not one of the difficulties, at least one of the perplexities of his life, both
obligation and nuisance. With something like regularity, over the years,
Roger has presumed both to need Mat and to find him useless. When
Roger's summons goes out to Mat and the old lawyer, they go. Usually
Mat gets there first. And usually he waits, stopping his car at the roadside
below the house, until the lawyer arrives. And then they walk together
up the slope and around the house where Roger will be waiting for
them-on the porch in good weather, in the cluttered kitchen in bad. Roger greets them ceremoniously and solemnly, shakes their hands,
offers them chairs, stands until they are seated, and seats himself. The
order of business never changes.

At the beginning Roger defines and analyzes his problem in his prim,
deliberate voice, in language so excessively grammatical and discriminating that Mat and the lawyer sometimes leave after two or three hours
without any certain idea what is the matter. The problems vary from
urgent to trivial without producing any change at all in the length of his
deliberation or the tone of his voice. Once he wanted them to ponder
"carefully, gentlemen, if you will be so kind, the perfectly alarming proliferation of mice in the corncrib." Once he was wondering "if the wild
honey could not be extracted from the cornices of the house to some
profit."

After he has stated the problem, Roger asks Mat what he would advise.
And Mat, knowing that it can come to nothing, explains what he would
do if he were Roger. And then Roger turns to the lawyer and asks him
what he would do, and the lawyer invariably agrees with Mat.

Roger listens to each of them, attentive, nodding, polite. And then he
leans back and, touching the tips of his fingers together, delivers a long
discourse on what he, himself, Roger Merchant personally, considers to
be "good fawming in the present case." This can go on for the better part
of an hour, supported by no practical sense, no knowledge, no experience. At the end of this spiel it is normally discovered that the lawyer has
footed quietly across from Mat's plan to Roger's. Mat is outvoted; Roger
is delighted by the reception of his idea; the old lawyer is pulling his ear
and looking at his eyebrows.

From Roger's front porch the view down into the creek valley takes in a
tract of his land that is in itself a little farm. The house and its clutch of
outbuildings stand on a low shelf of the hill on the far side of the valley.
A little down the creek from the house, and a good deal nearer the floor
of the valley, stand a large barn and corncrib and stripping room. Even
from that distance, the buildings and the fields look better kept than any
of the rest of the Merchant land.

And if you were to step off Roger's porch and walk down the hill to
the front of the tobacco barn where Gideon Crop is standing now, you
would see that the apparent good order of the valley farm is no illusion
of distance. On closer look you would see that the extent of this orderliness, though it is real, is not large; the hillside that rises behind the
buildings was worn out and given up long ago, and now is covered with
thicket; the place is poorly fenced where it is fenced at all, and the buildings are old and rundown. You will guess that the place must have
declined unimaginably from what it was when Griffith Merchant was a
young man.

But what is left of it has been well cared for. The fields in the bottoms
along both sides of the creek show the signs of having been regularly
mowed and sensibly cultivated. Here and there on the old buildings a
loose board has been nailed back in place with new nails. Hinges and
latches are in good shape. In the sheds and outbuildings things are put
away neatly on their shelves and hooks. In the barn the farming tools
have been properly greased and stored for the winter; the dirt of the floor
is swept clean. A sizable area to one side of the driveway has been partitioned off, whitewashed on the inside, and stanchioned for five milk
cows. At opposite sides of the upper doorway there are stalls for a team
of mules. On up the inclining path along the face of the slope, standing
under an enormous white oak, there is a small building that has apparently at some time been rescued from collapse, pulled back, straightened,
rebraced, and made into a toolshed. There is evidence everywherearound the other buildings, the house, the garden-of the presence of a
strong, frugal intelligence, the sort of mind that can make do, not meagerly but skillfully and adequately, with scraps.

To Gideon Crop, standing in front of the barn in weather that has been
wet for days, the clouds so low now that they snag and unravel against
the wooded bluffs on each side of the valley, it seems that he is still just
barely ahead of his circumstances. He is thirty-seven years old, and in
the years of his manhood he has held tight, and come out finally a little
ahead of where he was when he began. Not much, but a noticeable little. That is how he is able to see it in his good moods. In the bad weather
of his mind it can seem to him just as undeniable that the settled account
of these years shows him falling behind. There is the money in the bank, all right, more by some few hundred dollars than there was when his
father died. But what about the years? He has seen more good years and
days than he will see again. His time of limitless energy and limitless
hope is gone, and there is nothing yet to show beyond that hopeful column of figures in the bankbook and in his mind, growing, he is afraid,
too slowly. His life seems to him to have become a kind of race to see
whether those figures will grow to their power before he has exhausted
his own.

From his father Gideon Crop inherited three things: a little bank
account in the name of "John Crop and Son," an ambition to own the
farm they have lived on, and Roger Merchant.

"Gideon," John Crop would say, "don't let anybody tell you it ain't hell
to do good work for another man who don't care if you do it or not.
Who, by God, don't know if you do it or not.

"But, boy," he would go on, "have good ways about you. First thing,
don't leave anything behind you that you wouldn't claim. Second thing,
we don't want to buy a place we've ruint ourselves."

After the tobacco was sold in the winter Gideon was seventeen, John
Crop made his only attempt to buy the farm from Roger. He had managed to save more money than he was ever to have at one time again.
The morning after he had sold his tobacco he wrote his bank balance on
a piece of paper and put it in his pocket and walked up the hill.

John Crop's savings would barely have made a down payment, if that.
From his encounter with Roger that day he learned that if he'd had the
full value in cash he still would not have had enough. Roger looked on
the place as an heirloom. He would not sell. Beyond a half-dozen perfunctory courtesies, he would not talk.

Gideon, standing at the woodpile where he had been sent to work
when they finished breakfast, saw his father turn out of the creek road
and start back along the lane across the bottom, and stopped and
watched him, leaning on the handle of the axe. John Crop came picking
his way carefully over the thawing mud, and passed in front of the house
and on down the incline toward the barn. When he went by Gideon he
smiled and kept walking.

"Honey," he said, "that axe handle ain't made to lean on."

At ground-breaking time, the spring of 1932, John Crop was dead and
buried, the Depression was on, and Gideon Crop's name was signed to
the new contract in the office of Roger's lawyer.

Gideon had not forgot, and never has yet forgot, the silence his father
kept when once or twice a year Roger and the lawyer would drive down
to the valley farm. It would usually be in the middle of the day-as
Gideon remembers it, it is the noon of a fair day in the summer; they
have finished their dinner and are resting on the front porch-and Roger
and the lawyer would drive in and stop in the road below the house and
blow the horn. And John Crop would walk down to the car and stoop to
the window. He nodded and spoke in answer to their questions, saying
no more than necessary, volunteering nothing. Gideon, watching from
the porch, knew that his father spoke out of the silence a man must keep
when all abundance and order in his sight are to his credit but not in his
possession.

In John Crop's pride and silence Gideon continued. He had the gifts of
quiet endurance, of tolerance of rough work and poor tools, of makeshift, of neatness in patched clothes, of thrift.

He has seen the last year's tobacco crop through the market at a good
earning, and is ready to begin preparations for the next, waiting only for
the weather to break and the ground to dry. Today he has made the
rounds of the buildings, cleaning and straightening and putting away.
Since noon he has given a fresh coat of whitewash to the milking stall,
and the afternoon is only half gone. The wet weather, the rising backwater, the delay of ground-breaking are worries, but the knowledge that
for the time he has done all that is possible to do is deeply pleasant to
him. It is a rare time in any year when he can permit himself to say that
he is caught up.