A Place on Earth (Port William) (20 page)

But difficulty and misery do not stop him. Again he knows with a furious concentration what he wants, what he is waiting for. In the dark the thought of the sound of Annie's voice is clear to him. Now and then he
believes he hears her, and he stops and answers:

`Annie, where are you, honey? Holler loud!"

And then the valley is silent. His own silence seems to grow large
around him, and he hears the rain falling.

He has lost all sense of time and distance. He walks in a dimensionless landscape of which the only characteristic is that each successive
footstep proves it solid-of which the only landmarks are the sounds of
water flowing, of rain falling.

His mind seems to have broken in two. His judgment tells him, as it
has been telling him all along, that Annie is dead, that there is almost no
chance that he will even find her body. But with another less controllable, more urgent part of his mind, which seems not to understand or
even to hear the voice of his judgment, he fixes on the thought of the
sound of Annie's voice calling to him over the water. And though he can
hardly bear the smallness and loneliness of his voice he does not stop
calling to her-at times calling in answer only to the silence, only because
silence may mean anything.

He flounders through the fringe of briars and sumac at the lower
edge of the woods and steps out into a cornfield. His boots are immediately clubbed with mud, but he feels lightened and goes more erect now
that he is free of the woods. He goes on until the rain slackens and he
sees house lights along the top of a ridge way off to his left, and he knows
that he has turned out of the creek valley and come upstream along the
river maybe half a mile. He turns, cursing the water and the darkness
and himself, and starts back.

But now he makes no attempt at all to follow the edge of the water.
Guessing at everything, with the fury of a man who has nothing to lose
but time and is losing that, he turns away from the river at an angle that
he estimates will take him back to the creekwater below the edge of the
woods. He is running now, plunging through the darkness with as much
abandon as if it were daylight, running into corn shocks and bushes and
fences, cursing the darkness and everything in it, telling it to do its Goddamnedest and be God-damned.

Sooner than he expected and without even the forethought of stopping, he cleaves like a diver into the briars at the rim of the woods, tan gling his feet and throwing him forward-and like a diver he turns at the
bottom of his fall, and makes his way out into the open again. He stands
still, listening. Not hearing the water, he runs again, and before he has
gone a hundred steps plunges in shoulder-deep, feeling, as his forward
momentum decreases, the current begin to take him. He lunges, grabs
to his left, and finds branches.

He goes up onto the mud and sits down and drains his boots.

He is shaking hard now from head to foot, though, blunted with
fatigue as he is, he cannot determine the location of his misery, does not
know if it is in his mind or in his body. Sitting on the mud, he can hear
himself moaning at the end of every breath, and an old knowledge out
of childhood tells him that he is trying not to cry. His clothes feel so
heavy he cannot imagine that he will get up again.

But even while his mind frets at their weight, he is already getting up
and starting into the woods. For a good many steps he cannot be sure
whether he is still sitting down, dreaming of going, or going, dreaming
of sitting down. With surprise he finds that the lantern is still hanging in
the crook of his elbow.

He gropes and stumbles among the trees, no longer finding his way
by conscious effort, repeatedly surprised, when his mind strays back to
him, to find the water's edge still beside him. But now his body begins to
quit on him-to balk, flinching from the punishment he is putting it toand it takes him several seconds or several minutes, he does not know
how long, to get it moving again.

During one of these involuntary pauses, while he waits for his body
to move on, the outward nightmare of that regionless darkness begins
to be accompanied by another that is inward. He becomes aware of the
bearing down of a question that must have been pursuing him all night.
Without a boat or a light, what could he do to save Annie if she should,
by whatever miracle it might be, answer him? And he damns himself,
with a willingness that startles him, for turning the boat loose, for having
taken no precautions to keep the matches dry.

Taking the matches out of his pocket, he finds that the heads are
either already gone, or that they crumble as soon as he touches them to
see if they are there. But he continues to take the dead sticks out of his
pocket one at a time and to stand them upright inside the sweatband of his hat. It is as though his mind, which like his body has begun to work
apart from his will, is gambling that absurdity will be more bearable than
reasonableness. He corrects the alignment of the matchsticks, making it
a good job, and puts his hat back on. Off his head, the hat has become
cold. His legs wait to walk forward until it has grown warm and familiarfeeling again.

Now all his stops are tortured by imaginings, the actuality of which
he can neither prove nor disprove until his body lurches forward again
into the unchanged darkness. He seems to hear Annie calling to him,
and he stops and sits down and calls back to her, assuring and encouraging, through the night, afraid that if he goes out of the sound of her
voice for help he will never find her again. And when morning comes
she is not there; there is no longer any answer to his calling.

Hearing her, he swims out to her, to help her hold on until morning.
But the current is too strong. He feels himself carried away from her, her
voice becoming fainter and fainter behind him.

He risks leaving her to find a boat. He goes, telling her to hold on and
trust him, for he will surely come back and he will bring a boat. And he
goes, his mind plunging like a man running to all the places he might
find a boat. He finds one and comes back-to discover, in the daylight,
that he has no idea where he was when he heard her calling, much less
where she was.

`Annie! Oh, Annie! Holler loud, sweet baby!"

Now the sound of his voice calling her name makes him cry.

His grief is no longer that of a grown man, but that of a child lost in
the dark. And in his abjection and misery his desire still knows the sound
of her voice answering him:

"Here I am!"

To his longing for it, her voice has become stronger, superior to his
own, assuring and calm.

"Here I am!"

As if at those words the flood of darkness and water would be cleft by
a light like the sun shining on snow, new heaven and earth.

He does not know how long he has been standing still when he becomes
aware of a heavy grey light in the sky. He is divided from the open, he
sees, only by a thin scarf of the woods. The rain has stopped, and there
is no wind. The silence has grown perfect around him. Through the
screen of bare branches, divided from him still by several hundred yards
of water, he begins to make out the lurching outlines of the big barn. He
feels growing in him, as simply as the growth of daylight, the intention
to go home and sleep.

But his body's weight seems too great to move. He falls back into his
stupor, oblivious as a tree among trees.

He is aware next of a flock of mallards feeding on the open water
ahead of him. He believes that their flying down must have alerted him,
and that his attention has been coming toward them slowly for some
time, for they are settled now and calmly feeding, remote from the flurry
of their arrival, scattered-forty or fifty of them-over the water. He is
so close to them that in the grey, slowly strengthening light he can see
not just the bold coloring of the drakes, but also the subtler patterning
on the backs and wings of the nearer hen birds. He feels let into the
depth of intimacy-the peacefulness of wild things among themselves.
Their peacefulness stretches among them, holding them at rest on the
shining surface of the water.

And so another knowledge seems to have reached him after a long
approach: the water is standing still. The sound and movement of it have
stopped-he wonders how long ago. A good way out a light, steady
wind has begun to riffle the surface. And that is all. The debris of its violence has come to rest on it. The valley floor is covered no longer by a
river but by a lake. The rise of the creek has been met by a rise in the
river that has backed it and held it still.

The day, again, is heavily overcast, the clouds dragging low over the
rim of the little valley. He reaches home, he judges, by sunup or a little
after. All the way he has been hurried by the thought of his bed. But now
as he comes abreast of the toolshed he turns out of the path, as if he
understands, and has all along, that on this day he can bear anything
better than comfort. He closes the door behind him and hangs up the lantern. He finds matches, shavings, kindling, and builds a fire in the
forge, cranking the bellows until the brittle flame stands still and high,
raking bits of coke into it as it burns stronger. As the room warms he
sheds his wet clothes, and spreads them to dry. Hanging bundled from
the rafters are several hundred-foot lengths of the light canvas used to
cover the beds of tobacco plants in the spring. Now, having cleared a
place on the workbench to lie down, he takes down one of these lengths
of canvas, wraps himself in it, and sleeps.

When he wakes he sees that a meal has been set out for him, kept warming on the coals. His wet clothes are gone, except for the hat and boots,
and folded on the bench near him there is a change of dry ones. It must
have been Ida who awakened him, shutting the door as she went out.
Through the windows above the bench he can see the milk cows straying up away from the barn through the bushes on the hillside, and the
two sows feeding busily at their trough. So she has done the morning
chores. He knows that she did them last night too, after he was gone. He
puts on the dry clothes, and eats hurriedly, standing at the bench before
the windows. It has begun to rain again, though now it is hardly a rain at
all but a steady drizzle; the sound of it striking the tin roof is only a whisper. Under it the surface of the water has turned softly opaque. He can
no longer see the far shore. There is no trace of a doubt in him about
what he is going to do, though at the same time there is no trace of a
conviction of the usefulness of doing anything. He puts on his jacket
and hat. The hat is still wet, heavy, stiff-feeling, and cold. The feel of
it recalls to him his last night's toil, the quick-grown familiarity of his
ordeal. His vigil mends over the short interval of his sleep; it is as though
he has never stopped. This time before going out he takes a burlap sack
and capes it over his shoulders, pinning it at his throat with a nail. He
opens the door to the sound of water dripping off the eaves and the
branches of the oak-and to the sound, faint and sharp through the drizzle, of the church bell ringing at Port William.

In the step that carries him into the weather there is already established the pace that in three-quarters of an hour brings him out of the woods on the hillside above the house of a fisherman, his nearest neighbor on the upriver side of the creek mouth. Once he is clear of the trees
he stops for the first time in his walk and studies his whereabouts, measuring in every direction the difference the flood has made. Here the slant
of the hill drops from the lower edge of the woods to the top of the river
bank, unbroken except for a tapering shelf of bottom just wide enough
to provide a bed for the road, now under water. From the front porch of
the house a row of stepping-stones goes down the slope and disappears
into the flood. At the edge of the water below the house he can see two
boats, the smaller one of which he recognizes as belonging to a doctor in
Hargrave who uses it in the winter for duck hunting.

When he starts forward again, he goes toward the boats, letting the
slant of the hill lengthen and hasten his stride. He has no thought of
going to the house to ask for help. Help to do what? How would he bear
to tell what it is that he no longer needs help for?

As he steps over into the doctor's boat, he sees from the litter of sticks
and dead leaves along the shore that the river is still rising. And then
pushing hard on the oars, he feels the boat free itself. He pulls strongly,
threading his way among the treetops, breaking out then into the open
river. And now, finally, he looks back at the house. No one is in sight.

He sets the boat into the current, staying just outside the channel to
keep his oars clear of the drift. His old anxiety of haste has come on him
again and he continues to row hard, the blades of his oars driving him on
ahead of the current. Approaching the creek mouth, he eases over into
the dead water, and then enters the narrower valley, crossing the road a
little upstream of the bridge.

All day he can see no more than a hundred yards in any direction. He
rides on the detached floe of his vision, which has for edge now the
brushy or muddy rim of one shore and now that of the other-which
contains, besides himself and the boat, now and again the top of a bush
or a tree drifting aimlessly out of the mist and back into it. And in all that
day he does not call once; in all the hours of his moving over the face of
the water he does not hear himself speak.

The flood crests toward the middle of the week. The rain slacks and
stops. The weather clears. As he continues his watching over it, the
water slowly gives way beneath him, yielding the land back to the light. And on the seventh morning-Saturday again, though he has lost all
track of the days-when he wakens and looks out the window of the
toolshed, he sees that the flood has withdrawn below the edge of the
woods. Behind it the valley lies free of it, the mud streaked with the red
sunlight of the early morning.