A Place on Earth (Port William) (21 page)

And he goes. He goes, it seems to him, through the opening at the
end of his life as it was. To stay, now that the end has come, would be to
plant and reap in the very earth of his ruin.

It seems to him that he has already been on his way for days, so that
when he does step through the shed door, leaving it open behind him, he
has not even the feeling of departure.

When the water came down Ida did not hear it. She was sitting beside
the window in the kitchen with a pile of mending on her lap and pies for
Sunday dinner in the oven. And she had the radio on. That Saturday, and
the day before too, she had kept the radio on most of the day, waiting for
the weather reports that were coming out of Louisville every half hour
or so.

When the rain stopped after dinner, she got Annie into her wraps and
sent her out to play, warning her to keep her feet dry and stay out of the
mud, and then snapped the radio on again before settling into her afternoon's work. She left it going, paying little mind to it except when the
businesslike voices of the news or the weather came over it, while she
washed and put away the dishes, went to the cellar for jars of berries to
put into the pies, made the pies and put them into the oven, went around
the house to see about Annie, and saw her sitting with Speck on the
swinging bridge-and then at last sat down to her mending.

When the radio stopped in midword a few minutes later, she got up
and tried the light switch. She sat down again and took up her work, saying to herself that a tree surely must have blown down on the wire. That
sometimes happened, she knew, though it never had happened since the
line had come to them. But it occurred to her suddenly that there had
been no wind. The thought frightened her, she did not know why. She
sat forward in the chair for a moment, her hands still, listening. She got up and started to the front of the house. She was thinking "Uh-oh, uhoh." She would remember that.

Before she got to the window, of course, it had already happened.

She stood at the window for a good many seconds, as if waiting to see
what she would do next, not able to look a second time at the bare grove
where the bridge had been. And then she ran to the telephone, put the
receiver to her ear, found it dead, and hurried on into the kitchen.

Wondering at herself, she seemed to watch as she went to the stove
and opened the oven and saw that the pies were cooking well and shut
the oven. And then, running, she went out the back door and across the
porch and around the house and down the path toward the toolshed,
below which Gideon had just stepped into the boat.

"Gideon! Where is she?"

But she knew.

"Where's Annie?"

But Gideon did not answer. He stood in the boat, as the current
caught it and began to turn it slowly, looking back at her, and then turning away as the boat turned.

She watched him go away on the current-trusting him to it, as she
had trusted him to other absences, believing that he would bear the
worst that could happen to him and come back. Maybe she even hoped
he would bring the child back-though she knew what they were up
against, she had seen, and the dirge in her mind never stopped.

She turned and started back up the slope toward the house. She went
slowly, conscious of the weight of her body lifted stride after stride. In
the kitchen she sat down in her chair, moving her sewing basket out of
the seat onto the floor. She sat without moving, only looking now and
again at the clock.

When the time came she got up and took the pies out of the oven.
She seemed to regain something then, and she did not stop. She built up
the fire in the stove and began to prepare supper. After that one lapse
when it seemed that she kept living only because she could not easily
break the habit, she began again her daily ordering and keeping of the
place.

When Gideon came back at dusk, she had the supper ready except for
the biscuits, which she had waited to put into the oven until he came, as she always did. But he would not eat, and she stood in the door and
watched him go back around the corner of the house. When he was
gone, seeing that it was getting dark, she went up the back stairs to the
room over the kitchen, and brought down an oil lamp. She took it out to
the barrel and filled it, carried it into the kitchen and wiped it clean, rubbing the inside of the chimney with a page of newspaper, and lighted it.
And then, moving the food off the fire onto the other end of the stove
where it would stay warm, she put on the jacket again and started to the
barn, carrying the lamp in one hand and the milk bucket in the other.
Though knocked off its footing at the lower end and half flooded, the
barn, she thought, would stand. The pens and stalls at the upper end
were dry. She would not worry about it yet. She milked the cows, fed
and cared for the stock, and shut the barn.

When she returned to the kitchen she set a place at the table and
made herself eat a little of everything she had cooked, and washed the
dishes and put them away. She sat down in the chair again, with the lamp
on the edge of the table beside her, and took up her sewing. Gideon
would be back before long, she thought, and she would have to keep the
light on until he came.

He did not come. She got up now and then and went around the
house on the chance that she would see his lantern or hear him, but the
darkness was unbroken all around, and it was quiet except for the water
running and the rain falling. And she went back and took up her work.
She seemed somehow to have gained an extraordinary control over her
mind. When she went out into the yard to watch for Gideon, she seemed
to know to the second how long she could stand it, to know to the second when to turn, as if away from the sound of her own crying, and
come back into the lighted kitchen, where she would force her attention
back to the sewing. It was Gideon's absence that occupied her. She
thought about it, speaking to herself about it, as though it was the same
as his other absences and this night the same as other nights: "He'll be
along. He won't want to be too late." And then she would say to herself:
"Yes, he's probably on his way. He may be coming up by the barn right
now" And there was also a limit to how much she could stand of that, and
she would have to get up and draw the coat around her and go out again.

And that other absence seemed still to lie somewhere ahead of her, a
place she had not yet come to.

Later, with the light still burning beside her, she fell asleep.

She woke up cold. The lamp flame was pale in the full daylight. The fire
in the stove had gone out. Waking she said, "Gideon?" From the sound
of her voice in the unwakened room, not answered, she knew, with the
same cunning she had had the night before, that her next utterance, if
she kept sitting there, would not be so articulate as a word. She got up
and put on the old coat and built a fire and, taking the milk bucket, started
to the barn.

She saw the fire-heat rising out of the chimney of the toolshed. She
walked around and looked through the window at Gideon's face. He lay
there, wound in the soiled canvas, his arm under his head. She would
have held him then. But glad of his sleep, she left him to it. She hurried
through the work at the barn, giving it, she said to herself, "a lick and a
promise." Back at the house, she made a breakfast for Gideon, wrapped
the change of clothes in a newspaper, carried those things down to him,
and, gathering up his wet clothes, slipped out again, hoping he would
wake up presently and eat and go back to sleep.

When she went down to the woodpile an hour later, he was gone.
After she filled the woodbox, she went to the toolshed again, and carried
the empty dishes up to the house and washed them. She got through
that day as she had got through the night before, and as she would get
through the next five. She washed Gideon's muddied clothes and ironed
them, kept the house, prepared the meals and had them ready at the
usual times; made work for herself, made herself tired; slept, gratefully,
when she had become tired enough.

Like Gideon, she did not, during that week, go back to their bed to
sleep, but kept to the rocking chair in the kitchen, bringing down a quilt
from a trunk in the back room to wrap around her.

As Gideon went back and forth in his watching, she watched him,
aware of his trouble more clearly then, perhaps, than she was aware of her own. He was, it seemed to her, straining to survive the death of their
child, as she had once strained to survive the birth. And so she did not
approach him, except to meet him at the edge of the water with food.

When she woke on the Saturday morning at the end of the flood, a
brilliant pool of sunshine lay across the kitchen floor. She sat still for a
while, wrapped in the old quilt in the rocking chair, and looked at the
light. It changed her. Before she moved at all, she understood that she was
no longer the same. The weather and the place, changing, had changed
her.

She got up and folded the quilt and made the fire and prepared to go
to the barn. When she stepped out the door a steady drying wind blew
against her, coming from the same direction as the light. Around her on
the open slopes, above the line of the flood, she could see the faint green
of new grass. Below the end of the barn, tilted at what last night had
been the shoreline, was the boat. Around it the fields lay free of the flood
and empty.

And now, looking over into the bottom on the far side of the creek,
she sees Gideon's tracks going away.

She sets her buckets down and goes back to the kitchen. She takes off
the coat and hangs it over the back of a chair. She goes through the hall
door and down the hall and through the other door into the sitting room.
She opens the stair door and starts up. She walks in great haste, hurrying
ahead of the oncoming of her pain. She reaches the top of the stairs and
goes through the door into Annie's room. Closing the door, she stands
just inside it a moment, looking around her. It is a wide low room, the
ceiling taking the slant of the roof. There are windows in three of the
walls, and now the strong morning light floods into it. The floor is littered with playthings. She walks over to a chair near the bed and, holding to the back of it, lets herself down onto her knees beside it. Her outcry begins deep in her, and rises, and breaks out.

At last the sound of her weeping leaves her more easily, and then it
quits. She grows quiet, letting her head rest on the seat of the chair. And
then, lightened, able again, she gets up, and straightens the room, and
leaves it.

Mat hears the knocking before he is awake. The sound is repeated at regular intervals, politely quiet, but insistent. And then Margaret touches
his shoulder.

"Mat, there's somebody at the back door."

He gets up, pulls his pants on over his nightshirt, and goes through
the hall to the kitchen without turning on the light.

Burley Coulter is standing on the porch, wearing a pair of earmuffs
under his old felt hat, his work jacket opened below the two top buttons
and his hands shoved for warmth under the bib of his overalls. Back of
him, the east has begun to brighten with the premonition of sunup. A
steady east wind blows into the doorway, sharp with the night chill.

"Mat, I'm sorry to wake you up."

"That's all right, Burley. Come in. Come on in here where it's warm."

Burley begins pulling off his boots, using the doorstep as a bootjack.

"Don't worry about that."

He pulls them off anyway, and steps into the kitchen in his socks. "But
I figured you'd be getting up pretty soon, anyhow."

"Yes. The night's about over."

Mat goes to the switch beside the hall door and turns on the light. "What's the trouble, Burley?" And it was not until he heard himself speak
those words that it dawned on him that something must be wrong.

"Well, Mat, what I've come about really ain't any of my business. I
think it probably ain't any of yours either, really. But the reason I come is
that if it ain't our business then it probably won't be anybody's."

Mat is clear awake and listening, but he raises his hand to stop Burley,
and beckons him to a chair. They move over to the table and pull out
chairs, and Burley goes on:

"Well, about the middle of yesterday afternoon, it was beginning to
look like the weather was going to dry out finally, and I went over to jarrat's, thinking maybe he'd want to plan a little work. We hadn't much
more than got set down to talk when this horn started blowing down on
the river road. I thought at first somebody must have had a wreck and
stuck the horn. But then, after a good while it stopped and then started
in again. We didn't know what to think. But since nobody lives close to
the road along that stretch, and nobody has been passing over it during
the high water, we figured it was sort of up to us.