A Place on Earth (Port William) (27 page)

He throws the last armload of scraps into the truck bed with a satisfying completing slam. "Well, I reckon I'll call it a day." Looking up at the
house now, he sees that she has already finished her work at the barn for
the night-the rinsed milk buckets, which were not in sight earlier, are
turned up to dry on a bench beside the cellar house.

"Mr. Finley-you're going to town, ain't you?"

"I'm aiming to."

"Well, could I ride out as far as the mailbox?"

'All right. Get in. I'm just ready to go." He hastens ahead of her, opens
the door, and makes a place for her, shoving aside the tools, gloves,
chains, water jug, pieces of rope that have collected on the seat and the
floorboard. "It's a mess. Maybe that'll be room enough for you."

"It'll be fine."

He gets in, starts the truck, and they leave, jolting and rattling over
the violent surface of the road.

"Gideon has to fix this piece of road every spring-all the way from
our house out to the pike. The county's supposed to, but it don't much."

Ernest cannot think what to reply, surprised at the ease with which
she speaks of Gideon. She mentions him casually, as confident of his
presence somewhere she does not know as she could be if he had gone
to Port William.

She stays silent for several minutes, holding to the door handle with
one hand and bracing against the dashboard with the other to steady
herself, looking out at the evening which is very slowly dimming toward
twilight.

"You going to fix that barn?" she asks.

'Aiming to."

"Mr. Feltner said you was aiming to tear down that lower end of it."

He nods.

"Well, I reckon there'll still be room left for Gideon's tools and things,
won't there?"

"I believe there will. I don't believe you need to worry about Mat mistreating you all."

"Gideon's always thought a lot of Mr. Feltner. So do I. Though I never
had many dealings with him until here lately." She watches the road
approach and pass under, shaking the truck. "You going to do all that
work by yourself?"

"I imagine so."

She gives him another speculating look, her eyes as direct and
unapologetic as if she is studying the back of somebody's head.

"Well, I imagine that'll be right smart of a job for one man."

"I imagine so."

He stops at the mouth of the lane, and she opens the door and gets
out. Standing there looking back at him, holding the door ready to shut,
she says, "I'm much obliged to you."

"Do you want me to take you back in? Save you the walk."

"No, I don't mind." She smiles for the first time since he looked and
saw her standing on the bridge. "That's a better road for walking than it
is for riding, anyhow"

She starts across the road to where the mailbox perches on its careening post, doorless, wide-open mouth tilted upward, like the hungry
young of some big bird.

Ernest turns into the road and goes, but slowly, watching her in the
rearview mirror. He sees her walk over to the box, look in, and turn back
empty-handed into the lane.

He was on the roof the next morning before the dew went off. He set his
ladders up against the eave, flung a long rope over the barn, tied it at
both ends to give himself a kind of banister, and propping his crutches
against the foot of the ladder, went up and began.

And he has been surrounded by his own noise now for nearly three hours-his hammer-claws driving in under the nailheads, the nails
screeching out through the tin, the released sheets sliding down over the
sheets still fixed and striking the ground. The sun is getting high, and the
metal roof has begun to give back the warmth of it. From time to time
he goes down and stacks the sheets he has torn off, and drinks, and goes
back up. Aside from that, he has hardly raised his eyes from his work.
After each interruption the sounds of his work have enclosed him again,
and carried him on. And each time he settles back into himself and into
the work, his habitual commenting to himself in his thoughts begins
again. Finding he has worked beyond reach of his rope, he thinks, "Uhoh!" Nerves aching with the smooth hard slant of the metal as he crawls
after the rope, he thinks of falling, and his thought shudders and whistles. "Shoo! Watch that! That won't do!"

He hears Mat saying-having put him and Virgil to painting the roof
of the feed barn, Virgil with a boy's bravery walking upright on the
slant-"Be careful up there, boys. We haven't got time now for a funeral."
And then, his voice lifting and hardening: "Virgil, damn it, when you
move on that roof take hold of the rope. A man's work asks you to be a
man. Don't play!" And again, his voice suddenly admitting what he feels:
"Sweet boy, don't get hurt."

The rope in his hand, Ernest feels the dread of falling loosen from
him. "Good enough. All right." Taking up his hammer and laying the
rope down beside him in reach of his left hand, he goes back to work.
"Virgil," he thinks.

"Uncle," Virgil says, "why in the hell does he have to be after me all
the time to be careful?"

"Well, if he didn't think a lot of you he wouldn't do it. That's one thing.
And, another thing, being careful doesn't come natural to you yet, and
he knows it."

"Well, if you know it too why aren't you after me all the time the way
he is?"

"Because you listen to me better than you do to him."

Virgil laughs. "Why?"

"Because he's your daddy and I'm not. That's the way it always is, and
he knows that too. That's the reason he sends you to work with me as
often as he does."

For a moment he can see Virgil, paint bucket in one hand, brush in the other, sitting on the comb of the roof, looking down at him and grinning with a boy's perfect confidence in the superiority of youth to anything. The hot sky stands open above him.

"Mr. Finley."

He looks down and sees Ida on the ladder, holding up a half-gallon
glass jar full of water.

"You want a fresh drink?"

He does. Though he has, as usual, his own jug of water in the truck,
he hands himself down along the rope to the edge of the roof, and drinks
and replaces the top and hands the jug back and thanks her. Pulling himself along the rope in a clambering, lopsided two-step, knowing that
behind him she is still on the ladder, watching, he goes back up the roof.

"How did you hurt your foot?"

"In the war."

"Not this one."

"No. The other one."

"Well, you sure don't have any trouble getting around."

He nods. He takes it the way it is meant, a compliment, but his mind
fumbles around it, not able to manage a reply. And then he says: "It slows
me down some."

"Well, I reckon we've all got our troubles." But as if she did not intend
to admit that, she smiles and steps down a rung. "I'll have dinner ready
about half past eleven. You can come anytime around then."

"Well, I've got my dinner there in the truck. I reckon I'll just eat that.
That's what I usually do."

"Oh, Gideon wouldn't stand for that, Mr. Finley. He says anybody that
works here eats here. So you come."

Her head disappears below the eave, and he sits still and listens to her
going down. She calls up to him from the ground, still out of sight at the
foot of the ladder: "I'll just set this jug here by the wall."

`All right," he says.

He is not comfortable with the thought of going to the house to eat.
For one thing, he never enjoys eating at a strange table, and he is particularly uneasy about eating at this one in Gideon's absence. For another
thing, he takes pleasure in the quiet noon meals he eats alone between
the noisy halves of his days. But the generosity of her invitation is familiar to him, and he knows he cannot refuse it kindly.

He is high on the roof and, looking over the comb of it, he sees her
come around the end of the barn and walk up the incline of the road
toward the house. He sits there not moving, the hammer dead in his
hand, until he sees her go into the kitchen and hears the door slam. And
then he slides the claws of his hammer under the next nailhead. The
noise of his work stands up around him again. He goes back into it. He
works steadily over the metal slope, letting the sunlight drop, after its
long absence, through the dark meshing of the barn's framework to the
ground.

When the time comes he goes down, hangs his hammer on one
of the ladder rungs, and stacks the scattered sheets. He takes up his
crutches, drinks, pours out what water he doesn't drink, and, carrying
the jug, goes up to the house.

The kitchen door is open, and Ida calls him to come in before he has
had a chance to knock. She is busy at the stove. On the opposite side of
the room he can see an ironing board set up, and a pile of freshly pressed
clothes on the seat of a chair. He comes in, ready to do without question
whatever she tells him, sets the jug down against the door facing, puts
his hat on the floor beside it.

She takes the teakettle off the stove and comes over to the washtable
just inside the door, and pours two inches of hot water into the pan.

He dips from the bucket, diluting the hot water, leans his crutches
against the wall, and washes.

"When you get washed you can sit down. It's ready."

There is only one chair at the table and he pulls it out and sits down,
putting the crutches on the floor beside him. And she sets the food onan abundant simple meal.

While he eats she does not sit down. She goes on about her work. As
long as he is at the table she makes no attempt at conversation, seeming
to take for granted that he has come only to eat, requiring nothing of
him except that he fill himself.

He grows amazed at her, at the dignity of her quietness in which he
knows she is lonely and grieving. What else he might have expected he
does not know, or no longer knows.

When he has emptied his plate, she comes and picks up the meat platter and offers it to him again. "You help yourself, now"

And he does.

Finished, he picks up the crutches and stands and replaces the chair.
"That was mighty fine. I thank you."

"Well. You fill that water jug at the pump and take it with you."

He has been stopped twenty-five minutes for dinner. He decides to
give himself another twenty. Because he is slowed by his lameness, he
usually works by the job rather than by the day. Still, though he never
works by the clock, he always rests by it-because, as he has explained it
to Mat, it is harder to stop resting than to stop working.

Having given himself those minutes, he becomes saving of them, and
hurries back down to the barn so as to waste as few of them as possible.
He brings out a feed bucket, turns it upside down against the wall, and
sits down in the sun. The only sounds now are a few sparrows chirping
back in the driveway of the barn and, continuous and more quiet in the
distance, the running of the creek. He sits for a moment without moving, letting these sounds and the little valley and the sunlight and the
white-clouded sky take their places in his mind, and then gets out a cigarette and lights it. He smokes slowly, carefully attentive to the pleasure
of it. He flips the butt out away from him onto the ground, and leans
back, his eyes closed, aware of being at rest in that place, feeling the sun
draw the skin of his face and hands, feeling the air stir coolly over him,
the light filling his shut eyes with red.

After a while he sits up and looks at his watch. He still has three minutes of his time. He yawns and rubs his eyes, and rather than sit there
and watch the time run out, hating to see it go, he gets up. Groggy with
sunlight and sleepiness and his full belly, he fights off the dread of movement. Moves. Takes up the crutches and goes around to the foot of the
ladder. He drinks, picks up his hammer, and climbs to the roof.

The day and the work are established around him again. He goes on,
deeper in, with a kind of excitement growing in him, a kind of hunger
for what it is possible to do before night. It becomes easier to go on than
to stop.

After about an hour he sees Ida come out of the house. She comes
down to the woodpile, splits a day's supply of stovewood, carries an armload up to the house. The next time he sees her she is out in the bottom,
mending and pulling up and straightening one of the fences broken
down by the flood. Ernest does not stop to watch her. When he looks up as he shifts from one place to another, he sees her, farther along than she
was before. Twice he forgets her completely for the biggest part of an
hour, and when he looks for her again she has moved on but is still at
work, the fence standing up behind her, makeshift and staggering, but
stout enough to keep the milk cows out of the crops.

Later, when he looks up, she is gone. And then in one of his pauses he
hears her beneath him in the barn. He sees that the team of mules and
the cows have come down off the hill and are waiting at the upper doors.
And they are not there when he turns in that direction again; she has
taken them in, fastened them in their places for the night, fed them. He
sees her on her way to the house with the milk buckets, and again pouring the skimmed milk in for the hogs.

When he winds it up, satisfied, the last sheet of roofing torn off and
stacked on the ground, and turns in the chill of the evening to go, she is
standing beside the truck, wearing the old sweater again.

"Would you care if I rode out to the mailbox?"

Getting out at the river road, she tells him she is much obliged, as
before, and turns to her errand. And again, watching in the mirror, he
sees that nothing has come.