A Place on Earth (Port William) (3 page)

The chicken yard is bounded on one side by the wall of a large feed
barn. The barn is painted white, and on its red roof there is a white redroofed cupola with a spire and wind vane. Opposite the barn, beginning
within the L-shape of the chicken yard and extending beyond it, is a large garden plot. To Mat's right, looking off the porch toward the side of the
lawn, a fence overgrown with honeysuckle hides the town from him; he
can see only the roofs of the store buildings, the bare treetops among
them, the roof and tall octagonal steeple of the church.

For a moment these things occupy his attention without his naming
or thinking about them, as though his mind has become simply the cool
grey-lighted space containing them, into which the rain falls.

But now he hears the pounding of his brother-in-law's crutches coming up the walk beside the house. The familiarity of the sound is suddenly welcome to Mat. It fixes him steadily again in the day and place.
Ernest is home for dinner. They will go into the house now.

Coming around the corner of the house, Ernest looks up, smiling at
Mat. "Dinner ready?"

"I don't know. I just got here myself."

Ernest swings up onto the porch with a movement both cumbersome
and strangely agile. He is ten years younger than Mat, his dark face finely
modeled, strong-boned, the lips set firmly and evenly together in denial
or concealment of the difficulty of his lameness. His faded work jacket
fits him tightly across the shoulders. A flat yellow carpenter's pencil
sticks out beneath the band of his cap.

He stands beside Mat, leaning on the crutches while he reaches inside
his jacket for a cigarette. "Did you hear from Virgil?"

Mat shows him the envelope. The two men look at each other a
moment. Ernest shakes his head and starts to the door.

Having put it off as long as he can, Mat turns to follow him.

Margaret and Hannah are sitting at the table, Margaret beating eggs
in a bowl she holds in her lap, Hannah sewing, holding the piece of
white material a little awkwardly above the bigness of her pregnancy.
They look up as the two men come into the kitchen. The room is warm,
the air heavy with the smells of cooking. Nettie Banion stands at the
stove, a lifting rag in her left hand, which she rests against her hip.

"Here they are," Margaret says. "Put the biscuits in, Net."

Ernest goes out into the hall. Mat goes to the table and holds the letter out to Hannah. There comes over him a great need to do this gently.
But he can only do it bluntly, with a kind of shame as though there might
be a polite way to do it but he does not know what it is.

She reaches out for the letter and takes it. Mat knows she is looking at
him, but he does not look at her. And he knows when she looks away
from him. She tears open the envelope and reads the letter, and lays it
slowly and flatly down on the table, indicating that Mat should read it.
And Mat reads it, and then, as though the duty falls to him, he reads
aloud: "Virgil Feltner ... missing in action."

Nettie closes the oven door and turns around. She says "Oh" very quietly, her mouth holding the shape of the sound. "He ain't dead."

"No," Margaret says.

Mat hears Ernest going up the stairs to his room.

Hannah has not moved. She sits staring out the window, her hands
lying quietly on the piece of white material folded in her lap. Mat picks up
one of her hands and holds it, awkwardly because she doesn't respond.
Her hand remains passive for a moment, and then she squeezes his and
gently takes her hand away. She has not looked at him.

"It may not mean a thing," he says.

"No."

And Margaret reads the letter and puts it back on the table. She takes
up the hem of her apron and wipes her eyes. Mat lays his hand on her
shoulder.

"Wash up," she says. "It's nearly ready."

Mat washes, and goes and sits down by the front window in the living
room. He opens the paper, but looks at it without reading.

As if obeying an instinct, he has done what he usually does. But his
eyes only follow the print of the page without reading; the headlines are
a black strict architecture; he cannot, somehow, bring himself to assent
to a meaning in the words. He folds the paper and moves over to sit on
the sofa. Out the window the rain strikes and splashes on the black road.

The sounds become more brisk and rapid in the kitchen. Mat can
hear Hannah setting the table. Ernest is in his room at the back of the
house above the kitchen; now and then his crutches thump across the
floor. Presently Hannah comes in and sits on the sofa beside Mat. She
holds up her sewing for him to see. It is a small white gown, delicately
embroidered with white thread.

Mat touches it with his fingers. "It's going to be a mighty dressed-up
baby."

"Oh, you're going to be proud of this baby."

"I am. I know it."

She folds the dress and turns and looks at Mat, smiling. "Tell me what
you did this morning."

And he tells her, the calm of his voice uncertain at first, contradicted
by his effort to keep it calm. He was busy all morning with the cattle, he
tells her. The cows are calving.

Virgil would be pleased to hear about the calves. But he does not
speak of Virgil.

"Uncle Jack," Mat says, "it's your play."

Old Jack draws an ace from the deck, and with a large avoidance of
looking either at his hand or at the card slaps it into the discard pile; and
Mat, who holds two aces in his hand, decides he will wait until his next
turn to pick it up.

The four of them have been there since the early afternoon. The rain
by now has dried out of their coats, which have been spread carefully
over the back of a wooden bench under the windows. They have, as
usual, a fire going in the stove; as usual, except for Old Jack's occasional
fits of swearing, they have played pretty much without talking.

By now the card game in the empty store has become an institution, a
kind of unnamed club that in the years since its beginning has acquired a
fairly stable membership and meeting time. The habit of gathering there
in the afternoons began in the late winter of 1941-42 with Mat Feltner
and Frank Lathrop. The two of them had been neighbors and friends as
long as either of them could remember. In the last thirty or forty years
their friendship had led them in and out of perhaps a dozen business
partnerships of one sort or another-the latest being the joint ownership of the old building in which, only a year before the war, Frank's son
had opened a general store.

But in the early weeks of the war, after their sons had gone into the
service, their friendship changed from a casual fact to a necessity. Their
talk stayed offhand and easy, but it was conditioned now by the presence
of the war, the uncertain nature of their involvement in it, their sense of helplessness before an immeasurable fact. The silences they had always
allowed to occur comfortably and simply between them were complicated now by the recognition that there were concerns too grievous for
talk. They came to speak to each other with a kind of gentle vigilance,
surrounding their conversations with sensitive boundaries, but also with
a deepening need to speak.

In those first weeks of the war, after the tobacco had been marketed
and they had begun the long and relatively idle wait for spring, they had
taken to walking down to the store in the afternoons. It comforted them
to build a fire there in the back room and sit and talk.

For a while they went on the pretext of seeing what would have to be
done to maintain the building duringJasper's absence, and what improvements ought to be made when he came back. "When and if he comes
back," Frank said cautiously only once. And after that they left jasper's
name out of it. In spite of their avoidance of his name they both knew
that he continued to be implicated in all they said. Any consideration of
the future of the store became intricately a consideration of jasper's
future, of the future and outcome of the war, of what would be lost.
Something would be lost, was in the process of being lost, and they
dreaded to ponder what. Their talk had become an obscure dealing with
fate. It made them nervous.

But by that time jayber Crow, the town's barber, had begun coming to
the store to sit and talk with them. Port William, Jayber said, provided a
short supply of heads to barber, and an even shorter supply of heads that
could make a satisfactory connection between a service rendered and a
promise to pay, so he might just as well be talking.

"You might just as well," Frank told him.

"If you can abide the company," Mat said.

"I'll do you the kindness," Jayber said, "of not judging."

In the afternoons he fastened to the knob of his shop door a battered
paper clock which, because of the looseness of the hands, announced
perpetually that he would be back at six-thirty; in consideration of the
obtuseness of Port William heads he felt obliged to make no further
explanations. "Hair's my business. Let it grow"

Jayber's presence made the gathering permanent. There was an air of
permanence in his idleness, his long body stretched in a straight line from the back of his tilted chair to the edge of the seat to where his shoe
heels bracketed on the rim of the sandbox under the stove, his fingers
laced behind his bald head. He would come and sit as long as they would
stay, talking for the love of company and the love of talk. It was Jayber
who brought the deck of cards.

So the rummy game is a creature of the war, shaped in the suspension
of action, the suspension of all certain knowing, that the war has imposed on them. It came about almost by nature, they feel. They know it
by its presence, which holds them there in the afternoons from the end
of autumn to the beginning of spring, allowing them a dependable
silence, masking and comforting them in the solitude of their fears.
They are waiting-for the war to be over, for whatever resumption will
take place at the end of it.

When dinner was over Nettie set the table again for Joe Banion and herself. Ernest put on his jacket and lit a cigarette and went back to the shop.

Now Mat has come back into the living room. He takes his shoes off
and lies down on the sofa. He lies on his side, facing the window, his left
arm bent back and propped against the pillow beside his head, his right
arm resting across his hip, the hand dangling. He no longer thinks of
where he is. He looks out the window, near sleep. The stillness of his
hands comforts him. Out the window he can see the yard fence blind
with honeysuckle, and above it the roof and white steeple of the church.
The branches of the trees in the yard thatch across the steeple, the green
shutters of the belfry under it. At the top of the sash a single bead of
water swells and drips; the bead grows heavier, touches the point of the
steeple, breaks; the drops, blown one at a time against the window,
streak down, twisting the steeple, holding its whiteness against the glass.

The rain falls harder, the wind blowing it in against the window. The
water beads and streaks over the whole pane, the sound sheeted and
vibrant there, the rain striking and flaring, blurring the light. The steeple
crumbles, its white and green held, with the black of the trees, in shivering transparent smears in the square of the window.

The surface of the water stirs when the wind stirs, ripples barring the reflected blue of sky with the green of water. Several blue dragonflies
hover and dart over the pond and in the cattails at the pond's edge, their
transparent wings blurring the hard shine of the sun. The mud at the
edge of the water is pocked with cow tracks, covered in places with a
thin green skim of algae; in places it has begun to dry and only the earth
in the cups of the tracks is wet. It is early afternoon. The sun is high.
There are no clouds. The sky is hot and brittle, a vast sheet and splintering of blue light turning the eyes down. White and yellow and blue butterflies have lighted on the wet mud; their wings open and close slowly,
mottling the light. The pond is at the center of a large field where Queen
Anne's lace and daisies are in bloom. The air is heavy with the noises of
insects, the hot pungent spices of weeds. The wings of the butterflies
open and close over the dark mud.

Mat sees the whole field circling the shimmering round blink of the
pond, dipping down to the wet banks. He is aware of the tense articulation of white translucent petals around the yellow eyes of the daisies,
the green smooth grassblades under which the ants traffic in a frail crosshatching of shadows.

It is the middle of the afternoon. The shadows have lengthened and
become intricate over the banks of the pond. The steeple of the church
points whitely up over the horizon of the field. He expects Virgil shortly.

The yellow butterflies all fly up at once. They whirl and flurry in the
air a moment and settle back onto the mud in a single movement like
one small animal lying down.

The cattle come down to drink, wading out shoulder deep in the
water. They drink leisurely, pausing to lift their heads and look at him.
Flies swarm over their red backs. Mat can smell the water, the sharp cool
mud-smell of it stirred up from the bottom. The cattle wade out again,
slowly, muzzles and bellies dripping, hooves sucking out of the deep
mud, and climb the bank. He watches them graze into the field. He can
hear the grass tearing. It is late in the afternoon.

Virgil has not come. Mat suddenly is afraid. He calls, "Oh, Virgil!" but
the sounds will not leave his mouth.

He sits up, his throat tight with the unuttered sound of his voice. The
suddenness of the movement makes him dizzy, and he sits motionless
for a few minutes on the edge of the sofa, stiffened and weighted with
sleep. He is still very near the dream, its colors and sounds continuing in
his waking, his mind still caught in the abrupt fear that ended it. The
house is quiet. He rubs his hands over his face, pushing his hair out of his
eyes, and picks up his shoes and goes down the hall to the kitchen.