A Place on Earth (Port William) (36 page)

Once they are home, the women and the baby safely inside, he leaves
without a word.

In the guest room the new order is quickly established. Hannah is helped
into bed, the baby given to her to nurse and then put down in the cradle
to sleep. Tiptoeing and whispering, Margaret and Nettie put things away
and straighten the room.

They have hardly finished and slipped out, closing the door quietly
behind them, hoping Hannah will sleep too while the baby is asleep,
when there comes a knocking on the kitchen door so loud it seems to
rattle every loose thing in the house.

"Oh, Lord!" Margaret says to Nettie, "Now whds that?" She hurries off
in the direction of the racket, hoping whoever it is has not come to visit.

It is Old Jack, making a great show of wiping his feet on the doormat,
though they are not muddy.

"Good morning, Uncle Jack," Margaret says. "How are you? Come
in."

"I'm all right," Old Jack says. But he stands there, leaning his hand
against the wall, slowly scrubbing his left shoe against the mat, as if he
has come just to wipe his feet. The trouble is that he is making a formal
social call, and he does not know quite how to manage it. But now he
hastens to mend his manners.

"How're you, honey?"

"Just fine, Uncle Jack."

"Honey," he says, "I come to see the baby. Where's he at?"

"It's not a boy, Uncle Jack, it's a little girl."

"I knew it," he says. "Excuse me, honey."

At the door of the room Margaret tells him, "Be quiet now, Uncle
Jack. The baby's asleep." She looks in, whispers to Hannah that company
has come, and then goes in, beckoning Old Jack to follow.

He does go in quietly, following Margaret to the cradle, where he
stands a long time, leaning over, looking down at the baby. Then, making a vague gesture toward it with his right hand, as if starting to touch it
and remembering not to, he goes around the bed to the side where Hannah is lying. Smiling up at him, she gives him her hand, and he takes it,
pulling off his cap and bowing as he speaks.

'What do you think of the baby?" she asks him.

"I think he looks mighty nice. Mighty nice."

Hannah makes the sort of bright conversation with him now that she
usually does, asking him questions, talking of pleasant, inconsequential things. He stands beside her, nodding, answering, smiling, admiring.
Now that he is no longer cramped by any obligation to speak of it, the
tenderness he feels toward her and toward the baby becomes plain. This
place of mothering and renewal, though he cannot approach it in words,
draws him to be in it, to lighten and warm himself in the idea of it.

The conversation pauses. Old Jack turns away, and Margaret starts to
the door to accompany him out. But then, coming to a chair near the
foot of the bed, to the surprise of both women Old Jack sits down, turning the chair sideways to the bed, back to Margaret, facing the front window. He comes to rest, hands folded on the crook of the cane.

"Uncle Jack," Margaret says, allowing the hint to become broad in the
tone of her voice, "I expect Hannah may want to rest now. She has just
had a long drive, you know"

Ignoring her, Old Jack turns to Hannah.

"Honey, you go right on to sleep if you want to. It won't bother me
atall."

"Well," Margaret says, trying again, "I expect she'd like to have it
quiet."

Old Jack nods. "I won't make a sound."

Though she would like just now to be left to herself, Hannah smiles
and nods to Margaret: Let him stay. And Margaret goes out, shutting the
door.

Having understood that Hannah needs to sleep, old Jack is careful
not to look at her or make a sound. It was not, anyhow, to make conversation that he came. He has come in Hannah's honor. But also, since Mat
came to tell him that the baby was born, he has thought of the absence of
Virgil. And he stays now because of that, sitting in that vacancy, though
he knows that he cannot fit or fill it.

He sits still for a long time, gazing out the window. Glancing up
finally toward the head of the bed, he sees that Hannah is still awake. She
smiles, and so does he, but still without looking directly at her. Digging
in the pocket of his coat, he pulls out a sack of candy. It is a variety he
particularly favors: coconut inside hard frosting, mixed pastel shades of
green and pink and yellow, a penny apiece. When he bought the dime's
worth from Milton Burgess this morning, he had a sort of vision of himself giving the sack to Hannah.

"I brought you this little bunch of candy, honey," he would say. "It's
mighty good."

And she would say to him: "Why, thank you, Uncle Jack. That's
mighty sweet. They are mighty good."

Holding the twisted neck of the sack, he sets it flat on the palm of his
extended left hand, and then looking at it-the neck of it twisted and
crooked over, the brown paper wrinkled and mussed from being carried
an hour in his pocket-realizes that it is not right. It is damned exactly
wrong. Cursing himself and Milton Burgess for their lack of a pretty
box, he fails to be able to offer it to her.

It is a bad moment. He would give a hundred dollars to have that sack
back in his pocket, but the expedient of simply putting it there somehow
seems the least plausible of all possibilities. She would surely think that
was strange-that he would pull a sack of something out of his pocket,
and sit there with it stuck out in his hand, and then put it back in his
pocket. Though he may have to settle for being thought an old fool, he
would rather she would not think he is crazy. Meanwhile the sack sits
like some kind of bad-smelling pet on the flat of his hand. Looking out
the window, he is pretending for the time being that he does not know it
is there. But realizing that she is watching him, he reaches out with his
right hand, untwists the neck of the sack, takes out one of the candies,
and sticks it into his mouth. Only slightly modifying the cramped pos ture of offering, his eyes fastened on the window as if there is something
of absorbing interest going on out there, he eats all ten pieces one after
another.

Hannah watches him helplessly. If she had understood quickly
enough, she could have asked to have a piece of the candy, and so made
it all right. But as soon as she realized that candy was what it was, he had
already begun eating it. Pretending to pay no attention, she watches him.

Now, as from the extremity of his embarrassment, she grows aware
of his caring for her. She understands, with shame at her misapprehension, that he is not there because he is flattered by her small attentions;
he has come to offer himself. In all her life she has known nothing like it.
She sees how free he leaves her. His love for her requires nothing of her,
not even that she find it useful. He has simply made himself present,
turning away, as he has now, to allow her to sleep if she wants to. She
feels enclosed by this generosity as by a room, ample and light. Turning
on her side, she does sleep.

When Margaret tiptoes to the door half an hour or so later, opens it
softly, and looks in, Hannah is still sleeping, and Old Jack is sitting at the
foot of the bed, gazing out the window, his hands folded on the cane as
before. In the cradle the baby too lies quiet, still asleep, her breathing
slightly moving the blanket, one of her hands opened in the air like a
leaf, at rest. Margaret stands for several minutes, looking in, moved by
the sight of them, they are so quiet.

By and by, not long after they have begun expecting him, Mat comes
in. He goes into the hall, hangs his hat up, and comes on into the kitchen,
where he begins running water into the wash pan.

Margaret watches him, aware of the change in him. She knows that
since the morning of the baby's birth, when like lovers they seemed to
meet and gather in the same joy, something has been breaking between
them. This morning she felt it in his silence.

And Mat is aware of it too. He knows that he is in retreat from her. He
knows how lonely that must make her, and he pities her-but as if from
a great distance, helplessly. It seems to him simply that their lives have
gone out of control, and he is grieved and resigned.

Leaving the house in the morning, he plunged into his work, abandoning himself to it and to his expenditure of himself in it. And once it was set forward again he began to sense powerfully the movement of it,
its using up of time, and he became grimly exultant in it. Nothing that
happens can touch him now. He is out of reach, set apart by the certainty of death. The solitude of his knowledge rings in his mind, hard
and insistent as a bell.

Looking at his back bent over the sink, Margaret feels something
inside her spring up in pursuit of him. And at the same time she feels
herself turning in opposition against him.

"Your Uncle Jack is here for dinner," she says.

He finishes drying his face and turns to her. She meets his eyes, and is
defeated by them, her pain revealed to him. He stands there grinning at
her, a brittle light in his eyes, daring her to tell him one thing that will be
worth telling.

She is angry, and hurt, near to crying. Mat sees it, and is sorry, but still
he exults, as if he would ride his loneliness over her very body.

Past bearing it, she turns away. Taking hold of herself, making her
voice matter-of-fact and easy, she says, "You can go tell him dinner's ready.
Hannah and the baby may still be asleep, so be quiet."

He walks through the house, his body feeling lightened and quickened. He feels charged with his own life, compact and resistant, his hands
awake at his sides. The strength of his refusal presses out around him
against the walls of the house.

Coming into Hannah's room, he sees that she has waked up. He nods,
smiles, asks how she feels, leans over to look at the baby. And Hannah,
too, notices the change in him, and it troubles her.

Going up behind Old jack's chair, Mat touches him on the shoulder
and tells him that dinner is ready. When Old Jack looks around, smiling,
glad to see him, Mat has already turned his back.

As they eat, Margaret and Old Jack defend themselves with silence
against Mat's silence, turned watchful against him, wondering at him.

When the meal is finished, Mat goes out.

"Making tracks, ain't he?" Nettie says.

And getting no reply from Margaret, she too understands that they
are on dangerous ground. She thought so.

On Sunday afternoon Mat is sitting in the living room, reading the paper.
Hannah not long ago finished nursing the baby and carried her in. Now
Margaret holds her in the rocking chair, rocking slowly and humming
some quiet song almost as tuneless as the back-and-forth creaking of the
rockers. Hannah sits on the couch, watching, a faint unconscious smile
on her lips. It is restful and peaceful, and it goes on that way a long time,
the quiet seemingly deepened by the small sounds that occur in it-the
creaking of the rockers, Margaret's breathless humming, the rustling of
the paper as Mat turns the pages.

Finally, suspecting that the baby is still awake, Margaret whispers, "Is
she asleep, Hannah?"

"No," Hannah says, "her eyes are still wide open."

Margaret shifts the baby down onto her lap. She lies there quietly,
wide-eyed.

"Won't Virgil be proud of her when he comes back!" Margaret says,
her voice resonant with the thought.

And an anger begins in Mat that he seems to have been waiting for,
and that he welcomes. "Don't, Margaret."

He speaks quietly, making an effort to do so, but his voice tightens
and hardens with his anger. "Don't talk like that anymore. That's not
doing us any good."

The two women look at him.

It is not until then that he fully realizes what it is he has to say. A kind
of panic hits him, a kind of sickness. But his words are empowered by
anger as they never could have been by grief.

"Virgil is dead. He's not going to come back. He's dead, Margaret.
Hannah, he's dead. Say so."

He gets up, and without looking at them again goes out the back
door.

"So be it," he tells himself. "It had to be."

He knows that remorse over what he has done is held off only by
anger, that he will suffer from it. But he also knows that his anger is
clearer than his sympathy. And he is glad it is done, relieved that they have come to the worst at last. It is upon them now They have begun to
bear it at last. So be it.

Feeling his anger begin to leave him, he walks faster, going back
through the chicken yard. He feels himself going down into sorrow, his
body filling with the pain of it, anger yielding to love-for Margaret, for
Hannah, for Virgil dead and lost.

"So be it. It had to be."

He goes into an old wagon shed at the back of the yard, closing the
door behind him. In the dimness streaked with dusty slats of sunlight he
sits on the ground against the wall and rests his head on his knees.

When he leaves the shed, done with his weeping and quieted, he feels
that he reenters his life at a new place, farther on. He will not live again
in Virgil's life.

It is getting late, the light weakening and reddening, the shadows
beginning to run together. He opens the corncrib and shells corn for the
hens, scattering the grains. The hens gather around him, their feathers
white in the glow.