A Place on Earth (Port William) (37 page)

June 7, 1945

Dear Nathan,

I'm ashamed to hand you the same poor old excuse every time, but it's the
truth that I haven't had a chance to write. It's raining this morning, and in
spite of the rush we're in I have to admit I'm just a little bit grateful for a
chance to rest my old bones.

We've been hard at it, trying to get the tobacco set. We've got out only
about an acre of our crops here at home. And at Mat's we're not but a
little better than half done. So we've got a long pull still ahead of us.

Also, sort of between times and when we can, we work some down at
Gideon's and Ida's. Gideon is still unheard from, but we're keeping the
place going. And Ida keeps the slack taken up when we're not there.
When we are there she works right along with us.

There's a lot of talk in Port William just now about her and Ernest Finley. Ernest has been working down there all spring, carpentering and
painting on those old buildings of Roger Merchant's-working there a
good deal of the time without another man in a mile of him. So you can
see what a fine chance that is for them rattle-mouths there in town. And
I don't reckon you need me to make a list of what is being said. It don't
cost them anything to see the visions they see.

They don't know Ida, for one thing. And for another, they don't know
Ernest. You don't have to be around Ida long to know that she's as mindful of Gideon as she ever was. If I ever seen a woman whose ways gave
the signs of belonging to one man, it's her. And I'm just about certain
that Ernest don't even know how to make the sort of proposition the
talkers are accusing him of.

Which don't mean that everything is right. There's some things I
believe I do know that haven't turned up yet in the talk. I do pretty surely
know that Ida cooks dinner for Ernest on the days he works down there,
just like she cooks for us when we're there. And I know for certain that
he never eats there when we do-always fixes it so he won't be there at
dinnertime on those days. Which means, as near as I can figure, that
Ernest has Ida on his mind in a way he don't want us to see. I know Ida's
a woman who can take up a lot of space in a man's mind, like a big bed in
a little room. And all this worries me. There seems a possibility of pain
in it.

I wrote you, I think, that Hannah Feltner's baby was born down in the
hospital at Hargrave three weeks ago. I've stopped by to see them three
or four times, and Hannah and the baby are doing fine. It's a girl. They've
named her Margaret. A couple of times when I've been there Mrs. Feltner and Hannah have started wondering who she looks like. They never
decide. You can see they want her to look like Virgil, but are afraid to say
either she does or she doesn't. So both times I just out and said, "Well, it
looks like to me she favors her daddy a good deal." I figure I wasn't really
lying. The baby is Virgil's, and looks like she's bound to get so she favors
him some sooner or later.

Well, old Nathan, be careful. I'm always thinking about you. And
thinking the world of you. Don't forget it, whatever you do.

Your uncle,

Burley

P.S. I meant to tell you-the other day we went out to salt the cattle, and
we salted them and stood there watching them. And your daddy turned
and stood looking out over our ridges towards the river. And directly he
said, "Well, I reckon it must be night now over yonder where Nathan is, and he must be asleep." He don't speak of you often, but I wanted to tell
you how plain it was to me, the way he said it, that he keeps you in his
mind.

It's night now. I'll have to end sure enough this time.

Hannah's pregnancy was like a long lovemaking, a long continuance of
Virgil's body in her own. And then, with the birth, they were divided.
Now she feels her body going to waste. Her mourning over Virgil is also
a mourning over herself-is the same. She feels his absence within herself, a vacancy, as though some vital part of her own body was removed
in her sleep.

On the Sunday afternoon two weeks after Mat forced on them the
fatal words "Virgil is dead," finding herself alone in the house, Hannah
puts the baby to sleep, and climbs the stairs and goes into the room that
was hers and Virgil's. It is the first time she has been there since the birth
of the baby. As she comes into it, the room is familiar, but it is a familiarity from which she is now estranged. She stops just inside the door, the
quietness of the house grown big around her.

Like a swimmer, filling herself with breath and determination, she
goes into the room and moves in it, resting her hands from time to time
on the furnishings, the dresser, the chairs, the table, the bed. She walks
with her arms folded tightly across her breasts, reaching down sometimes to touch one or another of the furnishings. She stops before one of
the windows, and stands looking out northward over the tops of the
ridges, the opening of the river valley, the ridges going on to the horizon
on the far side. The country is in the full green of summer. For several
minutes she watches it attentively as if listening to it. In the windless clear
sunlight of Sunday afternoon it lies before her, shining. But the room is
waiting, and finally she withdraws her mind into it, and turns and
watches her steps go back across the rug.

She goes to the closet and opens the door. Hanging there are clothes
that now belong to the past-her winter dresses from the time before
she needed maternity clothes, Virgil's civilian suits and overcoat and, folded on the shelf overhead, several suits of his work clothes. She kept
their clothes there together after Virgil's departure, one of the rituals of
her hope.

But now she begins slowly to take the suits off their hangers and fold
them, making a neat pile of them on the bed, finality in every move she
makes. It is not possible to stop or go back. She seems not even to work
by her own will. Beyond any power of hers, Virgil's death claims all that
is his. Handling his clothes, as though her fingers touch through the fabrics their own palpable remembrance of his body, her body becomes
vibrant with loss as a struck bell.

She goes and finds two empty boxes and some string, packs in the
suits and the work clothes and all the clothes of his left in the dresser
drawers, closes the boxes and knots the string around them, carries them
one at a time up into the attic, and sets them down in the musty darkness
under the slope of the roof.

She comes back down, turning off the light at the foot of the attic
stairs, and returns to the room. It is only then that it occurs to her that
she has nothing more to do. The room is filled with brightness, dazzling
after the darkness of the attic. She stands, looking around. And then her
widowed dresses hanging alone in the closet declare her misery to her,
and she sits down on the bed and cries. After some time, hearing the baby
wake, she gets up and wipes her eyes and shuts the closet door and goes
down.

She takes the baby up, changes her diaper, and then wraps a blanket
around her and goes out by the back door. Once outside, she feels better.
Lately the house has seemed to her the very embodiment of her plight
and her grief, filled with innumerable marks and signs declaring Virgil's
absence, her loss, the life she will never have. But now, lying around her
in the sunlight, the country seems purified of all deaths, past and to
come. No griefs cling to it.

She goes through the yard and the chicken yard and starts up the rise
of the ground behind the barn. She goes at a slow wandering pace that
does not take her directly up the slope, but here and there over the face
of it, looking around her as she goes, feeling sudden pleasurable intimacies with the sunlight, the curving hill, the clover and grass at her feet.

She does not free herself of the thought of Virgil. Intimations of him are still all around her. But out here the remindings of his life remain
peculiarly intact, as though only stopped, not changed, by the thought of
his death. Something of him seems still to be present in the life of the
place. She senses him almost palpably, just outside her reach.

She remembers walking up this way, carrying a water jug, one hot
July afternoon in the summer before the war. They were shocking hay
on top of the ridge, Virgil and the others. After helping wash and dry the
dinner dishes, she picked up the jug and went out. Stopping by the cistern at the barn to pump the jug full, she carried it to the field to them,
climbing slowly, oppressed by the heavy brilliance of the heat. She came
to Virgil first, and handed the jug to him, and he tilted it and drank. She
stood watching him-his shirt and the waistband of his pants dark with
sweat, his face and throat and bare arms glistening with it, the green haychaff sticking to his skin and his clothes. He finished and handed the jug
to the next man. Smiling at her, he made some casual remark to her that
she cannot remember, and went back to work. What came to her thenand comes to her now-was the sense of the abundance of strength in
him that accepted the heat and the tiredness of that day with a kind of joy.

Like an answer or echo to the life that so filled and moved him then,
she feels grow and quiver in herself the pain of the subsiding of his body,
of stillness coming over him. But also, as she climbs steadily upward,
bringing more and more into sight that country so charged with her
memory of him, there is a strengthening in her of the sense that what he
was still is. And with a kind of yielding, she receives him into herself, not
to be lost again.

She walks along the ends of the tobacco rows, in which the young
white-stemmed plants have begun to grow again after the transplanting.
The field has just been plowed, and the earth between the rows is dark
and fresh. The small plants are erect and green. Looking at them, she
feels the world going on, her life continuing with all that is alive.

The baby becomes restless, and she walks more swiftly now, climbing
straight on to the top of the ridge. At the highest point she sits on a pile
of posts in the shade of a walnut tree. She lays the baby on her lap, and
leans over and smiles down at her. The baby lies still, appearing to look
up through the airy mass of the leaves.

"Look up at the sky," she says. "See the sky?" But the baby's face crum pies and she begins to fret and then to wail. "I'm sorry. Don't cry. Don't
cry. Hush now." She opens her blouse and lifts the small reddened face to
her breast. Once the milk begins to come, the baby relaxes against her,
beginning a tiny breathless singsong.

Settling herself, Hannah lets her head rest against the tree, looking up
through the yellow-green of the leaves at the sky. She becomes conscious
now of the stirring and murmuring of the life of the place-the voices
and comings and goings in the town below her, the humming of insects
among the blooms of the fields, now and again the far-off bleating of
Mat's sheep somewhere back of the hill. The light has begun to cool. On
the slope below her the swallows are curving over the still face of the
pond.

The baby finishes nursing and sleeps. Having buttoned her blouse and
made the baby comfortable on her shoulder, she resumes her stillness.

A small yellow-striped fly, known around Port William as a steadybee, comes and stands still in the air in front of her. It moves several
times back and forth sideways, from one standing-still place to another,
remaining at each one several seconds before moving abruptly and
exactly to the other. And then it comes down and lights on the back of
her hand, its clear wings outspread. Its pointed curved abdomen pulses
up and down, tapping at her skin. She waves it off, and it goes two or
three feet away and stops in the air again as though watching her.

Again she leans her head back and looks up into the tree. The black
branches fork, taper, diminish, supporting the luminous, airy globe of
leaves. The sky shows raggedly through, and now and then the winged
black speck of a bird appears in one of the openings, wavering and turning in the high blue an instant. For a long time Hannah sits there, not
thinking of herself, or of the child slackened against her in sleep, but
filled with awareness of the tree, its green and gold hung in the light
above her.

Finally, as though waking, she lifts her head and looks around. The
steady-bee is not there anymore, and the air is cooler. Before her the
town is a silhouette against the low sun. The half-dark of the evening has
begun. The weedy dampness of nightfall is beginning to rise out of the
hollows. The silence has altered, deepened, but the sounds that take place in it now are more distinct and clear: a voice calling cattle, a dog barking,
a voice shouting "Hush!"-and the silence returning deeper than before.

The melancholy of it comes over her, and she shudders. The place, in
its submission to the night, now seems to withdraw from her and to
leave her alone.

She hears Mat's old truck come into the lot, and she gets up. Gathering the baby firmly against her, she hurries down the long slope to the
barn.

In the depth of Mat's grief there are stretches of days in which he loses
track of time. He seems to work through these days almost without
consciousness, coming aware of himself at odd moments with a kind of
shock, a fearful sense of the strangeness of everything-held to the place
and his work only by old habit. These are times of heavy dreamless
sleep, from which he can hardly force himself awake.

There are other times of almost unbearable clarity and activity of
mind, when he can hardly sleep for thinking, when he wakes knowing
he has been thinking in his sleep.

At these times his thoughts more and more take the form of talk
between himself and Virgil-Virgil having become obsessively the other
person of his thoughts. He is haunted by Virgil as though he summons
him from the dead in order to explain himself. Becoming aware of his
thoughts in the midst of his work, or lying awake at night, he will find
himself already explaining-telling how he felt when Virgil did this or
did that, telling what his plans were, telling some clarifying fragment of
their history. And Virgil listens, smiling in sympathy and understanding.
"That's all right," he says. "Yes. I know" Mat can rarely visualize more
than his face. Now and then a hand appears-a muscular hand, strongly
veined-and touches his cheek or temple, or scratches thoughtfully in
his hair.