A Place on Earth (Port William) (4 page)

When he comes through the door Margaret looks around and touches
her lips with her finger.

"Hannah still lying down?"

"Yes." Margaret turns back to her work. "This is going to be hard on
her."

Mat walks over and stands beside Margaret, putting his arm around
her. "On us too. But we can't help it."

"Yes."

They stand without speaking for a minute. Then, "What're you making?" Mat asks.

"Some chocolate pies. Bess and Wheeler and the boys are going to be
here for supper."

Mat smiles at her. "Well, I'm glad they're coming for supper. And I'm
glad we're having pie." He laughs. `And they'll be glad too, I expect."

"The boys will."

He pulls a chair away from the table and sits down to put on his shoes.

"You slept."

A little."

Mat goes into the hall to get his hat and coat off the rack and comes
into the kitchen again. "I'm going to town a while."

'All right."

He goes out and turns down the street towards the store. It is raining
still, and he walks with his head bent.

He is already in front of Jasper Lathrop's store when he sees Nathan
and Burley Coulter standing in the shelter of the little porch roof over the
entrance to the drugstore. The soldier and his uncle stand there watch ing the rain fall onto the road. It will be some time yet before the bus
comes, but they seem to have no intention of going into the drugstore to
wait, as if now that Nathan's departure has begun they will do nothing to
interrupt it. Nathan's brother Tom has been dead two years, killed in the
war. As he looks at them, that death seems to Mat to be somehow
implicit in their waiting.

Pausing, his hand on the doorlatch, Mat speaks to them.

They turn their heads. Burley raises his hand. "How are you, Mat?"

"Hello, Mr. Feltner," Nathan says.

"Well, are you leaving, Nathan?"

"Yes sir."

"I wish you luck," Mat says, and regrets the words, which seem to him
to say both too much and not enough.

They thank him. He opens the door and goes in.

The rain slackens, falls loosely and waveringly for a moment, and stops,
but after a few minutes begins again suddenly and more heavily than
before. It is only after this renewal, when the familiar rattle on the roof
has steadied again in their hearing, that they become aware that the drip
from the gutter never stopped.

Jayber Crow looks up, frowning, at the top of one of the windows.
"Why don't you all fix that gutter?"

"Did once," Frank Lathrop says. "She sprung again."

"Why in the hell don't you fix it?" Old Jack says.

"It's a weary old tune," Jayber says. He speaks to nobody, the tone of
objection gone out of his voice, as though nothing was said before.

"If you ever owned a gutter it'd be leaking."

None of them replies. Old Jack's most casual observation is apt to
take the form of a final judgment-which could be considered an insult
if anybody wanted to take the trouble. They know better than to take
the trouble. Though the old man is willing for his remark to be taken
better than halfway as a joke, they know that he himself takes it more
than half seriously. Jayber owns his barber shop, but it is a fact that he does not own a gutter. It is Old Jack's theory that a man who owns a roof
ought to own a gutter, and a cistern to conserve the water, and livestock
to drink at the cistern.

They hear the street door open, the slapping of rain against the wet
pavement coming abruptly into the building, and then slam shut.

"Whds that?" Old Jack asks, speaking to Jayber again because he is
still looking at him.

"Burley, I imagine."

They sit with their heads turned, listening to the approach of Burley's
footsteps, the sounds distinct and clear in the hollowness of the larger
room, as though he bears toward them his own portion of its emptiness.

He stops in the doorway, leaning his shoulder against the jamb. He
grins at them. The brim of his misshapen felt hat, weighted by the rain,
bends over his eyes.

"Gentlemen."

"Looks like rain," Frank Lathrop says.

Burley nods. "I look for it."

He shakes the water off his hat and leans there, creasing and smoothing the crown of it with his fingers, burlesquing his care. He watches
their faces, prolonging his interruption of the game while he elaborates
the joke of his concern for his hat.

"Looks like a man who could afford a ten-dollar hat for a ten-cent
head," Jayber Crow says finally, "could afford an umbrella."

Burley stares at him, his face nearly expressionless, but with enough
attention that it seems he shapes and completes the silence he allows to
follow Jayber's remark, as delicately as he now holds the perfected shape
of his hat.

"It looks like to me," he says then, "a two-bit barber with no hair ought
to be more respectful of heads."

He puts his hat on, nudging it a little toward the back of his head with
his thumb, a gesture that seems both to finish the quiet and detach him
from it.

"Well, Burley," Old Jack says, "is the boy gone?"

"He's gone."

Burley unbuttons his jacket and comes into the room. He shakes the
ashes out of the stove and puts in a lump of coal, and spreads his hands to the warmth. He shivers. When his hands are warm, he turns his back
to the stove.

"Burley," Mat says, "you might as well play."

They make room and Burley pulls up a chair.

They play without talking-two more hands, and into a third. Mat
pushes his glasses up on his forehead, rubbing his eyes, and turns to look
out the window.

"Rain, rain."

"The river'll be out of its banks," Frank says.

"Is now," Burley says. 'A little. It could get troublesome."

"Well, I've seen it rain," Mat says, "and I've seen it get troublesome."

"You've seen it worse than it is now," Old Jack says.

"Several times."

`And if you don't die you'll see it worse."

"I expect."

Jayber plays, and Frank, and Burley.

Old Jack draws and slaps down the ten of diamonds and rams his final
card into the discard pile. He looks triumphantly from one of his opponents to another.

He has played his ten of diamonds on Jayber's seven, eight, and nine
of hearts, but they choose not to notice his error, knowing what it would
cost them to try to undo it. Once the old man has committed himself to
a play, the rules, as far as he is concerned, no longer apply to it.

Old Jack is difficult. When the mood strikes him he can be magnificently
difficult.

For nine years after the death of his wife the old man stayed alone on
his farm and kept house for himself. But then, because his health seemed
to her to be failing, his daughter insisted that he come to Louisville to
live with her. He refused. She insisted that he hire a housekeeper; a man
his age ought not to be left alone, she said. He refused again, and this
time put himself to pains to see that she retreated with her plans and
opinions thoroughly dismantled.

Finally, though, there was a partial surrender on Old Jack's side. But it was none of her doing-he saw to that. It was Mat Feltner's son-in-law,
Wheeler Catlett, who brought about the compromise: that Old Jack
would come to live out the rest of his life in the hotel at Port William.
Wheeler was Old Jack's lawyer and, when they agreed, his friend. And in
this undertaking he had also the advantage of not being the daughter.

It was not that the old man had ceased to love his daughter. But her
marriage to a prominent Louisville banker had long ago set her apart
from his world and out of his reach. He saw that clearly at the time and
admitted it unhesitatingly to himself, and so when she came to him with
her invitation, well meant as he knew it was, he could see no reason to
back off. And with perfect understanding of the consequences, for his
daughter and for himself, he kept loyal to what he considered his own
place in the world.

But Old Jack admires candor, and Wheeler Catlett stated the proposition to him with candor: "Uncle Jack, you're old. You could get sick. It
won't be any pleasure to you to die out here by yourself."

"I can do it by myself," Old Jack said.

From the tone of his voice Wheeler judged he would do it to prove it
if he had to, and after that he let him alone.

Old Jack held out another six months, to proclaim his independence
and recover ownership of the decision, and then came to town. He
arrived at the hotel toward the end of last October in Wheeler Catlett's
automobile, his clothes and shaving equipment packed in two five-gallon
buckets that Wheeler afterwards carried back and set down on the well
top in front of Old Jack's barn.

Mrs. Hendrick's hotel, in the time of her departed husband, had subsisted on the patronage of a fellowship of traveling salesmen who came
and went more or less regularly through the town. But by the time of
Jack's arrival it was a kind of boardinghouse, inhabited for the most part
by Mrs. Hendrick and two other, much older, widows who turned out to
be extravagantly unsatisfactory companions for Old Jack. And he, by
nature or by calculation, proved just as unsuited to the conversational
purposes of the three ladies. Aside from the fact that the presence of a
man under their roof seemed a breach of respectability, Old Jack's language assumed for them, in this unsteady social predicament, the nature
of a direct assault on their virtue. His disregard makes a kind of bridge on which he tromps across the chasm of propriety that once supposedly
protected them in the insular delicacy of their sex. He says very little that
they can reply to without seeming to countenance a liberty as opprobrious as seduction. Their precautionary muteness in his presence has been
further intensified by Mrs. Hendrick's discovery that he urinates in the
back yard every night before he goes to bed and the first thing every
morning-and by the knowledge, discreetly gossiped to them all, that
the three of them are customarily referred to, by Jayber Crow and Burley Coulter among others, as "Old Jack's harem."

Mrs. Hendrick has a face like an auger, an imitation of the corkscrew
twist of hair at the back of her head. She had accustomed herself to
widowhood more readily than she ever had to marriage; the memory of
Mr. Hendrick she had stashed away neatly in the phrase "My blessed
husband, God rest his soul." And then Old Jack's coming put a sudden
end to the satisfactions and conveniences of her widowhood. Between
the two of them a kind of second marriage took place, enforced by circumstance, consummated by Old Jack's unreckoning invasions of her
privacy. But in consideration of the advanced age of the offender and the
dollars he pays her punctually on the first of every month, she has felt
obliged to tolerate him, and does, with the comforting sense that her
virtue somehow prevails.

Old Jack made the card game in jasper Lathrop's vacant store his winter outpost. Except for the one afternoon a week when Wheeler Catlett
drove him out to oversee the work on his farm, he sat by the fire in the
little room, talking when he saw that the players' interest in the game
had flagged and they would listen to him, and talking at times when he
knew none of them listened.

That lasted until Jayber Crow got the idea to teach the old man the
game.

"Take a hand, Jack. We'll show you how"

"Play," Old Jack said, gesturing refusal with the cane. "I don't know
one from the other."

But they repeated the offer, and he finally agreed to let them try to
teach him. "It'll be uphill," he told them.

It was, Jayber Crow said, like pushing a loaded wagon uphill with a
piece of string. But once they got him into it the old man stuck. He stuck, not from any love of the game, but because he immediately hated
it. He hates the impersonality of it, he hates it for the chance involved in
it, he hates the implacable rules of it, he hates it because it is a game. He
plays as if it is his obligation to wipe the game from the face of creation.
That they have been able to teach him no more than half the rules has
preserved his bafflement. His opponents are constantly trounced by his
anger, for their persistence in playing against him, for being able to play
without anger, for having caught him in the game in the first place. They
accept his anger with equanimity, and usually with amusement. They
oppose him as honestly and gently as they can, out of sympathy-realizing that the conflict has become necessary to him, one of the last staples
of his life-and out of respect.

Jayber grins and pitches his cards onto the block. "He's won. Let's call it a
day."

"You're laying it on us, Uncle Jack," Burley says.

The old man picks up his cane and wrenches his chair around to face
the windows. "Yes sir, it's a wet time, Burley."

Frank Lathrop gathers the cards and shuffles them once, and places
the deck in the center of the block. Mat relights his cigar.

Their gestures deliberately and a little gravely establish the game's
conclusion.

Frank nods toward the radio. "The news, Mat."

Mat reaches behind him and turns up the radio. They make way for
the voice of the announcer as for a procession, their gathering broken as
each of them moves his eyes away from it, staring out the windows or at
the floor. This solemn hearing of the news, after so long a time, has
become a kind of ceremony with them. All afternoon, while the game
goes on, the radio hums and murmurs in its niche among the boxes on
the desk top, like an idol come to life above its altar, a crude cyclopean
head erected and drowsily alert on the room's edge. Until one of them,
noticing a new inflection in its voice, calls attention to it. And they hush
for the precise voice of the announcer stating the facts of the war, continuing from the point at which it left off the hour before or the day before; the voice carefully objective, studiedly calm, a fact itself which
remains whole and remote among the facts it utters. The words come
to them unjudged, without lamentation or joy. Their quiet listening
becomes an obedience, an homage. For a few minutes they let the war
exist there in the room, calmly mouthing its deaths.