A Place on Earth (Port William) (41 page)

"What are you thinking about, Mat?"

The question startles him, for he gathers from the tone of her voice
that she knows what he is thinking, and asks with daring and with fear.

"Loss," he says.

Hannah stands with the two little boys, looking up into the darkening
tree, holding the boys' hands in hers, her back to the porch. Maybe
because she stands so with the two boys, who wait only for the katydids
to sing again, Mat is deeply touched now by the look of her. It seems to
him that loss is in the way she stands.

He looks at Margaret, meeting her eyes.

"Loss. It singles us out."

She is smiling at him, shaking her head. And he realizes that the singleness he is talking about never has belonged to her. She has been without even the comfort of that-not single and whole, but broken. He
grows ashamed of his bitterness. He too is broken, as he has been, and
has known, all along-that singleness of his an attempt, typical of him,
to prescribe terms to the world. The loser prescribes no terms.

"Mat, when we've lost it all, we've had what we've lost."

"But to lose it. Isn't there anything in you that rebels against that?"

She looks steadily at him, considering that-whether unsure of her
answer or unwilling to answer too readily, he cannot tell. He is aware that
Margaret is trying him, drawing deliberately at the bindings between
them, as he has tried her with his singleness.

"No," she says.

"None at all?"

"Virgil," she says, as if to remind or acknowledge what they are talking about. "From the day he was born I knew he would die. That was
how I loved him, partly. I'd brought him into the world that would give
him things to love, and take them away. You too, Mat. You knew it. I
knew so well that he would die that, when he did disappear from us the
way he did, I was familiar with the pain. I'd had it in me all his life."

A tone of weeping has come into her voice, though not openly, and
Mat does not yet move toward her. The weeping seems only the circumstance of what she is saying, not the result-an old weeping, well known,
bearable by an endurance both inborn and long practiced. The dusk is
thickening so that their eyes no longer clearly meet, though they still
look toward each other.

"But I don't believe that when his death is subtracted from his life it
leaves nothing. Do you, Mat?"

"No," he says. "I don't."

"What it leaves is his life. How could I turn away from it now any
more than I could when he was a little child, and not love it and be glad
of it, just because death is in it?"

Her words fall on him like water and like light. Suffering and clarified,
he feels himself made fit for her by what she asks of him. He shakes his
head.

She is clearly asking him now, and he gets up and goes and sits down
beside her. He puts his arm around her.

`And, Mat," she says, "we belong to each other. After all these years.
Doesn't that mean something?"

It is a long time before he answers. The night has nearly come. He can
see only the drifting white blur of Hannah's blouse under the dark hovering of the tree.

"I don't know what it means," he says finally. "I know what it's worth."

Early Monday morning, the thirteenth of August, Ernest is driving up
the creek road to work for perhaps the hundredth time. The valley is deep
in fog. Since he plunged down into it out of the sunlight on the upland,
he has been able to see only a few feet of the road, and he has driven
slowly, now and then turning on the wipers to clear the windshield.

The metal bed of the truck is filled with loose tools, odd scraps and
remnants, a dozen and a half empty paint buckets. As the truck works its
way slowly over the rough road, it is accompanied by a clattering and j arring and rattling absurdly disproportionate to its speed.

Riding in the littered cab in the midst of that commotion, Ernest becomes conscious at a certain point that Ida will have heard him coming
by now. And at the thought of her time seems to establish its continuity
again from the moment the evening before when as usual he let her out
of the truck at the mailbox, and watched her in the mirror until she was
out of sight. He imagines Ida hearing the sound of the truck and turning
her head toward it a moment, confirming her recognition of it, before
going on with her work as before. That is not what he wishes she would
do-he wishes that, hearing that sound, she would smile; he wishes that
she would put down her work and come out to meet him -but it is what,
with a desperate realism, he imagines her doing. The sight and nearness of her still raise in him an insurgence of heat and want. And the most
passing thought of her still wakes the dream of household and farm, in
which she moves as troubling and elusive as an unborn spirit. But desire
and dream are hounded through his mind now by awareness of their
futility. The whole structure has begun to be undermined by his understanding that it is licensed only by Ida's innocence of it and by his failure
to bring it to the test of any reality.

But the sense of futility has grown in his mind to the sort of restrained
terror that he would feel working without a rope on the incline of a high
steep roof. It is the middle of August already, the downward slope of the
summer. He has come in sight of the end of his work on the valley farm.
And the return to winter work in the enclosure of his shop, which once
so strongly appealed to him and which he would look forward to with
such a deep presentiment of pleasure, has become unimaginable. He
feels himself set loose and at large in the world, freed of all the limits
of habit or duty or pleasure that might have held him back, pursuing
through the boundlessness of his own fantasy his fleeting, hopeless
obsession, pursued by a disaster to which he is blind. Like one of the
damned, who with an indomitable loyalty even in Hell suffers only the
thought of his irrecoverable sin, Ernest goes back each morning, always
one day nearer the last, to his burning.

He drives up onto the bench where the house sits and stops in the
yard. After he has turned off the engine, he sits still, listening. At first
there seems to be no sound at all. And then he becomes conscious of the
trees dripping. That is the only sound. Ida is nowhere in sight. He does
not know whether she is at the barn or in the house. He cannot see to
the barn. The house looks shut and quiet like a house at night. Now his
own silence has begun to hold him. He waits for a sound.

But hearing none, he reaches over and unfastens the glove compartment, takes out a package of cigarettes, and flips the door shut. He lights
a cigarette and gets out and goes around to the back of the house. There
is an old shed there where he keeps paint and brushes and the few tools
he still has a use for.

He is in no hurry. He cannot begin painting until the sun burns
through and dries things off. He stands in the door, looking into the shed
at the clutter of his stuff, finishing his smoke.

When he is done with it he steps inside. He spends a few minutes rearranging things, collecting his tools where they are scattered on the floor,
gathering up the empty buckets and piling them in with the others in the
bed of the truck. He carries out a new bucket of paint and sits down in
the doorway and opens it. He stirs it carefully, taking his time, watching
the pigment rise and blend and smooth out, and then sets the top back
on the bucket. He takes his brushes out of the can where they have been
soaking overnight and works the turpentine out of them.

He carries his ladder around to the side of the house where the sun
will strike first, and sets it up. Taking a putty knife and a wire brush, he
climbs the ladder and begins scrubbing away the old paint that has
cracked and loosened around an upstairs window. For a good many minutes he works with concentration. As he works down from the top of
the window, his eyes come below the level of the half-drawn shade. He
leans sideways and looks in.

It is a child's room-Annie's room-and the sight of it is a revelation
to him. He braces his right hand on the sill and looks closely. The room
is neat, the bed prettily made with a patchwork quilt spread over the
counterpane. But he can tell, without quite knowing how, that it has not
been entered in some time. The door opposite him, that must go into
the hall, is shut. The shades of the other two windows are tightly drawn.
Only this one is partly raised. He understands, as if by an instinct born of
his long preoccupation with her, that though Ida wanted the room
closed, needed to have it closed, she could not bear to leave it dark.

What is revealed to him, what dawns on him with a kind of shock as
he stands there looking into the room, is Ida's life, the complexity of it,
the uncountable details of its making and being. There are secrecies and
intimacies of it that are as forbidden to him, as far beyond his reach, as if
he had never known her. The drive of his feelings has so oversimplified
her that he has forgot, if he ever allowed himself to know, that there was
bound to be such a room, and that it was bound to be closed to him. The
recognition seems depthless, and it fills him with a nameless heavy fear.
And yet he stands there, cramped and unmoving, looking into the room,
caught by the mystery of it.

There is an almost sexual intimacy about looking into that room. And
yet his strangeness to it is so strongly proclaimed by everything in it that it is not an intimacy at all but an invasion. And his sense of himself as a
stranger is immediately joined to a sense of Gideon's belonging there.
Gideon would know, and his knowing, though he might suffer it like
death, would make him free in that room, and in Ida's life. In that knowing he would be carried toward Ida, toward such a giving and having as
Ernest will never know.

He becomes aware that he has heard the yard gate open and shut.
Seized by shame and the dread of being caught, he begins scrubbing at
the loose paint again, not changing his position at all, bluffing through
the pretense that he only leaned over that way in order to do his work.
He does not look around. And then he can hear footsteps come up near
the foot of the ladder and stop. He can feel the nearness of her.

"Don't fall," she says.

He does not stop work, and he does not look down at her. "I won't."

"Well, you might, leaning over that way."

"That's part of it too," he says. "It takes some stretching and some
bending over."

"I guess it must. I don't know much about it."

As he straightens and begins working in a different place, he glances
down at her. She is standing within three or four feet of the ladder, a
bucket of milk on the ground at her feet. She is wearing a pair of fourbuckle overshoes that must belong to Gideon. She is no longer looking
up at him, but has turned, and is standing with her back to him, gazing
absently out into the fog, which is thinning a little. He can see the yard
fence now, rusty wires and spider webs beaded with clear drops. He
knows that she has stopped because she gets lonesome and wants somebody to talk to, but he also knows that she will not say anything to him
that she would not say to Mat or the Coulters or anybody else who might
come to work.

"I like to never found them old cows," she says.

"Huh!"

"They'd laid down in that fog and I couldn't see them-of coursebut I couldn't hear them either. Not a sound of a bell."

"I thought they usually come in by themselves. Didn't think you had
to hunt them."

"They do. They wasn't a hundred feet from the barn this morning. I just couldn't see them or hear them. If that old spotted one hadn't got up
and started her bell to ringing I'd be looking yet."

"Well. I swan."

She's silent a moment, and then he can hear the bail of the bucket rattle. "I reckon I'd better get on."

She goes around to the back porch. He hears her set the bucket down
and, after a pause to take the overshoes off, go into the kitchen. Very
shortly she comes out again and strains the milk and carries the filled
crocks to the cellar. Though he goes ahead swiftly with his work, he is
almost wholly attentive to the sounds she makes, translating them into
visions of her as she moves among her tasks.

He scrubs out all the nooks and seams and edges on that end of the
house, and moves his ladder again to the starting place. Going back to
the shed, he tosses knife and brush into the pile of tools. The fog has
begun to thin, and the pale disk of the sun to show through, but it will be
some time yet before the wall will be dry. He sits down in the shed door
and lights a smoke.

Ida comes out, carrying a water bucket. `A bad morning to paint."

"Yes. Too wet."

She goes to the well and pumps the bucket full and lifts it off the
spout, turning toward him again. "This old fog. It makes you feel a thousand miles away."