A Place on Earth (Port William) (42 page)

She goes back inside, leaning a little against the weight of the bucket,
her free arm raised for balance, but stepping quickly up onto the porch
and across it and into the kitchen.

Her footsteps go rapidly across the linoleum two or three times, and
then he hears her washing dishes. She washes her breakfast dishes, the
skillet and coffee pot, the milk buckets and strainer. She comes out and
empties the dishwater over the yard fence and goes back. This time, preoccupied, she does not look in his direction, and he feels a secrecy in his
presence there, a flickering of shame. But he listens again as she begins
preparing their dinner.

He hears her footsteps recede toward the front rooms. Now she will
straighten the house, sweep, make her bed, and go out to work in the
field until time to finish up dinner. There is an almost unbearable sweetness in his knowledge of all this. He has come to follow her through her days with the pleasing anticipations and recognitions with which one
reads a familiar and much loved passage, but with anxiety, too, as though
the passage is but a fragment, leading to the verge of a revelation that is
not told, or lost.

Suddenly, somewhere deep inside the house, he hears her begin to
sing. He has never heard her sing before. The sound-muted, wordless,
whole phrases inaudible-comes to him with the same sort of shock he
felt when he looked into the child's room. Any suggestion of change in
her, or in his idea of her, is fearful to him-mainly perhaps for the reason
that he has no way to respond to it. No matter how either of them may
change, nothing changes between them. No matter what may happen, he
is doomed to go on as always, obeying the void appearances of his old
self and his old ways.

She quits singing. Presently he hears her footsteps return toward the
back of the house.

His attention has been so fixed on Ida that he is alarmed to see that he
is sitting in the full light of the sun. He does not know how long it has
been shining on him, but he should already have been at work. The day
seems to have slipped a little beneath him. What is he doing?

Shame gathers him up and with clear force turns him toward his
work, and he submits to it with the relief of a man who has arrived at a
critical solution, righted himself. Standing high on the ladder, for the better part of half an hour he concentrates with deliberative self-mastery
on spreading white paint over the weathered cornice.

But as he reaches and turns at his work and turns back and leans to dip
his brush, he can glimpse the wheel tracks of the road going down from
the house to the barn. And his mind, as though it has gone wild and will
not be brought to confinement again by the bait of a simple regularity,
begins to stray out into the place.

His work, since spring, has followed the incline of that road upward
from the barn to the house, repairing and painting the buildings along
the way. He has made a difference in the time he has been there. But
beyond the vestige of workmanly satisfaction it gives him to look back at
it, there is a sense of irrevocable loss. Each one of those buildings represents one of the little periods of his life. Around each one in its turn his life formed a pattern. He has had an intimate knowledge of each onehas been attentive to the condition of every board and nail. And each has
stood in its place in the transforming light of his dream.

But it was an intimacy purely professional, purely temporary. There is
not one that he has had reason to go back to. And he has not been back.
He will not go back. That is the condition of his trade. He has scarcely
ever worked in a place that he did not come in some way to like. But
then the liking was dependent on the work, and ended when the work
did. Here the use of his skill, which always before has transcended and
carried him past his jobs, has failed him. He is not able to relinquish this
place as he passes through it. He cannot think of work beyond this work,
a place beyond this place.

He has lost track of Ida's whereabouts when he hears her speak to
him.

"Mr. Finley."

She stands at the foot of the ladder, ready to go to the field, holding a
large white envelope. He can see the address written on it, heavily, in
pencil. An ache of premonition swells in the pit of his stomach. He lays
his brush across the mouth of the bucket, and takes a step down.

"I wanted to show you this. I got it yesterday. I'm sorry to make you
get down."

"That's all right. I had to anyway."

He sets the bucket on the ground and props his crutches under his
arms. She hands him the envelope.

It is one of those stamped envelopes that you buy at a post office.
There is no return address, and he cannot read the postmark. The handwriting of the address is awkward, blunt, black, deeply impressed in the
paper. Looking down at it, Ernest stands as though shadowless, in an
inescapable brilliance. He has begun to sweat.

"You want me to read this?"

"Sure. Go ahead."

She is smiling, facing him with her hands clasped behind her. He
would not be surprised to see her suddenly dance up and down. She
reminds him just now of a young girl and that again makes her strange
to him. Again he is aware how far his knowledge falls short of her.

He removes from the envelope a large sheet of lined paper and unfolds
it. Again there is no address, there is no date. As on the envelope the
black angular script is sunk into the paper as if by the weight of it: "Dear
Ida, I am straightened up. I am coming home."

Had that been all, the meaning might have revealed itself slowly, and
might have been bearable. But Gideon had trouble spelling straightened.
He spelled it twice-first "stratened" and then "straytened"-before he
got it right. And somehow the record of that struggle-there are no erasures: the words are simply crossed out with a single deep stroke of the
pencil-gives Ernest as immediate a sense of Gideon's presence, wherever he is, as he has of Ida's, who is standing within his reach. It seems to
him that if it were not for the crutches, if he were not propped there like
a tripod, he might fall. But he keeps staring down at the letter, the writing having disappeared into the bright whiteness of the page. He feels
Ida becoming impatient for his response.

"That's fine," he says.

`Ain't that fine?"

"Yes indeed. That's good."

Not a foot and a half from his hand he can see her, wearing the bonnet and the man's shirt she has put on, as she usually does, to work in the
field. That close, it seems to him that he can feel in the hair roots along
the back of his hand the swelling and rounding of her breasts, soft under
the faded blue cloth of that shirt that he knows to be Gideon's.

"You're surprised, I reckon, to be hearing."

"No. I knew he'd be back. I didn't know when."

"You don't know for sure yet. He didn't say."

"Well, it'll be pretty soon. Soon as he can get here."

She reaches and takes the letter out of his hand.

"I just wanted to show somebody."

"Why sure," he says. "I'm glad you're going to be happy now."

That is as far as he can go. He stands there on the high stalk of his
pain.

She folds the envelope twice and buttons it in one of the shirt pockets.

"Yes," she says. "Maybe I sort of will now."

He seems to get through the rest of the day by holding on to the
handle of the paint brush. He dangles from it, the place vanished around him as if sunk into the blinding whiteness of Gideon's letter. He holds to
the handle of the brush, spreading whiteness, as one would hold to the
last hand's-breadth of a swinging rope.

Mat has washed his hands and come out to sit on the back porch to wait
for supper. He quit work early, as he has for the past several days, and has
been sitting there already for more than half an hour. Margaret is waiting for Ernest to come now before setting the food on the table.

On the arms of the rocker Mat's hands have gone into a kind of sleep.
The sun, ready to set, casts a last flush of reddish light against the westward end of the barn. He has been watching that light rise toward the
peak of the gable. And the light does rise and crest and depart, reaching
out over the rising edge of the night. He can hear Andy and Henry playing in the front yard. And now he hears Margaret cross the kitchen and
stop in the door.

"Where do you suppose Ernest is? He's never this late."

"I don't know. I reckon he'll be along in a minute."

"Do you suppose that old truck could have broken down somewhere?"

"Could have done it." The more Mat thinks about that possibility, the
more likely it seems.

"Well, maybe I'd better drive down that way." He gets up regretfully,
fishing in his pocket for his switch key. As he steps off the porch, he hears
Margaret come out of the kitchen and sit down to wait in the chair he
left.

He starts down through town toward the little farm in the creek valley. But as he gains speed he catches sight of Ernest's truck parked in the
alley between the post office and Jasper Lathrop's store. He stops and
backs up and pulls his truck in behind Ernest's.

The presence of Ernest's truck cancels the only probable explanation
of his lateness. As Mat walks the few steps back out to the street, it occurs
to him that, so far as he can remember, this is the first time in twenty-five
years that he has not known within a reasonable guess where Ernest is
and what he is doing. Mat feels an uneasiness in that thought that he did not expect. But he puts it aside and goes out to the street. He will look in
the drugstore.

As usual this time of the evening, the drugstore is deserted. Dolph
Courtney is sitting at one of the tables in the thickening twilight of the
place-until a customer comes in he will not turn on a light-picking his
teeth and watching the street. Mat opens the screen door and looks in.

"You seen Ernest, Dolph?"

"Not since this morning. Why? You looking for him?"

Mat turns away at once and lets the door spring shut behind him. He
starts to cross over and ask at Burgess's. And then he sees Jayber Crow
and Burley Coulter coming up the street from the barbershop. Maybe
Ernest went to get a haircut, he thinks, and got held up there. The logic
of that makes him quickly happy, and just as quickly evaporates; Ernest
would not be in the barbershop with Jayber gone.

`Jayber," he asks, as the two men come up in front of the drugstore,
"have you seen Ernest?"

A little to Mat's surprise, both men's faces immediately show the concern that he has begun to feel himself.

"Not for two or three days," Jayber says.

Feeling their eyes on him as he goes, Mat walks up the street and back
through the alley to Ernest's shop. The door is shut, and he knocks.

"Ernest?"

There is no answer.

He works the latch and gives an experimental push to the door. It is
not locked. He shoves it open and steps inside.

The big westward window over the workbench has filled the shop
with a pinkish backwash of light from the sunset. And whether because
that makes the lower three or four feet of the room proportionately
darker, or because he is already warned by some glimpse, for a good
many seconds after he steps through the door Mat does not see Ernest.
But the room is filled with an intimation of what he will see. And a part
of his mind is saying to him as if in a whisper: "You should not have
come."

"Ernest?"

And he sees then.

Against the far wall, a little out from the end of the workbench, Ernest is sitting on the floor, his head bent forward. His arms hang down
wearily at his sides, the left hand and part of the forearm hidden in a
freshly cut hole in the floor. The crutches, one resting on top of the
other, lie beside him.

Mat crosses the room and, kneeling, picks up Ernest's right hand and
feels for the pulse. There is none. For maybe a full minute he kneels there,
the dead wrist in his hands seeming to infuse its quiet into him and into
the room. His mind, as if in a fit of avoidance having leaped clean over
the fact of Ernest's death, begins to grope at the problem of how to tell
Margaret. The simplicity of it seems its difficulty-that he will have to
go, without qualification or offer of hope, and tell Margaret: "Ernest is
dead. He killed himself."

His mind flinches again and turns back. "Why didn't I know?" He
leans and draws Ernest's left hand up out of the hole in the floor. The
wrist is cut deeply open, as Mat knew it would be. There are no more
surprises.

He looks around for the auger and keyhole saw that Ernest used to
cut the hole in the floor and sees them hanging in their places. And he
sees on the right leg of Ernest's pants the two dark narrow stains where
he wiped the blade of his knife before returning it to his pocket. On the
floor, a foot or so to the right of him, there is a neat pile of ashes and the
extinguished butt of a cigarette.

Mat gently lays Ernest's right hand back on the floor and bends his left
arm so that the bloodied hand will rest in his lap. He lifts him, gathered
in his arms as one would lift a child, touched beyond tears by the vulnerability and innocence of the abandoned body still pliant and warm, carries him to the workbench, and lays him down.