A Place on Earth (Port William) (49 page)

"He'll never get a better funeral," Big Ellis says, "if he lives to be a
hundred."

And then, with all the force of a crucial realization that comes too
late, it dawns on Burley that the possibilities have been out of control
from the beginning. Suppose Whacker hadn't been able to get out by himself. They certainly had no idea how to get him out. Suppose he had
got sick down there, or died. Suppose they had forgot him and left him
there-as it surely did look like they were going to-and they had come
bringing Ernest.

He plunges to his feet.

"Let's go! Let's get out of here!"

They get up and follow him among the stones to where the car sits,
doors and trunk still open, and in the daylight still appearing to labor
myopically at the granite inscription. They set the wheels and, heaving
mightily at the cost of much pain to their heads, push it back over the
embankment into the road.

"Well," Big Ellis says, "looks like there's no place to go now but home."

"Get in the middle, Burley," Jayber says. "You'll be getting out last."

But Burley feels a sudden reluctance to go with them. He wants to
part from them now. Wants the night's doings to be finished now, and
done with. Here is a day started, it seems to him, that is going to ask a lot
of him, and he wants to get himself set for it.

"You all go on," he says. "I'm going to walk. I think it'll do me good."

Jayber gets in, but as the car starts to roll he says: "Wait! Listen!" The
car stops and he opens the door and leans out. "Listen," he says. "I don't
think anybody actually saw who it was making all the racket last night.
So if we make it out of here without getting caught, it was all done by
Unknown Citizens. You see?"

They see.

"Big Ellis," Burley says, "when you come around to where the drive
forks, if you'd back out to the road from there it might look like you'd
just pulled in to turn around."

Big Ellis nods. The car rolls forward, picking up speed, lurches as Big
Ellis throws it into gear, and, as the engine starts, grumbles off toward
the gate.

Burley stands there, watching them go. He should be going himself,
but he does not move. As soon as he has seen them back out and turn
and go out of sight toward town, the weight of his guilt comes down on
him, too heavy to bear away. At the time when Mat may have needed
him, and when he should have been sorrowful himself for the death of
Ernest, and when he should have been attentive in some decent way to Tom's memory and the hope of Nathan's return-at that time of all
times, that one and only and now past and unchangeable time, where
was he?

Drunk. Bawling and singing and laughing at the funeral of a live
drunkard. In the graveyard, insulting the peace of the dead.

And he lay down and slept among them. Among the dead in their
graves he lay down and slept. And what awful quiet came on him then?

He stands there, his suit and shirt wrinkled and dusty, his good hat
battered into early old age, the knot of his tie slipped down to the third
button of his shirt and jerked tight, his head full of pain and regret and
difficult thoughts. He looks at his long shadow pointing down the gravel
track ahead of him, and he knows for certain that he will die. He foreknows the stillness that, whichever way he walks, he is coming to. A
tremor shakes him from head to foot.

Even as he starts toward the gate he is strongly tempted to go the
other way, to go home across the fences and through the fields. But he
rejects that. The day summons him into the clear and that is where he is
going to go.

"No," he says to himself, "I may have to brazen, but I ain't going to
sneak."

He sees his shadow move its long leg, sees its foot separate from his
foot, light flowing between. There will be a time when he will come
here and not leave, but this is not the time.

Home again, Burley hangs his desecrated coat and hat on the yard fence
and goes straight to the barn. He attends to the few chores that need
doing there, and then, having put it off as long as he can, he goes outside
to the pump. He cups his hand under the spout and pumps and drinks.
And having filled himself, his thirst far exceeding his capacity, he douses
his face and pumps water over his head. He keeps pumping, breathing in
great spluttering gasps. Pumping on his head, the water flowing through
his hair, around his ears, down the sides of his face, streaming off his eyebrows and nose and lips and chin, splattering and darkening the dry
boards of the well top-that seems to him the finest quenching of his
life. Bent, dizzy under the spout, hanging on to the pump with one hand
to keep from falling, pumping with the other, he glimpses his brother
approaching around the corner of the barn.

He does not want to talk to Jarrat this morning and so he keeps
pumping, hoping that Jarrat is just on his way someplace and will go on.
But Jarrat does not. He stops and leans against the barn wall and watches.

"That looks like a hell of a hard way to drown."

Burley straightens up, shuddering as the cold water runs down the
collar of his shirt. Blinded by vertigo, he quickly sits down on the edge of
the stock trough and props himself with both hands.

"Huh?" he says. Though it does not matter, he feels caught, feels guilty
and most uncertain of himself and of Jarrat. For the thousandth time,
surely, he is the wayward younger brother, confronted by the righteousness of the older. Or is that how it is going to be this time? He risks a
quick glance at Jarrat's face, and discovers to his surprise and relief that
Jarrat is grinning at him.

"I said there ought to be some easier way to drown."

"There ought," Burley says, and he laughs. He looks directly at Jarrat
now. "Did you know the war's over?"

"I heard the commotion start up out there at town and figured that
was what it was. And I came over here then and heard the news on your
radio. I didn't reckon you would mind."

"I didn't."

"I listened a right smart while, sort of waiting for you to come back."

Burley feels a pang of disappointment-of loss. That was the first time
in years, maybe since the death of their mother, that Jarrat had come to
the house just to visit-and him not there. There could have been nothing finer, nothing be would have liked any more, he realizes with grief,
than to sit in the old living room with Jarrat late into the night, listening
to that good news come in on the radio.

"Well, I stayed pretty late at Mat's and then me and Jayber and Big Ellis
spent the night with some folks there in town. Just to keep from having
to come home so late."

He can see-with relief, actually-that Jarrat does not believe a word
of it. But he appears to be amused. He watches Burley with a skeptical,
critical gaze that Burley knows will not neglect or misinterpret anything.
But there is amusement in it too. Some change has come over him. Is it,
Burley wonders, the war ending? Or what is it?

"It was hard to sleep, I reckon, in all that racket."

"Well," Burley says, "the folks we spent the night with, they was
quiet."

He wishes Jarrat would go on home now. Or go somewhere.

"What time is Ernest's funeral?" Jarrat asks.

"Two-thirty, I think. Are you going?"

"I thought I'd go a little beforehand, and speak to Mat and them."

"Mat'll appreciate that."

"Well, I'll be seeing you," Jarrat says. He shoves himself away from
the wall with a little thrust of his shoulder and starts home.

"Be seeing you," Burley says. And then he says, "Come again! We'll
listen to the radio!"

As soon as Jarrat is out of sight Burley eases himself to his feet and,
after a careful start, walks to the house.

He builds a fire in the kitchen, puts on the coffee pot and a kettle of
water, and sits down at the table to wait. His encounter with Jarrat has
left him with a trying consciousness of his misery. To save trouble he just
admits that he is totally corrupt and unsalvageable, and yields to the misery of that too. "Oh, me!" he says.

The smell of the coffee rouses him. He sits watching the spout steam
until it has boiled long enough, and pours himself a cup.

It seems to him that from the minute he sits back down at the table
and leans over the fragrant steam of that cup, he begins-surely, this
time -to mend. He drinks it hot, sitting by the raised window, watching
the wind in the grass down the hillside. The grass is green in the sun, and
the wind combs it, laying it down, rippling it like water flowing over it.

"Eat! Put something in your stomach!"

Those are his mother's words, and they return to him in her voice, the
weary, determined inflections of her old Sunday-morning efforts to
sober him up and set him straight, revealing the strain between her persistent faith that this would be the last time and her suspicion that it
would not. They come back familiarly and painfully, his inheritance from
her.

To silence them he gets up and obeys. He poaches two eggs, and
toasts some light bread, and pours another cup of coffee. That puts some
strength into him. That he will make it through until bedtime begins to
seem likely. He begins to welcome the duty of going to Mat's and being
there to do what he can. What there will be for him to do he does not
know. Maybe nothing. For a few minutes he wishes, like a boy, that there
might be some task of great difficulty that Mat will ask him to dosomething to redeem all the failures, past and to come, of his best intentions.

He washes his dishes and makes things neat. And then, stripping off
his clothes, he bathes and shaves and combs his hair. Everything he does now makes him feel better. This is the starting place. From here a lot can
be imagined and hoped for.

Standing naked in the breeze from the window, combed and shaved
and thoroughly scrubbed, feeling better already than he expected to feel
before tomorrow, he applies himself to the question of what to do about
his suit. He picks up first the pants and then the coat, turns them this
way and then that, and hangs them back on the chair post. He shakes his
head. "Looks like they been slept in on the ground, boy."

His hat turns out to be more or less salvageable. He whacks the dust
out of it, and scrubs it lightly with a damp rag, and molds it into shape,
and puts it on. His shoes, after being rubbed a little with a rag, look very
well too.

Carrying a shoe in each hand he goes through the house and up the
stairs to his bedroom. Opening a bureau drawer, he finds a pair of socks
quickly enough, and puts them on. Digging into another drawer, he
finds at the very bottom an extra white shirt, put away hard to tell how
long before his mother died. It has begun to turn a little yellow, but he
shakes it out and holds it up. It will do, and he puts it on. He gets out his
newest work pants and puts them on. He will have to go without a coat,
but surely, he thinks, the weather is hot enough to justify that. He puts
on his shoes. Rummaging in the closet, he finds his other necktie and
stretches it out on the bed and studies it critically. It is a broad, bright red
silky one with a large yellow flower on it. Too pretty for a funeral, he
thinks, but he has no choice. Standing close and then far back, he examines himself in the mirror, and is reasonably satisfied. He is not what you
would call finely dressed, but he has contrived an appearance of discomfort that ought at least to vouch for his proper sense of the occasion.

Ready at last, he leaves the house with the sense of having perfected a
narrow escape. He is still pretty shaky, and his head still hurts; he can
surely remember mornings when he left home in better health. But he
has begun to have a decent feeling in his mind.

At the same time he keeps mindful of where he is going: to Mat's
house, to Ernest's grave, sorrow and darkness. He is going, faithfully and
uselessly, to be a comforter where there can be no comfort, and a friend
where friendship is powerless-a duty a man cannot do gladly for
another except for the love of him. And he goes bearing the thought of the death of Tom, which now begins its long outlasting of its cause. The
words of Jayber's elegy still stand in his mind, seeming to open and contain the depth of his grief.