A Place on Earth (Port William) (5 page)

"That's that," Frank Lathrop says. He shuts the damper on the stove
and they leave the room. Old Jack leads the way down the row of counters to the street door. He walks rapidly, his pants bagging a little over
the tops of his leather leggings, the dangling earflaps waving above his
coat collar as though he flies as well as walks.

When they step out on the sidewalk Frank Lathrop pulls the door to and
locks it.

The sky is still clouded, but no longer darkly. The wind has shifted a
little to the north, driving the clouds into the southeast. The wind is
steady and deep; it seems to move the whole sky, holding the shapes of
the clouds intact. The wind is colder now and they brace their shoulders
against it, pulling their collars more snugly around their necks. Tomorrow, they hope, will be clear.

Under the clouds the air is already clear; the light is hard and precise
on the wet surfaces of the buildings and the street, and on the bare
upstroking branches of the trees. Northward, beyond the edge of town,
is the broad opening of the river valley, seeming abruptly nearer with the
rain gone. The farthest barns and houses appear nearly and solidly rectangular.

The road follows the river upstream and south from where it empties
into the Ohio at Hargrave. For most of its distance it stays down in the
floor of the valley, bending along the first steepenings of the hills, leaving the bottomlands intact between itself and the river. A couple of miles
downstream from Port William it begins its one digression: it crosses a
bridge at the mouth of a tributary valley, passes the sagging rusting coal
tipple and shut store at the old town landing, turns away from the river,
and climbs the bluff. It follows the backbones of ridges across the upland, goes through the town, and after another mile or so twists down the bluff into the valley again. From the sidewalk in front of the store
they can see three-quarters of a mile of it-marked, for most of that distance, by brushy fencerows on either side: an irregularity of the landscape, like a scar or seam where two halves of the country have been
divided or joined. In places they can see the asphalt surface of the roadbed; in places it goes out of sight between embankments or clumps of
young locusts. It dips into a hollow, and turns toward the town, becoming visible again as it passes the graveyard and the first straggling row of
houses on the outskirts.

They stand in front of the store, talking disjointedly on the verge of
going home, leaning against the face of the building now to keep out of
the wind. The departure of the rain seems to them to have altered the
terms of their own departure, and they stay on-a little precariously,
without definite reason, but deliberately nevertheless-to observe and
speak of the difference.

"It'll turn cold," Frank Lathrop says.

"It's March now," Old Jack says. "You can't tell what it'll do."

"Well," Jayber says, "after it's stayed one way long enough you'll settle
for nearly anything as long as it's different."

Burley nods out the road in the direction of the river. "Speaking of
anything, here comes Whacker."

Even at that distance he is immense, his great paunch flaring his coat
around him like a funnel. And at that distance it is already obvious he
is drunk. They knew he would be before they turned to look at him.
Drunkenness is no longer simply his habit; it has become, for them as
much as for Whacker Spradlin himself, his natural state.

They watch him pass in front of the most distant of the houses and
come slowly down the row of them toward town, his walk a little
unsteady but neither awkward nor faltering; he never strays out of his
direction. It is the gait of a man intricately skilled and practiced in being
drunk. There is a ponderous grace about it like that of a trained elephant
or a locomotive. He sways heavily back and forth across the line of his
direction, like a man carrying a barrel across a tightrope, his progress a
sequence of fine distinctions between standing up and falling down. His
drunkenness has become precise. He walks with pomp, his knees lifting as though he is climbing a stairway. By the time he comes even with Mat
Feltner's house they can see the smoke rising from his pipe.

He bears down on them, puffing his pipe, his overcoat held together
at the neck by a safety pin and at the waist by a piece of twine. He wears
a wide-brimmed straw hat, the crown full of raveling holes, which seems
to them as much a part of his character as his drunkenness. They have
never seen him without it. The hat sits on his head emphatically, bending
his ears down. Behind him, in a child's red wagon, he hauls a rusty cream
can, the establishment of the bootlegger's trade by which he subsists.

As Whacker goes past the front of the store, the five of them nod and
speak to him. And Whacker nods to them without looking at them or
altering his gait, moving implacably forward, the downhill momentum
of his great body seeming to dominate and threaten the pavement in
front of him. He goes on past the drugstore and the poolroom.

He goes on past Jayber Crow's barbershop at the bottom of the hill
and starts up the next rise, looking straight ahead, his movements the
same going uphill as going down, precarious and deliberate, as though
he will go on through the town and beyond it in the same direction forever.

They watch him out of sight, and then start, separately, home.

It used to be asked, by strangers who would happen through, why a
town named Port William should have been built so far from the river.
And the townsmen would answer that when Port William was built they
did not know where the river was going to run.

The truth is that Port William no longer remembers why it was built
where it is, or when, or how. In its conversation the town has kept the
memory of two or three generations haphazardly alive. Back of that
memory the town was there for a long time-there are a few buildings
still standing that are surely twice as old as anybody's certain knowledge
of them. But the early history has to be conjectured and assumed.

It is as though in their crossing to this new place, the first-comers lost
everything to the wilderness but their names. And for a considerable
length of time after they arrived, the wilderness continued to make demands of them. It asked, among other things, too much of their attention and energy to leave time or strength for record keeping. That the
town had been begun, and was there, was more important than explanations and motives and reasons and memories. That they half exhausted
the country, in surprisingly few years, testifies convincingly enough to
the intensity of their preoccupation. The black ground broke open to
their plows like a pile of ashes. There was never anything like it-that black humus, built up under the forest for thousands of years. There it
was, dark as shadows under the trees, abundant and deep, waiting to be
opened. Surely no dirt was ever more responsive or more alive. You could
believe, for once, that the earth might give back to a man more than it
took from him. It welcomed him everywhere he put down his hand or
his foot or his seed. It had advanced through millennia to break itself
open on the coulter of his plow; he could not have helped but feel that
jointure and breaking in every nerve.

In two or three generations the country was imponderably changed,
its memories, explanations, justifications fallen away from it. The firstarrivers left it diminished and detached from its sources. It was like an
island, the past washing up to it, in fact, as the force of its becoming, but
not as knowledge. Past and future bore against it under cover of darkness. Whoever wanted to make a beginning, then, had to begin with
something already half-finished. And scarcely known.

Across the street from jasper Lathrop's store the white steeple ascends
and narrows to a point above the green-shuttered belfry, higher than the
tallest trees in the town. As he looks up at it from the sidewalk in front of
the store, and at the clouds moving steadily southeastward in the deep
wind, it seems to Mat for a moment that the clouds are still and only the
earth moves, drawing the point of the steeple in a curving stroke through
the sky.

Up the street, divided from the church by a vacant lot that contains a
single broken-branched old locust and a stone chimney with the ruin of
a hearth and mantel, is Mat's house, its weather-boarded white walls visible through the branches of the maples in the yard. From the angle of
the boundary in which his house stands, Mat's farm extends in a wide
irregular triangle to the river. The west line of the boundary follows the
road out of town; at the top of the first ridge it makes shape for the
graveyard, and then follows the road again to the top of the farthest
ridge and down the wooded bluff; at the foot of the grade it turns away
from the road and crosses the bottomland to the river. The land has been
shaped by water. It has kept something of the nature of water in the alterations of its shape and character as it moves away from the high
ground Port William is built on, descending to the river.

At the top of the ridge above the river bluff is the cluster of farm
buildings that has been known to the Feltners since Mat's father's time as
"the far place." In the field below the barns white-faced Hereford cows
graze with their new calves around the banks of a little pond.

The house and the land beyond it have become intimately the possessions of Mat's mind. Before he looked he knew the lay and the shape and
color of the field, and knew where the cattle would be. Even their erratic
distribution over the field seems familiar to him as though, turning his
head, he did not begin but continued to look.

Looking back at the house now as the gathering breaks up in front of
the store, he sees his grandson running toward him out of the corner of
the yard.

Old Jack, who has already gone halfway to the post office, stops and
turns around. "You've got company at your house, Mat."

"I see I have."

"That's a fine boy there," Old Jack says. "He'll grow up to be a shotgun of a lawyer like his daddy, you watch and see if he don't. Tell Wheeler
I said so."

"I'll do it."

The boy waves. "Wait, Grandad."

Mat goes on across the street and waits on the sidewalk in front of the
church.

"Hello, Grandad."

"Hello, Andy." Mat puts his hands on the boy's shoulders and hugs
him. "When did you come?"

`After school. Daddy had to go down on Bird's Branch, and he
brought us by."

"Whds us?"

"Mother and Henry and me. We're going to eat supper with you."

"You are? Well, you haven't asked me if you can."

Andy laughs. "Can we eat supper with you?"

"I reckon so."

"Granny's already told us we can."

"Well, you're all right then, if both of us say so."

"She said tell you to go down to Burgess's and get a box of salt, and
stop and tell Uncle Ernest to come home. Supper's going to be ready as
soon as Daddy gets back."

'All right."

And they go down the street, past the old stone building that houses
the bank, toward Burgess's store.

Neither of them hears the plane approaching. It has come in low over
the town, and appears suddenly; the four engines and wings and grey
fuselage take shape abruptly among the tops of the trees. For an instant
it seems to have risen vertically, out of the top of the rise beyond the
store. The racket of the engines comes on them all at once, so near they
not only hear it but feel the vibration of it in the air and in the ground
under their feet. As it comes nearer they can see the blur of the propellers, the black gun-barrels spiking out of the glass blisters, the rivetheads along the fuselage and wings.

It passes above their heads, shaking the ground.

'A big one," Andy says.

The plane goes on beyond the town, becoming toylike, familiar, as it
gains distance and altitude, circling eastward over the river.

The overcast has thinned, become dappled. The light glares on the
town. Going into the dim interior of the store, Mat shuts the door slowly,
allowing his eyes time to adjust.

Milton Burgess, his striped sleeves rolled two neat turns above his
wrists, sits on a tall stool behind the counter, his elbow propped against
the cash register. He has been talking with the band of loafers congregated on the opposite side of the counter, two of whom have hefted
themselves up to sit in front of the cash register, their backs to Milton.
With the loafers Milton allows himself a choleric indulgence in whatever
news or argument is current-the one prolonged conversation that he
has grudgingly allowed to continue there for forty-five years.

The store is a sprawling frame building, the foundation of which
bridges the small creek that runs down out of the pasture behind Jasper
Lathrop's store and around Jayber Crow's barbershop and under the road,
so that after the creek goes out of sight in the culvert below the barber shop it does not come into the light again for two hundred feet or so.
Beneath them, in wet weather, in the lapses of speech, the talkers in the
store can hear it running.