A Place on Earth (Port William) (50 page)

But he goes into the light too. The sun is getting high and hot. He has
already sweated through his shirt, and unconsciously has unbuttoned
and turned back the cuffs. Several times he has caught his hand ready to
loosen his collar and necktie, but so far he has resisted that. From the
graveled track of the lane high on the ridge, he can sometimes see the
river valley lying below him, and across the upland the town's gables and
rooftops among the trees. All the country is astir with the wind, and he
can feel it flowing steadily against him as he walks. Overhead big white
clouds fly rapidly from the southwest; their hundred-acre shadows slide
invincibly over the ups and downs of the land. Along the river the water
maples, leaves blown underside-up, are silver and brilliant.

It seems to him that time has now begun to shorten toward Nathan's
return. Though still from far off, he feels approaching him a good day,
the best of all. And then, in that deep wheel track on the ridge, he stops
and deliberately savors the air. It is the first morning of another time.

As soon as he has thanked the driver and the car door has slammed
behind him, Gideon resumes the stride in which he has crossed the intervals between rides. He turns into one of the pounded wheel tracks of
the creek road, and is soon out of sight of the blacktop.

When he left in the early spring, the valley was still leafless and open
to the eye as in winter. Now the road burrows through the foliage. And
though the morning shade is still deep, the air is already close and hot,
and he begins to sweat. The foliage along the roadsides bespeaks the
length of his absence. And he walks faster, filled with the anxiety of one
who is late.

He comes out into the open bottom. There is a field of corn now to
the left of the road. As he reaches the end of that he can see the house. A
thread of smoke rises straight up from the kitchen chimney. Though the
fields of the bottom are in full sun, the shadow of the hill still lies over
the house. Ida comes around the house from somewhere in the back, carrying a bucket. Seeing him, she stops and looks while he walks perhaps fifteen steps, before she sets the bucket down, and runs down the
slope of the yard and down the lane and along the path across the bottom. When he comes to the footbridge she is standing at the other end,
waiting for him, smiling at him as he crosses the springing planks.

"Gideon, I seen you coming. I looked, and there you were coming up
the road."

He comes to the end of the bridge and steps down.

Ida looks away, and back at him. She asks: "You been gone a long
way?"

"Yeah. I have, Ida."

"I imagine you're hungry, ain't you?"

"I ain't eat yet this morning."

"Well, come on to the house."

He puts his face down into his hands. She comes to him then, reaching out to him.

"Well. Don't, Gideon. Come on to the house."

For some time after he is quiet he continues to stand there the same
way, his face covered. Finally, at her urging, he allows her to take his hand
and lead him toward the house, although still he does not look at her.

"Did you come riding or walking?"

"First one then the other. Sometimes folks give me rides. Sometimes
I had to walk."

"Hard as you look, it's a wonder you ever got to ride at all. You look
worn out, Gideon. I bet you haven't taken any care of yourself at all."

"I can't tell you, Ida. It ain't to be talked about."

"Can you remember the last time you shaved?"

They cross the bottom and climb the slope to the house and go
around to the back and into the kitchen. Ida pulls a chair away from the
table and places it near the stove as though Gideon might be cold.

"Sit down in that," she says.

And he does, obediently, watching her as she begins stirring around
him. She makes the old room jolt and clatter as if all its uses have been
roused in it at once. She shakes the ashes out of the stove, and pokes the
fire, and puts in fresh wood. She scoots the teakettle over the fire, and
fills another kettle and puts it on, and fills the coffee pot and puts it on.
She goes out and brings in a fresh bucket of water. She sets him a place at the table. She fills a large wash pan with hot water and sets it steaming
on the floor at his feet.

"Wash," she says. She puts the soap down by the wash pan, brings him
a wash rag, hangs a clean towel on the back of his chair. "Get them filthy
clothes off. And them old shoes." She gathers up his shoes and his shirt
as he takes them off. As she stands there watching him, waiting, he hesitates. His hands seem to grow clumsy at the buckle of his belt, and then
stop altogether. He looks out the window, and down at his feet, and at
last, with great effort, at her.

"Ida," he says, "I ain't bothered any women while I been gone."

For the first time since they met at the bridge, she smiles at him.

"Well, ain't you something! I reckon you must be feeling pretty both-
erish by now"

"I reckon I am."

"That don't surprise me."

For many seconds they look at each other.

He takes off the rest of his clothes. She gathers them up with the rest
and flings them through the door onto the back porch. She brings back
clean clothes for him, and lays them on the edge of the table within his
reach. She brings shoes for him. And then she busies herself at the stove.

When he has washed and put on pants and shoes, she says to him:
"Shave. Get them whiskers off."

He does, and puts on the clean shirt, and combs his wet hair. He
comes to the table as she is taking his breakfast from the stove. She looks
at him.

"Well, well, it is you. Sit down. Eat."

As seems bound to happen now and again, in spite of Mat's watchfulness
against it, one of his young cows got with calf late. Uncertain of the
breeding time, he has been watching her for a week. This morning when
he went to count the cattle she was not in the bunch. He knew what that
meant, but other obligations were pressing him, and after walking the
length of the high backbone of the pasture he gave up the hunt until
later.

It is not until the afternoon that he can come back. He leaves his truck at the pasture gate, and this time, instead of walking the high ground
as he did in the morning, he turns along the fence and follows it down
toward the woods. It is a brilliant day, the air warm and still. In spite of
his worry about her, the job of searching for the cow is suited to his
mood and to the weather, and he is happy in having it to do.

The leaves on the branches, and falling, and on the ground, are so
golden that going in under the trees is to enter not the shade but a doubled sunlight. Though there is no wind, the leaves fall steadily, flashing in
the air, with a constant pattering against trunks and branches and the
ground.

Mat considers his course, and goes down to where the bluff steepens,
and turns again, following the contour of the slope. He might, he knows,
be wrong by ten feet or a hundred. If he is, he will have to come back at
a different level-and go again at yet another, if he is wrong again. He
feels too stiff in the knees to zigzag up and down the bluff, and so there
is nothing to do but choose a line and follow it. He takes his time, picking his way with care, keeping close watch on the woods above and
below.

And it happens that within half an hour he comes upon the cow grazing among the thicket growth over a little patch of ground that not too
many years ago was cleared and cropped. He quickly sees that she has
calved, and he approaches cautiously, not wanting to scare her off for
fear he will not then be able to find the calf. But he does not go many feet
before he is seen, and he stops. He can tell by the set of her head that she
is alarmed, preparing to run.

"Sook," he says quietly. "Sook, cow"

At that she does run, head and tail up, crashing into the undergrowth
at the edge of the clearing and out into the woods.

"You crazy bitch!"

She is out there in the woods, walking away from him now, bawling.
Mat goes on into the clearing and, again more quickly than he expected,
finds the calf curled up in some long grass in a patch of sumac. It lies
perfectly still, obeying like its mother an instinct still wild in it. For the
moment it is wild, and Mat is aware of that wildness, and aware of himself there, about to be the first man it will see, about to cross yet another
time the gap between his kind and its.

"Here you are," he says to it, to be saying something before he touches
it. "Your old lying mammy said you weren't, but I knew."

He has come up beside it and leaned over it. And now he slips his
hands under its belly and raises it to its feet. It stands up, pretty wobbly,
but all right-a bull calf, well marked, big enough. "Well," he says.

Leaving it spraddled on its weak legs, he goes back into the woods. As
soon as he is gone the cow, having circled around, comes anxiously back
into the clearing, and goes straight to the calf. Mat sits down with his
back against a tree, and watches, pleased with them and with himself.

After nuzzling the calf briefly as she came up to it, the cow has paid
him no more attention. She stands over it, head and ears up, watching
Mat. Her whole aspect has changed from when he saw her a day ago.
Instead of the complacency of a domestic animal, she now has the alertness of a deer. After standing shakily for some time on its spraddled legs,
the calf more or less collapses into the grass, but though her whole body
is tense with awareness of it she never looks at it. She has not moved
at all. And Mat himself has not moved. Into the tensely quieted space
between them the yellow leaves fall.

Finally Mat gets up and turns away. But instead of starting back the
way he came, now that he has done what he came to do, he goes on into
the woods. He has got ahead of his plans. There is nothing else that he
intended to do today. He is going on now for the pleasure of the going.
Since leaving the cow and the calf, he has continued to make an effort
to be quiet. He picks his way with care, walking slowly along the flatter
ground above the bluff. Now and then to his left there is an opening
among the treetops and he can see down out of the woods to the river
and the fields in the bottoms, and those openings keep him aware of
being on a height and on a verge.

The age of the woods varies with the lay of the ground. On some of
the gentler slopes the trees are young, and in these places there are neat
piles of rock, showing that once, where trees are now, there were crops,
and the rocks were picked up out of the furrows and carried to the edges
of the field and put down. Those steep fields did not last long. Mat believes or imagines he worked in these places as a boy. He knows he is
bound to have worked in some of them, but it is hard now to be exact
about which ones. The character they took from human use is gone from them. The trees have wholly claimed them. The piled rocks, covered with lichens and moss, have grown natural again.

He comes to where a stream has cut its way into the hill. The ground
tilts sharply as the bluffs turn in to the crease of the ravine, and here the
woods is old. In the face of the bluff on the far side of the ravine there
is a sort of amphitheater, its floor, relatively flat, affording a gathering
place for a stand of great beeches, whose silver trunks branch into the
gold masses of their leaves. Their brilliance, as Mat comes around the
hill's shoulder, stops him for a moment before he crosses over and goes
in under them.

He sits at the foot of one of the big trees at the edge of the grove,
leaning back against the trunk. He faces the way the stream falls, the
stream passing below him and to his left, the grove of beeches extending
back into its enclosure to his right. In front of him there is an opening
through which he can see a part of a bend in the river-within the bend
of the water the bend of the trees along the bank, within the bend of the
trees straight rows of corn shocks in a field. Around him the woods is
free of undergrowth, and the tree trunks rise cleanly up into the foliage.
There is a little water running in the stream, so that here, in addition to
the sound of the leaves falling, there is the steady trickling and splashing
that the water makes coming down over the rocks. Mat sits with his back
against the tree, his hat on the ground beside him, sorting out and examining one by one all the aspects and attractions of the place. It is one of
those places that, many times in his life, he has thought would be a good
place to rest, and now to be resting there makes him happy.

Below, across the stream, there is a place where the slope gentles. And
as he looks down there, Mat begins to see, scattered among the big trees,
the familiar cairns of rocks. They mean that that place too was once
cleared and broken and planted in crops. The trees on it are much older
than he is. The work that was done there was done long before his time,
and no doubt before his father's-the axe-work and the burning, and the
jumper plows breaking for the first time the black leaf-mold. And before
that the big trees standing without age or history, whose silence and
whose shaking in the wind Mat imagines now, shivering as he does.

And afterwards, now, the trees rise on the slope again. And the dead
who made that clearing are as forgotten as the forest they destroyed. As he sits looking at the heaped rocks, guessing the little he is able to guess
about them, there comes to Mat the sense of a lost and dead past, a past
perfect, without even the force of a memory. And though he resisted the
thought, fearing it would sadden him, it does not sadden him. There in
the presence of the woods, in the sounds of the water and the leaves
falling, he does not feel the loss of what is past.

He feels the great restfulness of that place, its casual perfect order. It
is the restfulness of a place where the merest or the most improbable
accident is made a necessity and a part of a design, where death can only
give into life. And Mat feels the difference between that restful order
and his own constant struggle to maintain and regulate his clearings.
Although the meanings of those clearings and his devotion to them
remain firm in his mind, he knows without sorrow that they will end,
the order he has made and kept in them will be overthrown, the effortless order of wilderness will return.