A Place on Earth (Port William) (7 page)

"I believe he's a good boy, though. I think I'll keep him."

Ernest looks away from the board and, with the same squint in his
eye, sights down at Andy.

"He looks like a pretty good boy."

Andy laughs. "Uncle Ernest, Granny said to tell you to come home
for supper before long. She's made a pie for dessert."

"Ho," Mat says. "That's who he is."

Ernest nods his head. "I knew him as soon as I heard him say pie."

When they go into the kitchen, supper is cooking. Margaret and Hannah and Bess Catlett are all sitting around the table, talking. Bess is holding her younger child, Henry, on her lap.

When he sees Mat coming to the door, Henry jumps down and runs
across the kitchen to meet him.

"See what's in my ear, Grandad."

He cocks his head sideways, putting his ear into the proper position.

Mat slips the bar of candy out of his pocket, concealing it in his hand,
and with a great show of effort fetches it out of the little boy's ear, and
hands it to him. Henry takes it and looks at it, his eyes big.

They all laugh. Mat walks over to the table. Bess takes his hand, and
he leans down to kiss her.

He stands there a minute to talk with them. None of them speak, as
they usually do at these times, of Virgil, and they are all conscious of the
avoidance. Over all they say there is a tension of awareness that the day
has become strange. Mat has understood from the moment he came in
that Bess knows of the letter-that, soon after she came, Margaret found
a time, out of the hearing of Hannah and the children, to tell her. He can
all but hear the sound of her voice, deliberately firm, discovering, by
instinctive goodness, the least painful words.

When Wheeler comes, he knows, they will have to tell him. And so it
has begun, and will go on. He buttons his coat around him again, and,
getting the milk buckets from the pantry, goes out.

At the barn Joe Banion is already at work, watering the mules. The
old Negro comes out of a stall, carrying a lead rein in his hand. The brim
of his hat is turned down so that it nearly touches the turned-up collar of
his mackinaw. The coat is too large for him, hanging nearly to his knees,
the sleeves half covering his hands. His pant legs are stuffed into a pair of
leather leggings, also a little large, which have been buckled and then
tied top and bottom with pieces of twine. He is small and a little
stooped, a little flinched against the chill. His face is that of a man who
has learned long ago to do what is necessary: to work, to take pleasure
as he finds it, to make do, to be quiet. His face does not show his age;
his hands do. As early as Mat remembers anything he remembers Joe
Banion.

Joe Banion shuts the stall door and slips the latch to. Turning then,
and seeing Mat, he nods his head and smiles. He is thinking of the letter.
He is thinking of Virgil, and is sorry.

For a moment, looking at Joe's face, touched by the kindness in it, Mat
would like to tell what he has on his mind, say what he is afraid of. But he
does not name his fear even to himself, and he says nothing.

"It sure ain't getting any warmer, Mr. Mat."

"It's not spring yet, Joe." Mat speaks without thinking, and hears,
almost with surprise, the casual tone of his voice.

"It'll be before long," Joe Banion is saying. "We'll be sweating before
long, I expect. Soon enough."

Mat hangs the milk buckets up inside the door, takes a larger bucket
to the crib, and fills it with ears of corn. He goes from stall to stall, down
one side of the long driveway and up the other, dropping into the feedboxes each mule's ration for the night.

He puts the bucket back when he has emptied it, and climbs the ladder into the loft. He moves above the rows of stalls, forking hay down
into the mangers. Below him he can hear the mules feeding, rattling the
corn in their troughs.

He goes out the back door of the barn, through the lot gate, and up
the long slope of the pasture to the sheep barn at the top of the ridge.
The sod gives under his feet like sponge. Behind him his tracks are filled
with water.

The flock of ewes, most of them with lambs now, grazes along slowly
in the direction of the barn, picking here and there at the short grass.
Seeing Mat on his way to feed them, they raise their heads, and come
along more quickly. In this sudden forward movement of the flock,
lambs get separated from their mothers, and the commotion increases.
Mat goes into the barn and pulls the doors to behind him. In the dim
light that comes in between the boards of the walls, the troughs and
mangers stand end to end in a long rank down the center of the driveway. He makes two trips from the feed bin with buckets of grain, spreading it evenly in the bottoms of the troughs, and forks hay into the
mangers. And then he covers the wet bedding with a layer of fresh straw.
He looks over his work, again with satisfaction: the feeding and the night
prepared, perfected.

He pushes the doors open and calls the sheep, standing back out of
the way as they come in and crowd to the troughs. He stays there a
while, looking over the field, making sure that none has been left out.
He feels growing in him now, in spite of all, a familiar and precious calm.
The flock is in the barn, well fed, safe from dogs and the cold, warmly
bedded. They will be there safe until morning. If not today, on most of
the winter days of his life this completeness has filled his mind.

The sun, almost down, breaks out of the overcast, throwing a warm
orange light over the town and the house and the ridge where Mat is
standing. Against the brightness of the clouds in the west, the town has
become a silhouette. The naked branches webbing over the tops of the
houses stand out clearly. The wall of the sheep barn is an intense glowing white. Everywhere the colors are stronger. The light picks out the
smallest beginnings of green in the pasture. The damp left by the rain
shines. Mat stands in the change of light as he has been standing all
along, but changed. He knows he will not think of it as winter again;
spring has become imaginable. He feels an elation, and then, in the same
thought, sorrow that the first change has come beyond what has happened to them. Now they move again toward what will happen.

A little less than a mile from town Burley Coulter turns off the blacktop
into the gravel lane that goes back through the fields to his house and Jarrat's. The lane runs somewhat windingly along the backbone of a ridge
which points toward the opening of the river valley. To the sides of the
ridge, though not so noticeably, lie the openings of the lesser valleys of
Sand Ripple and Katy's Branch. From so high Burley can see a lot of the
country, in which the only sounds audible to him now are his own footsteps. He walks along carefully between the two depressed and puddled
wheel tracks.

Toward its outer end the lane forks, as does the ridge, the left fork
going to Jarrat's house, the right to Burley's. Here the two farms are
divided by a hollow that becomes a deep ravine where the easy slopes of
the upland steepen to the wooded bluffs above the river valley.

Since the death of his wife more than twenty years ago, Jarrat has
lived alone, leaving his two sons to grow up in the other house, in the
care of their grandparents and Burley. The boys lived too far away to
know Jarrat as a father, near enough to know him as a taskmaster and
judge. Jarrat has remained a good deal apart from the family, cooking
and keeping house for himself.

Jarrat and Burley were born in the other house, the log house begun by their great-grandfather, completed by their grandfather, and weatherboarded by their father. Except for a reluctant trip to France in 1918,
Burley has never left, and now the deaths and departures of the other
members of the family have left him alone there. His father, Dave, died
in 1940. And both the boys went away-Tom before the old man's death,
Nathan later-because of quarrels with Jarrat. It is not injarrat's nature
to indulge a small disagreement, and so his quarrels with his sons were
the only real ones he had ever had with them, and the last ones. It is a
severe manhood that Jarrat has, that feeds on its loneliness, and will be
governed by no head but his own. Each of the boys was able to make
a reconciliation of sorts between himself and Jarrat, on the terms of a
quiet and mostly one-sided friendship, but the separation, once accomplished, was permanent, and neither of them came back home to live.
And now Tom is dead.

After old Dave's death and the departure of the two boys, Burley and
his mother lived on there together, oppressed sometimes by the emptiness of the big house, but managing, as Burley said, to peg along.

"We'll peg along, old girl," he would say to her.

She would sniff, and then laugh, at his impudence.

The old woman lived on in bewilderment, divided from the lives
that had been her care and duty. She went through times of deep loneliness; sometimes at night, after Burley had gone to bed, he would hear
her wandering among the empty rooms of the house, whispering to
herself.

During those last few of her years, Burley made the first honest
attempt of his life to please her. He tried-always fumblingly, often with
extravagant miscalculation-to be the kind of son he figured she had
wanted him to be. He left off, as nearly as he could bear it, what she
thought his most wayward habits, and when he was not at work or in
town on some errand he mostly stayed at home with her. They would sit
in the living room at night, and talk; or, more often, he would listen and
she would talk, her old voice wandering at random among her memories. The past had come near to her, and she would talk on and on, remembering idly and easily, but also obsessively and endlessly. She would
exhaust his ability to pay attention to her, and he would sit there, his
mind drifting, nodding his head. She repeated the same stories time and again, reminded of them by new memories, until finally he was able to
tell what story she was on just by the sound of it.

Occasionally in these ramblings of hers she would stumble, by accident, onto one of his misdemeanors. She would be taken by surprise;
the recollection would come to her as forcibly as if it had just then happened. She would lookup at him suddenly, crossly, over her glasses, and
point her finger at him.

`And you, Burley Coulter, were drunk."

She would shake her head, surprised and grieved that a son of hers
could ever have been drunk.

"Yes, Ma'am," Burley would say. "I expect." And he would get up quietly and go out of the house, leaving her to whisper and gesture her way
through her old anger.

Her early memories came back to her in swarms, but her ability to
keep the immediate past in mind grew weaker. She could remember
what happened fifty or twenty-five or ten years ago with lucidity and
clarity of detail that were surprising even to her. She would have sudden
recollections of things that she was no longer aware of having forgot.
But she would be unable to remember what came in the mail the day
before. She would hunt sometimes for half a day, having forgot where
she had put down her glasses or her thimble. Her lifelong habit of putting things away was transformed, by this failure of her memory, into
the interminable and wearisome process of hiding things from herself
and finding them again, always by accident and with great pleasure,
sometimes months later. A few things that she regarded as keepsakes or
valuables she put away carefully and never found again.

One Christmas she put away a box of candy-thinking that she would
ration it out carefully and it would last a month or two-and never came
upon it again until the week after Easter. By then the candy was hard as
gravel, and she had forgot how long it had been since she put it away.
Burley, to please her, ate nearly the whole box-in two nights, to get it
over with-talking the whole time about how tickled he was that she
had saved it. And she nibbled along at it herself, looking inquiringly over
her glasses, uncertain whether to believe him or not.

Finally she said, "I'll declare, Burley, these false teeth of mine seem to
have got out of whack."

When he had time he helped her in the kitchen, and helped her keep
house, sparing her as much of the work and worry as he could. In good
weather he would sometimes persuade her to let him do the washing,
and set up the tubs and wringer in the back yard to avoid cluttering the
kitchen, and do in an hour what would have been a half day's work for
her. When he finished, the clothes he had on would be as wet as the ones
he had washed.

"Burley Coulter," she would say, "you're worse than any kid." And
then she would laugh.

Seeing that his recklessness and awkwardness amused her, he plunged
and rubbed over the scrubbing board more furiously than ever, making
the water splash and spout higher than his head. Performing these elaborate exaggerations of his incompetence, he could make her laugh like a
girl.