A Place in Time (28 page)

I loved to hear my father tell those stories and others like them, and I can still see the visions they made me see when I was a boy. But now I love better to try to imagine the days, for which there are no stories, when Mike and my father hunted by themselves at home. On those days they passed beyond the margins of my father's working life and his many worries. Though they might have been hunting on a farm that my father owned, they passed beyond the confines even of farming. They entered into a kind of freedom and a kind of perfection. I am thinking now with wonder of the convergence, like two birds crossing as they rise, of a passionate man and a gifted, elated, hard-hunting dog, and this in a country deeply loved and known, from many of the heights of which the man could see on its hill in the distance the house where he was born. And it would be in the brisk, fine weather of the year's decline when every creature is glad to be alive.

My father would have been in his early forties then, young still in all his energy and ability, his body light with thought and implicit motion even when he stood at rest. He and Mike would pass through a whole afternoon or a whole day in the same excitement, the same eagerness for the hidden birds and for the country that lay ahead.

Thinking of him in those days, I can't help wishing that I had known him then as a contemporary and friend, rather than as his son. As his son, I was to see him clearly only in looking back. He was obscured to
me by his anxious parenthood, his fears for me, and by my own uneasy responses.

And yet I remember standing with him one day, when I was maybe eight or nine years old, on the top of a ridge in a weedy field. We were on the back of the farm we called the Crayton place. Beyond us, Mike was working with the beautiful motion that came of speed and grace together. My father held his gun in the crook of his left arm, at ease. He was in the mood that made him most comfortable to be with, enjoying himself completely, and with his entire intention allowing me to see what he saw.

Mike came to point, a forefoot lifted, his body tense from the end of his nose to the tip of his tail with a transfiguring alertness. Without looking at me, without looking away from the dog, my father allowed his right hand to reach down and find my shoulder and lie there.

“It comes over him like a sickness,” he said.

Like lovesickness, I think he meant, and even then I somehow understood. He was talking about a love, paramount if not transcendent, by which Mike was altogether moved, which he felt in his bones and could not resist.

And now of course I know that he was speaking from sympathy. He was talking also about himself, about his love, not only for the birds yet hidden and still somewhere beyond the end of Mike's nose, but for the country itself, his life in it, and the great beauty that sustained it then and always.

It was lovesickness, recognized in the dog because he knew it more fully in himself, that held him still, his hand on my shoulder, in that moment before we started forward to wake up the birds.

Mike, I think, was my father's one superlative dog, and his noontime just happened to coincide with my father's. It did not last long. After Mike, there were other dogs, but my father did not exult in them as he had in Mike. And he had less time for them. Griefs and responsibilities came upon him. His life as a hunter gradually subsided, and in his later years I don't think he much wished for it or often remembered it.

It may be that those summit years made the measure of the later ones, revealing them as anticlimactic and more than a little sad. The years with Mike may have established a zenith of performance and companionship that he could not hope, and even did not wish, to see equaled.

Mike lived long enough to become Old Mike to us all. And then the day arrived when we came down to breakfast and our mother told us, “I wouldn't go out there if I were you. Your daddy's burying his dog.” And we could see him with a spade down in the far end of the garden, digging the grave.

That was all I knew about the burial of Mike until one day, near the end of his own life, when my father told me a little more: “I had almost covered him up, when it occurred to me that I hadn't said anything. I needed to say something. And so I uncovered his head. I said, ‘Blessings on you, Mike. We'll hunt the birds of Paradise.'”

Grover Gibbs had a way, at odd times, of lying for pleasure. And he was good at it. He had a gift for it. Sometimes he would tell you something utterly preposterous, giving you all the time as straight and honest a look as if he was reciting the list of states and their capitals that he had learned in school, which he also would do from time to time. Sometimes he would tell you something utterly plausible and you would believe it, and he would walk out of the shop, serious-faced, leaving you to find out for yourself that it was a stretcher.

Later, when I accused him, he would say, “Wait a minute, Jayber. Wait a minute, Mr. Crow. Maybe I dreamt that. Or maybe you did.”

One day I was the only one in the place when he came in. I was sitting in the barber chair reading the paper. I lowered the paper to see who it was. Knowing Grover didn't need a haircut, I raised the paper up again.

“Have a seat, Grover,” I said. “Tell me a big one.”

He ignored that. I finished the paragraph I was reading, folded the paper, and laid it down. Grover sat down. We each had an item of news or two and a comment or two, and we chatted a while.

The talk went on as some others came in and I got busy. The customers went out, and it was just Grover and me again.

After a while more, Grover got up and settled his hat on his head. He looked very sober.

“Well, I reckon I better go out and see if there ain't something I can do for Danny and Lyda and them.”

I said, “
What
?”

“Oh. Burley Coulter died last night. I thought you knowed.”

“
What
!”

“Yep,” he said, meaning, “It's one of them things. It finally comes to us all.” He gave his head a solemn little shake and stepped on out the door.

And there I stood with a chill passing over me as if I was standing in a window and somebody was drawing down the shade.

I went to the front door and turned around my paper clock that always said “Back at 6:30,” and ran outside. I borrowed a car from the first friendly face I saw, which happened to be Mart Rowanberry's.

When I drove in out at the old Coulter place where Burley lived with Danny and Lyda Branch, who were his son and daughter-in-law, there Burley was, sitting on a bucket in the barn door, sharpening his knife.

I barely got the car stopped. I sort of fell back against the seat and for a while just looked at him, and he looked, wondering, back at me.

“Well,” he finally said, “are you traveling or just going somewheres?”

“I heard you were dead!”

“Aw,” he said. “Aw. Well,
I
heard that. Did
you
believe it?”

Well, you get older and you begin to lose people, kinfolks and friends. Or it
seems
to start when you're getting older. You wonder who was looking after such things when you were young. The people who died when I was young were about all old. Their deaths didn't interrupt me much, even when I missed them. Then it got to be people younger than me and people my own age that were leaving this world, and then it was different. I began to feel it changing me.

When people who mattered to me died I began to feel that something was required of me. Sometimes something would be required that I could do, and I did it. Sometimes when I didn't know what was required, I still felt the requirement. Whatever I did never felt like enough. Something I knew was large and great would have happened. I would be aware of the great world that is always nearby, ever at hand, even within you, as the good book says. It's something you would maybe just as soon not know about, but finally you learn about it because you have to.

That was the way it was when Big Ellis took sick in the fall of 1970. He was getting old and dwindling as everybody does, as I was myself. But then all of a sudden he wasn't dwindling anymore, but going down. First thing you know, he was staying mostly in bed. And then he had to have help to get out of bed.

Heart, the doctor said, and I suppose it was. But it wasn't just that, in my opinion. I think pretty well all of Big's working parts were giving out. He was seventy-six years old.

I'd walk over there through the fields every day, early or late, depending on the weather and the work. I was feeling that requirement, you see.

I would say, “Big, is there anything you need? Is there anything you want me to do?” hoping there would be something.

And he would say, “Burley, there ain't one thing I need in this world. But thank you.”

But he didn't mean yet that he was giving up on this world. I would sit by the bed, and he would bring up things we would do when he got well, and we would talk about them and make plans. And in fact he really didn't need anything. Annie May, who loved him better than some people thought he deserved, was still healthy then. As far as I could tell, she was taking perfect care of him.

We called Big “Big” of course because he was big. He was stout too. His strength sometimes would surprise you, even as big as he was. He sort of made a rule of not putting out more effort than the least he could get away with. He wouldn't pull his britches up until they were absolutely falling off. But if he thought he needed to, or ought to, he could pick up a two-bushel sack of wheat and toss it onto a load like it wasn't more than a basketball. Once I saw him pick up an anvil by its horn with one hand and carry it to where he needed it and set it down gently as you would set down an egg.

Big was a year or so older than me, and for a while that made a difference and I had to give him the lead. But as we got older we got closer to the same age, and we ran together as equal partners. We didn't settle down when we were supposed to, we were having too good a time. For a long time we stayed unattached, unworried, and unweary. We shined up to the ladies together, and fished and hunted together, and were about as free as varmints ourselves. We ran a many a Saturday night right on into Sunday morning. I expect we set records around here for some of our achievements, which I don't enjoy talking about now as much as I once did. But some of the stories about Big himself I will always love to tell.

One time we heard about a dance they were giving at the schoolhouse in a little place named Shagbark over on the far side of the river. We went to it in one of Big's old cars that never got anywhere except by luck. But we
did get there, after a stop in Hargrave to get a lady to sell us some liquor. It was good stuff, Canadian whiskey, the real article.

It was a good dance too, good musicianers. They had this fellow playing the piano. He had twelve fingers and he was making music with every one of them. I never saw such a thing before. I haven't since. And they had a better than average number of good-looking girls. We got to where we were just letting it happen, we didn't mind what. We didn't know a soul over there and nobody knew us. We didn't have a thing to worry about, and we were cutting up like a new pair of scissors. And then all at once it went kaflooey.

Big was wearing his suit. We'd had to buy our whiskey in half-pints, it was all the lady had, and he had stuck one of those into the inside pocket of his jacket. He got to dancing with this girl, a good-looking girl, a big girl, a fair match for him. She must have set a record for bracelets and things. She was wearing enough metal to draw lightning. She was jingling like a two-year-old mule in a chain harness. Big got to feeling fond of her, and he pulled her up close to him, to where she could feel that bottle. And that was what changed things. Maybe she wasn't too smart, maybe she was a little bit looney, as some girls are, but she thought that bottle was a handgun.