A Place in Time Page 15

  By her persistence and her undiscourageable belief in the possibility of “human improvement” and the “goodness in every human heart,” she taught him a great deal that he was unwilling to learn. He still remembers all she taught him, and now, as she often prophesied, he is grateful. After their long struggle was over, she had the grace, to his surprise, to remain interested in him and to be nice to him, and he finally found the grace in himself, also to his surprise, to respect her and to look for ways to be kind to her. When it popped into his mind one day that she had the full approval of her husband, Tol Proudfoot, that was a revelation, and it helped.

  Sitting on the well top, he felt the presence out there in the dark of the dark and empty house, and he felt Miss Minnie’s forever absence from it so recently begun.

  The farm would be sold. That much Burley knew for sure. As soon as the various heirs, scattered about in their various other places, could agree on the conditions of the sale, it would be sold. And who would buy it? Would somebody buy it, and come to live in the little house, and give light to it in the evenings and the early mornings, and give the place such love and care as Tol and Miss Minnie gave it? He thought of the Merchant place, gone to the Devil by the indifference of Roger, the last of the Merchants, then bought as an “investment” by somebody who will never live on it, or maybe even see it for years at a time, and the house filled with Berlews who will use it up just by battering around in it. He thought of the good, still fixable and livable stone house under its big white oak on the Riley Harford place, empty now for years. He thought of the young men who hadn’t come back after the war, some like Jarrat’s boy Tom, bless his heart, like Virgil Feltner, bless his, the young gone with the old, gone forever, and others gone to city jobs and the bright lights. Burley looked through the dark and thought, and he shivered.

  He had to get up, he told himself, if he was ever going to, for there was no point in just sitting there, getting stiff. Burley is fifty-two years old. Soon enough he will be fifty-three. He still has full use of himself, can still do a proper day’s work, can still stay at it with younger men, daylight to dark, but he doesn’t get up or down anymore without thinking about it. He is, in his mind, still a young man, sometimes still a boy, repeatedly surprised to find himself with the knowledge and the aches of a man going on fifty-three. He turned up the lantern flame and stood, grunting aloud for the luxury of doing so where nobody could hear. He walked out the driveway past the house to the road, and crossed the road and the tumbling rock fence beyond. From time to time one or the other of the dogs had mouthed, their pronouncements conjectural and far apart, but allowing him to walk now with a sense of direction.

  He crossed the broad, open fields of Cotman Ridge, and before long he was in the woods again, on the near side of the Willow Run valley. And some time after that, after crossing a tributary hollow or two, he no longer had a very sure idea of where he was. He wasn’t lost, maybe, but then at night you could get lost in that country. At night, as far as that went, you could get lost right at home. Given a little mist, say, or a little mistake at the top of the hill as you were starting for the bottom, talking to somebody maybe or hurrying to the dogs, and you could get lost right in the middle of your own farm.

  He told himself the story of getting lost on the Rowanberry place one night, hunting with the Rowanberry brothers and Elton Penn. Art and Mart Rowanberry were in an argument about where they were. It was getting late, the hunt seemed to be over, and everybody was feeling a little bit concerned.

  And then Elton said, “I know where we are.”

  “Where?”

  “Where?”

  “Right here.”

  Burley laughed out loud, as he always does when he tells himself that story.

  Wherever he was, he was pleased and oddly comforted by the weight of the pelts in his coat. At home in his barn he had a number of thin poplar boards of various sizes, square at one end, tapered and rounded at the other, and on these he would stretch and clean the hides and hang them up to dry. Burley did a good job with the hides, and he would be proud of them when the time came to sell them.

  He got reminded then of the fellow who had an extra smart little hunting dog. Whenever this fellow wanted a pelt, he would show a stretching board of whatever size to the little dog. The little dog would look at the board, tear out for the woods, and pretty soon come back with a possum or coon whose hide would just fit that board. Everything went fine with this fellow, he was the envy of everybody, until the day he made the mistake of letting the little dog into the kitchen where he caught sight of the wife’s ironing board. The little dog took a careful look, tore out for the woods, and nobody ever saw hide nor hair of him again.

  Burley used to tell that story to Jarrat’s boys, and then to his own boy, his and Kate Helen’s boy, Danny, until they got too old to believe it. But Burley still thinks it’s a pretty good story, and now and again he tells it to himself.

  Well, he was in fact lost, he decided, and that was fine. It was a big country now. The more lost you are in it, the bigger the country is. The bigger the country, the more he rejoiced in the size of it.

  He was on a hillside of fairly sizeable trees that, like most hillsides of the country he knew, had once been cleared and cropped, maybe more than once. He was just loafing along, waiting to hear from the dogs, looking around at what he could see by lantern light. The night was still thawing, but it was far from warm, and the chill had begun to creep through his clothes. Here and there on the slope were piles of rocks that had been carried and heaped up when the ground was prepared for planting in some springtime a long time ago.

  That kind of work belonged to the past now. It had about ended with the Depression, with the beginning of the war, and it seemed unlikely ever to be done again. Burley hoped it would never be done again. He had done it himself in his time, and he knew how hard it was, how damaging, and how poorly paid.

  “Wasn’t a thing automatic into it,” he said to himself.

  But he sought out one of the rock piles, one of the taller ones that would give some shelter from the flow of cold air that was moving down the slope. He found one that suited. He set the lantern on top of the pile and searched about for dead wood. Soon he had gathered and broken into proper lengths a good supply of fallen branches, big and little, and a rootless chunk of a stump for a backlog. Against the backlog he built over heaped-up dry leaves a lean-to of little sticks and then bigger ones. He struck a match and presently had a brisk small fire going about its work of light and warmth. He leveled a good, broad, flat rock to sit on, gathered more fuel to where he could reach it without getting up, extinguished the lantern, and sat down.

  He made himself at home. He had built the fire for warmth, but now he saw that he had needed it also for company. It made a cheerfulness all around, lighting the near sides of the trees and bushes and the branches overhead and throwing their shadows in tangles out into the dark. Burley loved a fire as he loved a good-working mule and a johnboat—good, useful, wondrous things—and he let the living light and warmth come to him and fill his mind. He had sat many nights beside such fires, sometimes by himself, sometimes with other fellows, maybe a little whiskey passing around, and the talk sometimes so good you half hoped the hounds wouldn’t call you away.

  And there had been times when the company he had wasn’t fellows at all, and no dogs either to interrupt. It had been just him and Kate Helen and a little fire and maybe a little something to cook over it. That Kate Helen would come along with him at night that way, and be just as much there, wherever they were, as he was, that was another one of his revelations. Maybe he hadn’t taken any women seriously before. Maybe he hadn’t intended to take her seriously, but it turned out that he did. Kate Helen reached into him. She found his heart and wrung it so that he would never again cease to feel her hold on it.

  He knew a certain big old hollow sycamore. The tree is still standing in fact, on the lower end of the old Cuthbert place: a grand, great old tree, h
ard to tell how old, with a hollow in it big as a room, big enough for a man and a woman to lie down in, with an opening, as if intended for a doorway, toward the creek, a little fire outside the opening, a fine spring night with half a moon, the sound of the creek running, and a man and a woman together that way, happy that way, happy to sleep close and wake up still together, still happy, the fire gone out and the moon low, quiet, quiet, and a man such as he was, old enough to know better, maybe, and yet still plenty young, head entirely emptied out and filled entirely up again with happiness and closeness and generosity and welcome, Kate Helen there with him at the end of the one true known way of his life.

  He thought, “Oh my! Old Marster come up with something good as that, maybe what they say about Him is right. Not all of it, maybe. A lot of it. Whoo! Who knows? But something so good.” He said aloud, “Mnh!” And then, “Mnh-mnh-mnh!”

  Their boy, Danny Branch, you might say came out of that old hollow tree. Danny is sixteen now. To the amusement of Burley, and some others, Danny still calls him “Uncle Burley,” as Nathan still does. Danny is a good boy, has a girl, Lyda, and is in what he is determined will be his last year of school. He is already raising his own crop, and he has at Burley’s place his own team of mules. He wants to get out in the world on his own and farm. Burley and Kate Helen, in their various ways, living apart in their unofficial marriage, have brought the boy up, teaching him and requiring of him as they have known to do. And he—too much like Burley, as Burley fears—has cared far more for what they have taught him than what he has learned in school. He wants to live free. He seems to know, better than Burley or anybody else, and maybe without exactly having been taught, what to do about this modern world they’re in, with its machines coming everywhere and the people going. He pays it little mind, and no respect.

  “What do you reckon? Could the place where a boy was got have something to do with the way he is? A boy that comes out of a hollow tree is maybe going to be different from one that comes out of a house in town or the back seat of an automobile, or even out of a proper bed in a farmhouse.”

  It has seemed to Burley that a man with a sixteen-year-old boy ought to be worried, but he has never been able to settle on a way of worrying about Danny. Maybe he ought to worry about him quitting school as soon as the law allows, but Danny already has more school than Burley and is better at books too than Burley ever was. And the boy has a way of stepping up to the mark before anybody can expect him to. It even looks like maybe he has settled on this girl Lyda, a good-looking girl too, with blue eyes that look straight at you until you blink.

  The boys Burley had really worried about had been Tom and Nathan when they were in the war. He had worried about Tom until Tom was killed, which is a bad way to stop worrying about somebody. He had worried about Nathan until the war ended and Nathan got home, and then he kept worrying about him. Nathan came home and went to work, went right back into it with Jarrat and Burley as if there had been no interruption. But when he wasn’t at work, it appeared like he couldn’t come to rest, couldn’t find a place to stop. And he was god-awful quiet about whatever had happened to him. He was like his daddy and had never had a big amount to say, but you couldn’t get a peep out of him about the war.

  “I reckon it got pretty bad over yonder.”

  “Yep.”

  But maybe things have started to get better for Nathan. Burley is afraid to say even to himself what he thinks Nathan now has on his mind, but now maybe he has started circling a place he wants to light.

  Burley said aloud, “Well, bless him!”

  And then he said, “Bless ’em all!”

  For a tremor of love for the three boys, the dead and the living, had passed through him and shaken him.

  Propped as he was on the pile of cold rocks, he could hardly have been surrounded by warmth. But it was a good fire, and its warmth had penetrated deeply into him. Having become still and warm after his long walk, late in the night as it was, he drowsed in his thoughts.

  He slept, and he dreamed he was where he was, wherever that was. It was such a dream as he had never dreamed within walls, under a roof. He dreamed that the trees stood around him in the firelight, reaching above the light into the darkness, in their own long winter dream. He dreamed that the fire was the light of all the knowledge he was dreaming. In his dream the fire dwindled and cooled, and the darkness drew in. And then Jet called into his dream to awaken him, her voice urgent and a long way off. She cried again, and Frog sang a long bass note in agreement. “Yes!” Frog sang. “She’s right!”

  For some time Burley did not know whether he slept or woke. And then he was for sure awake, knowing where he was, wherever that was, sitting up on his flat rock, yawning, smacking his mouth, looking around in the dwindled firelight for his lantern. Using a little twig, he transferred fire to the lantern and adjusted the wick, and then he set off on his long walk to reach the dogs.

  It was an old boar coon this time. He knew his business, and he made a long race of it. Twice he “marked” a tree, going up the trunk, out to the end of a long branch, dropping off, running again, and thus he delayed the hounds until Frog, who had his own cunning, made a wide circle and picked up the scent again.

  Now as they walk the backbone of that slowly widening, long ridge, wherever it is, in the tiny geography of the lantern light, both man and dogs are weary. After the final tree, the dogs maybe would have run on, but Burley has kept them close, and they have by now accepted his sense that the hunting is over.

  From the lay of the land, as they have felt it, walking over it, from the wear of the road as paths have gathered to it, Burley guesses that eventually they will come to a barn.

  Eventually they do. Burley has half-expected to hear house dogs barking. If he had, he would have turned aside. As a courtesy to sleepers and to his pleasure, he avoids houses when he can. But now the silence remains complete. They go through a gate into what will turn out to be a barn lot, and then they have the hulk of a barn ahead of them, a greater darkness more felt than seen. Burley again takes out the flashlight and carefully shines it around, moving so as to see clearly past the barn.

  There is no house in sight. The barn stands by itself on the ridge that extends on farther than the light can reach. Burley hasn’t formed his thoughts into words for a long time, not since he woke by the remains of the fire, and he does not do so now. But now that he is sure of his isolation, need comes upon him. He needs to drink, eat, and sleep.

  Within the barn lot, close beside the barn, there is a second lot, only a few feet square, planked off to enclose a cistern with a chain pump. Beyond the fence there is a half-barrel used for a drinking trough, now emptied and turned on its side. Burley goes through the little gate in the plank fence. He looks around for a can or something to drink from, but finds none. He cups his left hand under the spout of the pump, and cranking with his right hand, bends and drinks. Drinking big swallows of the clean-tasting, teeth-aching water, he floods his innards, he gratifies himself. He drinks until he can hold no more, and then straightens and wipes his mouth on his sleeve.

  The two hounds have sat politely and watched him drink. Now they continue to watch him, as with forbearance, not moving.

  “You all thirsty?” he says. “Well, I reckon so.”

  He is wearing what was once a good felt hat, now misshapen by use, but still a pretty good one. He takes it off, punches in the crown, pumps water into the concavity, and offers it. The dogs drink, Frog first, then Jet. Burley flings away the surplus water, restores his hat by punching out the crown, and puts it on again.

  He then sits down on the concrete top of the cistern, leans back against the pump, and feels into the pocket where he put the biscuits. They’re still there in their paper sack, to his relief, for he hasn’t thought of them since he left home. He imagines that the dogs have lunched on fresh meat in the lags after treeing, but he doesn’t think it right to eat in front of them without offering them something. Having seen no sign that dogs ca
n count, he gives them a biscuit apiece and keeps the other four for himself.

  He eats the biscuits slowly, with relish, for they taste good and, as his friend Art Rowanberry often says, there is a world of strength in a biscuit. He is not thinking in words, but only knowing as he knows. The sky is still overcast. It is dark as dark can be. He has no way of knowing the time, except for the instinct that tells him it is now well on the morning side of midnight. He is not going to make it home for his morning chores.

  There was a time maybe that would have been a worry, if at that time he had been much inclined to worry. That was when Burley and Jarrat had not quite seen eye to eye, when Jarrat, knowing that Burley hadn’t made it in, would say, “If it suits him to let it go to the Devil, let it go to the Devil.” But that time is gone. Jarrat, in his mostly silence, still carries his old griefs, his loneliness, his rage for work. But they get along now. They grieve some of the same griefs now. And now Burley is dependable mostly and, when not dependable, predictable. In the morning, guessing that Burley probably will have disappeared, Jarrat will walk across the hollow and do his chores for him, and won’t feel righteous enough even to mention it.

  When he has eaten all the biscuits and again pumped himself a drink, he goes into the barn, taking great care with the lantern. It is a feed barn, an old one well kept up, with a hayloft, a small corn crib, four horse stalls, and a large pen for feeding cattle. The cattle have been sold, or moved nearer home where maybe, so far into the winter, there is more hay. Everywhere are the signs and traces of a good farmer, somebody who knows what he is doing and likes doing it.