A Place in Time Read online

  Hackett caught the ball as it dropped through the hoop, and he held it. “Wait a minute. Whose side are you on, Elton?”

  “Why, hell, he’s on my side,” Pascal said. “Can’t you see he is?”

  But Elton was the thirteenth man, a problem that much arguing and rearranging failed to solve, until Cocky Jones said he had had enough basketball for one day and gave his place to Elton.

  And so Elton was in the game. Like some of the others, he had played basketball, or at least had played with a basketball in the course of his eight grades of education. The teacher in the Goforth school of one room, needing to keep the bigger boys as tired as possible, had bought with her own small store of money a proper basketball. For a goal, the boys fastened a succession of barrel hoops to a tree. For their play they knew some rules and made up the rest. Such as their game was, Elton became good at it. He was naturally athletic, and on that Sunday morning in Hackett Dunham’s barn loft he played pretty well, though he did not make another goal.

  Some while after the game resumed, Pascal Sowers dashed furiously after the ball, tried suddenly to stop, skidded, and then disappeared through a long hole in the floor. The hole was used for feeding hay down into the manger below. The week of feeding since the last game had left the hole wide open. It was so far from the area where they mostly played that nobody until then had given it a thought.

  After Pascal fell through the hole, everybody thought of it. They all, players and watchers alike, gathered around it, staring down through it at Pascal who lay in the manger, staring back up at them. By another piece of pure luck, the morning’s second fine accident, there had been enough hay left in the manger to break his fall. The bunch of heifers penned down there had not yet finished their breakfast. Onto the piled hay Pascal had lighted more or less feet first and flopped backwards. In the first seconds afterward, those in the loft could hear the trampling and colliding of the panic-stricken heifers.

  When enough staring back and forth had convinced him that Pascal was conscious and in no pain, Hackett called down to him, “Well, I reckon you’re thanking me for being a generous feeder.”

  At that, Pascal returned fully to life as himself. “Thanking you, hell! If your damned old hay was fit to eat, Sudie would be burying me. And I hope she’d be suing you for the two dollars you don’t already owe somebody.” They all laughed. Pascal climbed out of the manger and returned to the loft. The others discovered various ways to congratulate him on his survival. Hackett, Pascal’s neighbor, and his friend too though neither would have admitted it, said, “I thought, ‘Pore old Pascal. If he’s dead, it sholy will stop him from lying.’”

  It was one of the best moments of the sporting life of the Port William neighborhood. Fifty years later you could still find people who hadn’t been there who could tell you all about it.

  The interruption of the game continued while they stacked up a barrier of hay bales alongside the hole. But by then it was too late to continue playing. Pretty soon the wives and mothers of some of them would be getting home from church. The boys started idly shooting goals. The men stood around retelling the story of Pascal’s fall and laughing. If any of them knew which side had won the game or what the score was, the subject was never raised. Maybe the boys knew.

  After that, when they played basketball on Sunday mornings Elton was with them. The game went on for a few more Sundays, and then there came a bright warm Sunday morning early in April when basketball was no longer a thinkable thought. They came to Hackett’s place as before, but they stayed in the sun. They merely accumulated in front of the barn, sitting on the fenders of their vehicles or on upturned buckets or standing propped against the wall, pleased with the bright day and the warmth, joking back and forth, talking without urgency about the weather, the condition of the ground, the work to come.

  Elton Penn was the last to turn into the lane that morning. When he came to the open stretch between the house and the barn, the bunch of ex-ballplayers and ex-fans saw him slow down and then stop altogether. He was looking, they supposed and they turned out to be right, at several draft horses, twelve or fifteen of them, standing in a small grove of beech trees in the pasture adjoining the barn lot. He took his time looking, and then he came on into the lot, stopped the truck, and got out.

  “Hackett,” he said, “I’ll pick a team out of that bunch and beat you pulling.”

  Hackett didn’t say a word. He pushed himself off the fender he had been sitting on, went into the barn, into the tackroom, and came out again, carrying two halters and two lead ropes, which he handed to Elton, who took them and started out into the pasture where the horses were.

  In a show of indifference typical of him—typical, the others would have said, of the trader in him—Hackett resumed his seat on the fender. The others remained much as they had been, only now they were not talking. The morning, having excluded basketball, had wanted a purpose, and now it had one. Or maybe it now had just a center of attention, and the center of attention was a mystery.

  Had Elton intended for events to go as far as they already had? His challenge had been brash, but that did not surprise them any more than Hackett’s calm response. Elton was brash and Hackett was calm, according to knowledge well-established. But what was next, how far would it go, and how would it end?

  Elton had had an unusually hard time leaving home that morning. It was a day he could have worked, had it not been Sunday. The weather was fine, the ground drying, the new season at hand. His teeth were worse on edge than before.

  But had he been running his mouth just for want of something to say, or had he meant what he said? The others knew at least that he had never driven a team in a pulling contest in his life, and they knew that Hackett was long-experienced and a proven master. And yet every one of them knew that Elton had to be taken seriously. He was a good horseman, a good teamster, and had been since he was hardly more than a boy. Horsemanship was second nature to him. Partly, it may have been his first nature. Albert Penn, Elton’s father, dead now for twenty years, had been in his day an uncanny teamster, who could control his horses, it was said, by his voice alone. It was said, and always in the same words, with the same awe, “He could hook a team to a sawlog and make one stand and one pull, and never touch a line.” And so maybe Elton had what his daddy had: a gift, a sleight, that most others did not have.

  As Elton knew it in himself, it was indeed a gift, one that might well have come to him from his father. It was a feel beyond word or thought for the beings of the creaturely world that he hunted or nurtured or used. By then experience had told him that sometimes he knew things he did not know he knew, until he dared them, so to speak, to reveal themselves. How he knew those things, he knew he would never know.

  Elton was starting out into the pasture, carrying the halters and the lead ropes, and Hackett paid him no attention at all, never looked in his direction. Perhaps in deference to Hackett, perhaps from politeness, as they had come as guests, for a time nobody else moved either except for Mr. Wright, who without respect to manners had hobbled three-leggedly after Elton as far as the gate. Nobody said anything. But their own curiosity was working on them now. It came on them like an itch needing more and more urgently to be scratched. And presently, one by one, they stood up or pushed free of the wall where they had been leaning and walked over to the lot fence where they could watch Elton, Hackett coming along with them, for of course he too was curious.

  They lined up along the fence, most of them having discarded their jackets, but still wearing the corduroy caps or the old felt hats that they had worn through the winter. They were of a kind now extinct in this part of the country, and no doubt also in the rest of it. They had lived by hard and exacting work all their lives from childhood. They had known the work of horses and mules all their lives. But by then, except for Mr. Wright of course and Burley Coulter and maybe another holdout or two, every man there had bought a tractor. Elton himself had bought his first tractor three years before.

&n
bsp; Of the gathering at Hackett Dunham’s that day, all the men are dead now, and the boys, the ones still living, are old. I am more or less the same age as the boys. I knew all the people in this story, the boys and the men. Some of them I knew as well as I have known anybody, as well as I knew the place and the community we all belonged to.

  I have known the history of the basketball game from about the time it happened. I heard versions of it, then and later, from Elton and Mart Rowanberry and Pascal Sowers. But the part of the story I am telling now, the story as it continued from the game to the contest of the two horsemen, I did not hear until nearly sixty years after it happened. That I didn’t hear it from Elton himself is strange. We were friends for the last thirty years of his life, and we worked together many days. Perhaps he simply let it go out of his mind along with the time it belonged to. For this is a story, really, of two stories. It is about several people, including me, who lived through a great change, for we were born in the last years of one story and lived into the beginning of another.

  Two years ago, Lisby Knole, the last of my mother’s generation in Port William, one of her dear friends from childhood, died at the age of a hundred and one. When I went to the funeral home for her visitation I got into a long talk with Spencer Gidwell Jr., who once had been Tomtit. The various remindings of our conversation brought us to the name of Elton Penn, and then Spencer told me the story that now I am telling. After the funeral the next day, when Billy Dunham and I had served as pall bearers, I mentioned the story that Spencer had told me, and then Billy told it, his version agreeing with Spencer’s in every significant detail.

  “Andy,” Billy said, “you ought to been there. That was a day!”

  And so I have this story in the nick of time, and as a gift. But it is a living gift, having a place among the brightest things I know. In my mind’s eye those ex-players of the basketball game in the barn loft and the ex-watchers of the game are as present to me as if I had been there. I see them too with the tragic vision of hindsight, as they could not have seen themselves. Except for old Mr. Wright and Burley Coulter, all of the men for a good many years had been owners of automobiles. The history of speed and shortening distances, those exhilarations, but also breakdowns, wrecks, and highway deaths had become familiar to them, though it was a history still fairly new. And now nearly all of them were owners of tractors, and in the Port William neighborhood that history had hardly more than begun. Though they had opened the way for the machines to intrude between themselves and the ground they worked and lived on and for a while would continue to live from, the men lined up along Hackett Dunham’s lot fence, watching Elton Penn walk toward the beech grove where the horses stood, the men and the boys too, even the most inept of them, were still contained within the culture of horsemanship that they were born into. The old language of the collaboration of men with horses and mules was still lively in their minds, still unthinkingly speakable.

  By the effort and willingness of living creatures that labored, suffered, and grew old like themselves, they had joined themselves to the living world in which nothing is machine-like. But by their acceptance and excitement, and against the resistance of a few of them, the machines came. As I look back at those men across sixty years, I see that they had already come past a difference that most of them would not live to recognize. Their kind as it had been through centuries mostly forgotten was already being replaced by a kind that no farmers, and in fact no humans, had ever been before.

  Though they stood in the shadow of a great and portentous story still ongoing sixty years later and so far without an imaginable end, they were nonetheless perfectly competent witnesses to the story of that day. They all belonged to the old story, the story of Port William before it was dominated by machines, the ancient story of people and animals moving over the earth. They watched and knew and judged the events of that day by the sort of mind-work that is so practiced and habitual as hardly to be conscious. What they were acutely conscious of was a number of things they did not know. In any transaction between humans and horses there would be mysteries, unknowns that would remain unknown. But there were also questions as yet unanswered that were going to be answered.

  Carrying the halters and lead ropes looped over his shoulder, Elton walked out to the beech grove and in among the horses. They were a mixed lot, varying in color and conformation and somewhat in size, though none was small. They were a bunch of culls, horses maybe with something to be said in their favor that Hackett had picked up cheap, brought home, tried out, and found wanting. They were to be loaded the next day, Billy Dunham told me, and trucked off to a sale. Most of them, no doubt, would go to the kill. All over the country the work teams were being replaced by tractors, and the horse market was off.

  Elton was with the horses a longish time. He reached out his hand to every one of them. Some accepted it and some shied away. The ones who did not move he made move. The men watching from the lot fence could have told you then, as I can tell you now, something of what he was looking for.

  He would have been looking for harness marks, for this would be no time to break a horse. He would have been mindful of questions of size, strength, conformation, soundness—qualities sufficiently clear and explainable. But just as important to him would have been subtler questions of bearing, demeanor, the look in the eyes. He would have wanted to know how each horse felt about himself. But he would not have been articulating those questions as I have written them here. Though he would have been aware of all that I have said, and more, he would not have been thinking in the manner of speaking to himself. If he had been putting his thoughts into words at all, he would have been saying something like “This one? Or this one? Not that one.”

  Elton took his time, but soon enough he had picked his horses, haltered them, and was leading them toward the lot gate. He had chosen two geldings, a buckskin and a paint.

  As he brought them through the gate, J. L. Safely said, “Well, Elton, they ain’t exactly a dead match.”

  Everybody laughed, for Elton’s pair were odd-colored individually, for draft horses, and they were colored as unlike each other as they possibly could have been. But the laughter was as free as it was because, except in color, the two horses went together well enough. They were not significantly different in size or gait or bearing, and they were, to the eye, plenty good.

  The watchers knew this, and so did Elton, but he said, “Oh, I reckon they’ll have to do. They’re the ones I could catch.” He spoke out of the habit of his humor, and the others laughed again, but it was clear that he had not spoken his mind. He had flung his joke at them, so to speak, over the top of his seriousness. He was completely serious, more concerned than he wanted them to see, but they saw.

  Hackett Dunham was the only one who had not laughed. He said quietly to Elton, “Take ’em on in the barn. We’ll find ’em some harness.” He too was serious.

  Elton led the horses into the driveway of the barn. He had no more than got them tied than Hackett, who had gone into the harness room, was handing out collar pads and collars to be tried for a fit. Immediately too many of the others were hastening to help. Elton dealt with this by addressing his questions to Mart Rowanberry and Burley Coulter, with whom he had worked and hunted and whose judgment he trusted.

  “How about that, Burley? A little too tight?”

  “I’d say a little tight.”

  “Now, Mart. How about this one?”

  “I’d call that a fit.”

  When the right pads and collars had been found and the horses were wearing them, Hackett handed out harnesses, first for one horse and then the other. He was standing in the harness room door, alertly watching to see what was needed.

  Until it is on the horse, a set of harness is a perfect blather of straps. But Elton and his friends knew the form within the tangle. They laid the harness over the horse’s back. As they fastened buckles and snaps, the use of each part declared itself. When Elton lengthened or shortened straps on one side, adjustin
g to a fit, Burley or Mart made the same adjustment on the other side. They fitted the harness according to their understanding of its use, but also, by sympathy, they fitted it as they would have dressed themselves. They wanted the harness snug enough, neat enough, unslovenly, but nowhere binding, so that the horse wore it comfortably and moved freely in it. With the same care they adjusted and fitted a pair of bridles.

  And then they untied the horses and stood them side by side, the buckskin on the left or “lead” side, the paint on the “off.” Hackett handed out a set of lines, which were threaded through the hame rings and snapped to the bits. Burley stood at the horses’ heads, holding them and speaking to them, for they were showing some nervousness, while Mart straightened the lines over their backs.

  When Elton had looked again at everything and was satisfied, he came to his place. Mart, with just a hint of ceremony, handed him the lines.

  And so the horses were joined to each other, to their driver, and their driver to them.

  Elton tightened the lines a little to get the horses’ attention, to tell them he was there. He said, “Come up!” and drove them out of the barn.

  Almost at once it was clear that something was wrong. The horses responded to Elton’s voice and to the pressure on their bits, but still they were nervous. They seemed uncertain and somehow distressed. Though they were held together by the lines, they were not consenting to be a team. And their confusion excluded Elton. The three of them needed to be at one, but they remained, separately, three.

  Finally Elton, who had started and stopped them several times, again said, “Whoa!”

  He looked at Burley. “Reckon we ought to switch sides?”

  Burley shook his head once, but he said, “I’d try it.”

  Since they had nothing else to try, Burley again stood at the horses’ heads, holding them, while Elton and Mart unsnapped and removed the lines. They then turned the pair “inside out,” as Mart put it, placing the paint on the left side, in the lead, and the buckskin on the right.