A Place on Earth Read online

  Finally, though, there was a partial surrender on Old Jack's side. But it was none of her doing-he saw to that. It was Mat Feltner's son-in-law, Wheeler Catlett, who brought about the compromise: that Old Jack would come to live out the rest of his life in the hotel at Port William. Wheeler was Old Jack's lawyer and, when they agreed, his friend. And in this undertaking he had also the advantage of not being the daughter.

  It was not that the old man had ceased to love his daughter. But her marriage to a prominent Louisville banker had long ago set her apart from his world and out of his reach. He saw that clearly at the time and admitted it unhesitatingly to himself, and so when she came to him with her invitation, well meant as he knew it was, he could see no reason to back off. And with perfect understanding of the consequences, for his daughter and for himself, he kept loyal to what he considered his own place in the world.

  But Old Jack admires candor, and Wheeler Catlett stated the proposition to him with candor: "Uncle Jack, you're old. You could get sick. It won't be any pleasure to you to die out here by yourself."

  "I can do it by myself," Old Jack said.

  From the tone of his voice Wheeler judged he would do it to prove it if he had to, and after that he let him alone.

  Old Jack held out another six months, to proclaim his independence and recover ownership of the decision, and then came to town. He arrived at the hotel toward the end of last October in Wheeler Catlett's automobile, his clothes and shaving equipment packed in two five-gallon buckets that Wheeler afterwards carried back and set down on the well top in front of Old Jack's barn.

  Mrs. Hendrick's hotel, in the time of her departed husband, had subsisted on the patronage of a fellowship of traveling salesmen who came and went more or less regularly through the town. But by the time of Jack's arrival it was a kind of boardinghouse, inhabited for the most part by Mrs. Hendrick and two other, much older, widows who turned out to be extravagantly unsatisfactory companions for Old Jack. And he, by nature or by calculation, proved just as unsuited to the conversational purposes of the three ladies. Aside from the fact that the presence of a man under their roof seemed a breach of respectability, Old Jack's language assumed for them, in this unsteady social predicament, the nature of a direct assault on their virtue. His disregard makes a kind of bridge on which he tromps across the chasm of propriety that once supposedly protected them in the insular delicacy of their sex. He says very little that they can reply to without seeming to countenance a liberty as opprobrious as seduction. Their precautionary muteness in his presence has been further intensified by Mrs. Hendrick's discovery that he urinates in the back yard every night before he goes to bed and the first thing every morning-and by the knowledge, discreetly gossiped to them all, that the three of them are customarily referred to, by Jayber Crow and Burley Coulter among others, as "Old Jack's harem."

  Mrs. Hendrick has a face like an auger, an imitation of the corkscrew twist of hair at the back of her head. She had accustomed herself to widowhood more readily than she ever had to marriage; the memory of Mr. Hendrick she had stashed away neatly in the phrase "My blessed husband, God rest his soul." And then Old Jack's coming put a sudden end to the satisfactions and conveniences of her widowhood. Between the two of them a kind of second marriage took place, enforced by circumstance, consummated by Old Jack's unreckoning invasions of her privacy. But in consideration of the advanced age of the offender and the dollars he pays her punctually on the first of every month, she has felt obliged to tolerate him, and does, with the comforting sense that her virtue somehow prevails.

  Old Jack made the card game in jasper Lathrop's vacant store his winter outpost. Except for the one afternoon a week when Wheeler Catlett drove him out to oversee the work on his farm, he sat by the fire in the little room, talking when he saw that the players' interest in the game had flagged and they would listen to him, and talking at times when he knew none of them listened.

  That lasted until Jayber Crow got the idea to teach the old man the game.

  "Take a hand, Jack. We'll show you how"

  "Play," Old Jack said, gesturing refusal with the cane. "I don't know one from the other."

  But they repeated the offer, and he finally agreed to let them try to teach him. "It'll be uphill," he told them.

  It was, Jayber Crow said, like pushing a loaded wagon uphill with a piece of string. But once they got him into it the old man stuck. He stuck, not from any love of the game, but because he immediately hated it. He hates the impersonality of it, he hates it for the chance involved in it, he hates the implacable rules of it, he hates it because it is a game. He plays as if it is his obligation to wipe the game from the face of creation. That they have been able to teach him no more than half the rules has preserved his bafflement. His opponents are constantly trounced by his anger, for their persistence in playing against him, for being able to play without anger, for having caught him in the game in the first place. They accept his anger with equanimity, and usually with amusement. They oppose him as honestly and gently as they can, out of sympathy-realizing that the conflict has become necessary to him, one of the last staples of his life-and out of respect.

  A Voice from the Distance

  Jayber grins and pitches his cards onto the block. "He's won. Let's call it a day."

  "You're laying it on us, Uncle Jack," Burley says.

  The old man picks up his cane and wrenches his chair around to face the windows. "Yes sir, it's a wet time, Burley."

  Frank Lathrop gathers the cards and shuffles them once, and places the deck in the center of the block. Mat relights his cigar.

  Their gestures deliberately and a little gravely establish the game's conclusion.

  Frank nods toward the radio. "The news, Mat."

  Mat reaches behind him and turns up the radio. They make way for the voice of the announcer as for a procession, their gathering broken as each of them moves his eyes away from it, staring out the windows or at the floor. This solemn hearing of the news, after so long a time, has become a kind of ceremony with them. All afternoon, while the game goes on, the radio hums and murmurs in its niche among the boxes on the desk top, like an idol come to life above its altar, a crude cyclopean head erected and drowsily alert on the room's edge. Until one of them, noticing a new inflection in its voice, calls attention to it. And they hush for the precise voice of the announcer stating the facts of the war, continuing from the point at which it left off the hour before or the day before; the voice carefully objective, studiedly calm, a fact itself which remains whole and remote among the facts it utters. The words come to them unjudged, without lamentation or joy. Their quiet listening becomes an obedience, an homage. For a few minutes they let the war exist there in the room, calmly mouthing its deaths.

  "That's that," Frank Lathrop says. He shuts the damper on the stove and they leave the room. Old Jack leads the way down the row of counters to the street door. He walks rapidly, his pants bagging a little over the tops of his leather leggings, the dangling earflaps waving above his coat collar as though he flies as well as walks.

  A Little Shift in the Wind

  When they step out on the sidewalk Frank Lathrop pulls the door to and locks it.

  The sky is still clouded, but no longer darkly. The wind has shifted a little to the north, driving the clouds into the southeast. The wind is steady and deep; it seems to move the whole sky, holding the shapes of the clouds intact. The wind is colder now and they brace their shoulders against it, pulling their collars more snugly around their necks. Tomorrow, they hope, will be clear.

  Under the clouds the air is already clear; the light is hard and precise on the wet surfaces of the buildings and the street, and on the bare upstroking branches of the trees. Northward, beyond the edge of town, is the broad opening of the river valley, seeming abruptly nearer with the rain gone. The farthest barns and houses appear nearly and solidly rectangular.

  The road follows the river upstream and south from where it empties into the Ohio at
Hargrave. For most of its distance it stays down in the floor of the valley, bending along the first steepenings of the hills, leaving the bottomlands intact between itself and the river. A couple of miles downstream from Port William it begins its one digression: it crosses a bridge at the mouth of a tributary valley, passes the sagging rusting coal tipple and shut store at the old town landing, turns away from the river, and climbs the bluff. It follows the backbones of ridges across the upland, goes through the town, and after another mile or so twists down the bluff into the valley again. From the sidewalk in front of the store they can see three-quarters of a mile of it-marked, for most of that distance, by brushy fencerows on either side: an irregularity of the landscape, like a scar or seam where two halves of the country have been divided or joined. In places they can see the asphalt surface of the roadbed; in places it goes out of sight between embankments or clumps of young locusts. It dips into a hollow, and turns toward the town, becoming visible again as it passes the graveyard and the first straggling row of houses on the outskirts.

  They stand in front of the store, talking disjointedly on the verge of going home, leaning against the face of the building now to keep out of the wind. The departure of the rain seems to them to have altered the terms of their own departure, and they stay on-a little precariously, without definite reason, but deliberately nevertheless-to observe and speak of the difference.

  "It'll turn cold," Frank Lathrop says.

  "It's March now," Old Jack says. "You can't tell what it'll do."

  "Well," Jayber says, "after it's stayed one way long enough you'll settle for nearly anything as long as it's different."

  Burley nods out the road in the direction of the river. "Speaking of anything, here comes Whacker."

  Even at that distance he is immense, his great paunch flaring his coat around him like a funnel. And at that distance it is already obvious he is drunk. They knew he would be before they turned to look at him. Drunkenness is no longer simply his habit; it has become, for them as much as for Whacker Spradlin himself, his natural state.

  They watch him pass in front of the most distant of the houses and come slowly down the row of them toward town, his walk a little unsteady but neither awkward nor faltering; he never strays out of his direction. It is the gait of a man intricately skilled and practiced in being drunk. There is a ponderous grace about it like that of a trained elephant or a locomotive. He sways heavily back and forth across the line of his direction, like a man carrying a barrel across a tightrope, his progress a sequence of fine distinctions between standing up and falling down. His drunkenness has become precise. He walks with pomp, his knees lifting as though he is climbing a stairway. By the time he comes even with Mat Feltner's house they can see the smoke rising from his pipe.

  He bears down on them, puffing his pipe, his overcoat held together at the neck by a safety pin and at the waist by a piece of twine. He wears a wide-brimmed straw hat, the crown full of raveling holes, which seems to them as much a part of his character as his drunkenness. They have never seen him without it. The hat sits on his head emphatically, bending his ears down. Behind him, in a child's red wagon, he hauls a rusty cream can, the establishment of the bootlegger's trade by which he subsists.

  As Whacker goes past the front of the store, the five of them nod and speak to him. And Whacker nods to them without looking at them or altering his gait, moving implacably forward, the downhill momentum of his great body seeming to dominate and threaten the pavement in front of him. He goes on past the drugstore and the poolroom.

  He goes on past Jayber Crow's barbershop at the bottom of the hill and starts up the next rise, looking straight ahead, his movements the same going uphill as going down, precarious and deliberate, as though he will go on through the town and beyond it in the same direction forever.

  They watch him out of sight, and then start, separately, home.

  2

  Port William

  It used to be asked, by strangers who would happen through, why a town named Port William should have been built so far from the river. And the townsmen would answer that when Port William was built they did not know where the river was going to run.

  The truth is that Port William no longer remembers why it was built where it is, or when, or how. In its conversation the town has kept the memory of two or three generations haphazardly alive. Back of that memory the town was there for a long time-there are a few buildings still standing that are surely twice as old as anybody's certain knowledge of them. But the early history has to be conjectured and assumed.

  It is as though in their crossing to this new place, the first-comers lost everything to the wilderness but their names. And for a considerable length of time after they arrived, the wilderness continued to make demands of them. It asked, among other things, too much of their attention and energy to leave time or strength for record keeping. That the town had been begun, and was there, was more important than explanations and motives and reasons and memories. That they half exhausted the country, in surprisingly few years, testifies convincingly enough to the intensity of their preoccupation. The black ground broke open to their plows like a pile of ashes. There was never anything like it-that black humus, built up under the forest for thousands of years. There it was, dark as shadows under the trees, abundant and deep, waiting to be opened. Surely no dirt was ever more responsive or more alive. You could believe, for once, that the earth might give back to a man more than it took from him. It welcomed him everywhere he put down his hand or his foot or his seed. It had advanced through millennia to break itself open on the coulter of his plow; he could not have helped but feel that jointure and breaking in every nerve.

  In two or three generations the country was imponderably changed, its memories, explanations, justifications fallen away from it. The firstarrivers left it diminished and detached from its sources. It was like an island, the past washing up to it, in fact, as the force of its becoming, but not as knowledge. Past and future bore against it under cover of darkness. Whoever wanted to make a beginning, then, had to begin with something already half-finished. And scarcely known.

  Company

  Across the street from jasper Lathrop's store the white steeple ascends and narrows to a point above the green-shuttered belfry, higher than the tallest trees in the town. As he looks up at it from the sidewalk in front of the store, and at the clouds moving steadily southeastward in the deep wind, it seems to Mat for a moment that the clouds are still and only the earth moves, drawing the point of the steeple in a curving stroke through the sky.

  Up the street, divided from the church by a vacant lot that contains a single broken-branched old locust and a stone chimney with the ruin of a hearth and mantel, is Mat's house, its weather-boarded white walls visible through the branches of the maples in the yard. From the angle of the boundary in which his house stands, Mat's farm extends in a wide irregular triangle to the river. The west line of the boundary follows the road out of town; at the top of the first ridge it makes shape for the graveyard, and then follows the road again to the top of the farthest ridge and down the wooded bluff; at the foot of the grade it turns away from the road and crosses the bottomland to the river. The land has been shaped by water. It has kept something of the nature of water in the alterations of its shape and character as it moves away from the high ground Port William is built on, descending to the river.

  At the top of the ridge above the river bluff is the cluster of farm buildings that has been known to the Feltners since Mat's father's time as "the far place." In the field below the barns white-faced Hereford cows graze with their new calves around the banks of a little pond.

  The house and the land beyond it have become intimately the possessions of Mat's mind. Before he looked he knew the lay and the shape and color of the field, and knew where the cattle would be. Even their erratic distribution over the field seems familiar to him as though, turning his head, he did not begin but continued to look.

  Looking back a
t the house now as the gathering breaks up in front of the store, he sees his grandson running toward him out of the corner of the yard.

  Old Jack, who has already gone halfway to the post office, stops and turns around. "You've got company at your house, Mat."

  "I see I have."

  "That's a fine boy there," Old Jack says. "He'll grow up to be a shotgun of a lawyer like his daddy, you watch and see if he don't. Tell Wheeler I said so."

  "I'll do it."

  The boy waves. "Wait, Grandad."

  Mat goes on across the street and waits on the sidewalk in front of the church.

  "Hello, Grandad."

  "Hello, Andy." Mat puts his hands on the boy's shoulders and hugs him. "When did you come?"

  `After school. Daddy had to go down on Bird's Branch, and he brought us by."

  "Whds us?"

  "Mother and Henry and me. We're going to eat supper with you."

  "You are? Well, you haven't asked me if you can."

  Andy laughs. "Can we eat supper with you?"

  "I reckon so."

  "Granny's already told us we can."

  "Well, you're all right then, if both of us say so."

  "She said tell you to go down to Burgess's and get a box of salt, and stop and tell Uncle Ernest to come home. Supper's going to be ready as soon as Daddy gets back."

  'All right."

  And they go down the street, past the old stone building that houses the bank, toward Burgess's store.

  Neither of them hears the plane approaching. It has come in low over the town, and appears suddenly; the four engines and wings and grey fuselage take shape abruptly among the tops of the trees. For an instant it seems to have risen vertically, out of the top of the rise beyond the store. The racket of the engines comes on them all at once, so near they not only hear it but feel the vibration of it in the air and in the ground under their feet. As it comes nearer they can see the blur of the propellers, the black gun-barrels spiking out of the glass blisters, the rivetheads along the fuselage and wings.