A Place on Earth Page 4

  It passes above their heads, shaking the ground.

  'A big one," Andy says.

  The plane goes on beyond the town, becoming toylike, familiar, as it gains distance and altitude, circling eastward over the river.

  The overcast has thinned, become dappled. The light glares on the town. Going into the dim interior of the store, Mat shuts the door slowly, allowing his eyes time to adjust.

  Milton Burgess, his striped sleeves rolled two neat turns above his wrists, sits on a tall stool behind the counter, his elbow propped against the cash register. He has been talking with the band of loafers congregated on the opposite side of the counter, two of whom have hefted themselves up to sit in front of the cash register, their backs to Milton. With the loafers Milton allows himself a choleric indulgence in whatever news or argument is current-the one prolonged conversation that he has grudgingly allowed to continue there for forty-five years.

  The store is a sprawling frame building, the foundation of which bridges the small creek that runs down out of the pasture behind Jasper Lathrop's store and around Jayber Crow's barbershop and under the road, so that after the creek goes out of sight in the culvert below the barber shop it does not come into the light again for two hundred feet or so. Beneath them, in wet weather, in the lapses of speech, the talkers in the store can hear it running.

  With the loafers Milton condescends to loaf, his condescension apparent enough that he seems not to join their gathering but to permit each of them separately to intrude on him, so that above his idle participation in their talk his proprietorship still reigns undiminished and austere.

  Seeing Mat and the boy come through the door, he climbs down off the stool and stands erect, his sparrowlike face becoming alert. He poises there, his spread fingers delicately touching the countertop, ready to jump instantly right or left at the slightest command from his customer. The quick sparrow face poises above the counter, waiting as if time halted when the door opened and will start again from the beginning the moment the customer speaks his order. It always happens. Mat knows that if one of the loafers, in the midst of their talk, should glance at the tobacco case and reach into his pocket the thin fingers would immediately graze the surface of the counter, the eyes quicken. "What can I do for you today?" Here, in this dim big room containing nothing that isn't for sale, Milton Burgess has made his life. The husband of his ledger, he never married. Over the years, wringing every possible penny out of his business, spending nothing more than is necessary to keep him and his old mother alive, he has made what the town confidently believes to be a solid fortune, which he puts to no use. Nothing interests him unless it can be made to add up. Though he is growing old and has no children, his ambition is still to squeeze out every other merchant in ten miles. At present he is enjoying the absence of Jasper Lathrop.

  "What can I do for you today?"

  Mat gives his order, adding a box of cigars.

  The plane comes over again. The store is caught up, lifted, shaken in the noise of the engines, the windowpanes rattling.

  Andy runs to the door, too late, to see.

  The men at the counter follow the sound of it with their eyes.

  "What in the hell's going on?"

  "That boy of Grover Gibbs's, I reckon. They made a pilot out of him."

  "He come cutting didos over Grover's place that way a week ago. Said he about tore the roof off his daddy's barn."

  They laugh.

  "Said Grover's mules run off when he done it."

  Milton looks up at Mat, inquiring. "Will that be all for you?"

  "That's all."

  Andy, who has come back to where he was standing in front of the candy counter, becomes conscious that Mat is watching him, and not wanting to appear to hint, he moves away and begins to look at a stack of tinware in the window. Mat takes a nickel out of his pocket and steps up behind him.

  "What's that you've got in your ear?" He takes hold of the boy's ear and pretends to pull the nickel out of it.

  "Oh," Andy says. He turns around, laughing, and takes the coin.

  "Thanks, Grandad."

  The men at the counter laugh.

  "Is that Wheeler's boy, Mat?"

  "He's Wheeler's."

  "He's a Catlett all right."

  Milton Burgess's fingers are touching the glass top of the candy counter now, his eyes cocked at Andy, who has gone back to stand in front of it. "Something for you today, young man?"

  Mat leans against the counter with the loafers now, waiting for the boy to be done.

  "You all heard from Virgil, Mat?"

  Mat starts to say what they have heard, but then, on the verge of speaking, hesitates. The truth, divided from his own love for his son, seems a betrayal. He does not want to expose himself to any drawing of conclusions, any offer of sympathy. Sympathy for what? For what?

  "Not in a while."

  "Well, when you write to him tell him I asked about him."

  "I will. I appreciate it."

  Mat turns to the storekeeper, handing him another nickel. "Give me one more of those, Milt."

  Milton hands him another bar of candy and he puts it in his pocket.

  "Call again," Milton Burgess says. The door swings shut behind them. Andy takes Mat's hand as they start across the road.

  Like a Bird

  When the plane made its first pass over the town, Burley Coulter and Jayber Crow, having walked that far together, had stopped again in front of Jayber's shop. Jayber stood with one foot on the step, his hand holding the doorknob turned, ready to go inside.

  The sounds of the plane's engines dropped down onto the town roofs like rocks, crashing and tumbling into all the crannies of their hearing, and then seemed to fill up the air above the town like water pouring into a glass jar.

  "What's that thing doing here?" Jayber said.

  "Billy Gibbs, I imagine. He flies one of them."

  "They'd better hurry up and send him to the war before he kills somebody."

  "Or gets killed."

  Jayber stepped through the door. "I'll see you, Burley."

  "I expect you will."

  Now Burley walks up the rise, heading home.

  His mind freed, he has Nathan's departure to think about. He walks back into Nathan's absence. And with the sorrow that has come to belong to his life, into Tom's.

  He has gone a good way up the slanted street when the plane comes back. He stops and watches it go over the town, low over the treetops.

  When he comes to the top of the rise he sees Uncle Stanley Gibbs standing out on the edge of his front yard above the road cut. The old man is in his shirt sleeves, hatless, his hair blowing, waving his cane.

  Uncle Stanley's life takes its shape, has taken its shape for years, around his Sundays. On Sunday mornings he goes across town to the church and rings the bell, long and loud, while the clapperstrokes penetrate luxuriously into his deafness. His little splintery body dangles ecstatically on the end of the pull rope, the bell lifting him. And then he goes out to sit on the step, while the congregation assembles and silence issues from the church door, waiting for the meeting to be over, to go in and straighten up.

  "That boy of Grover's come over here in that airplane of hisn" he shouts, waving his cane. "Come right up out of that woods back of Grover's place."

  "I saw him, Uncle Stanley."

  "Says which?"

  "I saw him!"

  "You did!" The old man bends forward, looking down at Burley, startled and proud. "Like a God-durned bird."

  The Carpenter Shop

  Ernest's shop is orderly and warm, filled with the odors of shellac and lacquer and wood resins, the sound of a strong fire licking in the stove, light from the single large window in the rear wall. The room is neat to perfection. There is only the one day's disarray of tools, the one day's litter of wood fragments and shavings and sawdust.

  Hanging on hooks and pegs and resting on the floor against the wall opposite the window are the ladders and rope tackle a
nd jacks necessary for the building of barns and houses. At the end of the room farthest from the stove, nearly stacked, sorted according to kind and quality and size, are the stores of fine woods he uses in his cabinetmaking. His hand tools, their handles worn to a polish, hang above the workbench from a row of pegs driven into the long sill of the window. On the wall to the left of the window there is a pencil holder into which are wedged a number of thick-leaded pencils of various lengths and colors, a ball of twine stained with the dust of blue chalk, a calendar with a picture of an idyllic farm in the small valley of a creek where flowers and fruit trees are in bloom. While Ernest is at work he does not use his crutches, but leaves them propped in the corner behind the stove. The interior of the shop has gradually conformed to an arrangement that requires the least amount of walking. By a kind of natural growth, everything here has come within his reach.

  Mat and Andy come in and close the door. They cross the room to the stove, and Mat sits down on a nail keg in front of it. Andy wanders here and there in the shop, looking, but touching nothing; Ernest will not stand for meddling. After a minute or two Andy comes back and stands beside Mat at the stove. Ernest is working at the bench, carefully dressing the edge of a walnut board with a plane. He has not yet looked around at them. They watch him without talking, waiting for him to be done.

  An Old Wound

  In the early summer of 1919, when Ernest came home at last from the war, both his parents were dead and the house sold. Port William had got used to his absence, and he came back changed.

  His wound had been difficult, complicated at the beginning by infection, and the healing was painful and slow. After his discharge he had to spend the better part of a year in the hospital. His foot was finally made as well as it would ever be; but this, the end of the healing, was the hardest for him to accept-that to be "cured" meant only that he would remain crippled. The fragmented bones and tendons were spliced back; the irreparable mutilation was made to heal and live. There would be no reason, they told him, why he should not live a normal life. Adjustments would have to be made, of course.

  Still, as he prepared to leave the hospital, learning, as though it was some ultimately unsolvable problem of mechanics, to piece out his loss with the crutches, he was aware that he had suffered a defeat. And he knew that this defeat was real and final, allowing for no recovery or revenge, permitting no illusion to mitigate its permanence. And it was from this defeat, more than from any place he had been, that he came back to Port William.

  He came back with his mouth shut, permanently, on these realizations. There were two things that he could neither speak of nor forget: his defeat, and the implausibility of the fact that something so vast as a war had picked out and defeated so small a thing as one man, himself. The difficulty was that this was an implausible fact. He was getting ready to leave the hospital; he was going back to Port William, to begin whatever would have to be begun, and now he realized that these thoughts belonged to him as permanently as his wound. He would go back to town, then, this much changed, and nothing could ever be as it was.

  But Mat, who came on the train to bring him home, made it easier than he had imagined. When Mat walked into the hospital that morning, he raised his hand in greeting.

  "I'm half contraption," Ernest said.

  And Mat said, "Not hardly that much."

  He smiled; they shook hands. Mat picked up Ernest's suitcase and led the way to the door. To Mat it seemed that they brought home, between them, the recovery of a time-an injury and vacancy in all their lives, healed over, like Ernest's wound, but with diminished pain.

  They got off the train in the early morning. The town of Hargrave had not begun to stir, and the valley lay under a fog that seemed to weight the quiet and to separate the town and themselves immediately from the rattling departure of the train.

  After an hour's driving over the rutted road, disappearing always a few yards ahead of them into the fog, they climbed out of the valley into the open daylight. From the top of the first ridge they could see Port William lying in the sun ahead of them, the white steeple of the church pointing up over the cluster of treetops and roofs. They drove along the ridge, the car chugging and jolting ahead of its plume of dust, dipping out of sight of the town, climbing the rise into it. The maples, in the perfect foliage of early June, dappled the road and the white house fronts with their shade. Flowers were in bloom in the yards and porch boxes. On an old millstone in a patch of sun a yellow cat sat licking itself. Behind them the fog, a white sunlit cloud, filled the valley to the brim.

  The town had settled into the quiet of workday mornings. Mat turned the car into the driveway beside his house and stopped and shut the engine off. And the quiet came over them-a susurration of the wakefulness of the town, in which the noon meal was being prepared, the floors were being swept, time was unwinding in the kitchen clocks, the sun was climbing in the warm clear sky toward noon and solstice.

  There were the smells of honeysuckle, of barns, of cooking, of hay curing, of horse dung warming and drying in the road. Mat, waking from death, would have known in an instant the place, the time of year, the time of day. Looking at the house, he saw Margaret walking toward them across the porch, smiling, though she saw and knew what he had brought.

  In the fall of that year Ernest built his shop. He did most of the work alone, with help now and then from Mat and Joe Banion when they could spare the time. The shop became, in a way, a town project, not of work, but of interest and curiosity-and then surprise that Ernest could lift and carry and climb and, more alone than not, frame and wall up and roof a sizable building. But Ernest had quickly developed the judgment necessary to his lameness, which enabled him to estimate accurately what he could and could not do-and to do more, by a considerable sight, than most of the townspeople would have guessed before they saw him do it. In the town they renamed him Shamble. Though the thumping of the crutches went ahead of him, he held up his face, and there would be a direct straight look in his eyes.

  It was understood from the first that Ernest would make his home with Mat and Margaret. He took the room over the kitchen in the back of the house, which had a separate entrance by the back stairs and the upper porch. After his carpenter's trade had been established, he seemed to withdraw into the established certainties and clear limits of it. He perfected his shop, making its work spaces neat and convenient. He perfected his silence.

  A Pretty Good Boy

  Ernest straightens up from his work and looks around.

  "Hello, Mat. Whds that you've got with you?"

  "I don't know who this fellow is. He just followed me in."

  Ernest blows the shavings out of the plane and lays it down on the bench. He takes the board out of the vise. Holding to the end of it with one hand, he runs his thumb down the edge of it, and then, drawing it to his eye, sights along it.

  "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."

  Feeding

  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 wal
ks 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.