A Place on Earth Read online

  For a moment, looking at Joe's face, touched by the kindness in it, Mat would like to tell what he has on his mind, say what he is afraid of. But he does not name his fear even to himself, and he says nothing.

  "It sure ain't getting any warmer, Mr. Mat."

  "It's not spring yet, Joe." Mat speaks without thinking, and hears, almost with surprise, the casual tone of his voice.

  "It'll be before long," Joe Banion is saying. "We'll be sweating before long, I expect. Soon enough."

  Mat hangs the milk buckets up inside the door, takes a larger bucket to the crib, and fills it with ears of corn. He goes from stall to stall, down one side of the long driveway and up the other, dropping into the feedboxes each mule's ration for the night.

  He puts the bucket back when he has emptied it, and climbs the ladder into the loft. He moves above the rows of stalls, forking hay down into the mangers. Below him he can hear the mules feeding, rattling the corn in their troughs.

  He goes out the back door of the barn, through the lot gate, and up the long slope of the pasture to the sheep barn at the top of the ridge. The sod gives under his feet like sponge. Behind him his tracks are filled with water.

  The flock of ewes, most of them with lambs now, grazes along slowly in the direction of the barn, picking here and there at the short grass. Seeing Mat on his way to feed them, they raise their heads, and come along more quickly. In this sudden forward movement of the flock, lambs get separated from their mothers, and the commotion increases. Mat goes into the barn and pulls the doors to behind him. In the dim light that comes in between the boards of the walls, the troughs and mangers stand end to end in a long rank down the center of the driveway. He makes two trips from the feed bin with buckets of grain, spreading it evenly in the bottoms of the troughs, and forks hay into the mangers. And then he covers the wet bedding with a layer of fresh straw. He looks over his work, again with satisfaction: the feeding and the night prepared, perfected.

  He pushes the doors open and calls the sheep, standing back out of the way as they come in and crowd to the troughs. He stays there a while, looking over the field, making sure that none has been left out. He feels growing in him now, in spite of all, a familiar and precious calm. The flock is in the barn, well fed, safe from dogs and the cold, warmly bedded. They will be there safe until morning. If not today, on most of the winter days of his life this completeness has filled his mind.

  The sun, almost down, breaks out of the overcast, throwing a warm orange light over the town and the house and the ridge where Mat is standing. Against the brightness of the clouds in the west, the town has become a silhouette. The naked branches webbing over the tops of the houses stand out clearly. The wall of the sheep barn is an intense glowing white. Everywhere the colors are stronger. The light picks out the smallest beginnings of green in the pasture. The damp left by the rain shines. Mat stands in the change of light as he has been standing all along, but changed. He knows he will not think of it as winter again; spring has become imaginable. He feels an elation, and then, in the same thought, sorrow that the first change has come beyond what has happened to them. Now they move again toward what will happen.

  3

  The Last

  A little less than a mile from town Burley Coulter turns off the blacktop into the gravel lane that goes back through the fields to his house and Jarrat's. The lane runs somewhat windingly along the backbone of a ridge which points toward the opening of the river valley. To the sides of the ridge, though not so noticeably, lie the openings of the lesser valleys of Sand Ripple and Katy's Branch. From so high Burley can see a lot of the country, in which the only sounds audible to him now are his own footsteps. He walks along carefully between the two depressed and puddled wheel tracks.

  Toward its outer end the lane forks, as does the ridge, the left fork going to Jarrat's house, the right to Burley's. Here the two farms are divided by a hollow that becomes a deep ravine where the easy slopes of the upland steepen to the wooded bluffs above the river valley.

  Since the death of his wife more than twenty years ago, Jarrat has lived alone, leaving his two sons to grow up in the other house, in the care of their grandparents and Burley. The boys lived too far away to know Jarrat as a father, near enough to know him as a taskmaster and judge. Jarrat has remained a good deal apart from the family, cooking and keeping house for himself.

  Jarrat and Burley were born in the other house, the log house begun by their great-grandfather, completed by their grandfather, and weatherboarded by their father. Except for a reluctant trip to France in 1918, Burley has never left, and now the deaths and departures of the other members of the family have left him alone there. His father, Dave, died in 1940. And both the boys went away-Tom before the old man's death, Nathan later-because of quarrels with Jarrat. It is not injarrat's nature to indulge a small disagreement, and so his quarrels with his sons were the only real ones he had ever had with them, and the last ones. It is a severe manhood that Jarrat has, that feeds on its loneliness, and will be governed by no head but his own. Each of the boys was able to make a reconciliation of sorts between himself and Jarrat, on the terms of a quiet and mostly one-sided friendship, but the separation, once accomplished, was permanent, and neither of them came back home to live. And now Tom is dead.

  After old Dave's death and the departure of the two boys, Burley and his mother lived on there together, oppressed sometimes by the emptiness of the big house, but managing, as Burley said, to peg along.

  "We'll peg along, old girl," he would say to her.

  She would sniff, and then laugh, at his impudence.

  The old woman lived on in bewilderment, divided from the lives that had been her care and duty. She went through times of deep loneliness; sometimes at night, after Burley had gone to bed, he would hear her wandering among the empty rooms of the house, whispering to herself.

  During those last few of her years, Burley made the first honest attempt of his life to please her. He tried-always fumblingly, often with extravagant miscalculation-to be the kind of son he figured she had wanted him to be. He left off, as nearly as he could bear it, what she thought his most wayward habits, and when he was not at work or in town on some errand he mostly stayed at home with her. They would sit in the living room at night, and talk; or, more often, he would listen and she would talk, her old voice wandering at random among her memories. The past had come near to her, and she would talk on and on, remembering idly and easily, but also obsessively and endlessly. She would exhaust his ability to pay attention to her, and he would sit there, his mind drifting, nodding his head. She repeated the same stories time and again, reminded of them by new memories, until finally he was able to tell what story she was on just by the sound of it.

  Occasionally in these ramblings of hers she would stumble, by accident, onto one of his misdemeanors. She would be taken by surprise; the recollection would come to her as forcibly as if it had just then happened. She would lookup at him suddenly, crossly, over her glasses, and point her finger at him.

  `And you, Burley Coulter, were drunk."

  She would shake her head, surprised and grieved that a son of hers could ever have been drunk.

  "Yes, Ma'am," Burley would say. "I expect." And he would get up quietly and go out of the house, leaving her to whisper and gesture her way through her old anger.

  Her early memories came back to her in swarms, but her ability to keep the immediate past in mind grew weaker. She could remember what happened fifty or twenty-five or ten years ago with lucidity and clarity of detail that were surprising even to her. She would have sudden recollections of things that she was no longer aware of having forgot. But she would be unable to remember what came in the mail the day before. She would hunt sometimes for half a day, having forgot where she had put down her glasses or her thimble. Her lifelong habit of putting things away was transformed, by this failure of her memory, into the interminable and wearisome process of hiding things from herself and finding them again, a
lways by accident and with great pleasure, sometimes months later. A few things that she regarded as keepsakes or valuables she put away carefully and never found again.

  One Christmas she put away a box of candy-thinking that she would ration it out carefully and it would last a month or two-and never came upon it again until the week after Easter. By then the candy was hard as gravel, and she had forgot how long it had been since she put it away. Burley, to please her, ate nearly the whole box-in two nights, to get it over with-talking the whole time about how tickled he was that she had saved it. And she nibbled along at it herself, looking inquiringly over her glasses, uncertain whether to believe him or not.

  Finally she said, "I'll declare, Burley, these false teeth of mine seem to have got out of whack."

  When he had time he helped her in the kitchen, and helped her keep house, sparing her as much of the work and worry as he could. In good weather he would sometimes persuade her to let him do the washing, and set up the tubs and wringer in the back yard to avoid cluttering the kitchen, and do in an hour what would have been a half day's work for her. When he finished, the clothes he had on would be as wet as the ones he had washed.

  "Burley Coulter," she would say, "you're worse than any kid." And then she would laugh.

  Seeing that his recklessness and awkwardness amused her, he plunged and rubbed over the scrubbing board more furiously than ever, making the water splash and spout higher than his head. Performing these elaborate exaggerations of his incompetence, he could make her laugh like a girl.

  She made, finally, a kind of household pet of him, made a child of him, and he submitted painstakingly. She fixed special treats and desserts for him. In the years between Dave's death and her own she crocheted a set of doilies for his room.

  He remembers the heavy day, after her death, that he spent burning the leftover odds and ends of her life that she had carefully preserved in the closets and the bureau drawers: postcards and letters from people whose names he had forgot and hastened to forget again, photographs of people dead before he was born, whose names he never knew. Though he wanted none of it, though he lightened himself by getting rid of it, there was an awesome finality in the burning of those things, dear to her for reasons that would never be known again in the world.

  Since his father's death and the boys' departure, and even more since the death of his mother, Burley has devoted himself to Jarrat-not because Jarrat ever has required devotion of him, but because he is touched by Jarrat's loneliness, and in the absence of so many is lonely himself.

  Jarrat lives for work. He has grown nearly silent. If Burley wants to talk, he has to wait for a chance to go elsewhere. But he and Jarrat have continued to work together, and there has been a great deal to be done and always more to do. During the past two years, in addition to farming their own places, they have sharecropped on Mat Feltner's. Jarrat took this new work. Burley knew, simply because the acreage became available-and because he is, within the limits of his strength, unable to let the opportunity of a crop go by.

  Burley has made himself Jarrat's friend. Though Jarrat will never acknowledge any dependence on him, Burley has made himself dependable. He has been, as he never was earlier in his life, faithful to their work, not for his own sake, but for Jarrat's. In these years of their loneliness devotion has become Burley's habit. He has become more gentle as Jarrat has become more hard.

  Now, as he comes up to the yard, Jarrat is waiting for him, standing on the stone walk between the back porch and the cellar house. He is past fifty now, and looks older-all leather and bone and lean meat, taller and leaner than Burley, a little bent in the shoulders. His face, beginning to hollow in the cheeks and temples and around the eyes, is covered with a week's growth of nearly white beard. His mouth is cleanly shaped, firm, and tightly, deliberately, closed. His eyebrows are coarse, heavy, completely black; below them his eyes are set deep and have a peculiar fixity of gaze.

  He is wearing an old hunting coat, soiled and stained and frayed. His large hands hang down at his sides, the knobbed heavy bones of his wrists showing beneath the coat cuffs. His hands are scarred and hardened, weathered to the color of an old saddle. Jarrat's face invites no sympathy; to Burley, all the humanness and vulnerability of him are in his hands, and he is always touched by the sight of them. For three or four years, Burley knows, Jarrat has been unable to sign a check. His hand has become incapable of performing the small movements of his name, can scarcely grasp and hold steady so small an object as a pencil. It is the peculiar adaptation of his strength that he can do small work only clumsily or not at all, but manages the roughest and heaviest labor with grace and seemingly without strain.

  He stands midway of the walk, awkwardly waiting. He asks, "Did he catch the bus?"

  "Yes."

  "You got him there all right. And saw him off."

  "Yes."

  Jarrat is looking down at his feet. He nods. And then, as though he had been not waiting but passing on some errand, he goes out the gate and starts home.

  Burley walks up the steps and onto the porch. He wipes his feet on the piece of old carpet beside the door and goes into the kitchen.

  He lays a fire in the cooking range and lights it. Once the blaze has caught, he goes to the living room to build up the fire there, and then goes out along the path to the barn to do his feeding.

  When he leaves the barn, the sun, just before setting, shines out of a breach in the clouds, and below him the valley is suddenly filled with a transparent mist of rich light. He stops to look. A window in a house he cannot see, on a ridgetop three or four miles away on the other side of the river, catches the sun. His clothes are still damp from the rain; his feet are wet and cold. He stands there, watching the light, thinking suddenly of spring.

  Back in the house, he gets out a pair of dry shoes and a change of clothes. He stands in front of the stove in the living room, taking off his wet clothes and putting the dry ones on. He waits there, holding his hands over the top of the stove, until he is warm.

  The house has become dark. He goes through the cold hall to the kitchen and turns on the light and begins preparing his supper. He goes about his work in about the same way as his mother would have gone about it.

  Usually his housekeeping seems to him to be too painstaking, even wasteful, for one man living alone. At times he has thought it would be better to move his bed down to the kitchen and live in the one room with the one fire, as Jarrat has always done, and close up the rest of the house. But he has never been able to bring himself to the change. He follows the old habits of the household, keeping at least the three rooms alive. And he keeps Nathan's room clean and waiting, refusing to accept loneliness as the culmination of anything. He knows better than to hope outright for the return of anybody, but he is careful to leave the possibilities open.

  When his meal is done with and the kitchen is set to rights, he goes back to the living room and sits and smokes in his chair beside the stove. The room is furnished sparely and to Burley, despite his own presence in it, it feels deserted. There is a checkered linoleum on the floor, a small carpet in the center of it in front of the stove. Besides Burley's rocking chair, there are four straight-backed chairs, a sofa, and a table under the front window. On the mantel behind the stove a stopped clock stands between two glass vases. Between the clock and the vases are pictures of Tom and Nathan in their uniforms, and an enlarged photograph of the family taken by Jarrat's wife in the year before her death. They are standing in a row in the yard in front of the house. It is Sunday, or else they have dressed up especially for the picture-he cannot remember. The two little boys, at either end of the row, are grinning, looking into the camera. Jarrat and Burley, almost unrecognizably younger, stand with the boys beside them and the old people between them; they have their hands behind them, their feet apart, their eyes squinched against the sun; Jarrat, self-consciously, is smiling. The grandmother stands with her hands clasped in front of her, her feet placed together at a prim angle, in wh
at was considered graceful posture in the time of her girlhood. Beside her, peculiarly apart from her, and from all the rest of them, old Dave is leaning forward over his cane. He might be there alone for all the deference he pays to the presence of the others. He is as tall as Jarrat, and as lean, his white hair uncombed. He is wearing a white shirt and tie and a dress coat of an old-fashioned cut which fits him too tightly across the shoulders, but his pants are work pants, without creases. The set of his face is stubborn. He has submitted only grudgingly-only, finally, at the insistence of his pretty daughter-in-law-to the taking of the picture. He stares straight ahead.

  They look into the room: the living faces of the dead, the different younger faces of the living, more perishable than the paper of the photograph. Jarrat's young wife was the first to die, leaving Jarrat and the two boys to become what they would not have become if she had lived, changing all the possibilities. And old Dave held on to his life as if nothing was less obvious and less certain than death-until a simple sleep, like a child's, pried his fingers loose. And the old woman died, among the gathering of her memories, as though she died into a death she had already lived in for years.

  And Tom is dead. And Nathan is gone again, bound to them now only by the thin strand of departure.

  Burley leans forward, opening the door of the stove, and throws in the butt of his cigarette and empties the ashes out of his hand.

  He picks up a newspaper and looks at it a moment. But it is yesterday's paper-he forgot to get the mail when he came in. He puts the paper down and turns on the radio, and then, anticipating with a kind of fear the breaking of the silence, turns it off again.

  He gets up and walks to the window and, shielding his eyes from the light in the room, looks out. There are no stars. The wind has quieted and the overcast, he imagines, is thickening again. He stirs the fire and sits back down.

  For a long time there is only the sound of the fire burning, the occasional shifting of the coals. Occasionally, marking the silence into long spans, he hears the cracking of the floors and walls as the house contracts and settles into the night cold. He is thinking of Tom.