A Place on Earth Page 6
Tom had been a bulldozer operator with a battalion of engineers, following the invasion into Italy. One morning they were sent up into the mountains where a battle had been fought the night before. The field was strewn with the dead of both armies, and Toms outfit had orders to bury them. The area was still under threat of counterattack, and they were to do their work in a hurry. The ground was stony and thin and frozen, covered with a layer of snow With considerable difficulty, Tom scooped out a long shallow grave. The bodies were laid in quickly, side by side in the naked grave, and he began covering them. He replaced the dirt he had moved, and to make the burial as deep as possible he began scraping up dirt from the area around the grave to mound over it. It was desperate work. Twice he became confused about the dimensions of the grave and dug out the bodies he was trying to cover. The forward movement of the heavy machine rolled them out of the pit before he could stop.
Now, grown still in the chair, the warmth of the stove around him, Burley doesn't know if he is awake or asleep. Cold in his mind, he digs in the skimpy dirt, moving back and forth on the narrow shelf of the mountain. Beneath him he can feel the shove and pitch of the machine, the sound of the engine alternately straining and idling. Looking down as if from a height, he sees the unfinished long mound of a grave. Under the mound are the dead, lying side by side in their torn uniforms, a single long rank of them, facing up into the raw dirt. He scrapes at the frozen ground, loosening only handfuls at a time, and pushes it onto the grave-to make the dead safe there, to be done with them, to hide them forever. He is in a terrible hurry, and there is not enough dirt.
He uncovers a face. Tom's. The boy lies on his side, his right arm crooked beneath his head. His eyes are shut, the dirt against his cheek like a blanket.
He wakes up. The house and the fire tick on into the silence. He sits still, trying to recover his presence there in the familiar room. It is time he was going to bed. But he puts on his hat and coat, and picking up his lantern at the kitchen door, starts back along the road to town.
The Had
The lobby of Mrs. Hendrick's hotel, considering its public intention, is a cramped small room. The ceiling is too high for the length and breadth of it. Light from the one-eyed ramshackle fixture in the ceiling thins and dims, reaching down into it. In a steep diagonal across the back wall of the room a stairway goes up to the second floor.
Beneath the stairway, divided from the rest of the room by a short counter, there is a small triangular alcove, which was the office of the establishment in its more or less flourishing days. The alcove contains a double row of empty pigeonholes. The counter bears a frayed inkmarked green blotter, a crusted inkstand and pen, a small nickel-plated bell. None of this has been in use for years. Now all the business of the place can be transacted well enough in and out of Mrs. Hendrick's snapping change purse, but she has maintained the little office as an appearance or reminder of her better days. The lobby is furnished with three wicker chairs and a wicker settee. They sit there empty, in conversational arrangement, offering hospitality in the empty room.
The dining room is a little better than twice as long and half again as wide as the lobby. Four ample tables stand in a row down the center of the floor. Light fixtures hang by cords from the ceiling at either end of the room, but only the most distant one is lighted. At the far end of the room a door opens into the kitchen, showing beyond it a large black cooking range. The table nearest the kitchen is the only one with a cloth on it.
At this last table Old Jack and the two lady boarders are seated. The old man sits at the end of the table toward the front of the building. At the opposite end is Mrs. Hendrick's empty chair. The old ladies sit, facing each other across the table, on either side of the landlady's place. The plates of the three women make a small close triangle, leaving as much of the table's length as possible between them and old Jack. The old ladies have woolen shawls drawn around their shoulders, and Jack still has on his coat and cap. The meal is nearly finished. The old ladies have stopped eating, and are leaning toward each other, talking almost in whispers. Now and then they glance down the table at Old Jack, but covertly, so as not to violate their pretense that they are unaware of his presence. As their glances at him show, their exchange of womanly confidences is a little thrilled at its surreptitious occurrence in the presence of the old man.
Old Jack is still eating. He has heaped his plate full for the second time, and has no more than half finished it. He eats with the forthright assistance of his left thumb, with a great wielding of his elbows. Whatever the old ladies say to each other at mealtimes, it always has a tacit reference to the old man's table manners. At the moment there is a trickle of gravy on its way down his chin; sooner or later, they know, ignoring his napkin, he will wipe it off on his sleeve.
Mrs. Hendrick is standing just out of reach of his left elbow She is holding out, vaguely in his direction, a nearly empty meat platter. She has been standing there for a full minute, waiting for him to notice her, her face set in a twist of impatience. Jack continues to eat, concentrating on the space between his plate and his mouth.
She pokes the plate at him. "Do you want any more of this meat, Mr. Beechum?"
"Naw'm," Jack says. "You can take that away, Suzy. I'm done with it."
Mrs. Hendrick's name is not Suzy. None of the three women is named Suzy. But Old Jack simplifies matters by calling them all Suzy.
One of the old ladies giggles in confidential outrage at the other.
Mrs. Hendrick makes hard rapid tracks to the kitchen with the meat platter. She comes back and scrapes up the old ladies' dishes and her own, and carries them to the kitchen. Her steps peck brittlely back and forth over the floor. She brings in the coffee pot and fills the triangle of cups at the ladies' end of the table and sits down again. She passes the sugar and cream to her lady boarders.
Old Jack finishes eating and pushes back his plate. Mrs. Hendrick gets up and hustles around the table, her heels again picking out the thin hard code of her martyrdom. Sometimes she gets furious at Mr. Hendrick for having died and left her alone, and poor, and dependent on these distresses. She brushes Old jack's crumbs into his plate and takes it out to the kitchen. She pours his coffee and sets the cream and sugar by him, and goes back to her place.
The old man scoops in three heaping spoonfuls of sugar and pours in cream until his cup fills to the brim. He stirs, slopping the coffee out into the saucer. Holding cup and saucer unsteadily in his big hands, he pours the saucer full, and blows on it and drinks. He finishes the coffee in five saucerings, rapidly, with a loud mixture of breathing and blowing and guzzling, and gets up, scraping his chair backwards, scrubbing his mouth on his coat sleeve. He unhooks his cane from the corner of the table.
He looks at Mrs. Hendrick and gives her a large smile. There is a blunt obtrusive kindness in his expression, utterly unaware of the displeasure that she has been at such pains to make obvious.
"I thank you, Suzy. And good night to you."
He turns and goes, walking heavily the length of the dining room and out the door, leaving his chair pushed back at an angle from the table.
Jack's departure, as far as the two old ladies are concerned, is as disturbing as his presence. His leave-taking is absolute. The turning of his back completely dismisses the entire circumstance of the meal and its company-themselves. He bears away from the table a filled belly, but beyond that not a thought. The set of his head and shoulders, the momentous stomping and hobbling of his gait, suggest that he has never looked behind him in his life. He seems to participate unequivocally in the continuing deaths and completions of things. His knowledge is as forthright as his hunger. He speaks of the approach of his own death as much as a matter of fact as he speaks of the approach of Tuesday. He accomplishes everything as if he is both aware and willing that every breath he draws will be the last of its kind. To the old ladies there is something obscene in it. They exchange a series of self-conscious glances-as after a near stroke of lightning.
At each end of the hall a bulb the size of a walnut gives a thin weak light shadowing the offsets of the doorways. Into the half-dark of the hall the rooms exhale the cold musk of emptiness. Jack goes into his room, leaving the door open so that a little light drains in from the hall. He feels his way to the light switch, and turns it on. The room contains only an iron bed, a tall bare-topped chiffonier with a peeling oval mirror, a large rocking chair. That the bed is made up is the only sign that the room is lived in. Old Jack's coming has changed nothing.
He shoves the rocking chair over to the window and hooks his cane over the arm of it and sits down. He leans back.
The room contains his sleep. It is there, waiting for him, folded in the iron bed. But he has to prepare for it. He has to get his mind ready for it beforehand. In the last few years, since he has become too old to work, he has slept a light short sleep. A sleep too easy to wake up from-his mind is always just barely submerged under it, as though he is looking up at light through an obscuring thin film of water. Unless he is careful he will wake up in the night and think of his fears.
Most of all he is afraid that before he dies he will be sick and unable to attend to himself. Death does not worry him so much. He has no time for the solemnity usually attributed to it, but it is a fact, at least, and can be considered and dealt with. He thinks of dying as a kind of job that will have to be done, and, as he tells Wheeler Catlett, he can do it. But the thought of sickness makes him afraid. He fears living on past sickness into dependence on other people. He dislikes the uncertainty of these thoughts. He has lived all his life loving solid objects, things he could hook onto with his hands and pull. He has loved to feel in his hands the thrown-back weight of his body.
Other times he will wake up thinking of the imperfections of his life. He will lie there, remembering his mistakes and stupidities and errors of judgment, furious at himself, furious and sickened at the impossibility of correcting the past. These recollections return to him like old pains. And once they start they come at him one after another. They are worse than nightmares; he cannot wake up from them, and he cannot go back to sleep.
And so he sits up by his window each night, waiting to need to sleep. He waits to go to bed until he feels he can trust his sleep to last until morning.
He goes to bed a good deal later now than he used to. But he has kept his old habit of getting up early. Long before dawn these winter mornings he will be out of bed and wide awake. After he puts on his clothes he draws the covers back over the bed. And then he turns out the light and feels his way to the rocking chair and sits down. When daylight comes he will be there at the window, waiting for it.
A single set of footsteps goes along the walk in front of the hotel, and farther down the street somebody is talking loudly in front of one of the stores. A door slams somewhere off in the town. Below him in the kitchen Mrs. Hendrick is rattling the supper dishes.
Up the street he can see lights in Mat Feltner's house. Wheeler Catlett is there for supper, he remembers. For a few minutes he considers going over to Mat's to pay a visit and talk to Wheeler. He thinks a lot of Wheeler-admires him, in fact, a good deal more than he aims to let him know. He imagines going in and sitting down and talking a while with Wheeler and Mat. They are fine men, and have good heads on them. And he would like to see Wheeler's little boys. Wheeler has taught his sons to call the old man "Unde Jack."
"Uncle Jack," the littlest one said, "you've got tobacco juice on your shirt." That tickled Jack. And Wheeler's embarrassment tickled him even more. That littlest boy of Wheeler's would walk right up and tell Franklin D. Roosevelt he had tobacco juice on his shirt. Old Jack's face creases into the shape of a large laugh, and he snorts. He thinks a lot of those boys of Wheeler's. Every Christmas he buys a little something to give them. Wheeler appreciates that.
He would like to hear Wheeler say something about the war. Jack stays troubled about the war. There is too much dying. Too many young men dying. He mistrusts what he reads in the papers. The war is more serious, it seems to him, than the papers make it out to be.
It may be necessary to use up the lives of young men; Jack will agree to that. He has no liking for defeat. But after a choice has had to be made between terrible sacrifice and terrible defeat, it is a time of mourning.
The newspapers add up the deaths of young men as if they were some kind of loan, an investment in something.
What is dead is gone.
He reaches into the bib pocket of his overalls and takes out a small notebook in which there is a carefully folded newspaper picture of the President. He opens the picture and looks at it. The President sits there behind his great desk. His eyes look direct and straight out of the picture so that they seem to focus on Old Jack.
The President's face is sober and tired, sorrowful. The strain of the war shows in it, the burden of knowing of so many deaths. It would take a lot of strength to know so much.
A great man, with a powerful head on his shoulders.
Jack thinks how it would be to sit in Mat Feltner's living room, and talk with Mat and Wheeler and Franklin Roosevelt. It would be brilliant.
"Mr. President," Wheeler says, "how much longer do you think it'll last?"
"I don't know." The President looks straight at Wheeler. "It's a hard proposition. We'll have to fight them until they quit."
That's a responsible answer, Jack thinks. He has to say so. "That's right," he says. "Go to it. By God, we're for you, sir."
"Thank you, my friend," the President says.
It is too late, now, to go over to Mat's. They would not be expecting him. He will see Wheeler later in the week, anyhow.
Saturday afternoon, or maybe Friday, the two of them will drive out to spend a couple of hours or so seeing to things on Old Jack's farm. And then maybe they will go on over to Wheeler's daddy's place, as they do sometimes, and visit a while there. Or go somewhere to look at a farm that Wheeler will be thinking of buying-and spend a while pointing out and describing to each other what could be done by way of improvement. Or maybe-it could be any day-Wheeler will have a case to try in one of the counties upriver, and will stop by and pick up Old Jack and take him along. They usually ride all the way to the courthouse without talking much, Wheeler's briefcase and maybe a law book or two on the seat between them. There's too much going on inside of Wheeler then. It is as if, while they are on the way to the trial, Wheeler's mind and his nerves are drawing down like the spring of a steel trap. And with Wheeler-who, in Old Jack's opinion, has a mind like a steel trap-that is a mighty formidable thing to see happening. Because once he stands up in one of those courtrooms, with the judge and the jury and the opposing lawyer and the plaintiff and the defendant and the crowd of courthouse regulars and loafers and idle farmers and the framed portraits of four or five generations of judges all looking at him, Wheeler's intelligence shines. Whether he wins or loses, Wheeler shines, Old Jack can see that. Every point Wheeler makes has the clean sound to it of a good axe chopping into a locust stump. And Old Jack, in his seat in the back of the room, says `Ah!" On the way home, after Wheeler has got limbered up and relaxed a little, Old Jack will slap him on the knee and tell him: "You're all right, son. You've got a powerful head, and that's fine. Mighty fine."
He folds up the President's picture and puts it back. He thumbs through the notebook until he finds a clean page; and then he takes a short pencil out of his pocket, and begins to write down a column of figures.
That pocket in the bib of his overalls is Old Jack's place of business. That is where he keeps his old silver pocket watch and his notebook and pencil; he tells Wheeler he uses the pocket to hold what he has got left of his mind. He and Wheeler both know that he's still got a shrewd head on his shoulders, but they let on as if he would have no mind at all if he had no pocket to put it in.
It is true enough that the old man no longer has any memory for figures. And all h
is accounts and receipts are kept in a file in Wheeler Catlett's office in Hargrave. He does his figuring in the notebook by guess, estimating and imagining what he cannot remember or never knew, and coming up invariably with a monstrous error in the result. But he has the habit of figuring, and so he figures, night after night, sitting by himself in his room, chewing furiously at his cud of tobacco, his imagination freewheeling among wishes and guesses, going up one side and down the other of what he presumes to be his farm accounts.
This is his farming, the remnant of habit and fascination from his life's work, which he claims he has died out of now, all except his mind. He relishes his ciphering. The figures come into his mind smelling of barns and grain bins and tobacco and livestock. His figures grunt and bleat and bray and bawl. This is the passion that has worn him out, and made him old, and is still a passion. As he labors over it, the notebook becomes as substantial in his hands as a loaded shovel.
Scratching and stabbing with the pencil, he makes a column of figures representing his guesses as to what his earnings have been since the first of the year, and his predictions of what he will have earned by the year's end. Beside that column he makes another, guessing and predicting his expenses. He adds both columns, and subtracts expenses from earnings. If the margin of profit strikes him as too small he begins again, and repeats the operation, increasing the earnings and economizing on the expenses, until he comes up with a figure that suits him. The next night he does the same thing, disregarding all the figures he has already made. And then, while they make their weekly drive out to the farm, he reads off his latest figures to Wheeler.
"No, Jack," Wheeler says. "You can't make that much."
And then they have an argument. Old Jack argues. And then Wheeler argues. And when Wheeler stops the car in front of the barn they both figure in the notebook.