A Place in Time Page 8

  After he left home, Tom raised a little crop and worked by the day for some people by the name of Whitlow. He proved satisfactory, and things went well until Mr. Whitlow died in the summer of 1940. Tom stayed on, finishing the crop and his year’s work after the farm was sold and Mrs. Whitlow settled with her daughter in town. And then he got word that Ernest Russet, who was looking for a good young man, wanted to talk to him.

  Tom had the reputation of a prime hand, and he was respected for his industry and honesty. He had come up under good teachers, his grandfather and father and uncle, who had taught him from before the time when he knew he was learning. By 1941, when he was nineteen, he was not only a good hand but also a good farmer, a young man with initiative and judgment, fully in charge of himself, needing and eager to know what Ernest Russet could teach him, yet needing no boss. To his elders he was a boy who had come to be honored as a man, and was said to be “promising.”

  He had the benefit of a proper upbringing too, as Naomi Russet soon was pleased to say. He accommodated himself considerately and quietly to the Russet’s life and household. He quickly learned their ways and the ways of the farm. He needed less and less to be told what to do. Beyond his instructions and duties, he looked for ways to be useful, doing on his own various jobs the Russets had not yet thought to ask him to do, and some that they would not have asked him to do. He sometimes accompanied them on their trips to Sycamore or the county seat, and he was always with them when they came to church. Sometimes on Saturday nights he would find a ride to Hargrave, which was the seat and commercial center of his home county, and which was widely known as a “Saturday night town.” He could be fairly sure of seeing his brother there, and perhaps his uncle too. And though the Russets never asked, they assumed he knew girls whom he would see there. He did not go too often, and he did not stay too late. His handsomeness, which was considerable, involved not just his looks but also an emanation, an almost visible luster, of intelligent, exuberant strength.

  There was a day in the late spring when his brother and uncle came to see him. They were invited to dinner on a Sunday when, as it happened, the Russets were feeding the preacher, and so Laura did meet the storied Burley Coulter, who was, as promised, in a class by himself. He was then in his forty-sixth year. The marks of time and weather were on him and his hair was gray, though he was still a man unusually attractive, which he seemed to know both frankly and modestly. Though he carried a muchabused felt hat in his hand and his blue suit shone with wear at points of stress, he had made himself presentable for what he clearly thought an important occasion. And on this occasion his obvious gift for sociability wore a sort of patina of formality. He was being conscientiously correct for the sake of his nephews. And yet when he was introduced to Laura he gave her an openly appraising look, which communicated both a compliment and his amusement that she had caught the compliment and liked it. She offered her hand. With fine discrimination he shook it almost too long, and she laughed.

  Nathan Coulter, who had driven them over in his father’s much-muddied automobile, seemed younger than his brother by more than the two years between them. He was a nice boy, in looks a little dreamy perhaps, and by nature much quieter than Tom, though obviously a product of the same teaching and upbringing. To everybody’s relief, the group of them went together fine, as Ernest Russet later said. It was at first a pleasant and then a happy meal, at which much was eaten in verification of the many praises that were passed over the food. And afterward, to the Russets and the Milbys, it seemed that their acquaintance with Tom Coulter had been enlarged and even lengthened. They knew him better, from farther back, than before.

  By the fall of that year two changes had come about that, in Laura’s mind, had assumed the standing of facts, and facts moreover that she pretty well understood: The Russets had come to love Tom Coulter as the son they had longed for but never had, and Tom Coulter had come to love Laura Milby as a young man loves a woman forever beyond his hope.

  The first of these facts may not yet have come into speech between the two Russets, but Williams and Laura, who had watched it happening, had talked of it, and to them it was merely obvious. On the one hand there was an absence long unfilled, and on the other hand, now, a presence that might exactly fill it. They thought it only a matter of time, another year perhaps, until the beautiful farm would have its designated heir. “That Tom,” Ernest Russet said, “he’s a born stockman if ever there was one.”

  The second fact was known only to Laura herself. If it was plain to her, it was in no general way obvious. Tom was not forward. In the presence of women, even of Naomi Russet, he was somewhat shy. But when he looked at Laura and looked away, his face was marked by a thought she recognized. That he wished to be near her she knew, because when it was possible for him to be near her he would be, though then he would hold himself a little apart and look away. And when, at the Russets’ or at church, there was something that could be done for her, something such as a load to be carried, he would be first to see it, for he would be watching, and he would do for her what needed to be done. But even without these visible signs, it seemed to Laura that she would have known his feeling for her by the mere force of it passing to her through the air.

  And she knew fairly well what to make of it and how seriously to take it. She was then twenty-five years old and in the fourth year of her marriage. In her thoughtful way she had parsed out the kinds of love and its changes. There was love as mere attraction, mere feeling, not of which as a girl she had known enough of the power and the giddiness. By now she had seen how such love could gather knowledge to itself and become different, and how it was changed again, profoundly this time, when it made the solemn offer of trust and submitted to vows. Love and trust, that vow “until death,” had carried Laura and Williams into an abyss of sorts, lighted only by the light they could find within and between themselves. They were passing on and on into the unknown life of plighted love. Behind them, committed and unchangeable, was the history of their love, which was changing it and would change it.

  She necessarily regarded this love of Tom’s as young, younger by far than any love of hers would ever be again. And yet, though she could not return it in kind, she was moved by it. She granted a certain respect to it. She saw moreover that, as it was unaskingly given, it was a gift to be honored, and she did honor it. She would not withhold from it even the name of love, for all love must begin without knowledge. Perhaps, as she thought, it is itself a kind of knowledge.

  At that time there already was war in Europe and war in Asia. Though war had not, so to speak, yet shown itself above the horizon around Sycamore, neither was it any longer ignorable. To the ones who were living there in those days, war had become a thinkable possibility, a premonition, like a distant mutter of thunder on a clear day.

  And then after the seventh of December 1941, war was present among them. Around Sycamore it was as if the people had turned away from the distant thunder, distracted from it by their workaday lives, and had turned back again to find a black cloud covering half the sky. As the magnitude of the opposing forces became manifest to her, it seemed to Laura that the whole sky darkened, and an unsourced light illuminated creatures and objects on all sides so that they stood out in sharp relief against the darkness. The young men in particular looked to her that way. Tom Coulter looked that way to her, as if a dark fate was gathering around him, and he was lighted, not by daylight at all, but by his own small life shining within him.

  The realization grew upon them all that everything would be changed. No life would be immune. No life now would be changed merely by time and mortality. Now history was outrunning time.

  January came. Though the lengthening of the days was hardly apparent so far, it was felt. The year was beginning. On the floor of Ernest Russet’s tobacco barn, now partitioned and bedded and furnished with mangers, the lambs of the new year were being born. Now the Russet household never completely slept. To give help to the laboring ewes when help was needed
, to save a wet newborn lamb from the cold, Ernest or Tom would be going to the barn by turns all through the nights, sometimes staying for hours, busy with a difficult birth or a weak lamb, or just sitting and waiting, warming their hands over the lighted lantern between their feet.

  At that time knowledge, fear, and sorrow were descending also upon the Russets. For them, the great fact of the war was coming to bear with a singular pointedness upon what was now their dearest hope. The war, as they had tried not to know but nonetheless knew, was going to require Tom Coulter. It would take him away. That it would destroy him they did not yet know, but they knew it could destroy him. Knowledge had begun to shudder in their hearts. The change that was coming had already begun to come, and they felt themselves impaired.

  On a Sunday near the end of the month, when the Milbys again came for dinner, sorrow was in the air undeniably—partly because of the Russets’ palpable need to deny it. The effect of the presence of Williams Milby, the comforter, was to make grief evident. The Russets were smiling and genial as usual, but there came relentlessly a moment when Naomi lifted a corner of her apron to wipe an eye, and when Ernest, seeing her do that, stopped twice in the midst of a story to clear his throat.

  As soon as the meal was over, according to her custom at such times, Laura excused herself and left the table. She put on her warm overcoat and scarf, her gloves and galoshes, and began one of her solitary walks, leaving the old ones in their sorrow, Tom in his embarrassment, Williams in his helpless standing by that was yet a comfort.

  Her departure had its usual excuse of discretion; Williams was the needed one, not her. But today, as she knew and told herself, there was cowardice in it too. She did not want to bear what in that house that day was to be borne. The place, which normally would have seemed to welcome her, today seemed to exclude her. She felt its indifference to whatever might happen in it. Its quietness, as if waiting or expectant, which usually would have comforted her, she felt now as indifference.

  Though it did not comfort her, she continued her walk for some distance, going as far as the little stream under the sycamores, which was flowing too full to cross by stepping stones, and then turning back toward the barns.

  The tobacco barn, now the lambing barn, opened front and back into two pastures. In the pasture behind it were the ewes whose lambs were now safely born and strong; in the smaller pasture in front were the ewes still to lamb. Laura walked up the long slope among the ewes with their new lambs, and here she felt a kind of pleasure at last. Here was a small success, even a small triumph, of the kind the world most dependably allows. The ewes moved out of her way as she passed, their lambs following. She walked to the wide-open doorway and went into the barn.

  When she had blinked away the outdoor brightness, she saw Tom busy by the row of lambing pens along one wall.

  “Hello,” she said.

  He answered, “Hello.”

  The barn no doubt had needed to be visited, but no doubt also, like her, he had welcomed an excuse to leave the house. She felt then how strongly his life claimed him, how he needed for his place and being the whole outdoors.

  She went to the row of pens. In the second one a ewe was nuzzling and muttering to a lamb as it stood unsteadily to nurse. Almost at her feet her suckling lamb’s twin lay on the straw, still slimed and bloody from its birth, marvelously formed to live, except that it was dead and now to the ewe a thing of no importance.

  “I should have got that out of there,” Tom said.

  “No,” she said. “It’s all right.”

  He had lifted from a nearby pen an orphan lamb and was holding it, its long legs dangling, in one hand, a nippled bottle of cow’s milk in the other.

  And suddenly she was filled with knowledge of him that was like love, or was love. In him, as he stood before her then, she saw the ancient unthanked care of shepherds. The sheep merely suffered what was to be suffered, living the given life, dying the given death. They did not ask for care or appreciate it when they received it. And yet the care was given. The flocks throve by no care commensurate with a price, but by an overplus of love, filling a known need in the shepherd, passionate and beyond memory old.

  What Laura said then she said as if merely in answer: “You’re in love, aren’t you?”

  He gave back her look. He grinned. She could see the boy in him then—the boy, anyhow, that he had been not long ago.

  “I thought you knew it,” he said. “I didn’t look for you to say so.”

  She said, “I would like to thank you.”

  Their held gaze seemed then to be one thing to which their two beings were for the moment incidental. It was a moment that had to pass. And it did pass. Time carried them from the moment before to the moment after.

  She smiled. “I don’t think we’ll talk of this again.”

  He nodded, and the boy he had been was nowhere near him now. “No. We won’t again.”

  There was in fact no more to say. Because they said no more, for the rest of his life, which would not be long, she shone in his mind as she had been that day: “I would like to thank you.” And to the end of her own long life she was grateful to him because with his young heart, never old, he had loved her.

  Misery (1943)

  The house where my father’s parents, Dorie and Marce Catlett, spent their long marriage was not a happy one, though I was often happy in it. It was regulated by the seasonal order of all farmhouses of its time and shared in the comeliness of that order. Even so, it was not a happy house because my grandparents’ marriage had been so often a collision of wills. Opposites attract, but this can be so only within limits, and Grandma and Grandpa’s story had the contending themes of attraction and conflict.

  To all of us younger ones in the family and some who were not in it, Grandpa in his old age referred to Grandma as “your mammy,” thus acknowledging their fundamental difference: She, and not he, had borne their two sons, a fact that he held in awe. This was the honest, insoluble awe of a livestockman and farmer who had been preoccupied all his life with the fecundity of the world. She had borne their children, had suffered their births—and how far this set her apart from him! But in telling of a time he went to see her during their courtship, a time he returned to often in his last years, he would conclude, “And your mammy came out to meet me—the prettiest formed little thing.” He would gaze away, seeing her again as she was, and again he would be moved. “Ay Lord!” Thus he acknowledged the attraction.

  It had been mutual. She had thought him in those early days “the best-looking man on the back of a horse that ever I saw.” In the first years of their marriage she would hear him away in the distance, calling the cattle. His call was beautiful, and she would think, “Oh, that such a voice should ever cease!” He remained a good-looking man on the back of a horse almost to the end of his days. Grandma came to take that as much for granted as he did. That he was as he was she saw as a condition of her life, and their fundamental difference, the difference of dam and sire, grew between them.

  There were other differences, some issuing from that primary one, some that were differences of character.

  Grandpa, burdened as he was by things as they were, suffering as he had and did from the circumstances of this world, accepted them nevertheless with the finality of a tragedian. This was in no sense “stoical,” for he was a passionate man, but was simply a disposition to see the world as a matter of fact. The deity he most spoke of he called “Old Marster,” and this was a world-making, weather-making, fate-making deity, not effectively to be pled with, who revealed his purposes by what happened.

  Though she faced with equal candor the things that were, Grandma resisted and protested. Some things that were should not have been. I don’t think Grandma ever reconciled herself to mortality—or, for that matter, to humanity. Her mourning of her losses, which were ever on her mind, always involved an unrelenting objection. She objected to growing old, which she felt as a wrong imposed upon her. “Oh, Andy,” she would say to me,
“it’s awful to get old,” and she said this, I felt, pitying not only herself but also the old man that I would one day be. Of humanity in general she was skeptical. She had a few favorites, of whom I was one, but even of those she could be suddenly and peremptorily dismissive, unsurprised at any outrage they might commit.

  And yet, going wide of Christian charity and forgiveness as she sometimes did, she adhered to her church and served it. She was one of the pillars of the little white clapboard Bird’s Branch Church, to which Grandpa did not adhere and of which he was not a pillar. Like, I believe, a good many others of his kind, who like him deferred to Old Marster in their ultimate unknowing, Grandpa felt excluded, and perhaps according to doctrines made to exclude him and his likes. And so religion had come between them. Grandpa told me once in the presence of Grandma, and for her benefit, that he was thinking of buying the church and tearing it down. This was a joke surely, and just as surely a provocation, a blow dealt in an established conflict.

  Grandma replied, “Yes. I reckon you would.”

  Her domain was the house and household, the domestic economy. The house, in the course of her time with Grandpa, had been under the influence of hard times from the depression of the 1890s to that of the 1930s, and it bore everywhere the signs and marks of economic constraint. Until well on in my childhood, when the electric lines and our brief heyday of cheap fossil fuels finally reached it, the most modern thing in it was the coal oil stove sometimes used for cooking in hot weather.

  The matching set of furniture in the dining room was of oak and oak veneer, not fine. That room was heated only by a grated fireplace, was mostly unused, and smelled unforgettably of the spices and brown sugar that Grandma kept in the sideboard. The parlor, also rarely used, offered the luxuries of a sofa and easy chair identically upholstered, an upright piano, and a glass-fronted bookcase containing a collection mainly of old textbooks and old popular novels. Except for that in the dining room, all the furniture in the house—even in the parlor, with its air of determined and deserted refinement—had a way of being mismatched. There were a few truly fine old pieces, perhaps left over from the time of Grandpa’s parents, but those were odds and ends along with the rest, not so fine, that appeared to have been acquired randomly, a piece at a time, from hard telling where. Except in the parlor, the floor coverings were of linoleum, with a few worn scatter rugs. There was a general character of make-do. And yet the house afforded the common luxuries of deep feather beds that made for delicious sleeping on winter nights, and a wealth of good food, nearly all of which came from the place.