A Place on Earth

  "Uncle Stanley hasn't wintered too well," Big Ellis says.

  "He says he won't be around many more winters."

  "Did he say that?"

  "He said he can't stand many more like this last one."

  Burley turns to Uncle Stanley and raises his voice:

  "I expect the old boy'll be around a long time yet. Bothering the women. How about it, Uncle Stan, can you still take up on the bit?"

  `Aw, ain't no good at all, Burley. Them days are gone."

  Jayber tilts the chair back, and begins lathering Big Ellis's face.

  Now that he has regained his audience, Uncle Stanley goes into a long reminiscence of his younger days-his dog days, he calls them. And winds up:

  "Oh lordy lordy lordy lordy. But not anymore."

  "That's not what I heard, Uncle Stanley," Big Ellis says. "Some of them was telling me about you." He laughs and looks over his stomach at Burley. "Said they seen a bunch of young girls walk past Uncle Stanley's house a Saturday or two ago, and there was Uncle Stanley marching up and down the top of that road bank, nickering like a stud horse, and that cane just whirling."

  He looks up over his stomach at Uncle Stanley, who is pleased out of his mind, and then drops his head back and laughs, splattering white flecks of lather up into the air over his face.

  "You'd better be still," Jayber tells him, "unless you want your throat cut."

  But Big Ellis is so tickled now at the picture he has made of Uncle Stanley that Jayber, laughing too in spite of himself, has to wait again.

  As soon as Big Ellis finishes laughing he is immediately sorry to have made fun of the old man. And so now he will try to make up for it: "I saw Billy when he came over today, Uncle Stan."

  Uncle Stanley wants to hear that again, clear. He leans over and puts his hand behind his ear.

  "Says which?"

  "I saw Billy when he came over in his airplane. He came right over my barn and then on over to Grover's place."

  That's all it takes. That's the word. Billy! If Billy ever so much as hinted that he would like to bomb his grandfather's house, Uncle Stanley would get right up and walk out, and stand on the other side of the road with his hat over his heart and watch him do it. It seems to him that he and Grover and all their forebears back to Adam have lived only for these minutes when their Billy comes roaring over the town in his bomber. He dreams of this brilliant young man leaning his head and elbow out the window of his huge flying machine, swooping like a hen hawk over all the little towns of the world-majestic and glorious as a railroad engineer and the Archangel Michael rolled into one.

  "Yes sir! By dab, by grab, God durn, I seen him myself."

  He goes out the door on the crest of his wave.

  And they resume.

  "That old boy of Grover's didn't have brains enough to hold his ears apart, did he?"

  `Aw, they've educated him since he got to flying."

  "They may have trained him. They haven't educated him."

  They laugh, and then Big Ellis, his voice so gentle and generous as to allow even Billy Gibbs a place on earth and in Port William, says: "Well, a fellow ought to think the best he can of a fellow oughtn't he? Old Billy, he was a little chuckleheaded and wild, but that's just a boy, ain't it?"

  Suddenly-whether because Big Ellis said "was," or because his words recovered Billy Gibbs himself, their neighbor and fellow man-suddenly the war is around them again, as though it has come up in the dark to crowd the walls of the little room. They become silent. And a thought runs among them like a path, and joins them and divides them: What if he dies? What if he is sent away tomorrow and never comes back?

  And now they feel the raw night leaning against the lighted small room, and they know with a terrible certainty that one will not explain the other. In this dimly lighted place they sit divided, filled with thoughts of struggle and of darkness. They contemplate the death of Billy Gibbs, as though it already exists and awaits him.

  Mat Feltner comes in blinking from the dark street, and stands at the stove. They greet him, and he replies. He unbuttons his coat and pushes his hat back off his forehead.

  "Nathan gone back, Burley?" Big Ellis asks.

  "This afternoon."

  "He was over to see Annie May and me the other day. We appreciated it. They're going to send him back across the water, ain't they?"

  "He thought they might. He didn't know."

  "That's a long way from home. Fellow like me wouldn't know what to do there, even if there wasn't a war. But I reckon a young man like Nathan, he'll do all right, won't he? Told me he was even learning to talk like them."

  "Yeah. I guess in a way it's giving him a lot of chances."

  "Take a fellow like me and put him across the river, and I'm lost. Ain't you?"

  Jayber finishes shaving Big Ellis and sets up the chair, and turns it so Big Ellis can see himself in the mirror.

  "How's that?"

  "I wish I'd been born rich in place of pretty. What I owe you, Jayber?"

  "Sixty cents."

  "Is that double?"

  "That's half-price."

  "I'll match you for it."

  "You match me. All right."

  Each of them flips a coin and slaps it down onto an arm of the barber chair.

  "Heads."

  "Heads it is. Keep your money."

  "Naw, I'm going to pay you anyhow. "

  "Why, I'm not going to take your money. You won."

  "That don't matter. I want you to take the money. Come on, Jayber. I just done that for a joke."

  Big Ellis's world is turning slowly upside down. For the sake of friend liness and fun, he is persistently in and out of trifling wagers on the fall of a coin or the length of something or the weight of something. `A fellow has to have a little sport, don't he? A little fun?" But he never means to win.

  Big Ellis tramps along with the coins held out in his open hand, backing Jayber around the barber chair.

  "Take your money and go on."

  `Ain't going to do it."

  And then Big Ellis, who would be a match for two like Jayber, picks him up by the waist and holds him and puts the money in his pocket. He takes his coat and hat, and goes out the door putting them on.

  "Good night to you fellows. Thank you, Jayber."

  And they hear him start his car and gun the engine, and the car lurch out onto the road.

  Jayber climbs back into the chair.

  They're silent a few minutes. As soon as they cease to talk they are surprised at how deep the silence is. Except for them the town is asleep. The light has gone out in Burgess's store. The silence in the little shop is also the silence of the town and of the whole dark countryside. In it the only living thing might be the fire stirring and breathing in the stove.

  Though his hands are warm, Mat holds them out into the heat over the stove.

  Jayber stretches and yawns, a long-drawn 0 with a grunt at the end.

  Burley asks, "What have you heard from Virgil, Mat?"

  It was coming. It was bound to come. He might be speaking out of a well, his voice sounds so strange to him: "He's missing. We had the notice today."

  He feels as though he has run to the edge of something and jumped.

  Burley and Jayber say nothing for a moment. But their silence turns toward him, and is an admission of the difficulty and insufficiency of what they will say.

  And then they say that they are sorry. Their concern touches him and, as though still falling, he feels himself caught in what they are saying, and hears the sound of his own voice speaking among their voices, becoming familiar again.

  He mentions what room he believes there still is for hope. He hopes.

  The others agree. So long as a man doesn't surely know, he has to hope. And that is more difficult than to know the worst surely.

  Burley knows that. It has been hard for him to free Tom's death from the hopeless hope that he may still be alive. So far away as he died, it is hard to quit hoping that it may be onl
y a long confusion and a mistake.

  Jayber sits quietly in his chair, keeping the shop open for them, their talk his gift. Finally, as the subject changes, he takes part again.

  The light has been out two hours in Milton Burgess's store. Mat and Burley hate to leave the lighted warm room and start home by themselves.

  Finally they have to.

  S

  Keeping Watch

  From the first week of January, when his lambs begin coming, until the end of bad weather, Mat keeps watch on the barns, seeing to the lambing of ewes and the calving of cows. Whatever is born will be born into his wakefulness and his care. He makes his first round in the dark of the mornings, his last at midnight. He is out of the house at night nearly as much as in the daytime. The smell of the barns stays in his clothes. In the dead of winter, in the time of the long sleeping of most things, he becomes more wakeful than ever.

  It is a weary time. The days will string together for weeks in a row, never divided by enough sleep. There are freezing nights when his feet break through a crust of ice into the mud on his first round after supper, and on his last round the tracked mud and manure at the barn door are frozen hard. There are thawing nights of heavy rain when he walks ankle-deep in mud, and nights of snow when the tracks he made going to the barn will be filled by the time he starts back. And there are nights sometimes when there will be a difficult birth, and he has to wake Joe Banion to help him, and the two of them work on into the second half of the night, their hands chilled and numbed by the birth-wet, their feet stinging in their shoes.

  In the winter the country sleeps, withdrawn from summer. And Mat, in his growing weariness, will be aware of that rest. Sometimes his head will fall forward and for a few minutes he will sleep an oblivious sleep, at the table after a meal, or sitting in his chair in the living room.

  From nightfall until midnight his weariness seems to grow less, and he sits with the family in the living room and talks until the others go to bed. And then he has the quiet to himself, and he sits by the fire, reading or figuring or planning, passing the time between his rounds. This is the easiest and pleasantest time of his day, and the most precious to him. Going his night rounds, walking among the barns and the animals in the light of the lantern, the weather and the moon working their changes, he hungers for the births and lives of his animals, as though the life of his place must be held up by him, like something newborn, until the warm long days will come again and the pastures begin to grow.

  In spite of the difficulty and weariness, be goes about his work with greater interest and excitement than at any other time of the year. This is the crisis of increase-what he was born to, and what he chose. When he has made sure of the life of whatever is newborn-when he has done, at any rate, all that can be done-he is at peace with himself. His labor has been his necessity and his desire.

  The Sheep Barn

  Mat goes up the hill, walking in the room of light the lantern makes. The ground appears to dip and waver under the swinging light, and every track is filled with shadow. Beyond the light of the lantern he can see nothing. He goes now as by the inward pattern and usage of his life.

  He comes to the fan of tracked mud in front of the barn and, raising the lantern, picks his way to the doors, and slides them open a little to let himself in. The sheep raise their heads and get up, but they are used to his coming and only step slowly out of his way as he moves among them. Shadows leap up around his light. As he moves the barn seems to sway and rise within itself. The ewes' breath smokes above their heads.

  In one of the back corners of the barn he finds an old ewe stretched on the bedding, her breath coming in grunts. She lifts her head to look at him, but makes no effort to get up. A newborn dead lamb is lying near her, not completely free of the birth sack. Mat knows that this second labor prevented her attending properly to the lamb she had already got born. He should have been here earlier. In spite of the circumstances of the day, he thinks with guilt of his failure. His mind has fallen short of its subject.

  But now the consequence requires his mind of him. Taking a piece of twine from his pocket, he ties the lantern to a tier rail above his head, and then brings a small hinged gate and pens the ewe into the corner where she is lying. He takes the dead lamb out of the pen and puts it by the doors so he will remember to carry it out. He beds the pen with fresh straw, making himself a clean work place. Already it begins to simplify. It is an act already complete in his mind that he goes about. There is no hesitation and no hurry in his movements. Where nature and instinct fail, he begins with his knowing. He desires the life of what is living. He requires the life of the body suffering to give birth and the life of the body suffering to be born. Nothing else is on his mind now.

  Moving gently and slowly, he straightens the lamb's head and forelegs, and delivers it, wet as a fish, into the air. He holds it up a moment-a limp, dangling thing-to make sure its nose is clear, and then touches it to the ground. It begins to struggle and to breathe. It comes tense and alive in his hand, wobbling its head, reaching down with its legs. It struggles against its weight, and breathes in the cold dung-smelling air.

  Mat feels a kind of magician's triumph. His trick is the trick of the life of a thing, almost as liable to fail as to succeed. His labor is a labor of joy whose joyfulness depends on this precarious result.

  He takes hold of the ewe and lifts her to her feet, and she remains upright, head hanging and dazed, loins caved. He carries the lamb to her flank and works the tit into its mouth. As soon as it takes hold and begins to suck he scratches its wet rump with his finger, in imitation of the way the ewe would normally lick and nudge. It becomes more eager, shaking its tail and butting weakly at the udder.

  Satisfaction comes into Mat, pressing up into his throat like laughter. Once the trick is set working, the longer it works the better it works. Its own strength and purpose come into it now, and he becomes less necessary to it.

  When he puts the lamb down the ewe turns to it and begins licking it, snuffling and bleating quietly and anxiously as she tends to it. Mat takes the lantern and a bucket and brings water from the well, and brings an armload of hay.

  He hangs the lantern overhead again, and sits down to watch. He is far from sleep now. He does not think of going back to the house. He holds himself and his thoughts near to these things that his work and care have made familiar again. He sits there on a bucket, his elbows resting on his knees, his hands clasped together, conscious only of the nearness of this place: the ewe and lamb in the lighted pen, the flock sleeping and stirring in the dark behind him, the cold night air on his face and hands.

  Part Two

  6

  A Dark Morning

  He wakes in the dark, unsure how long he has been asleep. He wakes without movement except for the opening of his eyes. For the moment he thinks of nothing. And then from the kitchen on the other side of the house he hears a footstep light and hard on the linoleum. He realizes with relief that he has slept all the way through the night. He reaches across the bed and feels the warmth where Margaret lay asleep minutes ago. The footstep in the kitchen is followed by the sound of the coffee pot scraping on the top of the stove, and by voices-Margaret's and Nettie Banion's. For a little while longer he lets himself lie quiet. As if by some movement of his mind during the night, the uneasiness of the day before has left him. It is as if without his will his mind has turned and opened toward the new day. There is, deep in him, an acceptance of time as persistent as time. He wakes on the rising of the morning. The future bears down, and as in hard times before he feels in himself the determination to let it come.

  He turns the covers back and gets up.

  A fuzzy paleness drifts into the room from the lighted doorway at the other end of the hall. He opens the shutters to close heavy darkness and the sound of rain coming down hard and steady onto the yard and the walk along the side of the house. It has been raining for some time; the sound is that of water striking water. He shivers at the sound and at
his apprehension of the wetness of the day. Under such a rain, he knows, the surface of the whole countryside will be a sheet of water moving down onto the loaded streams. He thinks with a kind of panic of how briskly, in a more seasonable year, he would have things moving by now, with the spring coming and the crops to get ready for. This season he will be beginning late, in loss. It rains into Virgil's absence. The sense of loss has carried his mind out of the house into the wind and rain over the soaked fields.

  A Difference Made

  By noon on Tuesday Virgil has disappeared from the knowledge of the whole town. The news has gone its rounds among the gathering places, and has quietly set the young man's life into the past tense of the town's consciousness. The town has begun to speak and think of him by the act of memory alone. To speak of him in the present tense becomes the private observance of his family-the enactment of their hope.

  Wherever Mat goes among the gatherings of his neighbors he feels himself surrounded by an embarrassment, which both he and they are powerless to relieve. Though he is troubled by this at first, it becomes understandable to him. Virgil's absence, which was once only an absence from the place, has become a vacancy in their minds. They are suddenly barred from the usual forms of politeness; they can no longer ask him about Virgil or offer him their greetings to be passed on. And so, except for the casual give and take of crop talk and weather talk, they have nothing to offer Mat but silence. He accepts this, and as time goes on he will accept it more and more gratefully.

  He is most sharply aware of this estrangement in his meetings with Frank Lathrop. In their long bearing of the absence of their sons, and their waiting, Mat has finally gone beyond what either of them had dared admit was possible. He has become the proof of what they most feared. The anticipation of loss that once bound them has been replaced by a reality of loss that divides them. In himself, Frank Lathrop is divided between a kind of shame at this inequality of fortune and a gratitude for it-neither of which he can acknowledge to himself, let alone to Mat.