A Place on Earth

  "Yessir! By grab, last thing I'd want to do is break in on a fellow's praying. I reckon there's plenty of need for it around here. I reckon I ought to know that. But I had to get that fire to going for the prayer meeting tonight. Take the damp outen this air." He laughs knowingly, slapping the preacher's knee again. "Take their mind off of their old bones while you say your say to 'em. We all got our calling. You got yours and I got mine. And we go about 'em and get along. Ain't that right, Preacher?"

  "That is so, Mr. Gibbs," Brother Preston says.

  A Knack for the Here

  March 9, 1945

  Dear Nathan,

  I've laid off to write to you every day for the last four, but it has been hard to get around to. I've been hoping for some good news to tell you. But none has happened.

  I was in the barbershop the night you left, and Mat Feltner was there and told us that Virgil is missing in action. I've been studying the last four days whether I ought to tell you about it or not. I know you'll be sorry to hear it, but my guess is you would want to know it anyhow He was a good boy.

  I talk like he's dead for certain, which there ain't any reason to believe yet. But in town I notice it's coming mighty easy to most to talk about Virgil as if missing means dead. You don't hear Virgil is. You hear Virgil was. It's understandable. It's simpler to go ahead and think the worst and get it over with, and hard for most people to hold out much for people they're no kin to. But Mat and them are holding out. I hand it to Mat. He's just himself, the way he always has been, as far as he's letting anybody see. He come up to this a man. And I reckon will go through it a man.

  I never been what you would call close to Mat. In spite of knowing him right onto fifty year. He hasn't been the kind you would need to worry about, for his sake or yours either. He has minded his business and stayed at his work. Has known his place, as they say. But the last four days he has been on my mind. I have the feeling that I'm holding out for him. In my mind I stick with him and hope his boy is alive. That's sympathy, I reckon. And we've come to it a hell of a way. By what has happened to us we're set apart kind of, and made to know each other.

  Wednesday afternoon, after the news had pretty well got around, I seen Brother Piston going in up there at Mat's. And I says to Jayber, "I know the speech he's going to make." And so would all of us. He come and said all that to me after we knew Tom was dead. And none of it quite fit. You could say that he didn't have too good of an idea who he was talking to. While he was having his say I sat there and thought my thoughts. Here in a way he'd come to say the last words over Tom. And what claim did he have to do it? He never done a day's work with us in his life, nor could have. He never did stand up in his ache and sweat and go down the row with us. He never tasted any of our sweat in the water jug. And I was thinking: Preacher, who are you to speak of Tom to me, who knew him, and knew the very smell of him?

  And there he sat in your grandaddy's chair, with his consolations and his old speech. Just putting our names in the blanks. And I thought: Preacher, he's dead, he's not here, and you'll never know what it is that's gone.

  The last words ought to say what it is that has died. The last words for Tom ain't in the letter from the government, and they won't be said by the preacher. They'll be said by you and me and the rest of us when we talk about our old times and laugh about the good happenings. They won't all be said as long as we live. I say that a man has got to deserve to speak of the life of another man and of the death of him.

  The difference between people is what has got to be taken notice of. There's the preacher who has what I reckon you would call a knack for the Hereafter. He's not much mixed with this world. As far as he's concerned there is no difference, or not much, between Tom Coulter and Virgil Feltner. Their names fit into the riddle he thinks he knows the answer to. I wouldn't try to say he ain't right. I do say that some people's knack is for the Here. Anyhow, that's the talent I'm stuck with. For us it's important to keep in mind who Tom was. And for Mat and them I judge it's important to know who is meant when they speak of Virgil. We don't forget them after somebody who never knew them has said "Dead in the service of his country" and "Rest in peace." That's not the way these accounts are kept. We don't rest in peace. The life of a good man who has died belongs to the people who cared about him, and ought to, and maybe itself is as much comfort as ought to be asked or offered. And surely the talk of a reunion in Heaven is thin comfort to people who need each other here as much as we do.

  I ain't saying I don't believe there's a Heaven. I surely do hope there is. That surely would pay off a lot of mortgages. But I do say it ain't easy to believe. And even while I hope for it, I've got to admit I'd rather go to Port William.

  As Jayber says, when we seen Brother Piston go in up at Mat's, the worst thing about preachers is they think they've got to say something whether anything can be said or not.

  Well, it's been raining right along since you left. The ground, you know, was soaked while you was here. So every drop that has fell has gone in the river. The river has got way up. It's into most of the bottoms. And the creeks are still running out big. And the radio says more to come.

  Night before last Anvil Brant sent word up here by his son-in-law that he had a sow and nine pigs he wanted to sell to me and your daddy. So yesterday morning we got in the pickup truck and went down. When we got there Anvil's wife said he was out to the barn. And we could see why. There Mrs. Anvil was with her children, and there was her and Anvil's oldest girl with her children, children and grandchildren looked like all running about the same age, and looked like four or five in each set, and all of them been fastened up there together since the rain commenced. And there was Mrs. Anvil, with her hair sticking out right stiff in several directions like a frozen floor mop, and one child sucking and one hanging onto her arm and one standing under her dress so you couldn't see nothing but its legs, standing there in pee smell strong enough to make your eyes water, slapping here and there and yelling at them all to be quiet, taking three or four minutes to tell us Anvil was down to the barn, anyhow she reckoned he was, she hadn't seen him since breakfast.

  We walked out that little rise the house and buildings are on, and found Anvil sitting in the back door of the barn. One of the older boys was there with him, and his dogs, and we could see right off that things weren't much more comforting at the barn than they were at the house. The river was up into the bottom there in back of the barn, and between there and the trees on the river bank was nothing but about three hundred yards of muddy water, with here and there a willow or a few dead horseweeds or a cornstalk sticking up out of it. And you just knew, as soon as you saw how things were, that Anvil had been coming out there to the barn every morning for the last three or four to watch it rain and watch it rise, and know he was doing nothing because there was nothing he could do. We went in the upper doors and walked down the driveway and spoke. I says, "How's it coming, Anvil?" "Up, by God," he says. I says, "How're you coming?" "Drownded out, by God," he says. "Britchies legs rotted off plumb to the knees." We sat there with him and the boy until nearly dinnertime and talked, none of us having anything better to do. And we wound up buying the sow and pigs. For more than they was worth. To your daddy's way of thinking, you don't what you would call trade with a man who is hurting. I know it has got hard for you to know your daddy, but he has that kind of rightness about him. He's very straight in his dealings.

  Anvil didn't figure the river would get into his house, but I expect it surely was in his barn by this morning. They say the Ohio has got into a few of the houses down at Hargrave. And the rain falling right on.

  March 10

  Still raining. Off and on all night, and pretty hard and steady since before day. When the rain lets up you can hear water running anywhere you stand. The mud is a foot deep around the barns here, and the barns are as wet inside as out. We put down a little dry bedding every night, but it gets tramped out of sight in a few minutes.

  Anyhow, it's raining and I've got nothi
ng to do for a while but sit here and write to you. Which I aim to do, because once the weather fairs up it won't be easy to find the time. I'm writing at the table by the front window in the living room. The rain coming down steady outside, and a good fire going in here. When I look back I don't see many wet weather mornings in my life when I've been sitting inside and doing something quiet. And in a way I wish there had been. I notice that every now and then I do something I wish I'd done more of, that I've lost a lot of chances for.

  I've quit minding to write as much as I did at first. When you boys was first in the army it give me some trouble. I don't reckon I'd wrote much more than my name for thirty years, and I did have an awful time trying to keep what I had to say inside of what I could spell. But finally it got so it come tolerably easy. I've got the habit of it now, and when I'm working or walking to town and soon, I think of a letter to you that says what's taking place. It's company for me.

  The weather is throwing us behind in our work. Every day we lose, the loss gets a little more on our minds. We've got plant beds to burn and ground to break and the barns to clean and so on and so on. When the weather does fair up things are going to break loose around here in a mighty hurry. I was thinking about it while I was eating breakfast, and kind of dreading it. You know how your daddy will come untied the first day the sun shines. He'll be just like a fox. One minute he'll be laying quiet, and the next minute in a dead run, and you'll have to look mighty quick to see the difference.

  There hasn't been many times this morning when you could see from here to the yard fence, but the rain has nearly quit now. A good deal more water in sight today than yesterday, so it must of rose considerably during the night. The bottoms are all under water as far as I can see in both directions. There's water from the foot of the hills on this side to the foot of the hills on the far side. Looks from here like the water is up to the window sills of the old Traveler house in the big bottom on the far side, and there's a car sitting in the front yard with just the roof and windows showing.

  Awful as it is, I have to say that a flood can be about as interesting to me as anything ever I run into. As soon as I see the backwater get into the bottoms I want to be out on it in a boat. You remember. And I finally did get around to it yesterday afternoon. I was in the barbershop toward the end of the morning, after I got done writing to you, and just happened to mention to Jayber that all morning it had been awfully easy for me to imagine that you could have some luck if you was to go fishing. And for some reason Jayber jumps right up and says "Let's go" -which he never did want to do before in his life. He turned around that old paper clock of his that says "Back at 6:30," and locked up, and we got a pound of cheese and a box of crackers from Milton Burgess, and went over the hill. I had my boat chained up on the porch of the old cabin, and the water was nearly up to the joists, so all we had to do was just roll her over and slide her into the river. About fifty foot from the porch we caught her in a long eddy and went just shooting up through the trees along the bank. We went over the road at the creek bridge, and across the backwater, and right on up into the big woods in the creek bottom. We tied the boat, and sat up there inside the woods and fished in the rain all afternoon. We are cheese and crackers and smoked and talked and caught fish.

  We carried what we caught back to town and fried them up atJayber's little living place over the barbershop. It's not but a little bit of a room, and he's got everything he needs fitted into it just perfect. And you never seen the like of books he's got up there. I've known Jayber mighty well for a long time, and I never knew he read books. But he tells me he's read some of them books as many as several times. Some of the authors was ones I'd heard of. You've got to hand it tojayber for the way he's held his learning and not let it go to his head. When he seen I was interested, Jayher told me that books has meant a lot to him, and there's some of them he puts a great deal of stock in.

  I thought about you all along while the good times lasted, and wished you was here. Afterwards, while I was walking home, I was thinking about you, and our old times fishing and keeping batch down on the river. I can remember whole conversations that we had back in those old times. Them was good times, I says to myself, and one of these days we'll have them again.

  Well, according to what they say I ought not to write you anything but cheerful news, and I see I've wrote little enough of that. There ain't but mighty little to be had around here right now, so it's hard to write much of it. Unless I lie. And I think I ought to save lying for when we need it worse. And I don't aim to ever start lying to you. If I lied to you who would I have for company then?

  I think a lot about you, and a lot of you.

  Your uncle,

  Burley

  Born a Idiot, Educated a Fool

  In the latter two-thirds of his life Mat Feltner's cousin Roger Merchant has memorialized his father as a cultivated and enlightened gentleman farmer-which Mat knows the old man never was, never thought of being, and would have refused to be if he had thought of it.

  The truth about old man Griffith Merchant is that he lived on his land like a blight, troubled only by the slowness with which it could be converted into cash, unable to see or care beyond his line fences. If Armageddon had blazed to those boundaries and stopped, he would have noticed it only to think that be had been rightly spared. But Roger"born a idiot," as his father once took occasion to remark, "and educated a fool"-has believed otherwise. By luck, defect, or determination, he has thought himself the descendent of gentleman farmers and one himself.

  He has lived by himself for forty years in the slowly collapsing house built by his grandfather, half log and half stone, on a point overlooking a wide creek valley to the south of Port William. The foundation under the log forepart of the house has been caved and splayed by groundhogs tunneling under it, and by dogs digging after the groundhogs. The yard- thickwalls of the stone L are buttressed by locust poles wedged at uneven angles against them. The house and outbuildings haven't been painted in half a century. Bees hive in the cornices. Maple seeds sprout knee-high in the gutters. A rambler rose has completely overgrown the steps and posts of the front porch, live runners threading heavy meshes of dead growth. In the garden, briars grow as high as the fence posts. The wall of an outbuilding near the garden fence has burst, spilling an avalanche of tin cans and bottles down the slope. The barn provides shelter, but no longer confinement, only for an old team of mules, kept to validate Roger's assertion that he has in his "latter years" restricted himself to "a little light fawming"-though there is not a complete set of harness for either of them on the place.

  In the last decade Roger has made a slow retreat from the opening cracks and leaks and bucking floors of the front rooms, and now lives entirely in the stone kitchen. That room is large and tall, in summer cool as a cellar and dim from the heavy shade of the maples in the yard. In the back of the room there used to be an enormous fireplace, now walled up and plastered, replaced by a tall, black cooking range. In a corner is an old kitchen cabinet whose doors customarily stand open, showing a supply of store-bought canned goods, mostly soups of various sorts, porkand-beans and Vienna sausages and sardines, boxes of crackers and cookies. A broad table, at which a numerous family or a crew of field hands might be fed, stands in the center of the room. The room is filled-all its horizontal surfaces littered and heaped-with plunder that Roger has salvaged from the front rooms as he has needed it: a walnut fourposter bed of excellent make, an outsize rocking chair, a half-dozen or so splitbottom chairs, a chamber pot, a grindstone, a hand-cranked Victrola, a five-shovel tobacco plow. Hanging from nails around the walls are various articles of clothing, a hat or two, a pair of fairly new half-swinny mule collars, a double-barreled shotgun, and a minnow seine. Against the chimney there is a pile of ear corn for the Dominecker hens that roost on the back porch.

  Surrounding this center, taking in ridge and bluff and creek valley, lie seven hundred acres of land, plundered by old Griffith Merchant in his lifetime, ignored by Rog
er in his. All the farming done on it now is done by tenants, who vary in number from two to four, and whom Roger may see three or four times a year. His only dealing with any of them is through an old lawyer in Hargrave, who arranges for their coming and going, and collects from them Roger's half of the proceeds from the sale of their crops. And the tenants, in turn, pester the lawyer in order to secure minimum supplies and to keep their houses and barns standing. Each of them raises a few acres of tobacco and corn, and is allowed to keep a few hogs or cows. Except for their shrinking islands of cropland, the place is overgrown with bushes and trees. Some of it Roger has never seen; much of it he has not seen since his boyhood; most of it, if taken to it, he would not recognize. In all his life he has built nothing, added nothing, repaired nothing. For twelve years Whacker Spradlin has kept him supplied with whiskey, making the seven-mile round-trip from his place to Roger's in all weather, as faithfully as the prophet's raven.

  When Roger drinks his aim is prostration. His fits of drunkenness extend to remarkable lengths. He has been known to go for months without getting out of bed except to answer what he calls "the physiological summons." He has been known to lie dormant through the coming and going of a whole summer.

  His trips to Port William are becoming less and less frequent. When he goes he drives a 1927 Ford, which since 1927 he has driven something less than three thousand miles, mostly back and forth over the same three and a half miles of road. Spangled with sparrow dung and rusted, the car wears as a hood ornament a cow's bleached skull with a four-foot spread of horns, the anonymous gift of some generation of Port William boys. Roger has never driven the car out of low gear. So far as he knows, that is the only gear it has. When he is asked-as he has regularly been asked for eighteen years by the boys of Port William-how he likes his car, Roger replies: "It is slow, sir, but powerful."