A Place on Earth

  When the rain stopped after dinner, she got Annie into her wraps and sent her out to play, warning her to keep her feet dry and stay out of the mud, and then snapped the radio on again before settling into her afternoon's work. She left it going, paying little mind to it except when the businesslike voices of the news or the weather came over it, while she washed and put away the dishes, went to the cellar for jars of berries to put into the pies, made the pies and put them into the oven, went around the house to see about Annie, and saw her sitting with Speck on the swinging bridge-and then at last sat down to her mending.

  When the radio stopped in midword a few minutes later, she got up and tried the light switch. She sat down again and took up her work, saying to herself that a tree surely must have blown down on the wire. That sometimes happened, she knew, though it never had happened since the line had come to them. But it occurred to her suddenly that there had been no wind. The thought frightened her, she did not know why. She sat forward in the chair for a moment, her hands still, listening. She got up and started to the front of the house. She was thinking "Uh-oh, uhoh." She would remember that.

  Before she got to the window, of course, it had already happened.

  She stood at the window for a good many seconds, as if waiting to see what she would do next, not able to look a second time at the bare grove where the bridge had been. And then she ran to the telephone, put the receiver to her ear, found it dead, and hurried on into the kitchen.

  Wondering at herself, she seemed to watch as she went to the stove and opened the oven and saw that the pies were cooking well and shut the oven. And then, running, she went out the back door and across the porch and around the house and down the path toward the toolshed, below which Gideon had just stepped into the boat.

  "Gideon! Where is she?"

  But she knew.

  "Where's Annie?"

  But Gideon did not answer. He stood in the boat, as the current caught it and began to turn it slowly, looking back at her, and then turning away as the boat turned.

  She watched him go away on the current-trusting him to it, as she had trusted him to other absences, believing that he would bear the worst that could happen to him and come back. Maybe she even hoped he would bring the child back-though she knew what they were up against, she had seen, and the dirge in her mind never stopped.

  She turned and started back up the slope toward the house. She went slowly, conscious of the weight of her body lifted stride after stride. In the kitchen she sat down in her chair, moving her sewing basket out of the seat onto the floor. She sat without moving, only looking now and again at the clock.

  When the time came she got up and took the pies out of the oven. She seemed to regain something then, and she did not stop. She built up the fire in the stove and began to prepare supper. After that one lapse when it seemed that she kept living only because she could not easily break the habit, she began again her daily ordering and keeping of the place.

  When Gideon came back at dusk, she had the supper ready except for the biscuits, which she had waited to put into the oven until he came, as she always did. But he would not eat, and she stood in the door and watched him go back around the corner of the house. When he was gone, seeing that it was getting dark, she went up the back stairs to the room over the kitchen, and brought down an oil lamp. She took it out to the barrel and filled it, carried it into the kitchen and wiped it clean, rubbing the inside of the chimney with a page of newspaper, and lighted it. And then, moving the food off the fire onto the other end of the stove where it would stay warm, she put on the jacket again and started to the barn, carrying the lamp in one hand and the milk bucket in the other. Though knocked off its footing at the lower end and half flooded, the barn, she thought, would stand. The pens and stalls at the upper end were dry. She would not worry about it yet. She milked the cows, fed and cared for the stock, and shut the barn.

  When she returned to the kitchen she set a place at the table and made herself eat a little of everything she had cooked, and washed the dishes and put them away. She sat down in the chair again, with the lamp on the edge of the table beside her, and took up her sewing. Gideon would be back before long, she thought, and she would have to keep the light on until he came.

  He did not come. She got up now and then and went around the house on the chance that she would see his lantern or hear him, but the darkness was unbroken all around, and it was quiet except for the water running and the rain falling. And she went back and took up her work. She seemed somehow to have gained an extraordinary control over her mind. When she went out into the yard to watch for Gideon, she seemed to know to the second how long she could stand it, to know to the second when to turn, as if away from the sound of her own crying, and come back into the lighted kitchen, where she would force her attention back to the sewing. It was Gideon's absence that occupied her. She thought about it, speaking to herself about it, as though it was the same as his other absences and this night the same as other nights: "He'll be along. He won't want to be too late." And then she would say to herself: "Yes, he's probably on his way. He may be coming up by the barn right now" And there was also a limit to how much she could stand of that, and she would have to get up and draw the coat around her and go out again.

  And that other absence seemed still to lie somewhere ahead of her, a place she had not yet come to.

  Later, with the light still burning beside her, she fell asleep.

  Changed

  She woke up cold. The lamp flame was pale in the full daylight. The fire in the stove had gone out. Waking she said, "Gideon?" From the sound of her voice in the unwakened room, not answered, she knew, with the same cunning she had had the night before, that her next utterance, if she kept sitting there, would not be so articulate as a word. She got up and put on the old coat and built a fire and, taking the milk bucket, started to the barn.

  She saw the fire-heat rising out of the chimney of the toolshed. She walked around and looked through the window at Gideon's face. He lay there, wound in the soiled canvas, his arm under his head. She would have held him then. But glad of his sleep, she left him to it. She hurried through the work at the barn, giving it, she said to herself, "a lick and a promise." Back at the house, she made a breakfast for Gideon, wrapped the change of clothes in a newspaper, carried those things down to him, and, gathering up his wet clothes, slipped out again, hoping he would wake up presently and eat and go back to sleep.

  When she went down to the woodpile an hour later, he was gone. After she filled the woodbox, she went to the toolshed again, and carried the empty dishes up to the house and washed them. She got through that day as she had got through the night before, and as she would get through the next five. She washed Gideon's muddied clothes and ironed them, kept the house, prepared the meals and had them ready at the usual times; made work for herself, made herself tired; slept, gratefully, when she had become tired enough.

  Like Gideon, she did not, during that week, go back to their bed to sleep, but kept to the rocking chair in the kitchen, bringing down a quilt from a trunk in the back room to wrap around her.

  As Gideon went back and forth in his watching, she watched him, aware of his trouble more clearly then, perhaps, than she was aware of her own. He was, it seemed to her, straining to survive the death of their child, as she had once strained to survive the birth. And so she did not approach him, except to meet him at the edge of the water with food.

  When she woke on the Saturday morning at the end of the flood, a brilliant pool of sunshine lay across the kitchen floor. She sat still for a while, wrapped in the old quilt in the rocking chair, and looked at the light. It changed her. Before she moved at all, she understood that she was no longer the same. The weather and the place, changing, had changed her.

  She got up and folded the quilt and made the fire and prepared to go to the barn. When she stepped out the door a steady drying wind blew against her, coming from the same direction as the light. Around her on the open s
lopes, above the line of the flood, she could see the faint green of new grass. Below the end of the barn, tilted at what last night had been the shoreline, was the boat. Around it the fields lay free of the flood and empty.

  And now, looking over into the bottom on the far side of the creek, she sees Gideon's tracks going away.

  She sets her buckets down and goes back to the kitchen. She takes off the coat and hangs it over the back of a chair. She goes through the hall door and down the hall and through the other door into the sitting room. She opens the stair door and starts up. She walks in great haste, hurrying ahead of the oncoming of her pain. She reaches the top of the stairs and goes through the door into Annie's room. Closing the door, she stands just inside it a moment, looking around her. It is a wide low room, the ceiling taking the slant of the roof. There are windows in three of the walls, and now the strong morning light floods into it. The floor is littered with playthings. She walks over to a chair near the bed and, holding to the back of it, lets herself down onto her knees beside it. Her outcry begins deep in her, and rises, and breaks out.

  At last the sound of her weeping leaves her more easily, and then it quits. She grows quiet, letting her head rest on the seat of the chair. And then, lightened, able again, she gets up, and straightens the room, and leaves it.

  8

  Something Ain't Right

  Mat hears the knocking before he is awake. The sound is repeated at regular intervals, politely quiet, but insistent. And then Margaret touches his shoulder.

  "Mat, there's somebody at the back door."

  He gets up, pulls his pants on over his nightshirt, and goes through the hall to the kitchen without turning on the light.

  Burley Coulter is standing on the porch, wearing a pair of earmuffs under his old felt hat, his work jacket opened below the two top buttons and his hands shoved for warmth under the bib of his overalls. Back of him, the east has begun to brighten with the premonition of sunup. A steady east wind blows into the doorway, sharp with the night chill.

  "Mat, I'm sorry to wake you up."

  "That's all right, Burley. Come in. Come on in here where it's warm."

  Burley begins pulling off his boots, using the doorstep as a bootjack.

  "Don't worry about that."

  He pulls them off anyway, and steps into the kitchen in his socks. "But I figured you'd be getting up pretty soon, anyhow."

  "Yes. The night's about over."

  Mat goes to the switch beside the hall door and turns on the light. "What's the trouble, Burley?" And it was not until he heard himself speak those words that it dawned on him that something must be wrong.

  "Well, Mat, what I've come about really ain't any of my business. I think it probably ain't any of yours either, really. But the reason I come is that if it ain't our business then it probably won't be anybody's."

  Mat is clear awake and listening, but he raises his hand to stop Burley, and beckons him to a chair. They move over to the table and pull out chairs, and Burley goes on:

  "Well, about the middle of yesterday afternoon, it was beginning to look like the weather was going to dry out finally, and I went over to jarrat's, thinking maybe he'd want to plan a little work. We hadn't much more than got set down to talk when this horn started blowing down on the river road. I thought at first somebody must have had a wreck and stuck the horn. But then, after a good while it stopped and then started in again. We didn't know what to think. But since nobody lives close to the road along that stretch, and nobody has been passing over it during the high water, we figured it was sort of up to us.

  "So we dropped down through the woods on the hillside pretty straight to where the sound was coming from, and a good while before we got down to it we could hear a motor running full-throttle underneath the sound of the horn. And then when we got down in sight of the road we could see this bright red Ford sort of leaning over the edge of the road into the ditch, all covered with radio aerials and foxtails and mudflaps and one thing and another until it looked like a carnival booth. Whoever was driving it had it running as hard as it would go, the rubber stinking and the blue smoke blowing and the mud spraying twenty feet behind the left hind wheel. And there was an old woman the size of a cow standing above it on the top of the road bank, with her fists doubled up on her hips, just looking at it.

  "It wasn't the sort of situation you'd just walk into. And we stopped in the bushes at the edge of the road to see if we knew who it was, and to try to understand if we could what in the world was going on. The commotion was just a little hard to see through. We wasn't hoping to see through it to anything reasonable, but did hope for something recognizable.

  "I'm telling you this from the beginning because I want you to know how I come to be meddling in it."

  "Go on," Mat says. "Tell it all to me."

  "Well, I didn't have any trouble recognizing the woman. She was a sister to Gideon Crop's wife's mother. Lizzie Kate Skinner. Used to be married to old man Albert Skinner in town here. You know the one I mean, the one they used to call Meathouse to her back. Big rough brassmouthed woman. Spent half her life trompling Albert into his grave, and then married an old fellow by the name of Greatlow down on the other side of Hargrave. Well, that's who it was was driving. I knew him along back before he married her. He was a pretty tolerable decent sort of fellow, as big as a bull himself, but awfully quiet and shy, and not too well stocked with brains. A bachelor all his life, for sixty or sixty-five years, and had a little farm, a good one, which is how come her to fall in love with him.

  "What had happened, as near as we could see, was they'd come down the hill from here and hit that layer of wet mud that the high water put down on the road, and of course after that couldn't either guide the car or stop it. And had gone scooting over into the ditch. And there they were. And the old man hadn't quit driving yet. The old woman had got out and up onto high ground, to save her life, I reckon. And the old man, I reckon, afraid she'd kill him if he ever once admitted he was stuck, was keeping on doing his level damnedest.

  "Me and Jarrat waded across the mud to the other side of the road. We just sort of nodded and tipped our hats to the old woman, and eased on around the front end of the car, and then along the slope of the bank to the door on old man Greatlow's side. He was still driving right on, blowing the horn in great long bleats. The car was just shaking and bouncing, but aside from that wasn't moving. The window was streaked with two or three slashes of tobacco juice, where he'd got confused and tried to spit out it while it was shut. I had to lean close to get much of a look at him. And there he sat, both hands gripped onto the wheel, staring straight out the windshield, pouring the gas to her like Casey Jones. He had the door locked.

  "I leaned down to the glass and hollered: Whoa there, Mr. Greatlow! Hello!' And then I knocked on the door.

  "He never let up or turned his head, or gave any other sign.

  "Finally I leaned over the windshield and waved and hollered, and directly he saw me. Whoa!' I said. And I went to his window again and tried to signal to him to stop the racket. He rolled the window down, and spit over my shoulder and hollered `What?' and kept that old car bucking right on.

  "I hollered to him: `Shut that engine off. We're going to try to help you a little!'

  "He seemed glad enough to do that, and he shut the racket down and scooted across the seat and got out. The door on his side was leaning too far over against the bank to open enough. And once he was out he didn't pay any more attention to me or Jarrat. The only one he was thinking about was the woman. He sort of backed out into the middle of the road, looking toward her but not at her, with his hand up. `It's all right now, Lizzie. I'll get it out. Just let me alone, and give me a little time. And I'll get the son of a bitch out of there. The God-damned road department.'

  `And Aunt Meathouse stood there on the top of the bank, sort of clouding up over him, like she was still waiting after six years for him to do or say something sensible.

  "Well, I seen that wouldn't do,
so I walked up the bank and raised my hat, and said, `Where was it you all was aiming to get to, ma'am?"'

  The sky has whitened. The first stain of the coming sunrise lies on the horizon. While Burley has been talking the two of them have turned to the window.

  "It's going to be clear again," Burley says.

  "Yes. Another good one," Mat says. "Well, go on. You asked where she was trying to go."

  Burley pushes his hat off his forehead, and settles it, and puts his hand back in his pocket. "That's right. Sort of by way of polite conversation I asked her where they were going.

  "Well, I found out. That is, I sort of gathered it in from among a good many strong statements about what old man Greatlow wasn't much good at, driving and so on. What it come down to is that it had been something better than a week since she'd talked to Ida Crop on the telephone, which she says she usually does every day or so because, with Ida's mother and daddy dead, she feels called on to take some interest. It's a worry to her and all, but she does it. Well, last Saturday, she said, she tried to get Ida and couldn't-it wouldn't ring. She called the operator, and the operator told her the line was out. She said she knew there wasn't much chance of getting into that creek bottom on account of the high water. So she called the phone company and told them the whole story, and told them they'd have to get down there and fix that line, and I can't remember all the strong statements she did make to them about it. Well, of course the phone company couldn't get in there any better than she could. And so the line stayed dead, and so on and so on. And she spent the week worrying about Ida.

  `And so when the river began to fall, she didn't waste any time getting the old man into that beautiful automobile that her son had fixed up, looked like, to haul movie actresses in, and then left with them when he went to the Navy. And they'd been on the way since sometime in the morning. The old man surely hadn't driven anything since a Model A, and he poked along, fumbling at it, scared to death-and that old woman, I know, mouthing at him every foot of the way. They had to give up the river road about a mile out of Hargrave, and double back and come by the hill roads and the ridges. And, finally, when they got here in town they somehow thought they'd made it-and went rolling into the mess we'd found them in.