A Place on Earth

  He makes his way with some difficulty into the swift water of the ford. The water comes nearly to the tops of his boots, caving them in coldly against his feet and legs. He is aware, almost as soon as he begins to move against the push of the current, of the absurdity of wading swift water on crutches. His gratitude that nobody is there to see him, and then his fear that somebody may come, make him ridiculous to himself. He crosses the creek, feeling his way over the uneven stones of the riffle with the crutch ends, and goes down the shallows along the far edge until he comes to where the bridge dangles in the trees. When he has fastened the rope to the loose end of one of the cables and weighted the free end of the rope with a rock and thrown it over to the other bank, he wades back across.

  Using a block and tackle, he pulls the bridge out of the trees and across the steam and into place. He locks the pulleys and walks to the top of the high bank and stands there for three or four minutes, studying the job now that he has it out where he can look at it. The snarled skein of wood and cable and wire that he has hauled tense between the banks has not even begun to resemble a bridge. The footboards have been broken and split, some of the crosspieces knocked out or broken, the handwires wound and tangled through the mess of the rest-and the whole thing, crusted with silt, bearded and swatched with drift, twisted two full turns. But the beginning is there, made. While he watches, a kingfisher lights on one of the strands of the tangle, perches a moment, sees him, startles, flies off down the creek. "I'll finish her by sundown," he says to himself. And he goes back to the truck for his tools.

  Until after sundown, until the bridge is a bridge again, and looks like one, curving its perfect curve between its fastenings, he does not stop. He untwists and splices the broken cables, binds them back around the trunks of the two trees from which they were torn loose, rebuilds the steps up to where the end of the footboard will be laid. He goes into it then, building his way across, wedging his way into the mess of it, leaving it made and straight behind him. Fixing as he goes, crawling back and forth for materials over what he has finished, he attaches the crosspieces and lays on and nails down the footplanks. And over his bent back the day moves toward the end of its own curve. He hurries at his work, excited by his high balancing out on the thing he has made, feeling the echo of every hammer stroke rock back under him along the taut cables-and excited by knowing that a bridge is what it is. There comes to be something deeply pleasing to him in the idea of a bridge-not, maybe, the first mark a man makes on the earth, but surely one of the first marks made by a neighborhood-and he hastens toward its completion. Long before he is done, he already knows how it is going to be, and he is driven on by an appetite for the finished look of it.

  The sunlight goes out of the valley, rising up along the sides of the hills on the eastern side. The ground begins to cool. His mind begins to take leave of his work. He gathers his tools from the ground around the finished steps and goes back to the side he began on, walking without the crutches and having to move slowly with his load to keep balanced. At the other end he puts the tools down, and takes up his crutches. For a moment he stands there, looking at the bridge and the water under it. Finished, he is let down now into his tiredness. He lights a cigarette, smokes it a moment with deliberate pleasure, and turns and begins loading tools and rope and usable scraps back into the truck.

  Hearing something, a footstep maybe, he looks across the bridge at Ida standing on the top step at the other end of it. She is wearing a plain faded cotton dress, and a sweater that he knows at once belongs or did belong to Gideon. She is smiling in reserved greeting to him, in expecta tion of what from him he does not know. She steps up onto the end of the bridge, and he feels the inwashing sense of the presence of her body, kept waiting inside that coarse, worn sweater of Gideon's.

  "Can I come across now?"

  "Yes. Come on across."

  She comes out onto the bridge, giving her weight to the flexible strength of it, following down into the curve of it. And then, for the first time all day, he thinks of this woman's drowned child, and his remembrance flinches inside him. He is suddenly nerved tightly as one watching a tightrope walker. And he sees that a hesitance grows in her as she comes on toward the place where she knows Annie was sitting during the last half hour she lived. To Ernest she seems to force herself up to that place, and then past it. And once past it, she is all right. She comes on, the footboard rocking slightly under her.

  He is standing beside the steps, and as she comes to the end of the bridge he reaches his hand up. He would not ordinarily have done so opening a thing-not, especially, hold out his hand to a woman nearly a stranger to him. But she takes it. And sensing the strength in that arm levering over the bar of the crutch, she looks at him. It is a look that he knew to anticipate-a look of surprise and of a sort of dismay, as if the only thing more odd than a cripple is a cripple of great and capable strength who smells and sweats and works and wears out pretty much the way everybody does. But Ida does not withdraw. She gives her weight to his hand, and steps down.

  "Thank you."

  And again she looks at him, this time with such immediate and open candor, such accepting of him as he is, that he feels himself made natural, made as if whole, by her look. It is as though she has reached into him with her hand. He turns and starts back to the truck.

  "Lord, you sure did get it done fast. I thought, the mess it was in, it would take a week."

  "Well, it wasn't too much trouble. Once you get started into a thing like that it'll usually turn out very well."

  "I declare, it's nice to have it up again. I ain't been on this side of the creek in I don't know how long."

  She is walking along beside him now, a little ahead of him-a woman not yet thirty, strongly and a little thickly made. Her face still keeps some of the prettiness of her girlhood, her hair pulled back out of the way and gathered and pinned. She walks with the naturalness of a woman who has gone a great deal on foot, and without the self-consciousness of one who has ever tried deliberately for grace-so calmly a woman of her own kind and place and way that she seems hardly aware of herself, and so quietly belonging to Gideon that the idea of him seems as near her, as much touching her, as his old sweater. Ernest is aware that she has given no thought to how she may look to him. His hand keeps the memory of the feel of her hand, nearly as hard as his own.

  He throws the last armload of scraps into the truck bed with a satisfying completing slam. "Well, I reckon I'll call it a day." Looking up at the house now, he sees that she has already finished her work at the barn for the night-the rinsed milk buckets, which were not in sight earlier, are turned up to dry on a bench beside the cellar house.

  "Mr. Finley-you're going to town, ain't you?"

  "I'm aiming to."

  "Well, could I ride out as far as the mailbox?"

  'All right. Get in. I'm just ready to go." He hastens ahead of her, opens the door, and makes a place for her, shoving aside the tools, gloves, chains, water jug, pieces of rope that have collected on the seat and the floorboard. "It's a mess. Maybe that'll be room enough for you."

  "It'll be fine."

  He gets in, starts the truck, and they leave, jolting and rattling over the violent surface of the road.

  "Gideon has to fix this piece of road every spring-all the way from our house out to the pike. The county's supposed to, but it don't much."

  Ernest cannot think what to reply, surprised at the ease with which she speaks of Gideon. She mentions him casually, as confident of his presence somewhere she does not know as she could be if he had gone to Port William.

  She stays silent for several minutes, holding to the door handle with one hand and bracing against the dashboard with the other to steady herself, looking out at the evening which is very slowly dimming toward twilight.

  "You going to fix that barn?" she asks.

  'Aiming to."

  "Mr. Feltner said you was aiming to tear down that lower end of it."

  He nods.

 
"Well, I reckon there'll still be room left for Gideon's tools and things, won't there?"

  "I believe there will. I don't believe you need to worry about Mat mistreating you all."

  "Gideon's always thought a lot of Mr. Feltner. So do I. Though I never had many dealings with him until here lately." She watches the road approach and pass under, shaking the truck. "You going to do all that work by yourself?"

  "I imagine so."

  She gives him another speculating look, her eyes as direct and unapologetic as if she is studying the back of somebody's head.

  "Well, I imagine that'll be right smart of a job for one man."

  "I imagine so."

  He stops at the mouth of the lane, and she opens the door and gets out. Standing there looking back at him, holding the door ready to shut, she says, "I'm much obliged to you."

  "Do you want me to take you back in? Save you the walk."

  "No, I don't mind." She smiles for the first time since he looked and saw her standing on the bridge. "That's a better road for walking than it is for riding, anyhow"

  She starts across the road to where the mailbox perches on its careening post, doorless, wide-open mouth tilted upward, like the hungry young of some big bird.

  Ernest turns into the road and goes, but slowly, watching her in the rearview mirror. He sees her walk over to the box, look in, and turn back empty-handed into the lane.

  A Guest at a Strange Table

  He was on the roof the next morning before the dew went off. He set his ladders up against the eave, flung a long rope over the barn, tied it at both ends to give himself a kind of banister, and propping his crutches against the foot of the ladder, went up and began.

  And he has been surrounded by his own noise now for nearly three hours-his hammer-claws driving in under the nailheads, the nails screeching out through the tin, the released sheets sliding down over the sheets still fixed and striking the ground. The sun is getting high, and the metal roof has begun to give back the warmth of it. From time to time he goes down and stacks the sheets he has torn off, and drinks, and goes back up. Aside from that, he has hardly raised his eyes from his work. After each interruption the sounds of his work have enclosed him again, and carried him on. And each time he settles back into himself and into the work, his habitual commenting to himself in his thoughts begins again. Finding he has worked beyond reach of his rope, he thinks, "Uhoh!" Nerves aching with the smooth hard slant of the metal as he crawls after the rope, he thinks of falling, and his thought shudders and whistles. "Shoo! Watch that! That won't do!"

  He hears Mat saying-having put him and Virgil to painting the roof of the feed barn, Virgil with a boy's bravery walking upright on the slant-"Be careful up there, boys. We haven't got time now for a funeral." And then, his voice lifting and hardening: "Virgil, damn it, when you move on that roof take hold of the rope. A man's work asks you to be a man. Don't play!" And again, his voice suddenly admitting what he feels: "Sweet boy, don't get hurt."

  The rope in his hand, Ernest feels the dread of falling loosen from him. "Good enough. All right." Taking up his hammer and laying the rope down beside him in reach of his left hand, he goes back to work. "Virgil," he thinks.

  "Uncle," Virgil says, "why in the hell does he have to be after me all the time to be careful?"

  "Well, if he didn't think a lot of you he wouldn't do it. That's one thing. And, another thing, being careful doesn't come natural to you yet, and he knows it."

  "Well, if you know it too why aren't you after me all the time the way he is?"

  "Because you listen to me better than you do to him."

  Virgil laughs. "Why?"

  "Because he's your daddy and I'm not. That's the way it always is, and he knows that too. That's the reason he sends you to work with me as often as he does."

  For a moment he can see Virgil, paint bucket in one hand, brush in the other, sitting on the comb of the roof, looking down at him and grinning with a boy's perfect confidence in the superiority of youth to anything. The hot sky stands open above him.

  "Mr. Finley."

  He looks down and sees Ida on the ladder, holding up a half-gallon glass jar full of water.

  "You want a fresh drink?"

  He does. Though he has, as usual, his own jug of water in the truck, he hands himself down along the rope to the edge of the roof, and drinks and replaces the top and hands the jug back and thanks her. Pulling himself along the rope in a clambering, lopsided two-step, knowing that behind him she is still on the ladder, watching, he goes back up the roof.

  "How did you hurt your foot?"

  "In the war."

  "Not this one."

  "No. The other one."

  "Well, you sure don't have any trouble getting around."

  He nods. He takes it the way it is meant, a compliment, but his mind fumbles around it, not able to manage a reply. And then he says: "It slows me down some."

  "Well, I reckon we've all got our troubles." But as if she did not intend to admit that, she smiles and steps down a rung. "I'll have dinner ready about half past eleven. You can come anytime around then."

  "Well, I've got my dinner there in the truck. I reckon I'll just eat that. That's what I usually do."

  "Oh, Gideon wouldn't stand for that, Mr. Finley. He says anybody that works here eats here. So you come."

  Her head disappears below the eave, and he sits still and listens to her going down. She calls up to him from the ground, still out of sight at the foot of the ladder: "I'll just set this jug here by the wall."

  `All right," he says.

  He is not comfortable with the thought of going to the house to eat. For one thing, he never enjoys eating at a strange table, and he is particularly uneasy about eating at this one in Gideon's absence. For another thing, he takes pleasure in the quiet noon meals he eats alone between the noisy halves of his days. But the generosity of her invitation is familiar to him, and he knows he cannot refuse it kindly.

  He is high on the roof and, looking over the comb of it, he sees her come around the end of the barn and walk up the incline of the road toward the house. He sits there not moving, the hammer dead in his hand, until he sees her go into the kitchen and hears the door slam. And then he slides the claws of his hammer under the next nailhead. The noise of his work stands up around him again. He goes back into it. He works steadily over the metal slope, letting the sunlight drop, after its long absence, through the dark meshing of the barn's framework to the ground.

  When the time comes he goes down, hangs his hammer on one of the ladder rungs, and stacks the scattered sheets. He takes up his crutches, drinks, pours out what water he doesn't drink, and, carrying the jug, goes up to the house.

  The kitchen door is open, and Ida calls him to come in before he has had a chance to knock. She is busy at the stove. On the opposite side of the room he can see an ironing board set up, and a pile of freshly pressed clothes on the seat of a chair. He comes in, ready to do without question whatever she tells him, sets the jug down against the door facing, puts his hat on the floor beside it.

  She takes the teakettle off the stove and comes over to the washtable just inside the door, and pours two inches of hot water into the pan.

  He dips from the bucket, diluting the hot water, leans his crutches against the wall, and washes.

  "When you get washed you can sit down. It's ready."

  There is only one chair at the table and he pulls it out and sits down, putting the crutches on the floor beside him. And she sets the food onan abundant simple meal.

  While he eats she does not sit down. She goes on about her work. As long as he is at the table she makes no attempt at conversation, seeming to take for granted that he has come only to eat, requiring nothing of him except that he fill himself.

  He grows amazed at her, at the dignity of her quietness in which he knows she is lonely and grieving. What else he might have expected he does not know, or no longer knows.

  When he has emptied his plate, she com
es and picks up the meat platter and offers it to him again. "You help yourself, now"

  And he does.

  Finished, he picks up the crutches and stands and replaces the chair. "That was mighty fine. I thank you."

  "Well. You fill that water jug at the pump and take it with you."

  He has been stopped twenty-five minutes for dinner. He decides to give himself another twenty. Because he is slowed by his lameness, he usually works by the job rather than by the day. Still, though he never works by the clock, he always rests by it-because, as he has explained it to Mat, it is harder to stop resting than to stop working.

  Having given himself those minutes, he becomes saving of them, and hurries back down to the barn so as to waste as few of them as possible. He brings out a feed bucket, turns it upside down against the wall, and sits down in the sun. The only sounds now are a few sparrows chirping back in the driveway of the barn and, continuous and more quiet in the distance, the running of the creek. He sits for a moment without moving, letting these sounds and the little valley and the sunlight and the white-clouded sky take their places in his mind, and then gets out a cigarette and lights it. He smokes slowly, carefully attentive to the pleasure of it. He flips the butt out away from him onto the ground, and leans back, his eyes closed, aware of being at rest in that place, feeling the sun draw the skin of his face and hands, feeling the air stir coolly over him, the light filling his shut eyes with red.

  After a while he sits up and looks at his watch. He still has three minutes of his time. He yawns and rubs his eyes, and rather than sit there and watch the time run out, hating to see it go, he gets up. Groggy with sunlight and sleepiness and his full belly, he fights off the dread of movement. Moves. Takes up the crutches and goes around to the foot of the ladder. He drinks, picks up his hammer, and climbs to the roof.

  The day and the work are established around him again. He goes on, deeper in, with a kind of excitement growing in him, a kind of hunger for what it is possible to do before night. It becomes easier to go on than to stop.