A Place on Earth

  "What's on your mind, Uncle Stanley?"

  "Well, I got a j ob to offer you. Keeping care of the graveyard. Preacher told me to find somebody to do it."

  "You mean dig the graves?"

  "Well, that's part of it."

  `About all of it, ain't it?"

  "Well, some of the time. But in the summer you've got to cut the grass. And ain't so many dies in the summertime. In the winter just about all of it's digging the graves. Mud, or ground froze hard as a bull's horn, by grab, and every kind of weather, and ain't hardly enough pay to make it worth the trouble. But it's a job, and there's a little money to it, and every little bit helps if you want to look at it that way. I quit looking at it that way. And, by grab, I quit, I did."

  "How come you've quit?"

  "How's that?"

  "What did you quit for?"

  "Why now, by gob, preacher and that undertaker come up day before yesterday wanting me to go out there by myself in that rain and dig two graves in one day. I says, `By grab, I won't do it. I'm too old. I can't do it. All I can do to dig one grave in a day.' `Well now,' preacher says, `Mr. Gibbs, perhaps you ought to try.' `Try nothing,' I says, I did. `You look at that ground out there. That ground's so wet you could dig a grave with a bucket as quick as you could dig one with a shovel. That's a job of work. I reckon you don't know a job of work. But I do. Because I've done several.' `Well,' preacher says, `what are we going to do?' 'Do?' I says. `We're going to get somebody to help me dig them graves or they ain't going to get dug, and you can just keep them corpses until I get around to 'em, that's what we're going to do.' `Mr. Gibbs,' he says, `you was hired to dig them graves.' Made me mad, he did. I says, `Now look a here, they've set around here for six weeks in a row and ain't a one of them died, and now here two of them ups and dies in one day. It ain't right, and I quit."'

  "Did you dig the graves?"

  "Well, I dug one of them two. Preacher got them big old boys of Siler Smith's to dig the other one. By grab, you ought to seen it. Them big old idiots wallowing and tromping around in that mud. They'd dig out a little hole and it'd cave in on them; and they'd throw out a shovelful of mud and a shovelful would run back in. And them a fighting it like killing snakes and cussing till you'd a thought they'd a woke up everybody there. Even I could hear them. I got mine dug and went home about the middle of the afternoon, and they'd just got theirs down about waist deep. Some of them said the preacher and that undertaker finally had to come in to help them, and they was all out there with a lantern still digging when midnight come."

  Uncle Stanley has to stop and laugh.

  "Well, they dug a pond, shaped sort of like a funnel. I know just how it happened because I made the same mistake myself when I was new at the work. When you dig one of them holes in the mud, if you don't be careful about tramping around the edges of it, and don't watch what you're doing when you cut down the sides, to do it just so, well it'll widen out at the top quicker than you can deepen it at the bottom. When the preacher and the undertaker and them boys got done gauming around in it and tramping around it and falling into it and climbing out of it, that grave must have been eight foot wide. And tracked and tramped and muddied around the edges till it looked like where a sow'd had pigs. They throwed the dirt out on the downhill side because it was easier, and it rained a hard one before daylight, and there wasn't nothing to keep half the hillside from draining right into the hole, and she filled plumb to the brim. That undertaker was there half the morning unrolling that imitation grass of hisn, trying to make a kind of shore to it, so the family and friends of Mrs. Brewster wouldn't notice they was attending one of them naval burials. He let on he didn't see me coming, on account of the words I'd had with him and the preacher the morning before, but I walked right up like the sun was shining and we was the only friends each other had. `Well,' I says, the Jordan's running a little muddy this morning, ain't she?' He went right on about his work like he never heard me. I says, `Is this going to be a baptizing or a funeral?' He tried not to say anything, but I see it coming up in him, and finally he had to let it out. `You'd look a damn sight better with your mouth shut,' he says. `I'm just here waiting for the boat,' I says. And then I let up on him and give him a hand. We bailed out the hole, but the rain wouldn't quit, and it was filling up again.

  "Well, Grover come down by the house after the funeral, and he said in spite of all the talk and flowers and artificial grass it still looked more like a boat launching than a burial. `You've heard of crossing to Jordan's other shore,' I says. `Well,' he says, `if that's how it's done, Mrs. Brewster's on her way. Go look.' I put on my coat and went up. That undertaker had just bundled all his muddy grass and trappings into the hearse and gone back, and nobody was left in the graveyard but the preacher. He was standing there in the rain with his hands in his pockets watching Mrs. Brewster's coffin. It was floating just as dandy as you ever seen. He was as glad to see me as if we was both preachers. It showed all over his face. He thought I'd just walk up and pull out a plug or something, and everything would be fine. But I knew it wasn't no simple matter, and I wanted him to know it, so I just happened up to the edge of the grave like a casual bystander and took a long look. I says, `Well, well, well, you've got a right smart little problem here.' I says you. He looked across at me like I was an angel fresh out of Heaven. What're we going to do, Mr. Gibbs?' he says. He says we, so I taken it up. `Well,' I says, `we could catch her and tic her up until the water goes down. Or,' I says, `if it don't go down, we could load her with rocks and try to sink her.' And right there's when the wobbling shaft jumped off of the bobbling pin. It come a little closer to him than I meant it to, to tell you the truth. He'd got his mind all made up to hire me back, I seen that. But I'd done ruined it and made him mad, and I swear to you, Jayber, I done it more or less by accident. But there wasn't no undoing it, and I just had to stand there and watch him swell up. He was mad enough to drown me and bury me right in the same water hole with Mrs. Brewster, but he didn't want to be illmannerly. I thought he'd bust. I says to myself, `Now you're going to hear it.' Because if I ever seen a thirty-minute cuss piling up in a man I seen it then. But finally he says, just as even and quiet: `Mr. Gibbs, after you get done filling these here two graves, perhaps you can find someone else to take your job.'

  "It wasn't that I hated to lose the work and the little dab of pay I was drawing out of it, but I did hate to end on hard feelings. So I said very friendly: `Well now, Preacher, it won't be easy, because you don't find a man that can dig a grave just anywhere you look. There's sleights to every trade, Preacher,' I says, `by grab, and there's sleights to this one. You and that undertaker, now you all thought poor old Uncle Stanley didn't have no more brains than it took to bend his back, and that he'd been doing this work all these years without learning anything about it. But now you all can see from this here mess that it takes considerable know-how to do the job the way it ought to be done. Now it's a job that ain't going to be easy to fill, but I'll look around, Preacher, and I'll find you a good man. And no hard feelings.'

  "But he never softened. `Thank you very much, Mr. Gibbs,' he says, `by grab, I'll appreciate it if you'll find someone right away.' I says, `Now Preacher, there'll be some things he won't understand how to do right off, but I'll stay around with him and oversee his work and learn him how to do a good job for you. And no hard feelings, by grab,' I says.

  "`That'll be perfectly fine, Mr. Gibbs,' he says. `Well,' I says, `do you want him to keep care of the church too, or just the graveyard?' 'Just the graveyard, for now, will be all right,' he says.

  "So I've been studying about it, Jayber, and I figured you was the only one with enough brains and time that could use the money. The work's hard, but it ain't what you'd call steady. Sometimes everybody'll be alive for three or four months in a row"

  "What did you do about Mrs. Brewster?" Jayber asks.

  `Aw, me and them old boys of Siler Smith's, we bailed the water out again and rolled in a few mudballs.

  "Wel
l, what about it, Jayber? You want to take this job? I've got to find somebody. You was the first one I thought of and I thought you might appreciate it."

  `Are you sure the preacher won't hire you back, Uncle Stanley? Don't you reckon he'll change his mind if you go and ask?"

  `Aw now, Jayber. He won't. I done tested him out. Well, to tell you the truth, I did go ask him, by grab. I went to his house last night, and I asked him. I even told him the madam wanted me to have the j ob again. But he said he'd just stick to the understanding we'd worked out.

  `Anyhow, Jayber, I'm too old to do it much longer. It's just getting more than I can do."

  "Why, Uncle Stanley, you just said you dug a grave by yourself in half the time it took the Smith boys and the preacher and the undertaker to dig one."

  'Aw, I can still dig them all right, Jayber, ain't no worry about that. But I'm getting so derned old that when I get one dug I can't hardly get out of it."

  The old man falls quiet, and confusion crosses his face like a shadow.

  "Let me think," Jayber says.

  "Says which?"

  "Let me think!"

  Uncle Stanley perks up and keeps watch while Jayber thinks.

  The idea of extra money is foreign tojayber's way of life. For a minute he doesn't know what in the world he would do with it. But he knows that in the back of his mind there has been, not exactly troubling him, but asking for his attention, the question of what he'll do with his old age. He has been a little uneasily on the lookout for an ending to his life. Until now he has silenced the question with the reply that he will just barber right on through to the end. But now, for the first time, here is another possibility.

  Jayber would like to fish. He would like to become a fisherman. Suddenly and surprisingly the whole vision blooms before him. It becomes imaginable and desirable and even possible in a single stroke. Put a little money aside every week, and before too many years he could build a small house on the river bank. The land would not cost much, would be practically worthless except for such a use as he would have for it, and he would build the house himself out of used lumber. He would stay there and fish and be quiet until the end of his days. He would cease being a public man and become a private man. He would fish in the river as though that was the highest calling that had ever come to a man. And he would fish in his mind. He would have a boat-he could see it, painted green, floating lightly as a leaf among the willows at the foot of the bank.

  "I'll tell you what, Uncle Stanley. I'll take the job. And then I want to hire you to stay on as supervisor. I'll do the work and you can furnish the know-how, and we'll split the money."

  `And now," he says to himself, "you've started something."

  He has, he realizes, changed his life. He has, from the moment just past, begun to live like a man possessed by an idea and a plan-a man who suddenly knows what he will do for years ahead if he is able-a man possessing not only a life, but a death. He has changed beyond anything he could have imagined a minute ago. But also, for the first time since he made up his mind to leave the university, he is uncertain that he wanted to do what he has done.

  But there is no uncertainty in Uncle Stanley. He is delighted. This is a realization of his highest ideal: a position of authority with half-pay and no work. He would not ask more of Heaven.

  "Well, Jayber, I was going to offer to stay along with you and learn you the sleights of it, and see to it that you don't get into any problems."

  He saws his cane across Jayber's shin.

  "But that proposition you just made, now, by grab, that was mighty kind. It was white, by grab."

  Jayber starts to say something, but he does not have a chance. Uncle Stanley is going to do all the talking. They are partners now. They are a team, and Uncle Stanley is the leader. Now that he has said yes, Jayber is to have nothing more to say.

  "Next one dies, now, that's our start," Uncle Stanley's saying. "Preacher'll let you know and you let me know, and we'll start in. Maybe tomorrow you ought to come and let me show you where I keep the tools and give you a key to the shed."

  Every new idea is better than the last. Uncle Stanley never realized what great authority he had until he lost it, and now he has had it given back to him. It is a resurrection. He thought he was a goner, but now his life is twice as abundant as before.

  He goes into a discourse on the sleights and subtleties of gravedigging, a discourse on method: how to dig a grave in the rain, in the snow, in mud, in clay, in rock, in hard ground, in soft ground, on sloping ground, on flat ground, on top of a rise, along the edge of a drain, in frozen ground, in hot weather, in cold; how to dig them big, how to dig them small; what to do with the dirt; how to fill, how to mound, how to sod, how to set a tombstone; what to do with wilted flowers. His erudition and eloquence surprise him. He knows things he did not know he knew. Gravedigging becomes the science and art that explains the world.

  Still pretending to listen, Jayber gets up and sweeps the floor and sets the place to rights and begins stropping his razors. He is a fisherman, thinking of the river, biding his time.

  Light and Warmth

  A car pulls off the road in front of the shop. The door slams. The shop door opens and Big Ellis comes in. He stands inside the door nodding and smiling at Jayber and Uncle Stanley. It has been several weeks since Big Ellis has been to town, and Jayber is surprised to see him.

  "Who dug you up?"

  Big Ellis laughs as freely as a child.

  "The woman run me out. Said not to come back until I got some of this hair and beard cut off. Said it was like living with a horse."

  "Paying customer?"

  "she let me have a little money."

  "You mean I'm really going to collect? Let me see your money."

  Big Ellis pulls a handful of coins out of his pocket and holds them out.

  "Welcome, sir."

  Jayber brushes off the barber chair. Uncle Stanley is still talking. When Big Ellis came in the old man just waved his arm at him as though he was passing by, and went on with his lecture.

  "What's he talking about?"

  "He's giving me a lesson."

  "Oh," Big Ellis says. He begins unbuttoning his overcoat. His hair has grown out over his collar, and he has at least a week's growth of whiskers.

  "I'll have to charge you twice for cutting all that off."

  "Well, it's the woman's cream money. Go ahead."

  The thing about it is that Big Ellis means it, the woman's cream money or not. His face, the smile widening on it to showJayber that anything he wants to do will be all right, is the most pleasant and agreeable single object in the neighborhood of Port William. Smiles and laughs have wrinkled and creased it like an old leather glove. Big Ellis wants to please. He wants everybody around him to be pleased. That is his weakness and his nature and his passion. If he offers you a cigarette he means for you to take the whole pack. If you happen to be at his house when mealtime comes, you eat, and while you are reaching to the meat platter Big Ellis will spoon you out another helping of beans and his wife will refill your glass.

  He gets into the chair and Jayber pins the cloth around his neck.

  "What kind of lessons is he giving you?"

  "Gravedigging lessons."

  Big Ellis gets tickled and Jayber has to wait.

  "Have you gone into that business?"

  "I've just contracted to take over Uncle Stanley's job. The graveyard part of it."

  Uncle Stanley has just finished saying that if you strike bedrock you've got to blast. And now he is telling how to set the charges. A few years back, after he got so deaf, he remembers, he let off a blast on one side of the hill while they were holding a burial on the other side. You got to be careful about that.

  Burley Coulter comes in.

  "Look whds back," Jayber says. "What do you know, Burley?"

  "Not much. What do you fellows know? How's everything over at your house, Big Ellis? You haven't been out much lately."

  "Pretty good,"
Big Ellis says. "Well, a fellow just as well stay home, hadn't he? Weather no good. No money. No place to go. Jarrat ain't working you too hard?"

  "Not much he can do."

  "You find any sand and plaster up there in my head, Jayber, don't be surprised," Big Ellis says.

  `All right, I've got over being surprised at what I find in people's heads. What're you doing with sand and plaster in yours?"

  "The ceiling fell in over home the other night. If it hadn't hit me in the back of the head, it would've hit the woman right square in the face."

  Burley hangs up his hat and sits down.

  "We're going to have some more rain, ain't we?"

  "Looks like it. I'd have thought it would've cleared and frosted maybe."

  "This keeps up there's going to be water in the bottoms."

  "Well, everything happens for the best," Big Ellis says.

  Usually such a remark would either end the conversation or change the subject. But this time, to Jayber's surprise, Burley takes it up, and in a tone that does not leave room for argument:

  "It don't do any such of a damned thing."

  "What I mean, the Lord knows best, don't He?"

  "Well," Jayber says, "He'll have the final say, anyhow. So if there's a flood you all just as well go down and fish in it."

  "Hanh?" Uncle Stanley says.

  "Burley," Big Ellis says, "we've got a new graveyard man in Port William."

  Jayber takes a bow.

  "You?"

  "Who else in this town has both brains enough and time enough?"

  Burley laughs, and they can tell from the sound of it that he is sorry for his shortness with Big Ellis.

  "You've gone into business. Port William's a corpse factory, and now you're the foreman."

  "No, Uncle Stanley's still in charge. I'm just his second-in-command. I'm going to be the shovel specialist."

  "How come the old man to give up his job?"

  "Well, he says he's getting too old for it. Says he can't hardly get out of them graves once he gets them dug."

  They laugh.