We finished early in the afternoon, and dipped the last of the unplanted seed out of the drill. The Markman Place, adjoining Elton’s at the back, had been put up for sale, and we stood leaning on the drill box in the satisfaction of the field replanted and safe for the winter, wondering who the buyer would be. The farm had been owned by an old couple, like many others, whose children had grown up and scattered to the towns. The husband had died on the place a good many years ago, and then, that spring, the wife had died at a nursing home down at Hargrave. Who the new owner would be was a mystery that troubled Elton, for it was unlikely that anybody would buy such a farm—small and off the road and now run down—as a place to live.
He stood silently looking over the fence a moment, and then he said, “Let’s go over there and look at it.”
And so we did. We climbed over the fence and started across a weedy field toward the house and outbuildings. Beyond the line fence the ridges grew narrower and dropped away toward the wooded hollows. Since the onset of Amster Markman’s last illness, the farm had been cropped by a neighbor and otherwise unused. Briars and sumacs and young sassafras trees had begun to colonize in patches the pasture we were walking through.
We jumped a rabbit, and Elton mimed a shot, snapping an imaginary gun to his shoulder. I knew his mood. He was feeling free and excited; the most anxious stage of the year’s work was behind him.
We went first to the house and walked around it, through the overgrown yard, to the front porch. We had in mind to look in through the windows—at least I did—but when we had climbed the steps we went no further. Miss Gladys Markman’s ruffled curtains were still hanging in the windows. The porch swing still swung from its rusty hooks.
At the edge of the porch we stood and looked out past the sugar maple in the yard and over the tops of the trees on the bluff into the Bird’s Branch valley. You could not help but imagine Gladys and Amster Markman, old and alone, sitting there in the cool of the evening.
“It’s a fine place for a house,” Elton said.
“It is,” I said, moved by possibility.
“And it’s a good house, too,” Elton said. “It’s been kept up. Nothing wrong with it at all.” He looked at me and grinned, knowing that I had a girl I was serious about down at Hargrave.
We went on around the other side of the house and drew a drink from the well by the kitchen door. Elton stood with his hand still on the pump handle, looking at the weed-covered garden plot and the lots out by the barns. “Nobody going out to milk here this evening,” he said.
The old tobacco barn was twisted and leaning as though about to collapse under the weight of its roof. The small feed barn was still straight, square, level, and plumb; we went in through the half-open door. The field we had walked across had been unscarred beneath the weed growth, and now we saw that Amster Markman had planted flagstones edge-up beneath the stall partitions and thus kept the manure from rotting the wood.
“He was a good farmer,” Elton said. “He had that name.”
There were stalls for four horses on one side of the driveway. On the other side there was a little feed room and two large pens, one with tie chains and troughs for five cows. A set of old harness still hung from pegs in front of two of the stalls. All the doors had neat wooden latches. There was still hay in the loft.
When we stepped out again into the daylight, Elton said, “Let’s you and me buy this old place and set it to rights.”
He was watching me, grinning again, to see how the thought would hit me. Remembering it now, I cannot be sure how serious he was. It was at least a thought that he could not resist thinking. And he was grinning, I suppose, because he knew that I could not resist it either.
“But how would I get the money?” I said.
“I don’t know.” He was still looking at me, grinning, poking in his shirt pocket for his cigarettes. “Maybe Wheeler would help you. You ought to ask him.”
The possibility then seemed to descend upon us and envelop us, like a sudden change of weather. It changed everything: our minds, the day, the place.
We went into the careening tobacco barn.
“The framing and innards are all sound,” Elton said. “It could be straightened up.”
We spent a quarter of an hour dreaming aloud of what could be done. And then we walked in the other ridgetop fields, down into the woods, and back up by the lane that went out to the road.
“Here’s a place where a young fellow could get started and go on,” Elton said.
I knew it was. The thought of it had already gone all through me. It aches in me yet, though the Markman Place never became a real farm again and the house was vandalized and finally burned by hunters.
By the time we crossed the line fence again we knew the layout of the place, and we had thought of a way to farm it.
And so, late that afternoon, I climbed up the sounding well of my father’s office stairs, the noises of the street shut out behind me so that I rose up within the sound of my own steps. At the top of the stairs I took the two further steps to the office door and opened it into the waiting room, now empty, where Miss Julia Vye’s typewriter sat beneath its gray cover. The room was full of the level-lying late sunlight that entered through the back windows. I shut the door quietly and took another couple of steps to see if my father was at his desk.
He had already swiveled his chair around. He was smiling. He said, “Come in, Andy.”
He was in one of his beautiful times. I knew of the times when he would quietly enter the shade where his cattle were resting, and sit down. I knew too that he loved the seldom-occurring times late in the afternoons when he sat on at his desk after the office had emptied, when he could be as quiet as the room, ordering his thoughts. It was a time when time seemed to have stopped and his work itself was at rest.
Sometimes when I interrupted him at work in the press of a day’s events, he could be short enough, but now he welcomed me into his ease.
“Sit down. I’m glad to see you.”
He positioned a chair for me and I sat down. He laid his writing pad on top of one of the neat stacks of books and papers on his desk. He screwed the top back onto his fountain pen, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, and then he looked at me.
“What have you got on your mind?”
I told him. Though I guessed that he already knew the Markman Place, I described it to him as Elton and I had seen it, walking over it. I told him the possibilities we had seen.
My father’s attention, when he freely turned it to you, was a benevolent atmosphere. His hearing was the native element of my tale. He knew what I had seen; he had imagined such restorations as I had imagined; he had felt my excitement and my longing. The possibility I was trying to find voice for—an old place renewed and carried on—had kept him a farmer, though he was also a lawyer; it had sent him into endless struggles. Now, having lived to the age he was then and past it, and thinking of my own children, I know how stirred he was, listening to me, for he was hearing his own passion uttered to him by his son.
And yet he talked me out of it.
“Wait,” he said. “You’ve got more directions in you than you know.”
He wanted me to be free for a while longer. Perhaps he felt free to keep me free because he saw that I was already securely bound; my wish of that day would not leave me, though I had yet to drift far from it and return. In talking me out of my hope, he accorded it a gentleness that enabled me to keep it always.
Chapter 17
NOW THAT I have told virtually all I know of the story of Uncle Andrew and of his death and how we fared afterward, I see that I must return to my old question—What manner of man was he?—and make peace with it, for I am by no means certain of the answer. A story, I see, is not a life. A story must follow a line; the telling must begin and end. A life, on the contrary, would be impossible to fix in time, for it does not begin within itself, and it does not end.
Within limits we can know. Within somewhat
wider limits we can imagine. We can extend compassion to the limit of imagination. We can love, it seems, beyond imagining. But how little we can understand!
Whatever he was, Uncle Andrew was more than I know. In drawing him toward me again after so long a time, I seem to have summoned, not into view or into thought, but just within the outmost reach of love, Uncle Andrew in the plenitude of his being—the man he would have been for my sake, and for love of us all, had he been capable. In recalling him as I knew him in mortal time, I have felt his presence as a living soul.
However we may miss and mourn the dead, we really give little deference to death. “Death,” a friend of mine said as he approached it himself, “is a convention . . . not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records.” The dead remain in thought as much alive as they ever were, and yet increased in stature and grown remarkably near. The older I have got and the better acquainted among the dead, the plainer it has become to me that I live in the company of immortals.
One by one, the sharers in this mortal damage have borne its burden out of the present world: Uncle Andrew, Grandpa Catlett, Grandma, Momma-pie, Aunt Judith, my father, and many more. At times perhaps I could wish them merely oblivious, and the whole groaning and travailing world at rest in their oblivion. But how can I deny that in my belief they are risen?
I imagine the dead waking, dazed, into a shadowless light in which they know themselves altogether for the first time. It is a light that is merciless until they can accept its mercy; by it they are at once condemned and redeemed. It is Hell until it is Heaven. Seeing themselves in that light, if they are willing, they see how far they have failed the only justice of loving one another; it punishes them by their own judgment. And yet, in suffering that light’s awful clarity, in seeing themselves within it, they see its forgiveness and its beauty, and are consoled. In it they are loved completely, even as they have been, and so are changed into what they could not have been but what, if they could have imagined it, they would have wished to be.
That light can come into this world only as love, and love can enter only by suffering. Not enough light has ever reached us here among the shadows, and yet I think it has never been entirely absent.
Remembering, I suppose, the best days of my childhood, I used to think I wanted most of all to be happy—by which I meant to be here and to be undistracted. If I were here and undistracted, I thought, I would be at home.
But now I have been here a fair amount of time, and slowly I have learned that my true home is not just this place but is also that company of immortals with whom I have lived here day by day. I live in their love, and I know something of the cost. Sometimes in the darkness of my own shadow I know that I could not see at all were it not for this old injury of love and grief, this little flickering lamp that I have watched beside for all these years.
A PLACE ON EARTH
For Mary and Chuck
For Katie, Virginia, and Tanya
For Den and Billie
For Emily and Marshall
CONTENTS
PART ONE
1
The Empty Store
Missing
The Card Game
A Dream of Absence
A Departure
Rain, Rain
I Can Do It by Myself
A Voice from the Distance
A Little Shift in the Wind
2
Port William
Company
Like a Bird
The Carpenter Shop
An Old Wound
A Pretty Good Boy
Feeding
3
The Last
The Hotel
The Grass May Grow a Mile
Images Like Seeds
Waiting
4
The Barber’s Calling
Talk
A New Calling
Light and Warmth
5
Keeping Watch
The Sheep Barn
PART TWO
6
A Dark Morning
A Difference Made
A Comforter
The Sanctuary
A Knack for the Here
7
Born a Idiot, Educated a Fool
The Farm in the Valley
Flood
Where Are You?
Coming to Rest
A Vigil
The Keeping of the Place
Changed
8
Something Ain’t Right
Never What It Was
Some Cleaning Up
A Pleasing Shadow
For Someone Who Will Come Later
A Spring Night
Green Coming Strong
PART THREE
9
Look a Yonder
The Bridge
A Guest at a Strange Table
10
The Wanting of What May Be Lost
Something in the World to Do
A Pleasant Place to Sit
11
Green Pasture
Caught
Daylight
A Birth
PART FOUR
12
Going Down
Dangerous Ground
He’s Dead
13
Hard at It
A Widow Alone
Haunted
14
A Famous Escapade
The Presence of Grief
A Ramble
A Result
The Sense of Time Passing
What Is Left
15
That’s Fine
Another Result
16
Six Feet
It’s Over!
Redounding and Sublime
A Passing Dirge
Among the Dead
PART FIVE
17
Straightening Up
A Homecoming
Into the Woods
PART ONE
Chapter 1
THE EMPTY STORE
The seed bins are empty. The counters and rows of shelves along the walls, stripped of merchandise, contain only slanting shadows and the slanting rainy light from the front windows. The interior of the store has been reduced to a severe geometrical order over which the light breaks without force, colored but not brightened by the white of the walls, the pale green of the counters and shelves. Its swept surfaces outline precisely the dimension of its silence and emptiness, but the strict order and cleanness of the room make it a silence that seems actively expectant of sound, a carefully tended emptiness anticipating an arrival. In the back, near the entrance to a small screened-off area once used as an office, a black iron safe stands against the wall. When Frank Lathrop cleaned out the store after his son Jasper went into the Army at the beginning of the war, he left the door of the safe ajar for fear that if he closed it he would never be able to work the combination to open it again. He did not foresee that he would ever want to open it again, but at the time the precaution seemed necessary, consistent with the careful neatness in which he had left the place.
The four men who sit at the card game in the makeshift office feel the vacancy of the larger room as a condition of the smaller, which, like the seepage of wind through the back wall, subtly qualifies their presence there. All afternoon the sound of rain on the tin roof has pecked and swiveled through the hollow building, constantly changing in force and inflection, but never ceasing, until it seems to them the very presence and noise of emptiness. They have got used to the sound; consciousness, attentive to the details of the game, has overridden it, but at the back of their minds it persists. And the rain itself has persisted for days into the beginning of March, making the dawns sluggish, the evenings early and sudden, so that they have come to think of time as a succession of nights rather than days.
A large desk, its cover pulled down and locked, stands at the end of the room farthest from the door. On its top are several neatly marked boxes of accounts
and receipts, and a radio playing so quietly that the music is no more than a series of stuttering accents like the far-off rattling of a snare drum. Between the desk and the heating stove at the opposite end of the room Jasper Lathrop’s meat block has been placed to serve as a card table. The two windows in the back wall look out on a narrow lot covered with dead weed stalks, chicory and poke and burdock, and the lighter brown napping of foxtail and wild oat. In the center of the lot there is a disjointed heap of weather-blackened crates that Frank Lathrop once intended to burn; but on the day, a week or so after Jasper’s departure, when he set the store in order and shut the building, he felt his duty to his son was more finished than he wanted to believe. The act of burning seemed too final, too suggestive of a conclusion he was unable to face. In the three years that have gone by since then, the crates have stayed there, and now in the steady rain they have the look of permanence, the stack of them monolithic and at ease, an indelible feature of the casual back view of the town. At the rear of the lot, built sidelong to the fence, is the small carpenter shop of Ernest Finley. Black coal smoke comes from its chimney, twisted off the bricks by the wind and driven to the ground, turning delicately amber as it thins. The carpenter’s pickup truck is parked in front of the door, and through the afternoon the men at the card game have heard the measured sounds of his hammering and sawing. Beyond the shop a broad pasture swags down to a creek branch and tilts up again, gently, to the top of a long ridge. A flock of sheep, heads down against the rain, straggles toward the barn at the top of the ridge for the night feeding. Beyond the ridge is the opening of the river valley.
The light is still strong in the room. The card faces turned up on the hacked surface of the meat block are still white and exact. Outside the windows the gutter drips, also exact, as steady and half-heard as a clock ticking. The sounds of voices and automobile engines out on the street reach back to the room only occasionally and faintly. The smoke from Mat Feltner’s cigar, which he has balanced fire-end out on the edge of the block, rises in a straight thin shaft a yard high, then scrolls out beneath the ceiling, clouding bluely down again into the light at the tops of the windows. Mat taps the fingers of his left hand against the seat of his chair, repeating the same rhythm half a dozen times, and then stops; the nervous rapidity of the sound seems to him to have communicated his uneasiness, and he glances at Frank Lathrop and then at Jayber Crow and Old Jack Beechum to see if they might have noticed. But they are occupied with their cards. He hooks his thumb into his belt.