A Place in Time (18 page)

And then, the year he was sixteen, a little edge crept up between him and his daddy. It wasn't very much in the open at first, wasn't admitted really, but there it was. I thought, “Uh-oh,” for I hated to see it, and I knew there wasn't much to be done about it. Tom was feeling his strength, he was coming in to his own, and Jarrat that year was forty-seven years old. When he looked at Tom he got the message—from where he was, the only way was down—and he didn't like it.

Well, one afternoon when we were well along in the tobacco cutting, Tom took it in his head he was going to try the old man. Jarrat was cutting in the lead, as he was used to doing, and Tom got into the next row and lit out after him. He stayed with him too, for a while. He put the pressure on. He made his dad quiet down and work for his keep.

But Tom had misestimated. The job was still above his breakfast. Jarrat wasn't young anymore, but he was hard and long-practiced. He kept his head and rattled Tom, and he beat him clean. And then he couldn't stop himself from drawing the fact to Tom's attention.

Tom went for him then, making fight. They were off a little way from the rest of us, and both of them thoroughly mad. Before we could get there and get them apart, Jarrat had just purely whipped the hell out of Tom. He ought to've quit before he did, but once he was mad he didn't have it in him to give an inch. It was awful. Ten minutes after it was over, even Jarrat knew it was awful, but then it was too late.

It was a day, one of several, I'm glad I won't have to live again. Tom was too much a boy yet to get in front where he wanted to be but too much a man to stay and be licked. He had to get out from under his daddy's feet and onto his own. And so he bundled his clothes and went away. Afterwards, because the old ones were so grieved, me too, Nathan too, the house was like a house where somebody had died.

Because he didn't need much and asked little, Tom found a place right away with an old couple by the name of Whitlow over on the other side of the county, far enough away to be separate from us. I knew he would do all right, and he did. He knew how to work; and the use of his head,
that was already coming to him, came fast once he got out on his own. He began to make a name for himself: a good boy, a good hand.

When we had found out where he was, Nathan and I would catch a ride on a rainy day or a Sunday and go over to see him, or we'd see him occasionally in town. After he got his feet under him and was feeling sure of himself, he would come over on a Sunday afternoon now and again to see his grandma and grandpa. In all our minds, he had come into a life of his own that wasn't any longer part of ours. To the old ones, who had given up their ownership of him by then and their right to expect things from him, every one of those visits was a lovely gift, and they made over him and honored him as a guest.

He stayed at the Whitlows' through the crop year of 1940. Mr. Whitlow died that summer. After the place was sold and Mrs. Whitlow settled in town, Tom struck a deal with Ernest Russet from up about Sycamore. Ernest and Naomi Russet were good people, we had known them a long time, and they had a good farm. Going there was a step up in the world for Tom. He soon found favor with the Russets, which not everybody could have done, and before long, having no children of their own, they'd made practically a son of him.

After Tom had been with them a while, the Russets invited us to come for Sunday dinner. Jarrat wouldn't go, of course, but Nathan and I did. The Russets' preacher, Brother Milby, and his wife were there too, a spunky couple. I took a great liking to Mrs. Milby. It was a good dinner and we had a good time. Ernest Russet was the right man for Tom, no mistake about that. He was a fine farmer. The right young man could learn plenty from him.

By the time he went to the Russets, Tom was probably as near to the right young man as the country had in it. He had got his growth and filled out, and confidence had come into his eyes. He was a joy to look at.

One Sunday afternoon after the weather was warm and the spring work well started, he paid us a visit. Grandpa had died the summer before, so now it was just Grandma and Nathan and me still at home, and it was a sadder place. But we were glad to see Tom and to be together; we sat out on the porch and talked a long time.

Tom got up finally as if to start his hitchhike back to the Russets', and so I wasn't quite ready when he said he thought he'd go over to see his dad.

That fell into me with sort of a jolt. I hadn't been invited, but I said, “Well, I'll go with you.”

So we went. We crossed the hollow, and clattered up onto the back porch, and Tom knocked on the kitchen door. Jarrat must have been in the kitchen, for it wasn't but seconds until there he was, his left hand still on the door knob and a surprised look on his face. Myself, I wasn't surprised yet, but I was expecting to be. I could feel my hair trying to rise up under my hat. I took a glance at Tom's face, and he was grinning at Jarrat. My hair relaxed and laid down peacefully again when Tom stuck out his hand. It was a big hand he stuck out, bigger than mine, bigger than Jarrat's. Jarrat looked down at that hand like it was an unusual thing to see on the end of a man's arm. He looked up at Tom again and grinned back. And then he reached out and took Tom's hand and shook it.

So they made it all right. And so when the war broke out and Tom was called to the army and had to go, he could come and say freely a proper good-bye to his dad.

It wasn't long after Tom got drafted until Nathan turned eighteen, and damned if he didn't go volunteer. I was surprised, but I ought not to've been. Nathan probably could have got deferred, since his brother was already gone and farmers were needed at home, and I reckon I was counting on that. But he had reasons to go, too, that were plain enough.

Nathan and Jarrat never came to an actual fight. Nathan, I think, had Tom's example in mind, and he didn't want to follow it. He was quieter turned than Tom, less apt to give offense. But Jarrat was hard for his boys to get along with. He just naturally took up too much of the room they needed to grow in. He was the man in the lead, the man going away while everybody else was still coming. His way was the right way, which in fact it pret' near always was, but he didn't have the patience of a henhawk.

“Let's go!” he'd say. If you were at it with him and you hesitated a minute: “Let's go! Let's go!”

When we were young and he would say that, I'd say back to him,

“Les Go's dead and his wife's a widder.

You be right good and you might get her.”

But nobody was going to say that back to him anymore, not me, much less Nathan.

After Jarrat's fight with Tom, I would now and again try to put in a word for Nathan. “Why don't you let him alone? Give him a little head room. Give him time to be ready.”

And Jarrat would say, “Be ready, hell! Let him be started.”

It didn't take much of that, I knew, to be a plenty. When Nathan came back from the war his own man, Jarrat did get out of his way, and they could work together, but for the time being Nathan needed to be gone. Of course he got a bellyful of bossing in the army, but it at least didn't come from his dad. He also had a brotherly feeling that he ought to go where Tom had gone. Grandma was dead by then. There was nothing holding him. So I reckon he went because he thought he had to, but I didn't want him to. For one thing, it would leave us short-handed. For another, I would miss him. For another, I was afraid.

As it turned out, Nathan never saw Tom again. They kept Nathan on this side till nearly the end of the war, but they gave Tom some training and taught him to drive a bulldozer and shipped him straight on across the waters into the fight. He was killed the next year. I know a few little details of how it happened, but they don't matter.

It came about, anyhow, that in just a couple of years the old house was emptied of everybody but me. It took me a while to get used to being there by myself. When I would go in to fix my dinner or at night, there wouldn't be a sound. I could
hear
the quiet. And however quiet I tried to be, it seemed to me I rattled. I didn't like the quiet, for it made me sad, and so did the little noises I made in it. For a while I couldn't hardly bring myself to trap the mice, I so needed to have something stirring there besides me. All my life I've hunted and fished alone, even worked alone. I never minded being by myself outdoors. But to be alone in the house, a place you might say is used to talk and the sounds of somebody stirring about in it all day, that was lonesome. As I reckon Jarrat must have found out a long time ago and, like himself, just left himself alone to get used to it. I've been, all in all, a lucky man, for the time would be again when the old house would be full of people, but that was long a-coming. For a
while there it was just Jarrat and me living alone together, he in his house on one side of the hollow, me in mine on the other. I could see his house from my house, and he could see mine from his. But we didn't meet in either house, his or mine. We met in a barn or a field, wherever the day's work was going to start. When quitting time came we went our ways separately home. Of course by living apart we were keeping two houses more or less alive, and maybe there was some good in that.

The difference between us was that I wasn't at home all the time. When the work would let up, or on Saturday evenings and Sundays, for I just flat refused to work late on Saturday or much at all on Sunday, I'd be off to what passed with me for social life or to the woods or the river. But Jarrat was at home every day.
Every
day. He never went as far as Port William except to buy something he needed.

If you work about every day with somebody you've worked with all your life, you'd be surprised how little you need to talk. Oh, we swapped work with various ones—Big Ellis, the Rowanberrys, and others—and that made for some sociable times along, and there would be good talk then. But when it was just Jarrat and me, we would sometimes work without talking a whole day, or maybe two together. And so when he got the government's letter about Tom, he didn't say but two words. We were working here at my place. After dinner, when he walked into the barn, carrying the letter in his hand, he said, “Sit down.”

I sat down. He handed me the letter, and it felt heavy in my hands as a stone. After I read it—“killed in action”—and handed it back, the whole damned English language just flew away in the air like a flock of blackbirds.

For a long time neither one of us moved. The daily sounds of the world went on, sparrows in the barn lot, somebody's bull way off, the wind in the eaves, but around us was this awful, awful silence that didn't have one word in it.

I looked at Jarrat finally. He was standing there blind as a statue. He had Tom's life all inside him now, as once it had been all inside Lettie. Now it was complete. Now it was finished.

And then, for the first and last time I said it to him, I said, “Let's go.” The day's work was only half finished. Having nothing else we could do, we finished it.

*     *     *

What gets you is the knowledge, and it sometimes can fall on you in a clap, that the dead are gone absolutely from this world. As has been said around here over and over again, you are not going to see them here anymore, ever. Whatever was done or said before is done or said for good. Any questions you think of that you ought to've asked while you had a chance are never going to be answered. The dead know, and you don't.

And yet their absence puts them with you in a way they never were before. You even maybe know them better than you did before. They stay with you, and in a way you go with them. They don't live on
in
your heart, but your heart knows them. As your heart gets bigger on the inside, the world gets bigger on the outside. If the dead had been alive only in this world, you would forget them, looks like, as soon as they die. But you remember them, because they always were living in the other, bigger world while they lived in this little one, and this one and the other one are the same. You can't see this with your eyes looking straight ahead. It's with your side vision, so to speak, that you see it. The longer I live, and the better acquainted I am among the dead, the better I see it. I am telling what I know.

It's our separatedness and our grief that break the world in two. Back when Tom got killed and the word came, I had never thought of such things. That time would have been hard enough, even if I had thought of them. Because I hadn't, it was harder.