A Place in Time (19 page)

That night after supper I lit the lantern and walked over to Jarrat's and sat with him in the kitchen until bedtime. I wasn't invited. I was a volunteer, I reckon, like Nathan. If it had been just me and I needed company, which I did, I could have walked to town and sat with the talkers in the pool room or the barber shop. But except that I would go to sit with him, Jarrat would have sat there in his sorrow entirely by himself and stared at the wall or the floor. I anyhow denied him that.

I went back every night for a long time. There was nothing else to do. There wasn't a body to be spoken over and buried to bring people together, and to give Tom's life a proper conclusion in Port William. His body was never going to be in Port William again. It was buried in some passed-over battlefield in Italy, somewhere none of us had ever been and would never
go. The word was passed around, of course. People were sorry, and they told us. The neighbor women brought food, as they do. But mainly there was just the grieving, and mainly nobody here to do it but Jarrat and me.

There was a woman lived here, just out the road, a good many years ago. She married a man quite a bit older—well, he was an old man, you just as well say—and things went along and they had a little boy. In four or five years the old man died. After that, you can imagine, the little boy was all in all to his mother. He was her little man of the house, as she called him, and in fact he was the world to her. And then, when he wasn't but nine or ten years old, the boy took awfully sick one winter, and he died, and we buried him out there on the hill at Port William beside his old daddy.

We knew that the woman was grieved to death, as we say, and everybody did for her as they could. What we didn't know was that she really was grieving herself to death. It's maybe a little hard to believe that people can die of grief, but they do.

After she died, the place had to be sold. I went out there with Big Ellis and several others to set the place to rights and get the tools and the household stuff set out for the auction. When we got to the room that had been the little boy's, it was like opening a grave. It had been kept just the way it was when he died, except she had gathered up and put there everything she'd found that reminded her of him: all his play pretties, every broom handle he rode for a stick horse, every rock or feather or string she knew he had played with. I still remember the dread we felt just going into that room, let alone moving the things, or throwing them away. Some of them we had to throw away.

I understood her then. I understood her better after Tom was dead. When a young man your heart knows and loves is all of a sudden gone, never to come back, the whole place reminds you of him everywhere you look. You dread to touch anything for fear of changing it. You fear the time you know is bound to come, when the look of the place will be changed entirely, and if the dead came back they would hardly know it, or not recognize it at all.

Even so, this place is not a keepsake just to look at and remember. You can't stop just because you're carrying a load of grief and would like to
stop, or don't care if you go on or not. Jarrat nor I either didn't stop. This world was still asking things of us that we had to give.

It was maybe the animals most of all that kept us going, the good animals we depended on, that depended on us: our work mules, the cattle, the sheep, the hogs, even the chickens. They were a help to us because they didn't know our grief but just quietly lived on, suffering what they suffered, enjoying what they enjoyed, day by day. We took care of them, we did what had to be done, we went on.

Dick Watson was my grandfather Catlett's farm hand, and he was my friend. When he died, I did not go to his funeral. I was in school. It occurred to nobody that I should have gone, but I should have. I wish I had.

My father and Grandpa Catlett did go to the funeral and so I know about it. Maybe other white people were there too, about that I don't know. But it is important to know that at least two were there. This would have been the fall of 1945, and so everybody there belonged to the old division of the races we came to call “segregation.” They had been born in it, had lived in it, partly at least had been made as they were by it. And yet that formal and legal division, applied after all to people who were neighbors, made within itself exceptions to itself. And so they came together, the white with the black, in duty to Dick Watson, at one in loss and in sorrow.

“Well, sir, it was perfect, Andy. It was just right,” my father said to comfort me, for he knew I was grieving. “That preacher was splendid.”

From time to time he recited parts of the sermon to me as he remembered it, for he could not forget, and I have not forgot. I will try to line it out as the preacher sounded it. “It was not a speech,” my father said. “It was a song.”

Standing above the open coffin in which Dick's body lay in his Sunday clothes in its stillness and Aunt Sarah Jane who sat in the black dress of her sorrow nearby, the preacher gestured broadly with his opened hands, all the while looking at the people, as if to see if they knew already what he was going to say. He said:

This ain't him.
He ain't here.
This ain't no more our brother,
our beloved. For he
ain't here. Where he is
all is well.
All is well with Dick Watson.
All is well.
He has come to a door
to a mansion
didn't have to knock
to get in. He had heard
that voice.
He has heard, O Lord,
thy voice.
“Brother Watson, come in.
Well done.
Well done, thou good
and faithful servant.
Well done. Enter
into the joy of thy Lord.”

“
Something
like that,” my father said. “For one man can't do it by himself. He has got to have help. He has got to have inspiration, and help too from the other people.”

The sermon took a while. The people took up the preacher's phrases and sang them back to him. They called out to him to encourage him:

“Amen!”

“Yes!”

“Amen!”

They shouted to him to go ahead, to preach it, for he had it right.

At first some of the people were crying, and Grandpa cried with them. And then, as the voice of the preacher called them, a sense of triumph grew among them, and the tone shifted. Heaven and earth drew together. The preacher said:

Blessèd!
Blessèd are the poor
in spirit, for theirs
is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessèd!
Blessèd are they that mourn,
for they shall be comforted.
Children,
don't cry no more.
Sister Sarah Jane,
don't cry no more.
Our brother,
where he is,
he don't hear no crying.
For his burden is lifted.
For freedom
has come to him
and rest.
For where he is
ain't no crying there.
Not a sigh.
Not a tear.

The preacher stood then with his hands again opened. A beautiful voice sang back from among the people: “Nooo, not a tear.” The other agreeing voices quieted and fell away. While the preacher regarded the people with his hands still lifted, my father said, an immense quiet came upon them, and the freedom of Dick Watson in that moment was present to them all.

They sang a hymn, they said a prayer, and then they let him go.

Burley Coulter is bone-tired, thirsty, hungry, lost, and entirely happy. He has his worries and his griefs, but for the time being they are not on his mind, nor is his workaday life. All that is eight or ten hours behind him, a long time yet ahead of him, and a world away.

He is somewhere, he believes, way up in the headwaters of Willow Run, far out of his home territory. Since his hounds last treed, at a branchy white oak where an upland pasture dropped off to a wooded bluff, he has been walking along a seldom-used farm road on the crest of a long ridge. The road has so far led him past a cornfield and a tobacco patch, both sowed in barley, and a big field of grass and clover, mowed early for hay, then pastured, now deserted. That is as much as he knows of where he is.

Except for the ambient glow of the coal oil lantern he carries in his hand, the night is perfectly dark. It is too late, or too early, for a house light to show, and the sky is thickly clouded. Beside him his shadow stretches on the ground, disappearing before it is complete into the greater darkness. Two hounds walk with him, and he is alert to keep them close; he does not want them to start hunting again.

He, his brother, Jarrat, and Jarrat's son, Nathan—mostly just the three of them—had stood at the stripping room benches from early winter until a few days ago, already February of 1948, preparing the previous summer's tobacco crop for market. The work had been steady, consoling in a way, for
it was always there, but it was confining too, and finally they were weary of it, happy to be done. They had gone, the day before, to the warehouse in Hargrave to see the last of it sold.

When he got home, having for a change nothing else to do, Burley did his chores early, putting out hay for his cattle and his mules, and corn for his hogs. The old house, once he was back in it, felt too empty. As often, now that he was living in it alone, it did not satisfy. After a bright cold spell, the weather had turned cloudy with a warming wind. The snowless frozen ground had thawed on top and grown slick. He did not even bother to build up the fires.

He took off the fairly new work clothes he had worn to the warehouse and put on older ones. He strapped on his long-barreled .22 pistol in its shoulder holster and dropped a few extra cartridges into his pants pocket. He took his everyday felt hat and the hunting coat he wore as a work jacket from their nail by the back door and put them on. Into one pocket of the coat he put a flashlight, and into another, in a paper sack, six cold biscuits made by himself just the way they had been made by his mother and her mother and her mother, except maybe with less shortening so they'd be a little more durable. He felt his pants pockets to make sure he had matches and his knife. The knife was a heavy one with the handle worn smooth and pale; it had two blades that were razor sharp and a dull blade that he used for scraping and digging. The knife as much belonged to his sense of himself as either of his thumbs. He shook the lantern beside his ear to make sure it was full of oil. At the edge of the porch he sat down and pulled on and buckled his overshoes. He stood again, picked up the lantern, called the dogs, and headed down into the woods along Katy's Branch.

Behind him now was not just the old weatherboarded log house that he had thought of as empty since the death of his mother, who all his life before had been its presiding genius; the old crop year too was at last behind him. It had been a good enough year. The crop had been, he would say, better than the year, and had sold well, thanks to their nearly perfect work, which Burley does not credit to himself. It was owing, as he knows and will readily say, to his brother and nephew, to their love of the work, their sense of the beauty of it, their passion. Burley's own submission to work was characterized, not by reluctance, let us say, but by a division of mind; he would have settled for less perfection. And yet, in the background
of his present eagerness, there was satisfaction with the completed year, the crop beautifully cultivated and beautifully handled.

In this completion he began to feel the opening of what he recognized as freedom, unobstructing by the least taint of guilt or regret his wish to do exactly what he was doing. He went down through the pasture toward the hollow they called Stepstone, which descended steeply to Katy's Branch. When he reached the woods, the old house and its outbuildings on the ridgetop, and the open slope also, were out of sight. The woods enclosed him, quieted the light, and changed the way he felt. It was as if an old world had passed away and another, forever new, had risen up around him. The air bore the smells of the woods, of leaf mold stirred by his footsteps, of the thawing ground. The new, warmer air was playing its way into the spaces around him as if excited by its own arrival. He seemed to breathe into himself the presence of his country.