A Place in Time (22 page)

Now as they walk the backbone of that slowly widening, long ridge, wherever it is, in the tiny geography of the lantern light, both man and dogs are weary. After the final tree, the dogs maybe would have run on, but Burley has kept them close, and they have by now accepted his sense that the hunting is over.

From the lay of the land, as they have felt it, walking over it, from the wear of the road as paths have gathered to it, Burley guesses that eventually they will come to a barn.

Eventually they do. Burley has half-expected to hear house dogs barking. If he had, he would have turned aside. As a courtesy to sleepers and to
his pleasure, he avoids houses when he can. But now the silence remains complete. They go through a gate into what will turn out to be a barn lot, and then they have the hulk of a barn ahead of them, a greater darkness more felt than seen. Burley again takes out the flashlight and carefully shines it around, moving so as to see clearly past the barn.

There is no house in sight. The barn stands by itself on the ridge that extends on farther than the light can reach. Burley hasn't formed his thoughts into words for a long time, not since he woke by the remains of the fire, and he does not do so now. But now that he is sure of his isolation, need comes upon him. He needs to drink, eat, and sleep.

Within the barn lot, close beside the barn, there is a second lot, only a few feet square, planked off to enclose a cistern with a chain pump. Beyond the fence there is a half-barrel used for a drinking trough, now emptied and turned on its side. Burley goes through the little gate in the plank fence. He looks around for a can or something to drink from, but finds none. He cups his left hand under the spout of the pump, and cranking with his right hand, bends and drinks. Drinking big swallows of the clean-tasting, teeth-aching water, he floods his innards, he gratifies himself. He drinks until he can hold no more, and then straightens and wipes his mouth on his sleeve.

The two hounds have sat politely and watched him drink. Now they continue to watch him, as with forbearance, not moving.

“You all thirsty?” he says. “Well, I reckon so.”

He is wearing what was once a good felt hat, now misshapen by use, but still a pretty good one. He takes it off, punches in the crown, pumps water into the concavity, and offers it. The dogs drink, Frog first, then Jet. Burley flings away the surplus water, restores his hat by punching out the crown, and puts it on again.

He then sits down on the concrete top of the cistern, leans back against the pump, and feels into the pocket where he put the biscuits. They're still there in their paper sack, to his relief, for he hasn't thought of them since he left home. He imagines that the dogs have lunched on fresh meat in the lags after treeing, but he doesn't think it right to eat in front of them without offering them something. Having seen no sign that dogs can count, he gives them a biscuit apiece and keeps the other four for himself.

He eats the biscuits slowly, with relish, for they taste good and, as his friend Art Rowanberry often says, there is a world of strength in a biscuit.
He is not thinking in words, but only knowing as he knows. The sky is still overcast. It is dark as dark can be. He has no way of knowing the time, except for the instinct that tells him it is now well on the morning side of midnight. He is not going to make it home for his morning chores.

There was a time maybe that would have been a worry, if at that time he had been much inclined to worry. That was when Burley and Jarrat had not quite seen eye to eye, when Jarrat, knowing that Burley hadn't made it in, would say, “If it suits him to let it go to the Devil, let it go to the Devil.” But that time is gone. Jarrat, in his mostly silence, still carries his old griefs, his loneliness, his rage for work. But they get along now. They grieve some of the same griefs now. And now Burley is dependable mostly and, when not dependable, predictable. In the morning, guessing that Burley probably will have disappeared, Jarrat will walk across the hollow and do his chores for him, and won't feel righteous enough even to mention it.

When he has eaten all the biscuits and again pumped himself a drink, he goes into the barn, taking great care with the lantern. It is a feed barn, an old one well kept up, with a hayloft, a small corn crib, four horse stalls, and a large pen for feeding cattle. The cattle have been sold, or moved nearer home where maybe, so far into the winter, there is more hay. Everywhere are the signs and traces of a good farmer, somebody who knows what he is doing and likes doing it.

Along one wall of the cattle pen there is a manger with two-by-four stanchions. It still has hay in it, fairly fresh, still fragrant. The dogs, knowing Burley, lie down under the manger and curl up. Burley extinguishes the lantern. He stands to let the dark complete itself, and then, feeling his way, he climbs between two stanchions into the manger. Before he has completed the deep nest he has in his mind, he is already sleeping.

For Mary and Stan Flitner

Elton Penn thought Sunday was a good idea, not that he was apt to be found in church. Like many farmers, he knew he lived in the presence of mystery and of wonders, and he responded with his version of reverence, but he was not a churchman. He liked the idea of Sunday because six days of work, the way he went at it, were about enough for anybody. He was glad of a good excuse to rest on the seventh day. There were Sundays when, as they said around Port William, “the ox was in the ditch,” and Elton would have to work, but that could put thirteen hard days in a row. It pleased him to be able to stop on Sunday. “Six days
ought
to be enough,” I often heard him say, “and they
are
enough.”

His problem was that he couldn't rest at home. When he tried to sit and be still—or, worse, attempted just to wander around—at home, pretty soon he would see some job that needed to be done, and first thing he knew he would be doing it. Elton had a weakness, you might say, for work. Unlike some people born and brought up to the work of farming, Elton loved it. When he saw work that needed doing, he wanted to be the one who did it. With him there was never much time between thinking of it and starting in to do it.

To rest he needed to go someplace else. There were various places
he would go. Sometimes he would even go to Port William to sit with the loafers, and that way he learned many things of interest. But loafing in town, maybe because some of the loafers loafed faithfully every day, would begin to seem to him less restful than merely idle, and he would become dissatisfied. The resting place that most suited him was Arthur and Martin Rowanberry's place down at the lower end of the Sand Ripple valley below Port William.

Not so long after the war had ended and Art had made it home, both of the elder Rowanberrys had died. In the early spring of 1946, Mr. Early Rowanberry died in the night, having worked all day the day before. A little more than a year later, Miss Stella, to whom nothing had seemed quite right after Mr. Early's departure, followed him out of this world. With the parents gone, Art and Mart had stayed on in the old house, sharing the housework and batching it out together tolerably well.

And now it was 1949, and the bachelors' household down at the Rowanberry place had become an established thing, taken for granted in Port William. Mart, the younger brother by five years, enjoyed going places, and he had a longtime girlfriend, Oma Settle from down by Hargrave, but nobody expected him to get married.

His brother was in some ways his opposite. Art Rowanberry was born in 1905. He had been an old soldier, an “old man” among the boys with whom he had fought the war. When he had at last got out of Bastogne, his travels, as far as he was concerned, were over. He traveled on, under orders, to the wound that took him out of the war and nearly out of the world. When he was strong enough again, he traveled home. And that pretty much was that. He had seen by then as much of the world as he wanted to see, except for the stretch of country between Bird's Branch and Katy's Branch, and from Port William and Goforth to the river, which was home to him far more than the great nation he had fought for. After he came back from the war and the government was finished with him except for taxes, he would go to Port William or Hargrave if he had to, but for pleasure he stayed home.

What the two brothers had in common was the boundary of land—arable ridges and creek bottom, wooded slopes and hollows—that Columbus Festus Rowanberry, their grandfather's grandfather, had received for his service in the War of Independence. They had the place, and the ways
of it, that they were born to. They had the farming of it, which they thought of as work. And they had the free hunting and gathering from it and the fishing from the river, about as strenuous as work but which they thought of as rest.

They were good men, the Rowanberrys, work-hardened from earliest boyhood, good at their work, and well-furnished with knowledge of their place and neighborhood. Like Elton, they honored Sundays by their rest, which included various pleasures. Their rest had about it always the sense of having been earned, and so it was in their rest that Elton too could rest. With them he loved to sit and talk, inside by the stove in cold weather, out on the porch overlooking the creek valley if the weather was fine, allowing the time to go by without wishing it would go faster or slower, or even thinking of it.

On many a Sunday morning, I sat with the three of them and sometimes with Jayber Crow too on that porch, watching the light change over the little valley and listening to their talk. Because I was by far the youngest, I mostly listened. Though I was not present for the events I am going to tell about, I know about them from listening, lately and long ago.

As the winter was ending in that year of 1949, early on a rainy Sunday morning, Elton left the old Beechum place on the Bird's Branch road, where he was then living as a tenant, and headed down to the Rowanberry place. For weeks he had been kept close to home, seeing his ewes through lambing. Now it was March, and he had entered a sort of between-times. The last of his tobacco crop of the year before had been sold. The last of the lambs had been born. As soon as the weather permitted, the plowing and the other work of the new crop year would have to begin. It had not begun yet, but he had ahead of him the drying ground, the coming warmth, the growing light, and the relentless prompting of several things needing to be done at once. After the work was started, the various jobs fallen more or less into order, he would feel better. The thought of all of it awaiting him, unbegun, had set his teeth on edge. Or so he put it to himself. And so, leaving their old car for his wife, Mary, to drive to church, he got into his even older truck and drove out the lane.

He drove slowly, deliberately slowly, as if by doing so he could force himself to think slowly. It helped a little. He drove out the Bird's Branch
road to the blacktop, went through Port William, and just beyond the town turned down the Sand Ripple road. The lane into the Rowanberry place forded the creek a couple of hundred yards from the house, but backwater from the rising river was standing deep over the ford. The creek was now crossable only by a swinging footbridge: two steel cables with split-locust joists wired between them, a narrow row of planks nailed to the joists, two number-nine wires for banisters. Elton pulled the truck out of the lane, killed the engine, and got out into the big silence and the chill of the morning. He crossed the creek on the lurching footbridge, walked up the slope to the house and around to the back. He stepped into the small enclosed back porch with its stack of firewood, a variety of outdoor clothing on a row of hooks, a lantern hanging from a nail, and a two-gallon coal oil can with a spout. He knocked twice on the kitchen door.

“Hang on,” Art Rowanberry called from inside.

“It's just me,” Elton said, letting himself in to keep Art from having to get up. He shut the door carefully behind him. “Morning,” he said.

“Come in, come in!” Art said. “Take a chair. Good to see you back down on the creek.”

Art was sitting tilted back in a straight chair by one of the kitchen windows with the Sears, Roebuck catalog opened across his lap. There was a fire in the stove, and the room was dry and warm.

“You about to make an order?”

“Well,” Art said, “I was reading up on the price of socks. I've just got started on mine when the heels and toes are gone. But I'm down to some now ain't nothing but tops.”

Elton unbuttoned his jacket and stood by the stove with his hands over it a moment, soaking up the warmth.

“It's a fine morning out, if you like a rainy morning,” Art said.