A Place in Time (23 page)

“I don't mind a rainy morning,” Elton said. “But a week of dry weather wouldn't hurt a thing.”

“No. It wouldn't hurt,” Art said.

Elton pulled a chair away from the table and sat down.

Art said, “I allowed you'd be playing basketball.”

“No, I reckon not,” Elton said, puzzled but passing it off. “Where's Mart?”

“Playing basketball.”

“Basketball!” Elton said. He was grinning now at the thought of Mart playing basketball. “What's he doing playing basketball?”

“Oh, a bunch of 'em been getting together Sunday mornings and playing basketball in Hackett Dunham's barn loft. Hackett and his boys, Spence Gidwell and Tomtit, Pascal, Burley—a bunch of 'em, I don't know who all. Some of 'em play, and some of 'em watch.”

“And Mart plays?” To Elton's knowledge, neither of the Rowanberry brothers had ever played basketball, at least not until now. And now Mart was thirty-nine years old. It was a late start.

“Oh, I reckon Mart's took back to running with the boys.”

Of the two brothers, Elton liked best to work with Mart. He knew what to expect of Mart, they were tuned up pretty much alike. But Art interested him the most. Art did not say everything he thought, and he did a lot of thinking. He had been through a lot and had a lot to think about.

Elton said, “How come you're not down there playing with them?”

“Well, everybody needs something he don't have to do. It appears like basketball has got along well enough so far without me.”

Elton passed a little more time with Art to hear how things were going with him and Mart and their dogs and other animals. And then he got up and rebuttoned his jacket. “Maybe I'll go see what they're up to.” He had in fact grown intensely curious about the events in Hackett Dunham's barn.

“Oh, I imagine they'll be needing you down there,” Art said. “Come back when you can stay longer.” He said this in perfect good humor, but all the same, as Elton well knew, he loved the quiet and would be happy for the morning to continue as he had started it.

Hackett Dunham's farm lay below the mouth of Bird's Branch, in the angle between the creek and the river. It was a sizeable place, lying on both sides of the river road, containing some good high bottomland that never flooded, and rising up the valley side across the grassed lower slopes to the wooded bluffs along the rim. Hackett was a trader in livestock, which gave him a peculiar status in the community. People liked him. He was an affable, humorous man, never at a loss for a comeback. And yet people's liking for him shaded off into uneasiness and sometimes into a low-grade fear. It was understood that in any trade he was likely to know more than the man he was trading with. They had to assume that he was trading in
his own interest and to his own advantage, which was fair enough—why else would he be trading? —but it was a little intimidating too, a little scary. He was there to be traded with, he performed a needed service, so far as could be figured out he was not dishonest. And yet a trade with him was apt to leave an aftertaste of self-doubt.

There was, for instance, a famous conversation between Burley Coulter and Big Ellis:

“Where'd you get them cows, Big?”

“Hackett Dunham.”

“Well, did you get 'em worth the money?”

“Well, I don't
think
I got as good a deal as I
believe
I did.”

To cap off his standing in the Port William neighborhood, Hackett Dunham was a serious and successful participant in horse-pulling contests, in Kentucky and neighboring states. A part of his trade, a very lucrative part of it too, was in horses suitable, by strength and character, for the contests. It was known locally that his reputation was wide and better than moderately high. Along with their wariness of him, people around were proud of him. He had won championships.

Though Hackett was older than Elton by four or five years, by then, in Elton's twenty-ninth year, the two of them were long past the sort of worry that Hackett so often caused. They were cousins. Their mothers were sisters, and in the maternal line back at least to the granddam there had been a quick practical intelligence that Hackett and Elton knew in themselves and recognized in each other. Neither of them, certainly, found the other in any way to be feared.

When he got to the Dunham place, Elton turned into the lane that went back past the house to Hackett's big feed barn that was partitioned into box stalls and tie stalls for horses and gated pens for other animals. There were several vehicles parked in the barn lot, one of them being Mart Rowanberry's old car. Another, of about the same prewar vintage but worse used, Elton recognized as Big Ellis's. And so Big's neighbor, Burley Coulter, was probably in attendance also.

Elton switched the engine off, and then, sure enough, he could hear a ball bouncing, loud voices, and a rush of many feet, sounds that could be coming from nowhere but the loft of the barn.

He sat, listening, a moment. And then he got out of his truck, went
into the barn through the wide-open front doorway, and stepped into a tackroom full of harness and other equipment. From there he went up a set of stairs into the loft.

There was a bunch of them up there, just as Art had said, some playing, some watching. By that time of the year the loft was maybe two-thirds empty of hay. At its front end, the end away from the hay rick, was a netless iron hoop and a backboard, well made and well braced. By the look of it, Elton thought, it was a product of the blacksmith shop up at town. Hackett no doubt had had it made for his boys, June and Billy, and for Tomtit, son of Spence Gidwell who lived on the place, sharecropping and working by the day. The Dunham and Gidwell boys, and probably J. L. Safely's boys too, had been playing ball up there. And that, Elton guessed, was the way the Sunday games had started. The watchers were sitting on bales of hay along the sides of the loft.

Among them, sitting alone near the opening in the floor that Elton had come up through, was old Mr. Milt Wright, by far the unlikeliest presence in that time and place. Mr. Wright was one of the last of the generation that grew up after the Civil War. He was Hackett's wife's grandfather—“an old remnant man,” he called himself—who had come to shelter with her and Hackett in his final days. He sat with his cane leaning back against his breast, his hands resting as idly on the crook of it as a pair of gloves on a clothesline. He wore what would prove to be the last thing he would ever buy: a too-large, misbuttoned army surplus overcoat that he now wore almost all year round, for his blood had got thin and he was cold all the time. The coat, Hackett would say in a mood compounded of affection and amusement, “looked like the whole damned war had been fought in it.” He wore a felt hat with a punched-up crown that, before its decrepitude, might have belonged to Hackett. A stain of ambeer descended from one corner of his mouth. Hackett had known him a long time, could remember when he was strong and capable, when you could imagine him young, one of the better horsemen of his own day whose experience and judgment, as Hackett knew, were still useful. Now he had grown too old to notice himself. “He's the daddy of us all,” Hackett would say in a mood part indulgence, part respect, and part mockery too sometimes of the old man's habit of speaking as a ghost: “Ay God, I've done outlived my time. Ain't nar' a man living I knowed when I was a boy.”

Elton leaned to offer his hand to the old man, whom he liked and enjoyed listening to. But if Mr. Wright was looking at the players he was not seeing them. He was not seeing anything until Elton laid a hand on his shoulder and was recognized.

“Ab Penn's boy! Ay God, how are you, son?”

They shook hands. Elton greeted with a wave and a nod the several others in the row of watchers, and sat down between Burley Coulter and Big Ellis who, pleased to see him, scooted apart to make him room.

It seemed that everybody who wanted to play was playing, a full dozen by Elton's count. But it took him a while to determine who was on which side, since there was only the one goal and the players all were in work clothes. The only readily visible difference among the players was that on both teams the boys were wearing the rubber-soled shoes that they called “tennis shoes,” though none of them had ever so much as seen a game of tennis, but the men all were wearing their work shoes. A considerable part of the interest of the game was the men's efforts to start and stop and stay upright in those shoes on boards that had been polished by the hay shoved across them for fifty years. Also the boys, who had been playing basketball at school all winter, were in practice, young and agile and comparatively fast, whereas the men were out of practice or had never played before, and were comparatively slow and awkward in addition to being poorly shod.

Among the players, sure enough, were Mart Rowanberry and his brother-in-law Pascal Sowers, whose wife was Sudie, the lone sister of the Rowanberry brothers. Pascal who, like Mart, had been innocent of basketball until the past two or three Sundays, was playing clumsily and hard, and in the process finding, as usual, much to say. Mart, who had once been truly capable at baseball, was playing earnestly, alert and careful, going at play about as he went at work. But when he dribbled he bounced the ball as high as his waist, watching it to keep it from getting away, so that invariably it was stolen by one of the boys. And so when he got the ball Mart got rid of it again as soon as he could.

Elton had been there only a little while, watching and talking with Burley and Big Ellis, when somebody threw a wild pass. The ball came flying straight to Elton, he caught it, stood up, shot at the goal, and, for a wonder, made the shot.

A little later I am going to tell of something Elton did that was truly wonderful and altogether to his credit. But the goal he made, his first and last that Sunday morning, was a pure piece of luck, as Elton himself knew, though he claimed full credit for it. It was a fine accident, and it stopped the game.

Hackett caught the ball as it dropped through the hoop, and he held it. “Wait a minute. Whose side are
you
on, Elton?”

“Why, hell, he's on
my
side,” Pascal said. “Can't you see he is?”

But Elton was the thirteenth man, a problem that much arguing and rearranging failed to solve, until Cocky Jones said he had had enough basketball for one day and gave his place to Elton.

And so Elton was in the game. Like some of the others, he had played basketball, or at least had played
with
a basketball in the course of his eight grades of education. The teacher in the Goforth school of one room, needing to keep the bigger boys as tired as possible, had bought with her own small store of money a proper basketball. For a goal, the boys fastened a succession of barrel hoops to a tree. For their play they knew some rules and made up the rest. Such as their game was, Elton became good at it. He was naturally athletic, and on that Sunday morning in Hackett Dunham's barn loft he played pretty well, though he did not make another goal.

Some while after the game resumed, Pascal Sowers dashed furiously after the ball, tried suddenly to stop, skidded, and then disappeared through a long hole in the floor. The hole was used for feeding hay down into the manger below. The week of feeding since the last game had left the hole wide open. It was so far from the area where they mostly played that nobody until then had given it a thought.

After Pascal fell through the hole, everybody thought of it. They all, players and watchers alike, gathered around it, staring down through it at Pascal who lay in the manger, staring back up at them. By another piece of pure luck, the morning's second fine accident, there had been enough hay left in the manger to break his fall. The bunch of heifers penned down there had not yet finished their breakfast. Onto the piled hay Pascal had lighted more or less feet first and flopped backwards. In the first seconds afterward, those in the loft could hear the trampling and colliding of the panic-stricken heifers.

When enough staring back and forth had convinced him that Pascal
was conscious and in no pain, Hackett called down to him, “Well, I reckon you're thanking me for being a generous feeder.”

At that, Pascal returned fully to life as himself. “Thanking you, hell! If your damned old hay was fit to eat, Sudie would be burying me. And I hope she'd be suing you for the two dollars you don't already owe somebody.” They all laughed. Pascal climbed out of the manger and returned to the loft. The others discovered various ways to congratulate him on his survival. Hackett, Pascal's neighbor, and his friend too though neither would have admitted it, said, “I thought, ‘Pore old Pascal. If he's dead, it sholy will stop him from lying.'”

It was one of the best moments of the sporting life of the Port William neighborhood. Fifty years later you could still find people who hadn't been there who could tell you all about it.

The interruption of the game continued while they stacked up a barrier of hay bales alongside the hole. But by then it was too late to continue playing. Pretty soon the wives and mothers of some of them would be getting home from church. The boys started idly shooting goals. The men stood around retelling the story of Pascal's fall and laughing. If any of them knew which side had won the game or what the score was, the subject was never raised. Maybe the boys knew.