A Place in Time (30 page)

He said, “Well, Burley, it come over me that I ain't going to come out of this.”

I went over to the bed and gave his hand a shake. I took my jacket off and sat down by him. His hand and his voice were weak, but they weren't noticeably weaker than the day before.

He said, “I'm about to be long gone from here.”

“Oh, sho'ly not,” I said.

“It's so,” he said.

I said, “If it's so, old bud, it'll make a mighty difference around here. We'll look for you and we'll miss you.”

He had been stronger than me all his life, and now he was weak. And I was sitting there by his bed, still strong. What could you do? What could you do that would be anyways near enough? I could feel the greatness of life and death; and the great world endless as the sky swelling out beyond this little one. And I began again to hear from that requirement
that seems to come from the larger world. The requirement was telling me, “
Do
something for him. Do more than you've ever done. Do more than you
can
do.”

As if he had read my mind, he said, “I appreciate you coming, Burley. You've stuck by me. I imagine I'll remember it as long as I live.” And then he giggled, for in fact it was a fine joke.

“Well, I wish I could do more. Ain't there anything at all you want?”

“Not a thing. Not a thing in this world.”

We talked then, or mostly I did, for a while, about things that were going on round about. And finally I had to leave. They were busy at home, and they'd be looking for me. Big had said he wasn't long for this world, but he looked about the same as yesterday. For all I knew, he might live a long time yet. When somebody tells you he's going to die, you can't say, “Well, go ahead. I'll just sit here till you do.” I was going to be surprised when I got word that afternoon that old Big had sure enough left us.

“Well,” I said, “I got to be getting on home.” And I stood up.

He raised his hand to stop me. “Wait, Burley. There
is
something I want you to do.”

“Sure,” I said. “Name it.”

“Go yonder to the press”—he used the old word—“and open the door.”

I went to the closet and opened the door. It was where they kept their good clothes, Annie May's Sunday dresses, not many, and Big's suit, all put away there together.

“Ain't my pistol there, just inside?”

The pistol was in its shoulder holster, hanging on a nail in the door jamb. It was a .22 revolver, heavy-built and uncommonly accurate for a pistol. It was the only really good thing Big had ever owned, and he had taken care of it like a king's crown. He bought it new when times were good back there in the forties, and the bluing was still perfect except for a spot or two where the holster had worn it. I had always thought highly of it, and he knew I had.

“It's right here,” I said.

“I want you to take it. I'd like to know where it'll be after I'm gone.”

It flew into me then just how far toward the edge of things we'd come, two old men who'd been neighbors and friends since they were boys, and if I'd thought of anything to say I couldn't have said it. For a while I couldn't even turn around.

“Put it on,” Big said. “Button your jacket over it. I don't want Annie May to see it when you leave.”

I did as he told me. I said, “Thanks, Big.”

“Sure,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “I'll be seeing you.”

He said, “Yeah. See you later.”

So I had come to do something for Big, if I could, and instead Big had done something for me, and I was more in debt to the requirement than ever.

I went out through the kitchen, speaking a few pleasantries with the women, and let myself out. I sat down on the porch step to put my overshoes back on, and started home. And all the time the requirement was staying with me. “Can't you, for God's sake, think of
something
to do?” When I got to about the middle of the barn lot, I just stopped. I stood there and looked all around.

Oh, it was a splendid morning, still frozen, not much changed at all. The ground was still shining white under the blue sky. I thought of a rhyme that Elton Penn was always saying in such weather: “Clear as a bell, cold as hell, and smells like old cheese.” Maybe that was what put me in mind to do what I did.

When I looked back towards the house, the only thing between me and the sky was that old dinner bell leaning on its post like it was about to fall.

Big's pistol, when I pulled it out, felt heavy and familiar, comfortable. It was still warm from the house. There were five cartridges in the cylinder, leaving an empty chamber to rest the hammer on. I cocked it and used my left hand to steady my right. What I wanted was a grazing hit that would send the bullet flying out free into the air.

Even as the bullet glanced and whined away, the old bell summed up all the dongs it had ever rung. It filled the day and the whole sky and brought the worlds together, the little and the great. I knew that, lying in his bed in the house, Big heard it and was pleased. Standing in the lot, I heard it and I was pleased. It wasn't enough, but it was something. It was a grand sound. It was a good shot.

Marcie Catlett was usually wakened in the morning by his father's voice calling up the stairs, according to his mood, “Marcie! Betty! Time to get up!” or, singing badly, “Dear ones, Harford Fork again awaits the sunrise!” or, beating on a pan, “Wake up and pee! The world's on fire!”

But this morning the telephone rang into Marcie's sleep in the dark before the house had stirred. Or maybe it was a pressure of calamity that woke him before the phone rang, as if the whole dark countryside were already disturbed by the knowledge that Elton Penn was dead.

And so Marcie lay under the covers, alert and still, through the long time until the fourth ring and then his father's voice answering. Marcie would never forget the sounds that followed.

“Hello?” And after a pause: “
Aw
!” And then after a long pause, and interrupted by further pauses: “What time? . . . Oh. . . . Oh. . . . Where are you now? . . . Well, I'm sorry, Henry. . . . I know you are. . . . All right. We'll be there.”

Marcie heard his father hang up the telephone. He heard him say, his voice breaking on the last word, “Flora, Elton's dead.”

Those words, his father's voice saying them, seemed fixed and continuing in the air. They seemed suspended as though they might fall, though they had not fallen.

He heard his mother: “Oh, Andy, I'm so sorry!”

And then the house began to sound like itself again. Marcie heard
his father go out the back door to the barn. He heard his mother fixing breakfast. Presently he began to smell breakfast. It might have been any morning, except for the three words, “Flora, Elton's dead,” that continued still, aloof from him, suspended in the air—and except that he and his sister had not been called, though ordinarily they would have been. Their father maybe was doing their morning chores in addition to his own. And so it was a different day.

Marcie and Elton had been friends. It was a family friendship. Marcie had inherited it, so to speak, from his father who, with his brother, Henry, had inherited it from their father. Marcie's father and Elton often worked together, and when they did, if he was not in school, Marcie would be with them. That had been a regular part of his life from before he could remember. Sometimes, now that he was nearly ten and getting bigger, he would be at work with Elton by himself, and Elton would let him help or give him jobs to do on his own. When Marcie had actually helped and been necessary, Elton would reach into his pocket for money to pay him, or he would write him a check.

To tell the truth, Marcie did not like working with his father as much as he liked working with Elton. This embarrassed him a little, and he tried to keep his father from knowing. But he belonged to his father, so his father clearly thought, and that was sometimes too tight a fit. His father had expectations that sometimes Marcie felt closing in on him, so that he could not to save his life work willingly or keep in a good humor. He and Elton, though, were nothing but friends. With Elton, he felt free, even when Elton was being hard on him, which Elton sometimes was and didn't mind being.

Marcie could be careless. Sometimes, even with Elton, he could not keep his mind on his business. He left a gate open and next thing he knew three sows were in the garden, and Elton was in what Marcie's father and his uncle Henry called a limited good humor. If Marcie had been older, as he well knew, it would not have been even limited good humor. Elton said, with limited amusement and even kindly but also sternly, “You're sorry, Marcie, but sorry don't shut the gate when you were supposed to shut it, and it don't keep the hogs out of the garden, and it don't undo the damage.”

So he had to stand and take it, for Elton was neither more nor less than Elton. If you wanted to be with Elton, which Marcie did, you had to be with him as he was. To displease him was a way of finding out how much you wanted to please him.

Marcie had begun to imagine a time when he would be grown up and would work as an equal with Elton and his father and the Rowanberrys and the others, when even Elton would recognize him as a man good at work, capable of putting his hand to a job and doing it right.

But now, though this was far yet from Marcie's imagination, it was not going to be Elton who would recognize him as a hand and a man. The one who would grant him that formality, in another eight years, was going to be Mart and Art Rowanberry's not easily pleased brother-in-law Pascal Sowers who, when he came with the rest to harvest the first crop of Marcie's own that he grew entirely by his own work and knowledge, would nod his head in most serious commendation and pronounce, “Well, you
are
worth a shit!”

Their mother called them to get up.

When they dressed and came down, she met them at the foot of the steps to tell them, as Marcie understood, so that their father would not have to do it, “Elton's dead. He died last night. I'm sorry, kids. I'm sorry to have to tell you.”

Marcie's big sister, Betty, cried and let herself be held and comforted by their mother. But when their mother looked at Marcie, he only looked back at her, waiting, for her words had not reached him. And then he went past her into the kitchen.

They were going to the Penns', they were going to Elton and Mary Penn's house, as soon as breakfast was over, and breakfast did not keep them long. They did not even clear the table. Marcie expected to be told to put on better clothes, but nobody mentioned clothes. Just as they were, nobody finding anything to say, they got into the car and went out the lane to the road. They went to Port William and on through it. They turned onto the Bird's Branch road, and passed the Catlett home place where Henry lived. They followed the road down into the Bird's Branch hollow and turned into the lane that went back along the old rock fence to the farmstead and the house that belonged to Elton and Mary.

Marcie had made this trip hundreds of times. Traveling the lane that
led to the Penns' house was as familiar to him as traveling the lane along Harford Fork that led to his own house. This was the country he belonged to, a permanent country, so far as he knew it, landmarked by people who apparently always had been there, as firmly and finally planted as the stones in the graveyard on the hill at Port William: his parents, his Catlett grandparents, Penns, Rowanberrys, Coulters, Branches. So far as he had known it, it was subject only to the changes of weather, of seedtime and harvest, summer and winter, day and night.

But now a change of another kind had come upon it, a great change that he could feel in his parents' silence and his sister's and his own. None of them had said a word. It was a silence weighted with dread at coming to this place now that it was changed. It was altogether changed, though it looked the same as it always had, and this made the change by far the worst he had ever known.

In the driveway beside the house, he saw his uncle Henry's car, new-looking and clean, and behind it his grandfather's car that was black and dust-covered and covered with scratches. There was a third car that he knew belonged to Elton and Mary's daughter Martha and her husband, who lived in Cincinnati. That, for the time being, was all.