A Place in Time (36 page)

When Elton and Mary Penn ran away and got married one night in the October of 1938, he was eighteen and she seventeen. After that, she was to her parents as if she were dead or never born. They were never her parents nor she their daughter ever again. Perhaps the young couple should not have been surprised at this, for they had been warned. Mary had been forbidden to see Elton, who, her parents said, was “nothing.” He was a half-orphan boy, educated no further than the eighth grade, who had not an acre or hardly a penny to call his own.

In the year Elton was nine, which was the first year of the 1930s Depression, his father had died. His mother married again—too soon, according to local opinion—and Elton hated his stepfather. When he was fourteen he left home, and from then on, share-cropping and working by the day, he had made his own living. By the time he was eighteen he owned a team of horses, a cow, and a few tools. These possessions made him a little more than the nothing his in-laws said he was, but not by enough certainly to make him a fit match for a daughter of the Mountjoys, a family of aristocratic pretension, with a good farm on the fat upland near Smallwood.

And so Mary and Elton began their life together as outcasts, their very being recognized only by themselves. In hasty preparation for their marriage, Elton had rented from his mother the sideling, rundown little farm she owned on Cotman Ridge, near Port William. Elton and Mary moved there and set up housekeeping, making do with the elderly stoves and the
few sticks of furniture that had been abandoned in the house, to which they added the bare necessities they could afford. “Lord,” Mary once said to Andy Catlett when she was old, “it looked like it took us forever to accumulate a little kitchen cabinet and a few things to put in it.”

The farm offered them no advantages, except that it divided them effectively from Smallwood and the Mountjoys. Smallwood was not far away in miles, but it was out of the orbit of Port William. On the place they had come to there was not a sound building, including the old house itself. Its pastures grew more briars and locust sprouts than grass. The small ridgetop patches that could be cropped had been misused and eroded. It was a place from which too many owners or users had demanded too much for too many years. To Elton and Mary it offered merely a foothold, a chance to survive.

Their good fortune was that the farm lay in a neighborhood of five households that clustered together, with their modest acreages, out there on Cotman Ridge. Elton and Mary's neighbors were Braymer and Josie Hardy, Tom Hardy and his Josie, Walter and Thelma Cotman, Jonah and Daisy Hample, and Uncle Isham and Aunt Frances Quail. The Hardy brothers' wives, the two Josies, were known for convenience as “Josie-Braymer” and “Josie-Tom.” Josie-Tom was Walter Cotman's sister. Thelma Cotman and Daisy Hample were daughters of Uncle Isham and Aunt Frances. The Tom Hardys were childless. Braymer and Josie-Braymer had a daughter and two sons. The Cotmans had one daughter. The Hamples were parents already of “a flock” of six, all of them, like their father, so nearsighted “they couldn't see all the way to the ground,” and all of them, like their father, born mechanics who “could fix anything by feel for want of sight.”

This was an old community. Its middle generation all had grown up together, had known one another “forever,” and were closely bound by marriage, kinship, friendship, history, and memory. Almost everything they did, all the long, hard jobs of farm and household, they did together. Sometimes the women worked together apart from the men and the men apart from the women. Sometimes the men and women, and the children too, all worked together. They had, among them, the expectable diversity of knacks and talents. Everybody had always known what everybody else was good at. And so they worked together familiarly, in harmony, and
always with a dependable margin, a sort of overflow, of pleasure, for as they worked they talked and their talk pleased them. They remembered and relished everything that had ever happened that was funny. They told and retold old stories along with new ones. They talked and teased and laughed and sometimes sang.

And so at the time when Elton and Mary Penn most desperately needed a community, they had the good fortune to land right in the midst, in the very embrace, of one that might as well have been expecting them.

The women opened their hearts and their arms to Mary. They befriended her, mothered her, gave her freely their companionship. By instruction and example they taught her the arts of farm housewifery, of which they knew, it seemed to Mary, everything. “Everything I know,” she would say later, “I learned from those women.”

Elton, who still had much to learn, who would continue his eager learning all his life, was already a confirmed farmer, an excellent teamster, and a good hand at anything he tried. The men were glad to include him in all the work they did together, telling him where they would be and when to come. When he needed help, they came to him. The men were to Elton as the women were to Mary. They became his teachers and his friends. And beyond all that they told him, Elton pondered their ways of working, their ways of talking and thinking, their ways even of wearing their clothes. Of them all, Walter Cotman was the best farmer and had the clearest mind, was most fastidious in everything he did or said, was least tolerant of poor work and hardest to please. Elton put himself to school to Walter, watching and questioning him and remembering everything, and Walter did not hesitate to correct him and set him straight even if it made him mad for two days, as it sometimes did.

From every one of them Elton learned something he needed to know. Braymer was the one most likely to know the market value of something and how to get it cheaper. When Elton's old car or some implement needed fixing and he couldn't fix it himself, he took it to Jonah Hample, and then stayed to watch and learn while Jonah figured out what was wrong and put it right. Uncle Isham Quail was a rememberer who had saved up in his mind everything he had seen and experienced and everything he had heard. In his latter years he seemed to live in all the times
of that small place back to the original wilderness. Elton learned how to start Uncle Isham's flow of talk, and then he would listen and remember.

The only one of the men whose example Elton finally had no use for was Tom Hardy. By some early learning or by nature, Tom Hardy was a satisfied man, content to be himself, to be where he was, and to have what he had, accepting of every day as it came and went, never asking or arguing for a better. But Elton, probably by nature and certainly by his circumstances, was not a satisfied man, not then and not ever.

Within the limits imposed by Elton's mother's used-up farm, which afforded little scope for their talents and desires, Elton and Mary could not have prospered during their seven years on Cotman Ridge. They had come there hoping merely to survive. But with the help of their neighbors, by their own unstinting work and determination, by taking every opportunity to rent more land or to work for pay, they improved significantly upon survival. They grew strong individually and together.

They grew strong as a couple despite their differences of temperament, and despite the burden imposed upon their marriage by Mary's parents' rejection. The Mountjoys' legacy to Elton was his own retaliatory anger and defiance, preserved all his life by the fear, especially when he was at odds with Mary, that they had been right: that he was, or was in danger of becoming, nothing. To Mary their legacy, in addition to the wound they had given Elton, which she spent all their life together trying to heal, was the wound to herself, assuaged somewhat by the motherly women of Cotman Ridge, assuaged much more by the Christian faith that shone quietly and steadily in her to the end of her days.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that in their years on Cotman Ridge, Elton and Mary grew up. They became responsible and competent in many things. And so when Wheeler Catlett came looking for them in 1945, they were ready.

Wheeler Catlett was Old Jack Beechum's lawyer, his kinsman by marriage, and his friend. He had been raised as Old Jack's neighbor, for the Beechum and the Catlett places lay on opposite sides of the Bird's Branch Road north of Port William. Wheeler knew Old Jack and his place probably as well as he knew anybody or any place. In the late winter of 1945
Wheeler was in the midst of a long and so far unsuccessful negotiation with Old Jack, not as his lawyer primarily, but as his friend and moreover as a family spokesman. This negotiation had begun with an understanding between Wheeler and Mat Feltner, Wheeler's father-in-law and Old Jack's nephew, that Old Jack, eighty-four years old and long-widowed, was too old to continue living alone in his big empty house. He needed to move into the old hotel in Port William where he would be properly fed and looked after by Mrs. Hendrick, who had turned her relict property into a sort of old folks' home.

So far, Old Jack had resisted. In fact he had triumphed. When Wheeler in exasperation had played what he had withheld as his trump card—“We don't want you to die out here by yourself” —Old Jack, returning point-blank the younger man's stare, said, “I can do it by myself.” He went so far as to memorialize his triumph with a snort. Wheeler replied only with a snort of his own, partly of delight in the perfection of his defeat.

From the time of his middle years, and according to his principles, Old Jack had been doing his work mainly by himself, when necessary swapping work with his neighbors. As he did not wish to be bossed, he did not wish to boss. He had subscribed to a further principle common enough in the Port William community: “I'd not ask another man to do anything I'd not do myself.”

But age and wear and finally arthritis—“that Arthur, the meanest one of the Ritis brothers”—had forbidden him to do himself the work that needed to be done. There followed a procession of tenants or hired hands, who lived on nearby farms or else moved with their families into a fixed-up two-room log cabin that had stood below the barns since sometime during slavery, and whom Old Jack fired always a little sooner than they could be replaced. It began to seem to Wheeler and Mat that they were spending half their time looking for yet another “somebody who might do.” What they had to “do” was measure up to Old Jack's standards of work, and one after another they failed.

“You can hire a fellow's body,” Old Jack said, “but you can't hire his mind. The mind, if he has got one, has to come along free. Can't you find me somebody can
think
?”

Well, at last Wheeler could, and he did. He found Elton and Mary Penn who, according to available evidence, could think. They could think and
do, both at the same time. “They'll do,” Braymer Hardy told Wheeler. “They'll satisfy. They're a good pair of young people. You can depend on 'em.”

And so Wheeler had understood that they were not going to come as hired hands. He didn't even ask. If they were to come, they would come as tenants, farming the place as full partners, half and half, expenses to be fairly divided. And so Wheeler asked them, and they agreed, provided that Wheeler could get Old Jack to accept them and their terms.

Wheeler laid the proposition before Old Jack that night. It was getting well into February by then. If the thing was going to be done, it had to be done soon.

They talked, sitting in chairs drawn away from the table in Old Jack's kitchen, in the light of an oil lamp with a smoked chimney. He had spurned every offer and promise of rural electrification. Why should he pay for what he already had? His affirmation of certain things had made him good at refusal.

He had been through the motions, as he said, of what he called his supper. Now he sat and merely looked at Wheeler while Wheeler talked. His look did not make it easy for Wheeler to talk, for there was much of doubt and resistance in it. But Wheeler was confident he knew what he was talking about, and he made his case. “This is a good boy,” he said, “and he's married to a good girl. They're the right kind. They'll do.”

Old Jack reached out with the end of his walking cane and touched Wheeler's leg. “How do you know that?”

“I've looked and I've seen,” Wheeler said, allowing himself some emphasis. “Don't you worry about that. And I've got Braymer Hardy's word.”

Old Jack said, knowing better, “Braymer Hardy don't know big wood from brush.”

“Braymer don't miss much,” Wheeler said. “He's got sense, and he's honest.”

There was a little while then when nobody said anything. Old Jack's eyes quit looking at Wheeler while he turned his mind's eye upon his thoughts. Finally he looked outward again at Wheeler. “Tell 'em to come on.”