A Place in Time (37 page)

And then Wheeler, who had a new trump card, had to play it. “Well,
if they come, they're not going to live here in two rooms. They're going to need your house.”

Old Jack opened his mouth, and then he shut it again and looked down. To have what he wanted for his place, he would have to leave it. Wheeler, instead of snorting in commendation of his own triumph, had to look away.

When Old Jack looked up again, the burden of defeat and acceptance was upon him, but again he looked straight at Wheeler. “Tell 'em to come on.”

In the March of that year of 1945, Elton and Mary Penn moved into the house on the Beechum place, after Old Jack had moved—it was the first and last move of his life—to Port William and the hotel's society of elderly widows.

The Beechum house, a far better house than the one on Cotman Ridge, bore the marks of long inhabitance by an old widower, but Wheeler had attached to it his promise that it would receive the improvements necessary to make it, by the standards of that time, “livable.” The outbuildings and the cellar were good. The garden plot was larger and richer than the one they'd had. The electric line finally was installed. The house—even after Old Jack's daughter had come out from Louisville and carried away all the best dishes, silverware, and furniture—still contained furnishings enough, and more than enough, which made Mary happy.

She had come not far in miles from the Josies and the other neighborly wives of Cotman Ridge, but the few miles that now separated them made a difference. They were no longer within an easy walk of one another. There was no more “happening by.” Now when they visited it had to be by automobile, and only on Sunday afternoons. Sometimes they would be together in passing on Saturday night in Port William. The women of Cotman Ridge came over one day and helped Mary to make curtains and thus contributed to her “new start,” but the easy daily bonds of neighborhood were broken.

Now Mary had for womanly company and comfort mainly Dorie Catlett, Wheeler's mother, who lived across the road. Dorie was of the generation of Aunt Frances Quail—old, old, as she seemed to Mary—but she was, in her abrupt and outspoken way, a kind companion and
sometimes truly a comfort to Mary, whom she saw rightly as not only young but hurt and therefore needy. After she had finished her after-dinner housework, and if the weather was good, Mary would often take the shortcut across the fields to the Catlett place, to spend the rest of the afternoon sitting and talking on the front porch with Dorie. Dorie made her welcome, told her things of use or of interest, loaned her books from the glass-fronted small bookcase in the parlor, and listened as Mary told, in bits and pieces, her story. When Dorie had gathered in from Mary, and from Wheeler, the story of the Penns' marriage and its hard beginning, she pronounced her judgment upon the Mountjoys. She turned down the corners of her mouth and said with perfect finality: “Hmh!”

For Elton the old place, new to him, was exactly the chance he had been needing, his chance to prove himself, to exert his mind and his strength. At last, as he said, he could stretch his arms out full length and turn all the way around. In coming to the Beechum place, moreover, he came within the friendship and influence of Wheeler Catlett and of Wheeler's father, Marce, Old Jack's contemporary and friend, and of Old Jack himself. The influence of those men would remain with Elton, a circumstance of his life that was essential and dear, long beyond the deaths of Marce and Old Jack and until Elton's own death.

The neighborhood of the two families soon included Wheeler's boys, Andy and Henry. For Andy Catlett the story of Elton and Mary Penn, from the time he was included in it, became one of the shaping forces of his life. Their example, reduced to instruction, told him this: Grow up. Learn to be a good hand. Learn to be a good farmer. Marry for love. Get a place, a farm, of your own. Shape your life to the needs of your place. So far as you can, without hurting it, shape your place to your needs. Live from it and for it. Always try to make it better.

But to reduce that formative example to instruction is to misrepresent it, for instruction cannot even suggest the passion and the beauty, the difficult requirement and the hardship, of the example. What Andy took from the Penns was not instruction so much as a series of memories, visions, that ruled over his young life and still imposed their attraction and demand upon him when he was old: visions of Elton and Mary delighted with the first ripe tomato from their garden; of Elton plowing in the spring, his
mind alight with the thought of the made crop; of Mary and Elton butchering their meat hogs, and then of the cured hams, shoulders, bacons, jowls, and the sacks of sausage hanging in their smokehouse; of Elton's best days lived from dark to dark in the excitement of going ahead, leaving a good difference behind him.

Andy's first sight of Elton was from a distance, and it caused a memorable, if temporary, twinge to his conscience. On that early summer day in 1945, Andy's conscience was on one of its frequent absences from the neighborhood. He was riding Beauty the pony, and in his left hand he was carrying a bow and an arrow. His grandpa Catlett had sent him to bring in the two Jersey cows for the evening milking, and on that practical level he was functioning probably as well as he needed to. But his mind, which he had stuffed with books and comic books about cowboys and Indians in the Wild West, had more than one level. On a level or two above the practical, he was an Indian hunting buffalo on the broad prairie.

And so when he found the cows resting in the shade of a strawstack, he rode up to them, dropped the bridle rein, and shot the nearest cow with his arrow. The arrow had been cut from his grandma's mock orange and was about as harmless against cowhide as it would have been against steel. It was nevertheless a good shot, the arrow bouncing off the cow's ribs at a point, Andy imagined, very near her heart. But then, allowing him only a second or two for satisfaction, his conscience came flying back to warn him that he might have been seen.

He was, after all, in one of the front fields and on a rise of the ground in plain sight of the road. He saw nobody, no vehicle, on the road. But beyond the road, on the crest of the ridge exactly opposite, he saw a man who had started digging a posthole, but who now was standing with his right hand at rest on the handle of his spade, and he was watching Andy.

Since it was nobody he was kin to, nobody he even knew, though pride forbade him to dismount to retrieve his arrow, Andy untwinged his conscience and drove the cows up to the barn.

Andy—who had just got free of school and who intended to stay with his grandma and grandpa, if he could, until his parents and the school teachers forgot about him—already knew the name of the man who had been
watching him. He was Elton Penn, of whom he had heard his grandpa say, “Ay God, he's the right kind, and he's got a good woman.” Elton and his wife were the new people on the Beechum place.

New people being by far the most interesting items within reach, Andy got on the pony the first thing after breakfast the next morning and went over to see them for himself. At the road, he turned down the hill and then, halfway to the bottom, he turned into the graveled lane that made a long curve along a rock fence covered with moss and lichens and lined with trees. When he came in sight of the house and the yard, the fields adjoining, and the tobacco patch whose neat rows came almost to the yard fence, Andy stopped the pony and looked at everything.

The Beechum place was a good one, as Andy's father had pointed out to him often enough and as Andy by then could see for himself. Old Jack had taken good care of it for a long time. It was a comfort to look at, and this was because the layout of its buildings and fields, even the woods along its steeper slopes and the trees in its fencerows, all fitted rightly together.

At first Andy saw nothing he was looking for. He heard a hen cackling in the henhouse, but he saw nothing stirring. The stillness of the heat of the day had come early, and the place was in a sort of trance. And then, beyond the lilac bush in the yard, he saw a man in a straw hat at work with a hoe in the tobacco patch. The man was young, tall, and slender. He moved with a certain grace, his posture and attitude entirely conformed to the motions of his work.

Andy rode around to a gate and through it to the headland along the yard fence where the rows ended. At the end of the row in which the man was working he stopped the pony again, and again he sat and watched.

If the man was aware of Andy he made no sign. He had not looked up or altered at all the rhythm of his work. He was, as Andy felt then, as later he would articulately know, a master workman, and of no tool was he more a master than the one he was using at that moment. His hold upon the handle seemed to invest the steel of the blade with the sense of touch and an intelligent concern for the well-being of the plants. The hoe did not merely chop the weeds out from between the plants, but conveyed an exquisite attention to them, pulling and lifting and shifting the dirt about. Now and then he would lean down to raise the leaves of a weak
plant and tuck fresh dirt gently in around it. He worked swiftly and yet with perfect care. The row as he left it behind him was groomed like a fine horse.

The man did not look up until he had finished the row. When finally he did look up, he looked first at the pony, not at Andy. He had turned the blade of the hoe upward. He held the handle like a walking stick in his left hand. He laid his right hand on the pony's nose and made a gentle downward stroke.

“Whoa,” he said. He was a nice-looking fellow who wore his clothes as neatly as he had used the hoe.

When he looked up at Andy he was grinning. He was looking at Andy as he might have looked at writing hard to make out but interesting, also amusing. He reached under his hat to scratch his head. He had black hair that, young as he was, had begun to turn gray. He scratched his head slowly and then settled his hat again precisely as it had been before. He had never taken his eyes off Andy.

He said, “Do I know you?”

“No,” Andy said, “I'm Andy Catlett. I'm kin to people around here.”

“I'm Elton Penn,” Elton said. And he extended his hard right hand that was three or maybe four times as big as Andy's.

They shook hands. It was clear to Andy that Elton had expected him to be Andy Catlett, just as he had expected Elton to be Elton.

Elton had now crooked his right forefinger around the headstall of the pony's bridle just above the bit, and he was still grinning at Andy. He still had the studying look in his eyes.

He said, “I saw you shoot that cow.”

Andy did not think of anything to say. He only sat there on the pony, twiddling one of his shoes in a stirrup and grinning back.

When it was clear that Elton had said all he was going to say for the time being and was just going to stand there grinning and watching, Andy, who was getting embarrassed, said the next thing that came to his mind:

“They won't let me have a rifle. You've got one, haven't you? Maybe you'd take me hunting with you sometime. Maybe we could go to the woods down yonder along the creek. There's some
big
trees down there. A lot of squirrels. Maybe you'd let me shoot one.”

“If you shot a cow with a rifle, it
might
hurt,” Elton said.

Again Andy could think of nothing to say.

The door of the screened back porch opened and a slender young woman carrying a basket of wet clothes stepped out, heading for the clothesline, and the door banged shut behind her. She saw the two of them and stopped. Her hair was the color of a new copper penny, except that the sun shone all through it and made it even brighter.

“Mary,” Elton said, raising his voice only a little and not looking away from Andy, “this is our neighbor, Mr. Catlett. Mr. Andy Catlett.”

Mary said, “Hello!” and she laughed. She laughed maybe because Elton was so clearly enjoying himself, and maybe because Andy was so unabashedly looking at her, getting his eyes full.

“You notice she's got red hair?” Elton said. “You've got to be mighty careful around a redheaded woman.”

And Andy said, “Oh, I will!”

On the Beechum place Elton and Mary Penn came to a new beginning. This was a new beginning also in the lives of Andy and Henry Catlett. If the Penns had been interesting as new unknown people, they were far more interesting and more exciting too when they were known. The boys, so to speak, were kin to both the Catlett place and the Beechum place and had always had the run of both. But after the Penns had come, a new path was worn across the fields between the two houses.

When the mood was on him, Elton was a comedian. He could be immensely amused at himself, at the things he invented to say, at the foibles and oddities of the boys, at the world's plentitude of foibles and oddities. He was a good mimic of people's expressions and gestures, their ways of talking and walking. As the boys followed him about at his work for their own amusement and for his company, they grew from merely trying to help to being actually helpful. Elton would hire them then and instruct them and pay them a wage. Working with him, they got to know him better, and Elton was a man there was plenty to know about.

As they discovered soon enough, you could not work day in and day out with Elton and not get crossways with him on some days. He could not hide his feelings or keep from speaking his mind. Free as his laughter
was in his times of exuberance, when he was in a mood for condemnation his judgments were sudden and harsh. Andy would realize eventually that Elton's condemnations were likely to involve self-condemnation. He could get into moods in which he was dark and self-obscured, his caustic pronouncements flying out in all directions, so that some of them fell inevitably upon himself. It would be as though that never-forgotten sentence of the Mountjoys, “He is nothing,” began to close upon him, and he strove for air and light.