A Place in Time (38 page)

For of course Andy and Henry knew the story of Elton and Mary and the Mountjoys. They heard it from their grandma Catlett, from their parents, and, as time went on, from Elton and Mary. It was one of the legends of the boys' childhood and growing up. It was a love story lived against the dark background of a hate story. It was a comprehensible story lived against an incomprehensible one. Elton and Mary were attractive people. Who, knowing them, could think it strange that they had fallen in love, or that they had married with nobody's permission but their own? But who could understand her parents' anger, so unrelenting for so long, so apparently final?

From the time Elton and Mary got married and moved to Cotman Ridge, their story was one of the stories of Port William. Everybody knew it. It became in the end a legend of the place, according to which Elton, to prove his worth and to fling success and defiance into the faces of the Mountjoys, worked himself to death. But this explanation of Elton's too-early death Andy Catlett, among others, strongly doubted. It was too simple. There are always people who, taking for themselves every precaution against working themselves to death, are comforted to believe that somebody else has done so. Andy knew, on the contrary, that beyond the poverty that certainly drove Elton in the early years of his marriage, and beyond his undoubtable need to disprove the judgment of the Mountjoys, Elton was driven also by a passion for farming as great as that of Jack Beechum and Marce Catlett, both of whom lived long enough to become his teachers. Elton loved the use of his mind that revealed the possibilities within places and showed him the work that needed to be done. He loved offering himself to the work. He loved the knowledge of what one man's skill and strength could do in a day. He farmed as a lover loves.

And so not all of Elton's angers came from the old wound that was his legacy from the Mountjoys. They could come also in response to offenses against his devotion and his standards.

There would be a day when Elton and Andy would be in the young tobacco with their hoes. This was work that Elton liked. He accepted, was even beyond, its difficulty. To Andy it was a hardship always, but on some days more than others. It made large and clear the differences between the two of them. In Elton's mind this job, which he considered “pretty work” in itself, took a comeliness and a larger sense from the patterns of the farm and the year's work into which it fitted. To Andy, who still was inclined to understand work only in relation to himself, it fitted no pattern and so was all the more a trial. Elton, besides, was in the prime of his strength, whereas Andy, who was still growing, was weedy, dreamy, and awkward, not to mention slow—“barely able to stand up by himself,” as Elton had the delicacy not to say until years later, when Andy himself could think it was funny.

It was the summer of 1949, and Andy was a few weeks shy of fifteen. Often, when just the two of them were at work, Elton would position himself between his own row and Andy's. From time to time he would work a little in Andy's row, so that Andy could keep up and they could talk. Sometimes the talk would help, and for Andy his misery would take on an overlay of pleasure.

But that day, though Elton was helping him along, they were not talking. The weather was hot and humid, without a breeze. Elton had simply remarked, with a gesture at the sun, “Old Hannah's laying it on us today, ain't she?” and had gone ahead, apparently not minding. But Andy was stopping from time to time to pull out his bandanna and wipe the sweat from his face, and from time to time he expelled his breath in a sigh.

If he had been paying attention, he could have told by looking that Elton was running out of patience. Andy's sweat-wiping and sighing were putting forth an opinion with which Elton did not agree. But Andy was not paying attention, at least not to Elton. He was paying attention to how hot and weary he was and how much he would like to be somewhere else.

Elton worked fast and accurately. He never missed a weed and he never cut off a tobacco plant. He worked with a steady rhythm and forward
motion. Andy, faltering along, would occasionally snip off a plant, as on that day he finally did. Through the hoe handle he felt the little resistance of the stem as he cut through it. That did get his attention, and he was instantly aware that Elton was watching. He knew instantly also the track that Elton's mind was on. Elton was thinking that Andy was working poorly because he could afford to do so, because somebody else would pay for his mistakes. Elton, when he was Andy's age, had paid for his mistakes himself, and this was another difference between them.

“I'm sorry,” Andy said.

And Elton said, “Too late.”

With Elton, Andy was always ready to accept blame and apologize, and often enough Elton would say, “Don't worry about it,” or “Well, it's all right,” or, at worst, “I reckon you couldn't help it.”

But Elton was not always so forgiving. He could also see, and at times he could see only, that all apologies come too late, and he would require Andy to see, likewise, that apologies do not undo mistakes, and you can't improve bad work by being sorry for it.

Andy did not look back at Elton. He went on working, but he could feel Elton watching him.

Elton said, “It
might
help if you'd
think
about what you're doing. What do you charge for the use of your
mind
?”

When that failed to provoke a reply, Elton said, “And take hold of your hoe the right way. It's not a
broom
!”

And then Andy, already fuming with self-justification, got mad. He said, “I reckon the damn world depends on how I hold a damn hoe!”

Elton gave Andy a look then that he seemed to poke at him to make sure it went all the way. He said, “Not just you.”

From then until quitting time, Andy saw nothing of Elton but his back.

There were occasionally and inevitably days like that one, days when discord built to a momentum that could be checked only by the day's end. But there were days also that were exceptional for their goodness, when Elton and the Catlett boys, either or both, worked together in sympathy and harmony that were joyous.

The boys' grandpa Catlett died in 1946 and Old Jack in 1952. Elton had studied them closely in their latter days, just as he continued to study Wheeler. He had thought long about their devotions and their ways. He
would quote them in their own voices at appropriate times by way of instruction or correction to the boys. He seemed to call the absent into presence and they spoke through him.

It would be Marce Catlett: “Mind what you're doing, baby.” Or: “Ay God, I know what a man can do in a day.”

It would be Old Jack: “If you're going to talk to me, you'll have to walk.” Or: “Ready
hell!
I
been
ready!”

Or it would be Wheeler: “Put 'em to work! Make 'em do it right!” Or: “Honey, wait a minute. Hold on a minute.”

Much of the knowledge of their elders passed to the boys through Elton. Sometimes it seemed that a current of love traveled among them and joined them to one another, to those who were absent, to the old times, to the land and its creatures.

In the Penns' second year on the Beechum place, Elton bought a large secondhand tractor. In their fourth year, he bought a small new one. Elton's horses continued to be used, by him or the Catlett boys, for the lighter jobs or as an “extra tractor,” until Elton pensioned them off. He kept them, out of loyalty and gratitude, until they died. From about 1949, Elton cropped on the Catlett place as well as the Beechum place. For a while after he bought the big tractor, tractors being still rare in that country, he did custom work for neighbors. Andy, staying at the Catlett place, would sometimes wake in the night and hear Elton's tractor off in the distance still at work.

After Old Jack died, bequeathing to Elton a sum meant to be a down payment on the farm, and to Wheeler Catlett a most urgent plea—“See the boy has his place”—Elton and Mary, by Wheeler's intervention and help, did buy the Beechum place in the late winter of 1953. They bought it at what Elton thought was too high a price. But then, his own boss at last, and doing better economically than he had feared he would do, Elton gradually shaped the place to his own vision of it. He rebuilt the fences. He repaired the old buildings and built new ones. He and Mary, working on one room at a time, made the old house a comfort and a pleasure according to their needs. In 1958 they bought a second farm, an adjoining place long neglected and rundown.

*     *     *

As Elton went about his work day after day and year after year, the Bee-chum place came to a new order and beauty around him. After they bought the second farm, it too came to life and throve. Doing their own work, each helping at the other's work, Elton and Mary were making a life together, and lives for each other. Together they were coming substantially into existence, Mary from her death to all she had known and been before their marriage, Elton from the nothing her parents had judged him to be. They were making a success, even a triumph.

This accomplishment of the Penns stood among the other good things of the early life of Andy Catlett like an illuminated page. He had seen firsthand what they had done and how they had done it. They had taken what had been given them and what had been available in the time and place, and they had brought it to abundance and the luster of a new thing.

After they had come to the Beechum place and had got their feet under them, Mary and Elton had two children, first a daughter, Martha, and then a son, Jack, named for their old benefactor. As Andy and Henry Catlett grew up, they grew into friendship with Martha and Jack Penn, whom they played with and teased and helped to look after when they were small children, and whom they loved and bore in mind after Martha had become a schoolteacher in Cincinnati and after Jack too, having farmed for a few years following Elton's death, had gone away.

The story of Mary and Elton Penn was included in the story of Port William, which was included in the stories first of the Depression and then of the War, and then of the mechanization of farming and the disintegration of country life that began almost immediately at the end of the War. The old life of home farms and frugality and neighborhood and care-taking held together until the end of the War because it had to, there being until then no alternative. After the War, with the application of war machinery and chemicals and military-industrial thinking to agriculture, farming began to give way to an economy that was alien to it.

Andy would come to think of the fifteen or so years immediately following the War, which were the crucial years of the Penns' rising into prosperity, as a time unique in the stresses and contradictions that bore upon it. It was a temporary suspension or standoff between the last supports of the old agrarian economy and the forces, eventually dominant, of the
economy of industrialism. It was a time when the farmers' self-sustaining household and neighborhood economies were still in place, when prices were generally good, and when for those reasons, though only for a little while, industrial equipment could serve at a reasonable cost the effort of a young farmer such as Elton.

The Penns' story, then, was a story of the gathering up of a small, brief coherence within a larger, longer story of disconnection and incoherence. Even as Elton and Mary were making themselves whole, in their marriage and in their place, Port William and its neighborhood were coming increasingly into the story of cheap fuel, speed, and the fire-driven machinery of disintegration. By the time of Elton's death in 1974, the balance had tilted against such a life as he had aspired to and lived. The economy of industry had prevailed. The land and the people who did the land's work were to be used, and used up, by the measures of mechanical efficiency and corporate profit. Greed was replacing thrift as an economic virtue. All was to be taken, nothing given back. In his last years, Elton saw that this was happening, and he raged against it. It was again a reduction to nothing, this time not just for him, but for him and his kind. When he died, the world as he had known it, and for a while had helped to make it, was ending.

As time is reckoned in the modern age, Elton's death already is long ago. The Penns' kind and their kind of life are nearly gone from the Port William neighborhood and from the whole country. As Andy Catlett looked back on it, their story, in addition to all else it was, came to seem to him a sort of lens. When he looked backward through it, he could see the lives and ways of Marce Catlett, Jack Beechum and forebears dead before he was born. Looking the other way, he saw farmers never out of debt, resorting to town jobs, working at night and on Sunday to stay even, and always fewer of them as they died or gave up or failed to meet their payments and were sold out. After they were gone, there were always fewer to remember them. It is hard to remember one world while living in another.

In the Port William neighborhood as elsewhere, there would remain a few throwbacks, dissenters, oddities, who would be rememberers, conscientiously loyal to an old membership. Andy Catlett was one of these. The
story of Elton and Mary Penn survived in his memory and mind, in the fabric of his life, and in his conversations with his family and a few neighbors. As the story receded into the past and the light of more and more days fell upon it, it changed and grew larger and clearer in its aspects and in Andy's understanding. But always unchanged in its background were the dimensionless, legendary figures of Mary's parents, the old Mountjoys, whom Andy never knew and rarely had even seen.