A Place in Time (4 page)

The Civil War had its official realization in movements of armies and great battles in certain places, but in places such as Port William it released and licensed an unofficial violence also terrible, and more lasting. At its outset, Galen Dawe, on his way to join the Confederate army, was shot from his horse and left dead in the road, no farther on his way than Port William,
by a neighbor, a Union sympathizer, with whom he had quarreled. And Maxie Dawe, with the help of a slave man named Punkin, loaded the dead boy onto a sled drawn by a team of mules. Looking neither right nor left at those who watched, she brought home the mortal body of her one son, which she washed and dressed herself, and herself read the great psalm over him as he lay in his grave.

The rest of her children were daughters, four of them. Her grief and her bearing in her grief gave her a sort of headship over daughters and husband that they granted without her ever requiring it. When a certain superiority to suffering, a certain indomitability, was required, she was the one who had it. Later, when a band of self-denominated “Rebel” cavalry hung about the neighborhood, she saved her husband, the capable merchant James John, from forcible recruitment or murder, they never knew which, by hiding him three weeks in a succession of corn shocks, carrying food and water to him after dark. By her cunning and sometimes her desperate bravery, she brought her surviving family, her slaves, and even a few head of livestock through the official and the unofficial wars, only to bury her husband, dead of a fever, at the end of the official one.

When the slaves were freed in Kentucky, when at last she had heard, she gathered those who had been her own into the kitchen. She told them: “Slavery is no more, and you are free. If you wish to stay and share our fate, you are free to stay, and I will divide with you as I can. If you wish to go, you are free to go.”

There were six of them, the remaining family of the woman known as Cat, and they left the next morning, taking, each of them, what could be carried bundled in one hand, all of them invested with an official permission that had made them strange to everything that had gone before. They left, perhaps, from no antipathy to staying, for they arrived in Hargrave and lived there under the name of Dawe—but how could they have known they were free to go if they had not gone? Or so, later, Maxie Dawe would explain it, and she would add, “And so would I have, had it been me.”

She and her place never recovered from the war. Unable to manage it herself, and needing money, she sold the landing. She hired what help she could afford. She rented her croplands on the shares. After her daughters
married and went away, she stayed on alone. To her young granddaughters, and probably to herself as well, the world of the first half of her life was another world.

No more would she be “Maxie” to anybody. Increasingly she would be “Aunt Maxie.” She was respected. By those who lacked the sense to respect her she was feared. She held herself strictly answerable to her necessities. She worked in the fields as in the house. Strange and doubtful stories were told about her, all of them perhaps true. She was said to have shot off a man's ear, only his ear, so he would live to tell it.

And now her long life, so strongly determined or so determinedly accepted by her, has at last submitted. It is declining gently, perhaps willingly, toward its end. It has been nearly a day and now most of a night since she uttered a word or opened her eyes. A younger person so suddenly moribund as she would have been dead long ago. But she seems only asleep, her aspect that of a dreamer enthralled. The two vertical creases between her brows suggest that she is raptly attentive to her dream.

That she is dying, she herself knows, or knew, for early in the morning of the previous day, not long before she fell into her present sleep, her voice, to those who bent to listen, seeming to float above the absolute stillness of her body, and with the tone perhaps of a small exasperation, she said, “Well, if this is dying, I've seen living that was worse.”

The night began cloudy, and the clouds have deepened over the valley and the old house with its one light. The first frosts have come, hushing the crickets and the katydids. The country seems to be waiting. At about dawn a season-changing rain will begin so quietly that at first nobody will notice, and it will fall without letup for two days.

When midnight passes through the room, nobody knows, neither the old woman on the bed nor the young ones who watch beside it. The room would seem poor, so meager and worn are its furnishings, except that its high ceiling and fine proportions give it a dignity that in the circumstances is austere. Though the night is not quite chilly, the sternness of the room and the presence of death in it seemed to call for additional warmth, and the young wives have kindled a little fire. From time to time, one or another has risen to take from the stone hearth a stick of wood and lay it on the coals. From time to time, one or another has risen to smooth the
bedclothes that need no smoothing, or to lay a hand upon the old woman's forehead, or to touch lightly the pulse fluttering at her wrist.

After midnight, stillness grows upon them all. The talk has stopped, the fire subsided to a glow, when Bernice Gibbs raises her hand and the others look at her. Bernice is the oldest of the four. The others have granted her an authority which, like their grandmother perhaps, she has accepted merely because she has it and the others don't. She looks at each of them and looks away, listening.

They listen, and they hear not a sound. They hear instead a silence that reaches into every room and into the expectant night beyond. They rise from their chairs, first Bernice, and then, hesitantly, the others. They tiptoe to the bed, two to a side, and lean, listening, at that edge which they and all their children too have now passed beyond. The silence grows palpable around them, a weight.

Now, as Andy Catlett imagines his way into this memory that is his own only because he has imagined it, he is never quite prepared for what he knows to have happened next. Always it comes to him somewhat by surprise, as it came to those who remembered it from the actual room and the actual night.

In silence that seems to them utterly conclusive, the young women lean above the body of the old woman, the mold in which their own flesh was cast, and they listen. And then, just when one of them might have been ready to say, “She's gone,” the old woman releases with a sigh her held breath: “Hooo!”

They startle backward from the bedside, each seeing in the wide-opened mouths and eyes of the others her own fright. Oma Knole, who is clumsy, strikes the lamp and it totters until Bernice catches and steadies it.

They stand now and look at one another. The silence has changed. The dying woman's utterance, brief as it was, spoke of a great weariness. It was the sigh of one who has been kept waiting. The sound hangs in the air as if visible, as if the lamp flame had flown upward from the wick. It stays, nothing moves, until some lattice of the air lets pass the single distant cry of an owl—“Hoo!”—as if in answer.

Callie Knole turns away, bends forward, and emits what, so hard suppressed, might have been a sob, but it is a laugh.

And then they all laugh, at themselves, at one another, and they cannot stop. Their sense of the impropriety of their laughter renews their laughter. Looking at each other, flushed and wet-eyed with laughter, makes them laugh. They laugh because they are young and they are alive, and life has revealed itself to them, as it often had and often would, by surprise.

Margaret Feltner, when she had become an old woman, “Granny” in her turn, told Andy of this a long time ago. “Oh, it was awful!” she said, again laughing. “But the harder we tried to stop, the funnier it was.”

And Andy, a hundred years later, can hear their laughter. He hears also the silence in which they laugh: the ancient silence filling the dark river valley on that night, uninterrupted in his imagination still by the noise of engines, the great quiet into which they all have gone.

The laughter, which threatened to be endless, finally ends and is gathered into the darkness, into the past. The night resumes its solemn immensity, and again in the silence the old woman audibly breathes. But now her breaths come at longer intervals, until the definitive quiet settles upon her at last. They who have watched all night then fold her hands. Her mouth has fallen open, and Bernice thinks to bind it shut. They draw the counterpane over her face. Day whitens again over the old house and its clutch of old buildings. As they sit on in determined noiselessness, it comes to the young women that for some time they have been hearing the rain.

You would think a fellow whose paunch was bigger than his ass would take the precaution of underdrawers. Or suspenders. Or bib overalls. Big Ellis didn't, of course. He never thought of precautions until too late. After it was too late he could always tell you what the right precaution would have been if only he had thought of it. “Burley,” he would say, “I see the point. I've got my sights dead on it.” But he saw it going away, from behind. And so when he was a young man, and had grown to his full girth, his pants as a rule were either half on or he was holding them with one hand to keep them from falling off.

Big was late getting married. Marriage was a precaution he didn't think of until his mother died and left him alone to cook and housekeep for himself. And then he really began to hear the call of matrimony.

He was quite a dancer in his young days. You would think at first it was the funniest thing you ever saw. The fiddle music would carry him clean out of his head, and there he would be, swinging his partner like she didn't weigh anything, with his hair in his eyes, his shirt tail half out, sweating like a horse, his pants creeping down, and that one hand from time to time jerking them back up. But if you paid attention to him, you would soon see that he really was a dancer. He was a smooth mover, a big man but light on his feet. His feet had ways of going about their business
as if he himself didn't know what they were up to. They were answering the music, you see, and not just the caller. He could really step it off. He could cut a shine.

He did all right in his socializing until he got his eye set on a girl, and then he would get shy and awkward and tongue-tied. He would figure then that he needed to get her cornered in some clever and mannerly way that would be beyond his abilities. And he would come up with some of the damnedest, longest-way-around schemes such as nobody ever thought of before and were always well worth knowing about. He edged up to a girl one time at the Fourth of July and said, “I know a girl's about the prettiest thing ever I looked at,” and was struck dumb when she said, “Who?” He wrote one a love letter in his outrageous pencil-writing and signed it “A Friend.” He brought one a live big catfish and held it out to her like it was gold-plated, and never offered so much as to skin it. Those times, I have to say, he was not very serious. What he had in his mind then was sport. As you might call it.

When he began to shine up to Annie May Cordle with the honorable intention of marrying her if she would have him, he outdid himself for judgment. She was about as near the right match for him as he could have found. But he went about the business as perfectly hind-end-foremost as you would have expected. For a while he just hung around her every time he got a chance, looking as big-eyed and solemn as a dying calf. If she looked at him or said anything to him, he turned red and grinned with more teeth than a handsaw and hitched up his pants with both hands.

After he got his crop sold that winter, Big did what he usually would do. He took it in his head to trade off the team of mules he already had, maybe adding a few dollars to boot, for a better team. He always thought he got “a good deal” on “a better team,” and that was why he never in his life owned a team that was better than passable. In fact he was too big-hearted and generous, especially if he'd had a drink or two, to be any account at all as a trader. Somebody always took his old team and his money, and he wound up with a team just a teensy bit better or worse than what he had before. And so of course he was always wanting to trade.

By springtime sure enough he had his new team, a rabbity pair of three-year-old red mules, not above fifteen hands. Dick and Buck. They sort of
matched, and he was proud of them, though they were not hardly what you would call well broke.

The weather got warm. We needed rain, and then we got a showery day that was about what the doctor ordered and made us feel good. The next day it faired up. The ground being too wet to work and the day fine, I walked over to Big's to see what I could put him up to. He was a good one to wander about with on such a day. He was a good companion, always ready for whatever you needed him for. I thought we might drop down to the river and fish a while, maybe.