A Place in Time (5 page)

But when I got to his place he was hitching his new team to the sled. He was going to take a bunch of broken tools to the blacksmith shop in town to get them fixed. It was never any trouble at Big's to find broken tools, which wasn't because he worked all that hard. He just
used
things hard, or he used them for purposes they weren't meant for. He treated wood the same as steel. He had piled onto the sled a plow with a broken handle, a hoe with a broken handle, a grubbing hoe with no handle, a broken doubletree, and other such, too big a load to take in his old car.

“Why don't you use the wagon?” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “I forgot. Here. Hold the lines a minute.”

He went into the wagon shed and came back rolling a wagon wheel with two broken spokes.

So there was nothing for it but the sled, which wasn't the best vehicle on a gravel road, and with no tongue, behind a team the least bit touchous. And especially that little Buck mule, if I had pegged him right, was just waiting for a good reason to demonstrate his speed. He was the reason Big asked me to hold the lines while he went to get the wagon wheel.

Big had left himself a place to stand in amongst the load. I made myself a place and turned up a five-gallon bucket to sit on. Big told the mules to come up, gave the lines a little flip, and we started off with pretty much of a jerk.

When we hit the gravel, which we would be on all the way to town, you could see that both mules became deeply concerned. They got into a little jiggling trot and backed their ears so as not to miss anything that might be gaining on them. And the runners did screech and batter something
awful. But Big was stout enough to hold them and two more like them, if his old lines and bridles held together. Just looking at the back of him, I could see how pleased he was with his team, showing spirit the way they were. And they matched, you know. To some people, and Big was one, a bad team that matches is better than a good team that don't.

So we went stepping pretty lively into Port William. I unloaded the sled at the blacksmith shop while Big kept hold of the lines. And then we started back. There was no chance of loafing a while in town, for the mules couldn't be trusted to stand tied. One backfire from somebody's automobile and they might've disappeared off like two mosquitoes.

But when we got to the mouth of our lane, Big drove right on by. I saw then what he had on his mind. His real business for that morning wasn't to take a bunch of broken tools to town. He was going on out by the Cordles' place. If Annie May was where she could see, she was going to have the benefit of a look at that well-matched, high-spirited team of mules, and of old Big standing there holding the lines, calm as George Washington, everything under control.

The trouble was, by the time we were closing in on the Cordles', after the extra mile or so, the mules had lost their fine edge. They had worn down to a civilized manner of doing business. They were walking along, nodding their heads and letting their ears wag like a seasoned team. Looked like they both together didn't have an ounce of drama left in 'em, and the large impression Big was wanting to make had fallen by the wayside.

So without making a sudden motion I got on my knees and skimmed up a rock about the size of a pocket watch and settled back onto my bucket.

Big, among other things, was a lucky creature. For when we came in sight of the Cordles' house down in the pretty little swale where their farm was, there was Annie May, sure enough, looking sweet as a rose, right out on the front porch. She was churning, working the dasher up and down at a steady gait. She looked patient, gazing off at the sky. Maybe the butter was slow to come and she had been at it a while.

I was wanting to help Big all I could, of course. I waited until I was sure Annie May had seen us coming, until we could almost hear the dasher
chugging in the churn, and then I shied that little rock almost under the Buck mule's tail where he felt it the most.

He lost no time in taking offense. He clamped his tail down and humped up in the back, which notified the Dick mule that the end of the world was at hand. They shot off both at once like their tails were afire.

I swear I had no idea I was going to need a handhold as quick as I did. Just as I was starting backwards off of my bucket, I grabbed a double handful of Big's pants, and down they came.

He said very conversationally, “Burley Coulter, damn your impudent hide.”

But he stood to his work. He had to, of course. He made the drive past the Cordles' as magnificent as you please, proudly and calmly in control of his spirited team that was plunging on the bits, with his pants down around his ankles and his shirttail flying out behind. As we went past, I glanced up at Annie May and, so help me Jesus, she was smiling and waving—a good-hearted, patient, forgiving, well-fleshed girl, just right for Big.

Well, old Big did keep his team in hand. He never let them out of a short lope. Pretty soon he stopped them and got his pants back up more or less where they belonged, and took the long way home so he wouldn't have to pass the Cordles' again. He never looked at me or said a word. He wasn't speaking.

But when we finally got back to his place and had put away the mules, which were a good deal better broke by then, I felt obliged to have a serious talk with him.

“Big,” I said, “you're going to have to ask that woman to marry you, after you've done showed yourself to her the way you have.”

You couldn't beat him for good nature. He just grinned, clean back to his ears. He said, “All right. I reckon I will.”

So he was speaking to me again. And afterwards he told me all about it. He was giggling, red in the face, and absolutely tickled almost to death.

He gave up all his clever notions about courting, and was forthright. When he saw Annie May in town next time, he said, “Come here. I want to talk to you.”

She followed him out of earshot of the other people, and he said, “Well,
you've done had a look at my private life. Don't you reckon me and you ought to get married?”

She looked straight back at him and laughed. She laughed right into his face like the good old gal she was.

She said, “I would like to know why
not
!”

It has been a long, long time since old Uncle Bub Levers was called on to pray at the Bird's Branch church for the first and last time in his life, and he stood up and said, “O Lord, bless me and my son Jasper. Amen.”

The Lord must have thought that was a good idea. For with His help, maybe, Jappy Levers grew up and got himself educated for a lawyer. When he hung out his sign in Hargrave, he wasn't Jappy Levers any more. He was J. Robert La Vere, Attorney at Law. That might not have been all put-on. Some say that La Veres was what the Leverses were before they turned up around Port William. People in Port William don't say things they haven't heard of. They never had heard of La Veres. They had heard of levers.

With the Lord's help maybe, maybe not, Mr. La Vere got to be a rich man. Getting rich, you know, does not always meet with everybody's approval. There was always somebody, or several bodies, in Port William who would tell you confidently that Mr. La Vere got rich by finding out where the money was and helping himself to a good deal more than his share. In fact they didn't know, and I don't know. To find out how such things are done, you will have to ask somebody besides me. Maybe you can do like Mr. La Vere, who gaveth the credit to the Lord, at the same time keeping a good deal of it for himself, the Lord maybe not minding, maybe.

Anyhow, the Lord either did or didn't bless Mr. La Vere with the money
he scraped together by the time he was forty-five or so, when he bought the biggest house in Hargrave with a front porch two stories tall. After Uncle Bub died, Mr. La Vere kept the old Levers home place out on Bird's Branch, and as the chances came he bought other farms hither and yon.

So he was right smart of a big deal and on the downward slope when he topped himself off by taking to wife, as Wheeler Catlett put it, the elegant, accomplished, and beautiful Miss Charlotte Riggins. Miss Charlotte was from somewhere off. She could have been rich herself for all I know, maybe, maybe not, but she did come up in the world by changing her name from Riggins to La Vere and setting up housekeeping behind the tallest front porch in Hargrave.

How Mr. La Vere and Miss Charlotte hit it off as a loving couple is anybody's guess. I somehow never quite could imagine it myself, so I will leave it to you. But Mr. La Vere lived long enough that by the time he died, Miss Charlotte had taken on all his dignity and become a great lady.

By the time Mr. La Vere departed, Miss Charlotte's hair had turned mortally blue, but she wasn't exactly an old woman yet. If widowhood hadn't suited her so well, and with all her goods and money, surely somebody would have married her. I reckon I might have married her myself, maybe, if she had ever asked me.

Mr. La Vere died at about the start of the Depression or a little before, and Wheeler Catlett, who was a wingshot of a young lawyer then, settled the old man's estate, nearly all of it directly onto Miss Charlotte. At about the same time the tenant on the old Levers place gave it up, and Wheeler traded with Grover Gibbs to be the new tenant. And so Grover and his wife, Beulah, and their children moved into the old Levers house that was the Gibbs house then until Beulah's mother and daddy had gone from this world and left her the little piece of it where she was raised.

Grover was one of my old running mates, a little younger than I am, but it seems like I was young a long time. So from then on I was party to the doings of Miss Charlotte and to her, what do you call it? relationship, I guess, with Grover. Grover was probably the ideal man for the place—Wheeler probably couldn't have done any better. The Levers place was run down but still a pretty good farm, and Grover was a pretty good farmer, so it was a fit. Being a pretty good farmer was good enough for Grover. Now and again, when he was a little down in the mouth, he would make the
usual complaints about farming on the halves, but being a tenant farmer suited him really well enough. He had several other things he needed to see to: fishing and hunting, and drinking a little whiskey from time to time for his health, and holding up his end of the conversation out at town. Well, he held up his end along with the ends of several others in case they couldn't make it.

And, too, he took a particular pleasure in his relationship with Miss Charlotte. Miss Charlotte, you might say, was an enjoyable lady. I don't believe she was as enjoyable a lady as Beulah Gibbs, fact is I know she wasn't, but she was in her own way enjoyable. Wheeler, who was Miss Charlotte's lawyer for the next thirty or so years, had the gift of enjoying her for her own sake. Which was fortunate for Wheeler, for after she died her relatives decided that her estate was beyond the powers of “a country lawyer.” So Wheeler was paid for in fact a lot of bother mostly by a little pleasure. But Grover enjoyed the idea of himself as her tenant, and the idea of her as his landlady.

While she was still a widow in mourning, Miss Charlotte took over the supervision of the farms, and I don't believe there has been anything like it in the history of the world before or since. She would come riding in, always unexpectedly, in the back seat of her long green car that was about the same color as folding money. It would be shined so slick, Grover said, that a housefly couldn't stand up on it. She would be wearing a dress that was like a cloud or like a flower bed in full bloom or like a pool with goldfish—this is Grover talking. And she would have on white gloves and a hat with a veil, and if the weather was the least bit cool she would have a fox or a mink fur piece around her neck and her hands stuck into a fur muff with every hair standing on end. And she would be sitting straight up like a queen in a picture, in reference strictly to herself.

Driving her would be Willard Safely, of the black branch of the Hargrave Safelys, wearing a black coat and an official little black chauffeur's cap, Willard being a whole nuther item of interest himself. When he wasn't wearing his black coat to be Miss Charlotte's chauffeur, he would be her butler or table waiter wearing a white coat. His wife, Bernice, was Miss Charlotte's cook and housemaid, always starched and white and waiting to be told what to do next. Willard's life was in a way glorious, for who else anywhere around drove such a car? But it was difficult too, and not
just when Miss Charlotte joined forces with Bernice in regard to several of his pleasures. I know some of what I know, not just from Grover, but also from Wheeler.