A Place in Time (11 page)

Always, as the Milby's knowledge grew or as Williams's gift of sympathy apparently summoned it, the underlayer of suffering or sorrow would be revealed. The sorrow of the Russets was that they had had no child. Their expectation of a child had almost gently graduated into a wish for one, and thence into a doubt that there would be one, and later into the certain knowledge that there was never to be one, and then into resignation of a sort and an ever-deepening commiseration with one another, for never had a place been more lovingly made ready for in inheritor, of whose absence it itself was a daily reminder.

To this place in the spring of 1941 came a young man, hardly more than a boy in age, but to all intents and purposes and by reputation a man: Tom Coulter, from the next county down the river. Ernest Russet, as he said, was getting on in years. He and his place were needing a young man. Tom Coulter was available. He and the Russets had worked out a satisfactory “trade,” and Tom had come to them, moving with his few belongings into the room over the kitchen. The room opened onto the upper porch from which an outside stairway went down to the lower porch and the kitchen.

When Tom Coulter came to the Russets, he came with a story and a reputation both of which were well known to Ernest Russet. When he was
sixteen years old Tom had left home after a fight with his father, and he had been on his own ever since. The fight had been over a small thing—a contest of work in a tobacco patch—but it had been a small thing in which everything was at stake. It could not be got over, and Tom had gone away.

“I've known Jarrat Coulter all his life, about,” Ernest Russet told the Milbys. “He was all right—hell for work, excuse me, but all right—until his wife took sick and died when Tom and his brother were just little, and then he sort of turned in on hisself. He got unreachable, you might say. Jarrat's folks were on the adjoining farm, and they took the boys and raised them up. They and Jarrat's brother, Burley. That Burley, now, he's in a class by hisself. There's stories about him that nobody's going to tell you, Mrs. Milby, or anyhow I ain't, but I wish you could know him. He done right by them boys, and he's a good man.”

After he left home, Tom raised a little crop and worked by the day for some people by the name of Whitlow. He proved satisfactory, and things went well until Mr. Whitlow died in the summer of 1940. Tom stayed on, finishing the crop and his year's work after the farm was sold and Mrs. Whitlow settled with her daughter in town. And then he got word that Ernest Russet, who was looking for a good young man, wanted to talk to him.

Tom had the reputation of a prime hand, and he was respected for his industry and honesty. He had come up under good teachers, his grandfather and father and uncle, who had taught him from before the time when he knew he was learning. By 1941, when he was nineteen, he was not only a good hand but also a good farmer, a young man with initiative and judgment, fully in charge of himself, needing and eager to know what Ernest Russet could teach him, yet needing no boss. To his elders he was a boy who had come to be honored as a man, and was said to be “promising.”

He had the benefit of a proper upbringing too, as Naomi Russet soon was pleased to say. He accommodated himself considerately and quietly to the Russet's life and household. He quickly learned their ways and the ways of the farm. He needed less and less to be told what to do. Beyond his instructions and duties, he looked for ways to be useful, doing on his own various jobs the Russets had not yet thought to ask him to do, and some
that they would not have asked him to do. He sometimes accompanied them on their trips to Sycamore or the county seat, and he was always with them when they came to church. Sometimes on Saturday nights he would find a ride to Hargrave, which was the seat and commercial center of his home county, and which was widely known as a “Saturday night town.” He could be fairly sure of seeing his brother there, and perhaps his uncle too. And though the Russets never asked, they assumed he knew girls whom he would see there. He did not go too often, and he did not stay too late. His handsomeness, which was considerable, involved not just his looks but also an emanation, an almost visible luster, of intelligent, exuberant strength.

There was a day in the late spring when his brother and uncle came to see him. They were invited to dinner on a Sunday when, as it happened, the Russets were feeding the preacher, and so Laura did meet the storied Burley Coulter, who was, as promised, in a class by himself. He was then in his forty-sixth year. The marks of time and weather were on him and his hair was gray, though he was still a man unusually attractive, which he seemed to know both frankly and modestly. Though he carried a muchabused felt hat in his hand and his blue suit shone with wear at points of stress, he had made himself presentable for what he clearly thought an important occasion. And on this occasion his obvious gift for sociability wore a sort of patina of formality. He was being conscientiously correct for the sake of his nephews. And yet when he was introduced to Laura he gave her an openly appraising look, which communicated both a compliment and his amusement that she had caught the compliment and liked it. She offered her hand. With fine discrimination he shook it
almost
too long, and she laughed.

Nathan Coulter, who had driven them over in his father's much-muddied automobile, seemed younger than his brother by more than the two years between them. He was a nice boy, in looks a little dreamy perhaps, and by nature much quieter than Tom, though obviously a product of the same teaching and upbringing. To everybody's relief, the group of them went together fine, as Ernest Russet later said. It was at first a pleasant and then a happy meal, at which much was eaten in verification of the many praises that were passed over the food. And afterward, to
the Russets and the Milbys, it seemed that their acquaintance with Tom Coulter had been enlarged and even lengthened. They knew him better, from farther back, than before.

By the fall of that year two changes had come about that, in Laura's mind, had assumed the standing of facts, and facts moreover that she pretty well understood: The Russets had come to love Tom Coulter as the son they had longed for but never had, and Tom Coulter had come to love Laura Milby as a young man loves a woman forever beyond his hope.

The first of these facts may not yet have come into speech between the two Russets, but Williams and Laura, who had watched it happening, had talked of it, and to them it was merely obvious. On the one hand there was an absence long unfilled, and on the other hand, now, a presence that might exactly fill it. They thought it only a matter of time, another year perhaps, until the beautiful farm would have its designated heir. “That Tom,” Ernest Russet said, “he's a born stockman if ever there was one.”

The second fact was known only to Laura herself. If it was plain to her, it was in no general way obvious. Tom was not forward. In the presence of women, even of Naomi Russet, he was somewhat shy. But when he looked at Laura and looked away, his face was marked by a thought she recognized. That he wished to be near her she knew, because when it was possible for him to be near her he would be, though then he would hold himself a little apart and look away. And when, at the Russets' or at church, there was something that could be done for her, something such as a load to be carried, he would be first to see it, for he would be watching, and he would do for her what needed to be done. But even without these visible signs, it seemed to Laura that she would have known his feeling for her by the mere force of it passing to her through the air.

And she knew fairly well what to make of it and how seriously to take it. She was then twenty-five years old and in the fourth year of her marriage. In her thoughtful way she had parsed out the kinds of love and its changes. There was love as mere attraction, mere feeling, not of which as a girl she had known enough of the power and the giddiness. By now she had seen how such love could gather knowledge to itself and become different, and how it was changed again, profoundly this time, when it made the solemn offer of trust and submitted to vows. Love and trust, that vow “until death,”
had carried Laura and Williams into an abyss of sorts, lighted only by the light they could find within and between themselves. They were passing on and on into the unknown life of plighted love. Behind them, committed and unchangeable, was the history of their love, which was changing it and would change it.

She necessarily regarded this love of Tom's as young, younger by far than any love of hers would ever be again. And yet, though she could not return it in kind, she was moved by it. She granted a certain respect to it. She saw moreover that, as it was unaskingly given, it was a gift to be honored, and she did honor it. She would not withhold from it even the name of love, for all love must begin without knowledge. Perhaps, as she thought, it is itself a kind of knowledge.

At that time there already was war in Europe and war in Asia. Though war had not, so to speak, yet shown itself above the horizon around Sycamore, neither was it any longer ignorable. To the ones who were living there in those days, war had become a thinkable possibility, a premonition, like a distant mutter of thunder on a clear day.

And then after the seventh of December 1941, war was present among them. Around Sycamore it was as if the people had turned away from the distant thunder, distracted from it by their workaday lives, and had turned back again to find a black cloud covering half the sky. As the magnitude of the opposing forces became manifest to her, it seemed to Laura that the whole sky darkened, and an unsourced light illuminated creatures and objects on all sides so that they stood out in sharp relief against the darkness. The young men in particular looked to her that way. Tom Coulter looked that way to her, as if a dark fate was gathering around him, and he was lighted, not by daylight at all, but by his own small life shining within him.

The realization grew upon them all that everything would be changed. No life would be immune. No life now would be changed merely by time and mortality. Now history was outrunning time.

January came. Though the lengthening of the days was hardly apparent so far, it was felt. The year was beginning. On the floor of Ernest Russet's tobacco barn, now partitioned and bedded and furnished with mangers, the lambs of the new year were being born. Now the Russet household
never completely slept. To give help to the laboring ewes when help was needed, to save a wet newborn lamb from the cold, Ernest or Tom would be going to the barn by turns all through the nights, sometimes staying for hours, busy with a difficult birth or a weak lamb, or just sitting and waiting, warming their hands over the lighted lantern between their feet.

At that time knowledge, fear, and sorrow were descending also upon the Russets. For them, the great fact of the war was coming to bear with a singular pointedness upon what was now their dearest hope. The war, as they had tried not to know but nonetheless knew, was going to require Tom Coulter. It would take him away. That it would destroy him they did not yet know, but they knew it could destroy him. Knowledge had begun to shudder in their hearts. The change that was coming had already begun to come, and they felt themselves impaired.

On a Sunday near the end of the month, when the Milbys again came for dinner, sorrow was in the air undeniably—partly because of the Russets' palpable need to deny it. The effect of the presence of Williams Milby, the comforter, was to make grief evident. The Russets were smiling and genial as usual, but there came relentlessly a moment when Naomi lifted a corner of her apron to wipe an eye, and when Ernest, seeing her do that, stopped twice in the midst of a story to clear his throat.

As soon as the meal was over, according to her custom at such times, Laura excused herself and left the table. She put on her warm overcoat and scarf, her gloves and galoshes, and began one of her solitary walks, leaving the old ones in their sorrow, Tom in his embarrassment, Williams in his helpless standing by that was yet a comfort.

Her departure had its usual excuse of discretion; Williams was the needed one, not her. But today, as she knew and told herself, there was cowardice in it too. She did not want to bear what in that house that day was to be borne. The place, which normally would have seemed to welcome her, today seemed to exclude her. She felt its indifference to whatever might happen in it. Its quietness, as if waiting or expectant, which usually would have comforted her, she felt now as indifference.

Though it did not comfort her, she continued her walk for some distance, going as far as the little stream under the sycamores, which was flowing too full to cross by stepping stones, and then turning back toward the barns.

The tobacco barn, now the lambing barn, opened front and back into
two pastures. In the pasture behind it were the ewes whose lambs were now safely born and strong; in the smaller pasture in front were the ewes still to lamb. Laura walked up the long slope among the ewes with their new lambs, and here she felt a kind of pleasure at last. Here was a small success, even a small triumph, of the kind the world most dependably allows. The ewes moved out of her way as she passed, their lambs following. She walked to the wide-open doorway and went into the barn.

When she had blinked away the outdoor brightness, she saw Tom busy by the row of lambing pens along one wall.

“Hello,” she said.

He answered, “Hello.”

The barn no doubt had needed to be visited, but no doubt also, like her, he had welcomed an excuse to leave the house. She felt then how strongly his life claimed him, how he needed for his place and being the whole outdoors.