A Place in Time (29 page)

Well, John Dillinger was on the loose at that time, and nobody knew for sure where he was. That gave this event a sort of framework, you see. First thing you know, everybody was glancing toward us and whispering. We got the story later. That big girl hadn't much more than told what she thought Big had in his pocket before they figured out that he was John Dillinger and I was his driver.

Everybody began to leave. They weren't long about it. They made use of both doors and every window, all of them being wide open, for it was a hot night. It wasn't long until Big and I were the only ones left. We were puzzled until, as I say, we heard the story. And then we enjoyed it. Especially Big enjoyed it. For a good while after that if you wanted to make him giggle all you had to do was call him “John.”

To know how funny it was you have to picture Big the way he looked that night, all rumpled up in his suit and sweating, hot too on the track of that big girl, smiling like sugar wouldn't melt in his mouth, his feet stepping and prancing all on their own for he had forgotten about them,
and if you'd asked him to tell you right quick where he was, he wouldn't have known.

He was a wonderfully humored man. Things that would make most people mad just slid off of him. He would forgive anything at all that he could get the least bit of amusement out of. And any amusement he got he paid back with interest. He was full of things to say that didn't have anything to do with anything else. You'd be talking to him maybe about getting his hay up or fixing a fence, and he would say, “You know, I wish I'd a been born rich in place of pretty.”

One time when we were hardly more than grown boys, I got sent word of a dance they were giving on Saturday night down at Goforth. Well, it was a girl who sent the word, and I sent word back I couldn't come. The reason was I didn't have any good shoes, though I didn't tell her. I didn't have shoes nor money either. It was a time when money was scarce.

But the day of the dance I happened to go by Big's house and there his good shoes were, shined, sitting out on the well top. Wasn't anybody around, so I just borrowed the shoes and went my way and wore them to the dance that night. They were too big of course, and sometimes I had to dance a while to get all the way into the toes. I must say I danced the shine off of them too and nicked them up here and there. I left them on the well top at Big's house just before daylight.

Since he hadn't had any shoes to wear to the dance, Big got a full night's sleep. Next morning he left the house with the milk bucket on his way to the barn just after daylight, and there his shoes were, right where he'd left them the day before, but now they were all scuffed up.

“Well, shoes!” Big said. “I don't know where you been, but looks like you had a good time.”

One evening after supper I walked over to his place. I'd heard about a litter of hound pups, pretty nice it was said. If Big was interested, I thought we might go together and see them for ourselves. I was ready for a young dog, and I thought Big might be.

Nobody was home, and Big's car was gone. I imagined he'd taken his folks off to visit somebody. On my way to the house I'd looked in the barn and seen his work harness lying in two pretty much heaps on the barn
floor. I couldn't think why, and the matter got my attention. Big's daddy, I knew, would never ever have left his harness in any such a mess. But old Mr. Ellis was sick by then, and the place was coming under the influence of Big and his way of doing, which I didn't yet know as much about as I was going to.

When I saw nobody was at home, I stopped again at the barn, thinking to do Big a favor while I had it on my mind. I picked up his harness and straightened it out and hung it up on the pegs where I knew it belonged and went my way.

After breakfast the next morning, still wanting to talk about the pups, I went back again and found Big in the barn. He had one of the harnesses half on a mule and half on himself, his clothes in about as bad a shape as the harness. He was tramping and grabbling among the chains and straps, blowing at the sweat dripping off his nose, with the look of despair and anguish all over his face. Things he'd left in a heap made better sense to him than things put straight by me.

I could have laughed, but I didn't. I said, “Well, old bud, do you reckon you're going to make it?”

Before then he hadn't known I was there. He gave me a purely threatening look. He said, “I wish I had ahold of the son of a bitch that hung my harness up.”

However mad he was, I knew he wouldn't stay mad more than a few minutes. He
couldn't
was why.

I helped him harness his mules. I told him about the pups, and we agreed to go look at them that evening. I never laughed, nor as much as smiled. And not one word did I ever say about that harness.

You almost couldn't make him mad. But if you didn't watch yourself he could make you mad, just by being so much himself he couldn't imagine that anybody could be different. He didn't go in much for second opinions. He stayed single until his mother and daddy both were dead, and then he married Annie May pretty soon, which maybe was predictable. He liked company. He didn't like to be by himself.

Being married to Big, after the long head start he'd had, was not dependably an uplifting experience. Though Annie May was a good deal younger than he was, she was made pretty much on his pattern, ample and cheerful.
But she could be fittified. I've seen her mad enough at Big, it looked like, to kill him, and maybe he'd be off on another subject entirely and not even notice, which didn't help her patience. One time when she got mad and threw an apple at him—it would have hurt, she had a good arm—he just caught it and ate it. I didn't see that. It was told.

But she never stayed mad long. One time when I went over there she was just furious at him, mainly because he wouldn't bother to argue with her over whatever she was upset about in the first place. She was crying and hollering, “I'm a-leaving you, Big! You've played hell this time! I'm a-leaving here just as soon as I get this kitchen cleaned up!” That was like her. You wouldn't have minded eating dinner off of her kitchen floor. And of course by the time she got the kitchen cleaned up she had forgiven him. I think she loved him
because
he was the way he was. They never had any children, and he was her boy.

Maybe because they didn't have children Big and Annie May let their little farm sag around them as they got older, the way a lot of such couples do. Big's daddy had the place in fair shape when he died, but he died early in the Depression, and so Big couldn't have made a fast start even if he had wanted to. He and Annie May lived well enough, but that was mainly Annie May's doing. She made a wonderful big garden every year, and kept a flock of chickens and some turkeys. They always had three or four milk cows, milked mainly by Annie May, and they sold the extra cream and fed the extra milk to their meat hogs. So they always had plenty to eat. Annie May was as fine a cook as ever I ate after. When they had company or a bunch of us were there working, she would put on a mighty feed. Both of them loved to eat, and they loved to see other people eat.

But Big never tried for much or did much for his place. He wasn't, to tell the truth, much of a farmer. When he went to help his neighbors he'd work as hard as anybody, but put him by himself on his own place, and getting by was good enough. He was a great one then for “a lick and a promise” or “good enough for who it's for.”

I don't know that he ever owned a new piece of equipment, except for a little red tractor that he bought after the war just to be shed of the bother of a team of mules. When he got the tractor he stubbed off the tongues of his old horse-drawn equipment and went puttering about even more slipshod than before. My brother, Jarrat, and I swapped work with him all
our lives, you might as well say, but when we went to his place we always took our own equipment. Jarrat's main idea was to get work done, and he didn't have enough patience to enjoy Big the way I did. “If he gets in my way with one of them cobbled-up rigs of his, damned if I won't run over him.” That was Jarrat's limit on Big, and Big did keep out of his way.

His final sickness was pretty much like the rest of his life. He didn't seem to be in a hurry to get well, or to die either. He didn't make much of it. The doctor had said a while back that he had a bad heart and gave him some pills. Big more or less believed the doctor, but he also let himself believe he would sooner or later get well. I don't think he felt like doing much of anything.

Annie May said, “Big, for goodness sake, let's take you to a heart doctor or
something.
You can't just lie there. We can't just do nothing.”

“I ain't going anywhere,” he said. “I'm just feeling a little dauncy is all.”

She knew better than to push him. Easy-going as he was, when he took a stand you couldn't shake him. He
could
just lie there. They
could
just do nothing.

If he had been suffering, if something had hurt him or he had been uncomfortable, maybe he would have done something. Maybe he would be living yet. But the only thing the matter was he was getting weaker. His strength was just slowly leaking out of him. He didn't have much appetite, and he was losing flesh. But he was comfortable enough. He wasn't complaining.

So nothing was what they did. That was the way Big had solved most of his problems. He would work hard to help his neighbors, because he liked them and liked to be with them and wanted them to get their problems solved. He would wear people out talking to them and fishing for their opinions on anything whatsoever. He would go to no limit of trouble to have a good time, and he'd had a lot of good times. But when it came to doing some actual work for himself, he often simplified it by not doing anything.

That was why, when Big took sick, the old Ellis place, as some of us still call it, was pretty well run down. There wasn't a chicken or a hog or a cow. Another neighbor, a young fellow, was growing the crop and making
a little hay on the shares, but that was all. Social Security, I reckon, was taking up the slack.

I got used to making some time every day to go to see how Big was doing and to sit with him a while. What was harder to get used to was the place. The fences all gone down. The barns and other outbuildings all paintless, and the roofs leaking. The lots grown up in weeds and bushes so you couldn't open the doors that were shut, or shut the doors that had been left open. And every building was fairly stuffed with old farm tools, most of them going back to Big's daddy's time or before, for Big always figured they might come in handy.

What they did, it turned out, was come to be antiques. When the farm was sold to a Louisville businessman after Big died, and the tools and a lot of the household plunder were auctioned off, about everything was bought at a good price by antique collectors. After she was too old to use it, or even want it, Annie May had more money than she ever imagined.

Walking across the fields, the way I usually went when I went to see Big, I would have to appraise every time what had become of the place, a good little farm dwindled down almost to nothing. Nobody going out to milk anymore. Nobody going out to feed the chickens or the hogs. You really couldn't see that anybody still lived there until you got to the yard. The yard was still Annie May's territory—her last stand, you might say—and it was kept neat. The house itself, the cellar and smokehouse out back, they still showed care. And well off to the side, out of the way, the rusty dinner bell that hadn't been rung in years was still perched on its leaning pole. A man on a tractor couldn't hear it. The bell was going to turn out to be an antique too. At the sale two ladies bid for it until you'd have thought it was made out of gold.

The day that was going to be the day Big died I went over there first thing in the morning, as soon as we finished up at the barn and ate breakfast. It was a fine morning, cold and bright, the sky blue and endless right down to the horizon, and everything below shining with frost. We had finished with the hog-killing the day before, and I was bringing some fresh spareribs and tenderloin, thinking they might tempt Big to eat. Until then Big and Annie May both were talking like he was going to get well.

But that morning things had changed. I could feel it as soon as I stepped
in through the kitchen door. Annie May was busy setting the kitchen to rights. She didn't try to keep me from seeing that she was crying. Two of her friends, neighbor women, had come to be with her and help her, as the women do when there's trouble. What had happened was they had figured out—Big first, I think, and then Annie May—that Big wasn't going to get well. The whole feeling of the house had changed. My old granny would have said the Angel of Death had passed over and marked the house. Call it superstition if you want to, but that was what it felt like.

“I brought some meat,” I said. “Lyda thought maybe Big would like something fresh.”

“Well, God love her heart!” Annie May said, taking the packages from me, as if she was mourning over them.

And then she said, “Go on in, Burley. He's awake.”

I went in. Big was lying in the clean bed in the clean room, looking no different really, but that feeling of being in a marked house was there too. The counterpane was white as snow, and white as it was his hands lying on it looked pale. They looked useless. When I came in, he raised a hand to me and gave me a grin as usual. But now he seemed to be grinning to apologize for the feeling that was in the room. He would always get uneasy when things got serious, let alone solemn. He disliked by nature the feeling that was there, but he didn't refuse it either.