A Place in Time (31 page)

Marcie followed his parents and his sister around the house to the back porch and into the kitchen. Sitting in chairs drawn back from the table were Marcie's grandfather and his uncle Henry. Also there were Elton and Mary's son Jack, just home from the army, and Arch Hall, their son-in-law. They were quiet. The whole house was quiet. Marcie could hear the quiet in every room of it. Henry and Jack and Arch, who usually would have said something to tease him a little, were quiet. His father went from one to another, shaking hands and exchanging with each a word or two, and then he sat down, and the quiet resumed.

And so Marcie would know from then on that baffled silence, the silence of finding nothing adequate, and therefore nothing, to say.

Marcie's mother and his sister had passed through the kitchen to the living room to sit with the other women, who had come to sit with Mary and Martha in their grief. Marcie stood just inside the door where he had stopped. He would have liked to be not there, but he did not know, now that he was there, how to leave. And he had not thought of a place to go.

His grandfather was sitting nearest the door. When they had come in
he had been staring down at the backs of his hands lying open on his lap. Now, sensing Marcie's discomfort, he reached for him, drew him over, and put his arm around him. Marcie submitted to this, saying nothing. He did take a certain comfort in his grandfather's presence, and for a while he was glad to stand close to him. His grandfather's hands were proprietary and unrefusable but there was a certain relenting in them too, on that day as on others. There was the feeling of his grandfather's own kind of tenderness.

For a while his grandfather's arm around him was a shelter. But the news of Elton's death was making its way through the community. Others came, and they kept coming, requiring the men at the table to stand and speak and shake hands, shifting about to make room for more chairs. Finally attention was withdrawn from Marcie and a way opened between him and the door. He slipped out, leaving the door a little ajar so as to make no noise.

He came to the cars clustered along the driveway, some he had never seen there before. He went through them without looking back. There had been frost in the night. There was still a sharpness in the air, but this was the outside air and he welcomed the feel of it. Just by breathing it he could tell how big and free it was.

With the assembly of cars behind him, he was again in the world as he knew it, though change was upon it. It was a day unchangeably changed. It would be forever what it now was. Though nobody had said it, the word “forever,” along with the other words, began to be suspended in the air above Marcie's head. He himself had said no word at all. He had not made a sound.

He let himself through the gate in the lot fence that joined the fronts of the two barns, the implement shed, and the corn crib. He stopped and stood. It was as though he had come into the inside of Elton's mind. All around him were the things that were Elton's thoughts and the order that Elton had made. And yet everything was changed. It was unearthly quiet and still on a weekday morning when something ought to have been stirring. So early in his life Marcie had come to the confusion that would obsess his grandfather Catlett in his terrible forgetfulness at the end of his life: Though everything clearly had changed, everything looked exactly the same.

Various implements were in their places in the open-fronted shed, put away clean and in good repair, as Elton would always have them, ready to go to work again. Near the top of the ridge, two fences away, Elton's cows were grazing, some with young calves at their sides. The several shoats in the hog lot had eaten their fill and were lying along the fence, apparently asleep. As Marcie stood watching, Peg the Border collie, always in need of a job, drove a banty rooster between two boards of the board fence, herded him deftly through the open door of the feed barn, and lay down in the doorway to keep him from coming out again. Peg was a clever dog, one of the creatures of the place who could always make Elton stop and watch. On another day, Marcie would have called her to come to him and be patted, for her friendship was something of an honor. But the morning was too quiet. The quiet in the lot had too much the quality of having been there unusually long. It was a quiet he did not want to hear himself speaking into.

Instead, he walked quietly, not wanting to hear his footsteps either, past Peg and into the doorway of the barn. And from that threshold for a time he went no farther, for Elton clearly had been at work there, probably just yesterday. The dirt floor of the driveway had been raked and swept clean as a pin. A shovel, a rake, and a heavy push broom stood leaning against the wall. And near them, hanging from a nail, was Elton's work jacket. It hung still, still. It had not the shape of Elton's shoulders and back and arms, but the shape only of any garment dangling from a nail.

And now a strange freedom came upon Marcie. Now he could walk freely into the barn. Now he could touch the handles of the tools. Now he could touch the jacket. And all the while he heard himself crying, for he had recognized finally the changed world. The name of the change was absence. It was loss. And the changed world was the world he knew. It was the world known to his father and mother, to his uncle Henry and his grandfather, in which a man might grow warm at his work, take off his jacket and hang it on a nail, and forever not come back to put it on again.

And so, past the heavy gunnery, the bombs, the blood and fire of Bastogne and beyond, there was this: the creek valley opening below him as he rose step by step up the two-track road. Since the days and nights of combat, before the wound that set him free of the army and free very nearly of this world, he had borne in the back of his mind for going on forty years, as a sort of comment on everything else, the clamor of the big gun he had served, of the guns that accompanied his, of the guns that answered. Against that immense sounding, so long ago, so little receded, the small valley holds its plea, frail as a flower, and as undeniable.

The valley had widened below him now so that when he stopped and looked back the whole legend of it had come clear: the house backed against the near slope, the cellar and smokehouse, the barns on the near and far sides of the creek, the creek itself, Sand Ripple, twisting and shining between parallel rows of still-leafless trees on its way to the river, the inverted arc of the footbridge swung across at the edge of the woods upstream. The valley revealed itself now as a bowl, in the greatness of the country less than a cup, as familiar to him as the palm of his hand.

It was a small place, humble enough in all its aspects, except for an ordinary splendor that would possess it from time to time in every season. And it was, as some would have thought it, remote, tucked away in one of the folds of the much-folded landscape surrounding the town, also small and humble, of Port William. A stranger driving along the river road would
not have suspected the existence of such a place, would have noticed no doubt the stand of trees that hovered about the creek mouth, but probably not at all the narrow opening, near the Sand Ripple bridge, of the lane that followed the creek upstream through the woods to the abrupt fall of light onto the opened valley.

He was Arthur Rowanberry, known as Art, whose family, ever intent on taking its living from the place, which the place, mostly hillside, yielded to them reluctantly, had forgot the number of their generations on it.

He was walking up the hill road to the Orchard Ridge, as they still called it, though the last of its apple trees was long gone from living memory, where he would count the calving cows and put out their daily ration of hay. His brother Martin, Mart for short, had gone up in the early morning to see about them, driving the tractor while the ground was frozen so that the heavy machine would do no harm to the road. Otherwise, Mart too would have walked. Unlike their eventual successors, four different owners in twenty-five years, who would wear the road to a raw wound by driving on it in all weather, no Rowanberry ever drove a wheeled vehicle up the hill when the ground was soft.

By the calendar it was almost spring. The days were lengthening, a tinge of green was showing in the pastures, and the buds were fattening on the water maples. But on that day the season was halted by a cold spell. A steady, bitter wind was blowing from the north, hard against his back as he came up into it and turned the sharp bend in the road. He warmed his hands by shifting them, first one and then the other, from his stick to a pocket.

But he liked weather, anyhow most weather. He liked its freedom from walls, its way of overcoming all obstructions and filling the world. And he liked walking, which was another kind of freedom: no preparation, no expense, just get up onto your legs and go. What he had liked best in the army was the marching, the passing through country, with the others, nearly all younger than he, stepping in the same cadence all around. But a greater pleasure was in walking by himself. There was pleasure also in the company of old Preacher, the gray-muzzled hound who was walking for the time being at Art's heels. Preacher knew the way, even the errand, as well as Art did, and like Art he was too old for needless haste.

With Mart away, at Port William or Hargrave or somewhere, doing whatever it was he did on Saturday afternoon, Art began his walk plenty early, giving himself time. It was not that he needed time, so early in the day, for anything in particular. He needed time only to take his time, to have time for the day and the weather, to walk in his own time, unhurried, with no reason not to stop and look around, or to take a “long cut” off the knapped stone of the road and into the woods. In his own time, time asked nothing of him except to live in it and to keep alert, to watch, to see what he could see, the day and its light coming to him unburdened.

He had never minded company. He had always liked to be in the field, in the barn, at a wood sawing or hog killing, with a crew of friends and kin. Even then, at the age of seventy-six, he would hurry to get in on a lift, to do his part. “Many hands make light work,” he liked to say, for he knew it was true. But to be alone was a different happiness. At times it was almost a merriment, when he liked his thoughts.

Some thoughts that had gathered to him in his time gave him no pleasure. There was always something that had to be subtracted from pleasure, “always something,” as he would say now and again, “to take the joy out of life.” But he had acquired also many thoughts that gave him joy.

His thoughts were placed and peopled, and they seemed to come to him on their own, without any effort of his to call them up. He would think of the present day and place, as now, as the prospect widened below him and he felt in his flesh and in the breadth of the country the full, free stroke of the wind across the ridges.

“We'll have to face it, coming down,” he said to Preacher. And then he stopped and looked about. As if to console the dog he said, “Well, maybe it'll fair up tomorrow.”

Or it would happen that another time would open to him, sometimes from long ago, and he would see his grandmaw and grandpaw Rowanberry at the log house back on the ridge, and the old life they had lived there when he was a boy. He would see their going among the fields and along the roads, mostly afoot even when they went to town, and the network of paths that connected house and barn and corn crib and hog lot, well and cellar and smokehouse. The life they lived there he recognized, even in his
childhood, as old beyond memory, little changed in so much time beyond their marking of the ground. Some of the marks they left were wounds in the steeper land, slow to heal, for hard times and the family's unrelenting will to endure had driven them to crop the slopes, and the rains had imposed their verdict. Art knew the stern requirement that his elders, remembered and forgotten, should survive if they could, as he knew the inexorable judgment of weather and time. He saw the fault, knew the wrong, yet placed no blame. They had paid to live as resignedly as they had expected to die. In his thoughts they went from day to day to day in their steady work, eating their large and frugal meals, going to bed precisely at darkfall, rising to work again long before daylight even in summer. Of the things they needed they grew and made much, purchased little.

Art had been the first grandchild, and the elder Rowanberrys, his father's parents, made much of him. As his younger brothers and sisters came along, and at the rare times when he could escape the chores that were assigned to him almost as soon as he could walk, then oftener as his grandparents grew older and had need of him, he liked to leave the house down in the creek valley and go up to stay days and nights at a time at the old house on the ridge.