A Place in Time (33 page)

Preacher, born again to the life of a hunting dog with important business in the woods, turned and trotted off downhill among the trees. And that was the last Art saw of him until he turned up again at suppertime.

During the little while of Preacher's excitement and then his indignation, that particular slope of the ridge seemed to exist only in reference to the episode of the squirrel. But then the sound of the wind settled back upon it as a kind of quiet. Art looked about and took notice of where he was.

The whole Rowanberry place lay in his mind, less like a map than like a book, its times stratified upon it like pages. He remembered the seasons, crops, and events of the years he had known, of which almost always he remembered the numbers. And the living pages of his memory, as if blown or thumbed open, showed past days as they were, as perhaps they are.

In 1937, in the summer after the big flood, they grew a crop of tobacco on the slope above the hickory where Preacher had treed the squirrel. The summer of 1936, as if to require in justice the terrible flood of the next January, had been terribly dry. The country had been dying of thirst day after day and week after week. All the hard-won product of the farm had amounted almost to nothing. By the spring of 1937, the Rowanberrys
seemed to have made it through by luck, if luck was what they wanted to call it. That was the time when Art's father began telling people who asked how he was, “Here by being careful.”

But in the late winter and early spring, as people then did, as they had to do, Early Rowanberry and his four sons—Art, Mart, Jink, and Stob—cut the trees from the slope where Art would be standing and remembering in the cold March wind forty-four years later. They dragged off the logs and poles, burnt the brush, plowed and worked the soil, piled the rocks, and in a wet spell in late May, set out by hand the tobacco crop that would have to do for both that year and the year before.

The growing season of 1937 gave them enough rain, and they made a good crop. Art, as if standing and looking in both present and past, saw it in all its stages, from the fragile, white-stemmed plants of the setting-out to the broad, gold-ripe leaves at harvest.

The four sons and their father had kept faith with it, doing the hard handwork of it, through the whole summer. An old man already as they saw him and in fact getting to be old, but never forgetting the hard year before and other hard ones before that, their father drove them into the work, setting a never-slackening pace in the tobacco patch and everywhere else. As if in self-defense, the sons cherished every drink of water, every bite of food, every hour of sleep in fact and in anticipation, and they made the most of everything that was funny.

Just one time, in the midst of a breathless afternoon in July, Jink, who was the hardest of them in his thoughts, cried out, “God
damn,
old man, where the hell's the fire!” It would have been a cry of defiance if Early Rowanberry had been defiable. He might as well have been deaf. He went on. The three brothers went on. Jink himself went on. His outcry hung in the air behind them like the call of some utterly solitary animal.

And then it was getting on toward the noon of a day late in August. By then half the crop had been cut and safely housed in the barns. They had been cutting all morning, going hard, all of them by then moved by the one urgent need to save from the weather, from the possible hailstorm always on their minds, the crop by so much effort finally made. Half an hour earlier Sudie, the brothers' one sister, had brought a cooked dinner in two cloth-covered baskets and had left it in the barn farther back on the ridge. They quit cutting when they saw her pass and began loading a sled with cut tobacco to take with them when they went to the barn to eat.

They were letting Stob, the youngest, be the teamster, driving the horses and the sled as the others loaded. The tobacco they were loading had been cut the morning before and was well wilted. They put on a big load. Their father said, “All right, boys, let's go eat,” and Stob spoke to the team.

Standing on the hillside a little behind the sled, Art saw it all as he still would see it when he thought of it in all the years that followed. Stob was sixteen that summer, a well-grown big stout boy who hadn't yet thought everything he needed to think. When he started for the barn he ought to have got on the uphill side of the load. But he stayed on its downhill side, practically under it, walking beside it with the lines in his hands. Maybe all four of the others were ready to tell him, but they never got a chance. All of a sudden the uphill runner slid up onto the ridge of a row, the ground steepened a little under the downhill runner, and the load started over. Stob, who was then stronger than he was smart and too proud of his strength, didn't stop the horses and run out of the way as he should have done, but just threw his shoulder against the load as if to prop it and kept driving. He pretty soon found out how strong he actually was, for the load, the hundreds of pounds of it, pushed him to the ground and piled on top him. The old team stopped and stood unflustered as if what had happened had happened before. The four men were already hurrying.

They unburied Stob, and Art would remember with a kind of wonder how deliberately they went at it. They righted the sled and loaded it again as, carefully, not to mistreat the tobacco, but quickly enough, they delivered Stob back again to the daylight. When finally he rolled over and stood up, as if getting out of bed, he was wetter with sweat than before and red in the face and wild-eyed, his straw hat crushed on the ground and his hair more or less on end.

Art said, “What was you thinking down under there?”

And Stob said, as if Art ought to have known, “I was thinking the air was getting mighty
scarce
down under there!”

Even their father laughed. At every tobacco harvest after that, down through the years, they would tell the story. And they would laugh.

In the wind, in the gray, cold light, Art went back to the ridgetop and the road. His thoughts returned to his amusement at Preacher. He had given a good deal of study to the old dog's character, and the story of the
squirrel would stay on his mind. He told Andy about it, and about other events of that journey, for it had been a good one, a few days later. “I reckon he don't have much time for a man without a pistol.”

He went on back the ridge, the road passing in front of the old log house, now a ruin, the doors and windows gaping, the hearths long ago dug up by descendants of a family of slaves who had once belonged to Art's family. Those descendants, Rowanberrys themselves since freedom, believed that during the Civil War money and other valuables had been buried under a stone of one of the hearths. Art and Mart told them to dig away, perfectly assured that no Rowanberry had ever owned anything greatly worth either burying or digging up. As they expected, the digging was motivated entirely by superstition, but since then the hearthstones had remained overturned onto the puncheons of the floors. The chimneys too had begun to crumble. All of the old making that remained intact were the cellar and the well. For a long time two apple trees had lived on at the edge of what had been the garden, still bearing good early apples that Art and Mart came up to pick every year. But life finally had departed from the trees as it had from the house.

Art went on to the wire gap into the pasture where they wintered the cows and let himself through. Adjoining at one of its corners the tobacco barn where the hay was stored, the pasture was a field of perhaps twenty acres now permanently in grass. It was enclosed by the best fence remaining on the place, but even that fence was a patchwork, the wire stapled to trees that had grown up in the line, spliced and respliced, weak spots here and there reinforced by cut thorn bushes and even an old set of bedsprings.

The place was running down. Art and Mart were getting old, and the family had no younger member who wanted such a farm or even a better one. After so many years as the Rowanberry place, it was coming to the time when finally it would have to be sold. Mart perhaps already would have sold it, had the decision belonged to him alone. Art so far had pushed away even the thought. He needed his interest in the farm. “A fellow needs
something
to be interested in.” He had pushed away the thought of selling, as Andy still supposes, because so far he
could
not think of it. He could not distinguish between the place and himself.

But the place, its life as a farm, continued only by force of old habit.
The two brothers went on from day to day, from year to year, doing only as they always had done. They did nothing new, and as their strength declined they did less. They extended the longevity of fences and buildings by stopgaps, patching and mending, and by the thought, repeated over and over, “I reckon it'll last as long as it needs to.”

Their earnings in any year were not great, but they spent far less than they earned. They grew most of their food, or gathered it from the woods and the river. They heated the house with wood they cut and split still as they always had. They were thrifty and careful. Mart kept a pretty good used car and went places for pleasure. Art stayed mostly at home and spent, by the standards of the time, almost nothing.

There were ten cows and, as of that morning, four calves. The cows were Nancy, Keeny, Yellowback, Baby Sitter, Droopy Horn, Brown Eyes, Doll, Beulah, Rose, and Troublemaker. They had their tails to the wind, grazing to not much purpose the short grass. The four calves were lying together, curled up against the chill.

Seeing only nine of the cows, Art set off to find the tenth. He crossed over the ridge to the south side. There, in a swale affording some shelter, he found Troublemaker, afterbirth still hanging, and her still-wet heifer calf uneasily standing.

“Well, look a-there what you've done!” Art said to the cow. “Ain't you proud of yourself!”

He said to the calf, “You're going to make it, looks like.”

He didn't go near them. The cow would be ruled entirely now by the instinct to protect her calf. Her long acquaintance with Art would not have mattered. Not to her. She wasn't named Troublemaker for nothing.

“Well,” he said to her, “I'll leave it to you.” He turned around and went to the barn.

The timbers and poles that framed the barn had come from the nearby woods. The posts, girders, and top plates all had been squared by somebody—Grandpaw Rowanberry, Art thought—who had been a good hand with a broadaxe, for the work was well done. The barn, in its time, had been a fair example of good work with rough materials. Its posts rested on footers of native rock, and it had been roofed originally with shingles rived out of white oak blocks also from the woods of the place.
The only milled lumber had been the poplar siding. Now the barn, like the pasture fence, had become as much a product of the last-ditch cunning of making-do as of the skills that first had built it.

From the hay rick, by now much diminished, Art carried five bales one at a time into the pasture, spacing them widely, cutting the strings with his knife, dividing and scattering the hay, so that even Doll, the timidest cow, would get her share.

Having scattered the hay, he stood a while watching, to feel the culmination of his trip and the satisfaction of hunger fed. Soon it would be warmer and the new grass would come. The time of surviving would be past, and the cows and calves would begin to thrive.

On out beyond the winter pasture, the upland narrowed and then widened again, becoming what they called the Silver Mine Ridge. A long time ago Uncle Jackson Jones, an old man nobody knew much about, had passed through the country, digging for buried money. A number of his excavations were in the Port William neighborhood. Andy Catlett and a few other old men still know where they are, shallowed by time to mere depressions in the woods. The largest was the one on the Rowanberry place. Art's father had worked on that one when he was a boy. Uncle Jackson hired several of the local boys to help him dig. They made a hole long and wide and deep enough to bury a small house or a large corn crib. They had to use a ladder to get to the bottom of it.

While they were digging, Early Rowanberry remembered, another stranger, “a man with a needle,” happened by. The “needle,” Andy thinks, must have been the arrow on some sort of dial, some instrument of geological divining. The man with the needle took readings round and about. He then told Uncle Jackson that if he would dig a second hole, only a short distance away, he would strike a vein of pure silver. But Uncle Jackson said no, he was after coined money and nothing else. The man with the needle departed and was never seen again. The diggers dug on. But the only silver yielded by their big hole was in the coins paid out by Uncle Jackson to his crew of boys.

Every evening when they climbed out of the hole they left their picks and spades, spud bars, grubbing hoes, and other tools at the bottom. One night a terrific rain fell, collapsing the sides of the hole and burying the tools, which put an end to Uncle Jackson's work at that place.

“After that,” Art said to Andy, “it was anyhow a tool mine.”

But nobody ever went back to dig for the tools.

“Too much digging for a few tools. And, I reckon maybe, too few tools to dig with.”

When the wind, pressing through his clothes, at last laid its cold touch against his flesh, Art turned to face it, buttoned the top button of his jacket, and started back the way he had come. Behind him, the small herd of cows, filling and warming themselves with hay for the night, seemed to him for the time being to have been completed, and he was free to go.