A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership

by Wendell Berry

  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.

  I don’t mean to give you the idea that Wheeler Catlett went around gossiping about his clients. But when his boy Andy got big enough to be some account at work, he would tell us things. At that age, Andy wasn’t always on the best of terms with his father, but he enjoyed Wheeler’s knowledge and his language. So when we were all together at work and the stories would get started, Andy sometimes had good things to pass along. It’s a mystery how the voices gather. Our talk at row ends or in the barn or stripping room would call up the voices of the absent and the dead. Somebody maybe would wonder what old Uncle Bub would think of Miss Charlotte, and though we never knew him and he never knew her he would say about her what he said about everybody of wonder. “Hell and dammit, boys! She’s a ring-tailed twister!” About everybody knew of Miss Charlotte and took some interest in her. She was surrounded, you might say, with observation. And of course also, as Wheeler said, with her own glitter.

  Grover said he could tell when she was coming because first he would see Willard in his chauffeur’s cap driving around the corner of the rock fence along the driveway and then, well behind him, Miss Charlotte would come into sight in the back seat. They would drive up in front of the feed barn. They would look around. If they didn’t see Grover, Miss Charlotte would tell Willard to blow the horn, and he would give forth a toot. When Grover appeared, if he did, Miss Charlotte would roll her window down.

  Grover, you would think, might have gone over and leaned down to speak to her at a respectful level through the window, but Grover never felt dressed for the occasion. So he stood back at some distance, requiring her to raise her voice to, as he put it, his level to speak to him, and he would holler back to her. She took herself too seriously to notice that he took her unseriously.

  “Grover, are you giving milk regularly to the cats?”

  “Yes mam, Miss Charlotte.”

  “Grover, you aren’t looking well. Are you well?”

  “I was feeling pretty well, Miss Charlotte, but I got over it.”

  “I see you have a nice automobile, Grover,” she said once, pointing to one of Grover’s semi-wrecks that he said would roll down any hill it couldn’t pull up. “What kind is it?”

  “A small Packard, Miss Charlotte.”

  Grover liked that remark so well that every old car he had from then on he always called it a small Packard.

  But maybe more often than she came, Miss Charlotte would send Willard by himself. When she sent Willard it was usually with a message she didn’t want to deliver in person.

  Neither one of them ever said so, but Willard and Grover saw eye to eye on a lot of things. They enjoyed a lot of the same pleasures without ever so much as a look or a wink passing between them.

  Willard’s natural laugh was something to see and hear. He would bend way forward and then rear way back and give out a great bellow that would loosen shingles. But when more was going on than met the eye he had a little pecking laugh, “heh-heh-heh.”

  Miss Charlotte was maybe the president of the widows and old maids of the Hargrave aristocracy, and she made a big thing of giving all her constituents an old ham every C
hristmas, a big ham to the widows with families and a little ham to the old maids. How she got the little hams was a matter of some embarrassment to Willard, and a matter of artistic pride and satisfaction to Grover.

  Every fall when the nights were getting cold and hog-killing time was getting close, Willard would come driving in by himself. He would say, “Trim them shoulders round, Mistah Grover, heh-heh-heh.”

  Miss Charlotte’s hogs, you see, were the only ones ever known to have hams at both ends. “They had hams coming and going!” Wheeler Catlett said.

  Sure enough, Grover could trim a shoulder so anybody who didn’t know the difference would take it for a ham. And the aristocratic old maids at Hargrave didn’t know the difference.

  When it was coming Christmas there would be Willard again, by himself. He would back the big car up to the smokehouse door, Grover would hand the yearling hams out to Willard, and every time Grover handed him one of the little hams Willard, never looking at Grover, said, “Heh-heh-heh.”

  What made Willard laugh his big true laugh was for instance this.

  One afternoon Willard was driving Miss Charlotte and a lesser widow or two and Miss Agnes Heartsease home from some function, and they were overtaken by a big storm of rain at the same time that Miss Heartsease, full of coffee, was overtaken by an urge to uncork herself that she was powerless to resist—this is Wheeler talking.

  Miss Heartsease was a schoolteacher and a lady of the strictest religion. Her virtue, Wheeler said, was a mighty fortress that she had successfully defended against every assault, as many maybe as one.

  Anyhow, and this was probably something else new in history, Miss Charlotte made Willard stand out in the rain to hold an umbrella over Miss Heartsease, looking away, while she peed I’m sure a genteel little trickle on the gravel.

  The only one who would have told that was bound to be Willard, so I guess he told it. And of course it got back to Grover. And if it happened to be raining, Grover, who liked to make Willard laugh, would say perfectly serious, “Willard, I hate to ask it of you, but that coffee’s working on me. Have you got your umbrella?”

  When Miss Charlotte came to supervise the farming, she never got out of the car. Her need to supervise was fulfilled just by making the trip, passing a few words with Grover, and looking lovingly across the hollow behind the house at the roof of what she called “Father La Vere’s tobacco barn.”

  “Father La Vere” was what with deep respect and daughterly love she called Uncle Bub. It had been Uncle Bub’s barn, sure enough. And hard telling whose before him. It was old. Part of it was log. It went back maybe to the time of D. Boone. It had been pieced out and added to by later generations until it sprawled all over the hillside. Sometime toward the end of his earthly passage, Mr. La Vere had got a good deal on, it must have been, a barrel or two of blue paint, and he hired some brave fellows to brush it onto the rusty roof of that old barn. So when Miss Charlotte looked at Father La Vere’s barn, what she saw was half an acre of blue roof that made Chicken Little look like a true prophet. You could say, and maybe Mr. La Vere did say, that a barn is no better than its roof. But Miss Charlotte’s philosophy on barns was that if the roof is all right then the barn is all right.

  In fact, under the roof, the barn was just a collection of splices and patches. It was tiered off with old fence rails and locust poles, all nailed and wired up every which way. All of us who ever worked in it fell out of it at least once. And there was a big old cedar tree grown up on the downhill side with its limbs bushed out until they touched the wall. The tree had no business there, but way before Grover some tenant had let it get started, and every one since had left it, maybe as a comment on the barn that said more or less “To hell with it!”

  Well, after Grover had been there must have been four or five years, the rust began showing through the blue paint to where it was visible even to Miss Charlotte. And faithful to tradition, she wanted it painted again with blue paint.

  She put the proposition to Grover, but Grover couldn’t do it. He couldn’t work high off the ground. It made the world whirl. It made him so dizzy and sick he couldn’t hardly hold his dinner he was so scared he would fall. This was either true or it wasn’t, but it saved Grover a good deal of trouble along with maybe his neck.

  So Miss Charlotte authorized Grover to see who would take the job, and Grover put the proposition to my brother, Jarrat, who took him up. Out of generosity he took him up on my behalf as well as his own.

  “Hang on!” I said. “I don’t want to paint that damned roof. I can’t spare the time. And high places make me sick like they do Grover.”

  Jarrat, a man of few words, said, “You could use the money.”

  Matter of fact, I could. But like Jarrat I also could have done without it, and unlike Jarrat would have been glad to. But I was in and I knew it.

  Jarrat had traded with Grover for two dollars a day and our dinner, dinner to be furnished by Beulah Gibbs, which was the best part of the deal, for Beulah was a fine cook, paint and brushes and so on to be furnished by Miss Charlotte.

  So as soon as we got our crops laid by we gathered up ladders and ropes and everything we thought we’d need, and we got started. We had a long job of it. That roof must have been half an acre, give or take a tenth or two, and in them days nobody had thought of spraying paint or rolling it on. We rubbed it on with brushes, making sure to cover the nailheads and the rust, doing a thorough good job.

  We did the uphill side first because that was the bigger side. But also we wanted to get ourselves well used to the job before we got to work on the downhill side which was all of it steep and almighty high at the eave. To tell the truth, I didn’t have Grover’s problem with heights, but I knew that if you fell from so high onto that old ledgy hillside you wouldn’t get up again maybe until resurrection morning.

  Finally we did conquer the uphill side. We passed our ropes over the comb of the roof then and tied our ladders on the downhill side. And we were keeping our feet always on the ladder rungs. We weren’t taking any chances. We started each one on a side and worked toward the middle. After it seemed like forty days and forty nights we were working pretty close together, which back then wasn’t always the ideal arrangement for Jarrat and me.

  We came back onto the roof one day after dinner and went at it again. We were meaning to get the job over with that day if it took us till dark. I don’t know why it is, but even when you’re getting paid by the day, you want to get done. You’re eager to get done, just as you’d be if you were working for yourself at no wage. And it did seem like we’d been there nearly forever when there were better things to do. Looked back at, it was beginning to seem like a waste.

  And my Lord it was hot! You couldn’t touch that roof bare-handed, and you could barely see for the sweat. It was pure punishment. By the middle of the afternoon I began to feel unhappy with Jarrat for including me in the deal. I began to put on a little speed, laying that paint on slappity-slap, knowing he couldn’t help but hear. I had to keep it up quite a while before he said anything.

  Finally he said, “What’s your hurry?”

  “Well, you said it’s time we were getting done with this,” I said, no matter that we clearly were getting done with it. “I’m just taking your word for it, that’s all.”

  He didn’t answer. But I knew he was getting mad. It would make him mad when you were being unserious about work. I went on, slappity-slap, loading my brush with paint and making it pop against the roof. Jarrat was commenting by not saying anything. I was cooking him on a slow fire, and I ought to’ve had my ass kicked, for the poor fellow all his life had a harder time of it than I did, but being a man of weak character I couldn’t stop.

  I said, “And I got places to go and things to do.”

  He went ahead, serious about his work, and didn’t say anything for another while. And then he said, “Well, don’t slobber it on.”

  I straightened up and unseriously rolled a cigarette and stuck it in the corner of my
mouth and lit it and picked up my bucket and brush. I hadn’t hardly more than just started painting again when we heard this low buzz way off in the sky, and it got louder. We looked where the sound was coming from, and directly out of the heat haze and the shimmer this airplane just appeared.

  Back then an airplane was a rare sight, and this one was a four-winger flying lower than we’d ever seen one. The idea that some body was in that thing flying through the sky seemed to come somewhere between prime idiocy and a miracle. It passed right over the top of us.

  And then several events took place so fast they almost happened at the same time. While I was looking so straight up that my hat started to fall off, I stepped backwards to see better and threw my whole weight right onto the wet paint. I grabbed for my hat with my right hand that had the loaded brush in it and only painted the side of my face, the hat was gone. And so was I, of course. I dropped bucket and brush both to try for a handhold in the thin air, and didn’t find one.

  Half a gallon of spilled paint makes a tin roof uncommonly slick. I hadn’t had time to fall over, so I was going down that roof standing up, like a boy sliding on ice, and I was saying very clearly in my mind, “Well, this is the end of you, old bud.” I shot off the roof right into the top of that old cedar tree, and that’s how come I’m here to tell about it. I never could make my mind up whether it was Providence or luck, so I split the middle and thanked Providence for my luck.

  A tree like that, you know, grows its top branches upwards and its lower ones outwards. As I was flying in among them, the top branches raked some skin off here and there, and I reckon that slowed me down. When I came to the outreaching lower branches, they just bent and tumbled me from one to the next, sort of gently, maybe gracefully, until the bottom one dropped me without too much of a thump onto the ground. And there I sat, spraddle-legged in the shade, cooler than I’d been since dinner.