Of the pair, hers was the mind that was restless and questing, enticed and disturbed by mysteries. That the world was as it was did not save it from her sense that it might in many ways be different and certainly better. It seemed to her both tentative and final, unshakeable and woefully fragile.
Her husband’s ministry, as he conceived it, was not only to the church but to the whole community, and this often involved a thanklessness hard for her to bear. Not only did he stand up week after week to say and to offer again what he and generations of ministers before him had said and offered before, with no dramatic amelioration of this world as a result, but also he made himself answerable to any and every sufferer within a radius of five or six miles. Any sufferer who was in need or want of him could summon him, even by the ringing of the telephone in the middle of a stormy or frozen night, and he would go.
And when, having done all he could do to help a family through a quarrel or an illness or a death, performing services he was not paid for and could not have been paid for, he might never hear from them again, let alone see their faces even for the courtesy of one Sunday among his hearers, Laura felt herself wounded with sorrow for him and anger at them for their ingratitude.
“It’s not right!” she cried to him once, breaking for that once into his silence about it. “It’s just not right!”
“No. It’s not right,” he said quietly, and he gave her his smile with which he sought to quiet her. “But it’s all right.”
And yet she knew his own need for comfort, for shelter, for her herself, and for the welcome it was her need, in turn, to offer to him. They did not fit together like the two halves of one apple. Sometimes they were flint and steel, and the sparks flew. But they needed to fit together, and they were trying to. Often they did. They were a good couple. Out of the sometimes far estrangement of their differences, their need to fit together would draw them back to each other again. That was their desire. And desire would then freely have its way with them.
And so desire, her own and his, was one of the subjects of her thoughts. She saw the danger of it. She saw the beauty and the preciousness of it. She saw even the necessity of it, for it imparted beauty and motion, life itself, to the whole world. The desire to be at one with another, the desire to be pleased in living together, seemed to her at times to infuse with light the bedrock of the earth.
To know this was a passion with her. She felt herself to be most alive when she felt it alight within herself. It was this light in herself that strangely made her self matter little in comparison. It had the power, in fact, to cause her self entirely to disappear. And so she was mortified, most deeply thwarted in her instinctive tenderness toward the life and light of this world, when she was confronted, as she often was, with the belief, at large among their church people and in Sycamore itself, that desire merely was lust. It was not an adequate mitigation that she knew surely that desire sometimes was lust, and that the dearest, pleasantest desire, especially for the women, sometimes led to suffering.
“But they think desire is no different from lust,” she said to her husband. “Think of the loneliness of that. Think of the terrible loneliness of it!”
“Where do they get that idea?” Williams asked, though he knew.
“They think Jesus said so. ‘Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery already in his heart.’”
That a history of shame and loneliness did surround that saying they then acknowledged in the look they gave each other.
Williams Milby laughed, and his laughter granted standing to this acknowledgment, and it made room for her dissent that he knew was coming. He said, “If he meant desire, he has caught us all. I speak of course only for us men.”
“Speak for us all!” she said. And now to her own surprise she felt her tears, for suddenly it was to her as if she were lifting from herself a nearly unbearable weight. “Speak for us all! If he meant desire, he has caught every one of us.”
When Williams spoke again he spoke quietly, but his voice had changed, borne upward and unsteadied in his throat by an emotion like hers, for now he felt his great love for her, his great desire for her, pressing like a wind at his back. “You don’t think then”—he was testing, teasing her, beckoning her forward—“you don’t think then that desire is necessarily the same as lust?”
“No! Lust is selfish. It seeketh its own. Desire without selfishness, with self-denial, is only praise. It is even love.”
She had more to learn of the cost of self-denying desire.
In those days, in Sycamore as in all the country around, there was an honored practice known as “feeding the preacher.” The housewives of the church, or most of them, held it as an unbreakable law, for they had never known it to be broken, that the preacher and his wife, and their children if any, would be fed dinner and supper in some household of the congregation every Sunday. It was as though the preacher’s lesson, which was never altogether learned, and his comforting, which could not sufficiently be given, were to be compensated by this hospitality in earnest of a tribute never adequately paid. Part of the organization of the church was the order in which the duty of feeding the preacher was passed around from household to household.
This ceremony of Sunday hospitality was a dear privilege to Williams and Laura, for it opened the countryside to them as it was opened otherwise only to the veterinarian. And the veterinarian certainly never received anything like the hospitality that was accorded the Milbys. It was as if they perhaps were angels who appeared in the guise of a young minister and his wife. Whatever their hostess had that was best was laid before these strangers, who would always be strangers to some extent because set apart by the minister’s calling, which required that he and his wife should be sheltered, so far as they could be, from whatever was harshest in the speech and thought and experience of their hosts. The same compunction withheld also knowledge of the extremer pleasures. The list of things the Sycamoreans did not do “in front of the preacher” granted to the preacher a front as wide as a three-horse team. It took the Milbys a long time to learn of the community’s music-making and its dancing, about which it was a mark at least of decorum to say nothing to the preacher.
Whatever was set on the table at those Sunday meals thus was offered somewhat in apology, but also with the unspoken confidence and pride that it was the best available, and the Milbys learned to expect with about the same confidence that whatever was set before them would deserve the praise they would give in return. The food was heaped on the table and they were urged to eat as if they were being fattened for slaughter, or as if it were the known practice of ministers and their wives to eat only on Sundays.
In the hours between the big dinner and the lighter supper after which they would return to church for the evening service, Williams and Laura discovered two difficulties that they had to exert their ingenuity to deal with. The first was the onset of drowsiness after the noon meal. The second was the possibility that in trying to fulfill their hosts’ expectation of a proper Sunday conversation they would run flat out of anything to say.
“I hate to say anything to keep from saying nothing,” Williams said. “I look at you for help, and you say for the tenth or twentieth time, ‘What a wonderful dinner!’ and I say for the tenth or twentieth time, ‘Oh, yes, it was wonderful!’ It’s funny now, Miz Milby, and you can laugh, but it wasn’t funny then.”
Both of these dangers they learned to avoid by the one expedient of asking to be shown something outside the house—and usually, since most of their congregation were farmers, they would ask to be shown something on the farm. For this they learned always to bring their overshoes. And it was this that brought them into the presence of the place, the country itself, and that taught them their people’s ways of belonging to it and living upon it. They found that the farmers generally were proud of their farms, whether justifiably or not, and were ready, often eager, to speak of what they knew. Williams and Laura asked questions and learned and remembe
red, for they realized that they were being taught where they were, and more profoundly than they had expected to know.
They were not city people exactly, but they both had come from big towns. They had never known before a whole community in which everybody knew everybody, and the life of which went all the way to the ground. The community or neighborhood known as “around Sycamore” was a small place divided into many smaller places—farms and fields and woodlands—each of which, if you asked or if you waited to hear, had its unique, inseparable attachment of memories and stories.
On those Sunday afternoons in their unending sequence, when the weather was fit and sometimes when it was not, the Milbys followed their guides through barns and lots, fields and woods, and along the wild streamsides. They were shown flower beds, gardens, crops, and animals in all the stages of the year. Within a year or two they came into the intimate geography and life and worklife of the place. On the Kentucky side of the Ohio there at Sycamore the bottomland was rather narrow, and the farms were not large. The primary intent of the farm families they visited was to live from their land. Every farm produced a few acres of tobacco. Almost every farm had a small herd of beef cattle, and many had a flock of sheep as well. But invariably, and primarily for their own use, the farmers had vegetable gardens, milk cows, hogs for meat and lard, and poultry flocks.
The Milby’s interest in the place and its community fed upon their understanding and upon their failures to understand. Williams’s ministry carried him always along the seams of the community where the people were joined to one another and to the place, and he carried his realizations and his mystifications to Laura. There was always much that needed talking about. They began to know the farms they visited not only familiarly but also critically. From the comparisons that were inevitable, from comments overheard or casually made, they saw that some farms were more kindly and thriftily used than others. They learned to recognize bare ground as a danger. They began to see that the best farms were much grassed and little plowed. When Ernest Russet told them one day, finally breaking his rule against speaking critically in front of the preacher, “You can’t plow your way out of debt,” they knew what he meant.
Those Sunday afternoons afforded occasionally a benefit to Laura that she waited for and prized. When the after-dinner talk involved Williams in a way unusually needful or private, she gladly excused herself and went out alone. She was free then to walk at her own pace, following in silence her own direction and the line of her own thoughts. The only requirement was to get back on time, and for that she carried her husband’s watch.
Sometimes on these walks her direction would be one she prescribed to herself. Sometimes her direction seemed to be required by the place, and she went where it beckoned her to go. Sometimes she felt complete in herself and separate, walking in the place. Sometimes the place seemed to occupy her and to have its being within her, and she forgot herself.
At the end of a cloudy day in full spring the sun suddenly came out. Along the edge of the woods, the thrushes began to call. A mockingbird sang from a dead treetop nearby; a cardinal sang and a wren; in the distance a bobwhite whistled and was answered. Laura felt herself carried up into the freshened light where she seemed to have no life except that which now sang all around her.
On a rainy winter day, just at sunset, she saw the sky divided by the leftward stroke of a rainbow, the other side hidden by trees. Within the visible arc the sky glowed with a vibrant pinkish light, while outside it night was falling.
Walking one frozen afternoon in a wooded hollow of the valley side, she realized suddenly that her own steps made the only sound in that place. She stopped. And then absolute silence came over her, absolute stillness. Every tree, the wooded slope, the world itself, stood as if in the very nothing from which it had been called out.
At such times as these she felt that the great, mute creation was trying to speak to her. This disturbed her, it moved her almost to tears, for it seemed to intimate the nearness of some consolation—forever imminent and unreachable, almost knowable—for everything that was wrong.
As would be bound to happen, there came to be some farms, some couples, that they preferred above others. Of them all, Ernest and Naomi Russet were the most interesting and the most congenial.
Ernest Russet was in his late fifties, beginning to speak of growing old, but still straight and hard-fleshed. He was, as he said, a true-born farmer, who loved eagerly his well-husbanded farm. He loved the work and the care of it, and the abundance that by his passion and his skill he drew from it. He was a humorous man with a hearty, emphatic way of talking, a little too loud, as if his hearers were a little farther away than they actually were. He had only one eye, but a bluer, more intense, more seeing eye than that one never looked out of a man’s head. He quickly became an indispensable counselor to Williams Milby, for not only did his seniority and humor make his advice easy to hear, but Ernest Russet was a man of sound, practical judgment. He was likely to know what needed doing and how to do it.
Naomi, a famous cook at that time in that country where good cooks were commonplace, was an ample, round-cheeked, cheerful woman of great sweetness, who from the first always greeted Laura with her arms opened. Her energy and industry matched her husband’s. Together, they made their farm a place of abundance and generosity. They loved to eat the food they had grown, and they loved feeding it to others. They took delight, when it was their turn to do so, in feeding their young preacher and his wife. Sometimes, as their friendship grew, the Russets would invite the Milbys out for dinner on a weekday when they had something especially good to offer.
“Eat, now,” Ernest Russet would say as soon as Brother Milby had offered thanks. “Ask for what you can’t reach.”
The Russets understood that the minister’s vocation was in a way a hardship, a cross to bear, and they tried to ease the burden. The Milbys rarely left the Russet place without something good to eat stowed away in their old car. Laura came to depend on Naomi much as Williams depended on Ernest. The Russets became, in fact, the parents the young couple needed in a place unlike any other they had known. Sometimes when an extra hand was needed, Williams would work a day or a few days for Ernest Russet.
The Russet place, the Milbys thought, and not just because of their affection for its owners, was the most beautiful farm in all the country around Sycamore. It was in a valley tributary to that of the great river. The house, standing on a shady rise of the ground well back from the road, was white-painted, with steep gingerbreaded gables, a wide front porch, and a second porch of two stories running along the ell that contained the kitchen and a bedroom above.
Behind the house were the garden and henyard, henhouse, and privy. And then, joined by lots and pens for the handling of livestock, were two barns, a corncrib, a granary, and various other outbuildings, all in good repair and painted white like the house.
From this steading the fields spread away on three sides, the bottomland sloping gradually downward to a winding stream bordered with tall white-limbed sycamores. Beyond the stream the land rose gradually again, steepening to permanent pasture on the valley side, and from there, as it steepened more, wooded to the hilltop. On the pastures were Ernest’s four work mules, a small herd of beef cows, a larger flock of sheep, a few pigs, and three Jersey cows whose surplus cream went to the cream station in Sycamore and whose surplus milk went to the pigs. Because it was orderly and well-kept, this farm, even when Ernest was hard at work upon it, seemed somehow to rest within itself.
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 be
en 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.”
A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership Page 7