But now, though this was far yet from Marcie’s imagination, it was not going to be Elton who would recognize him as a hand and a man. The one who would grant him that formality, in another eight years, was going to be Mart and Art Rowanberry’s not easily pleased brother-in-law Pascal Sowers who, when he came with the rest to harvest the first crop of Marcie’s own that he grew entirely by his own work and knowledge, would nod his head in most serious commendation and pronounce, “Well, you are worth a shit!”
Their mother called them to get up.
When they dressed and came down, she met them at the foot of the steps to tell them, as Marcie understood, so that their father would not have to do it, “Elton’s dead. He died last night. I’m sorry, kids. I’m sorry to have to tell you.”
Marcie’s big sister, Betty, cried and let herself be held and comforted by their mother. But when their mother looked at Marcie, he only looked back at her, waiting, for her words had not reached him. And then he went past her into the kitchen.
They were going to the Penns’, they were going to Elton and Mary Penn’s house, as soon as breakfast was over, and breakfast did not keep them long. They did not even clear the table. Marcie expected to be told to put on better clothes, but nobody mentioned clothes. Just as they were, nobody finding anything to say, they got into the car and went out the lane to the road. They went to Port William and on through it. They turned onto the Bird’s Branch road, and passed the Catlett home place where Henry lived. They followed the road down into the Bird’s Branch hollow and turned into the lane that went back along the old rock fence to the farmstead and the house that belonged to Elton and Mary.
Marcie had made this trip hundreds of times. Traveling the lane that led to the Penns’ house was as familiar to him as traveling the lane along Harford Fork that led to his own house. This was the country he belonged to, a permanent country, so far as he knew it, landmarked by people who apparently always had been there, as firmly and finally planted as the stones in the graveyard on the hill at Port William: his parents, his Catlett grandparents, Penns, Rowanberrys, Coulters, Branches. So far as he had known it, it was subject only to the changes of weather, of seedtime and harvest, summer and winter, day and night.
But now a change of another kind had come upon it, a great change that he could feel in his parents’ silence and his sister’s and his own. None of them had said a word. It was a silence weighted with dread at coming to this place now that it was changed. It was altogether changed, though it looked the same as it always had, and this made the change by far the worst he had ever known.
In the driveway beside the house, he saw his uncle Henry’s car, new-looking and clean, and behind it his grandfather’s car that was black and dust-covered and covered with scratches. There was a third car that he knew belonged to Elton and Mary’s daughter Martha and her husband, who lived in Cincinnati. That, for the time being, was all.
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 fa
ther 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.
At Home (1981)
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.
It was a house of two tall rooms broadly square with a wide hallway between, a long upstairs room under the pitch of the roof, two rock chimneys at either end with wide fireplaces, and at the back a large lean-to kitchen, weatherboarded. The house was finely made, the logs hewed straight and square, the corners so perfectly mitered that you could not insert a knife blade into the joints. The rafters were straight poles, saplings, notched and pegged together at the peak with the same artistry as elsewhere. When he had stayed overnight, Art slept upstairs in the drafty, unceiled attic room illuminated in the daytime only by the light that leaked under the eaves. The wind too came under them. He had waked some mornings when blown-in snow had whitened the covers of the bed.
Of the old house in the time of
its human life, before its abandonment after the deaths of his grandparents, he remembered everything. Of his grandparents, their life, and all they remembered and told him, he remembered much. Whether or not he thought their thoughts, he thought at least the thoughts that belonged to such a house and such a life.
And so when he went into the army in 1942, he passed from a world as old and elemental nearly as it had ever been into a world as ruthlessly new as by then it had managed to become.
He was the oldest child, the eldest son. It was his duty, as it appeared to him, to go first to the war, and by doing so to save his younger brothers from the draft—though at this he was not entirely successful. Early in the new year following the attack on Pearl Harbor, he volunteered. He was thirty-seven that year, old for a common soldier, which the younger men, the boys, he served with never let him forget. Soon enough the younger ones were calling him “Pappy,” which he accepted, amused to know that he was old enough in fact to have been father to most of them, and recognizing with at least tolerance that to some of them the name alluded to his rural speech and demeanor, his origin, as they put it, “at the end of nowhere.”
But they knew him soon enough as a man by a measure that few of them had met or would meet. The rigor of basic training he took in stride, finding it no harder and sometimes easier than the work he was accustomed to at home. He did not have to be taught to fire a rifle, or to fire it accurately. Nobody had to urge him to keep to the pace of a long march. Sleeping on the ground, he rested well. He never complained of the weather. When they were called upon to use an axe or a mattock or a spade, he was the exemplary man. Boys who had never so much as seen an axe would be astonished, watching him work. “You can tell a chopper by his chips,” he said to them, and they stood around to admire him as he made the big chips fly. He might, as one of his officers told him, have been promoted as high as sergeant, but he submitted to authority without envying or desiring it.
A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership Page 22