And so at the time when Elton and Mary Penn most desperately needed a community, they had the good fortune to land right in the midst, in the very embrace, of one that might as well have been expecting them.
The women opened their hearts and their arms to Mary. They befriended her, mothered her, gave her freely their companionship. By instruction and example they taught her the arts of farm housewifery, of which they knew, it seemed to Mary, everything. “Everything I know,” she would say later, “I learned from those women.”
Elton, who still had much to learn, who would continue his eager learning all his life, was already a confirmed farmer, an excellent teamster, and a good hand at anything he tried. The men were glad to include him in all the work they did together, telling him where they would be and when to come. When he needed help, they came to him. The men were to Elton as the women were to Mary. They became his teachers and his friends. And beyond all that they told him, Elton pondered their ways of working, their ways of talking and thinking, their ways even of wearing their clothes. Of them all, Walter Cotman was the best farmer and had the clearest mind, was most fastidious in everything he did or said, was least tolerant of poor work and hardest to please. Elton put himself to school to Walter, watching and questioning him and remembering everything, and Walter did not hesitate to correct him and set him straight even if it made him mad for two days, as it sometimes did.
From every one of them Elton learned something he needed to know. Braymer was the one most likely to know the market value of something and how to get it cheaper. When Elton’s old car or some implement needed fixing and he couldn’t fix it himself, he took it to Jonah Hample, and then stayed to watch and learn while Jonah figured out what was wrong and put it right. Uncle Isham Quail was a rememberer who had saved up in his mind everything he had seen and experienced and everything he had heard. In his latter years he seemed to live in all the times of that small place back to the original wilderness. Elton learned how to start Uncle Isham’s flow of talk, and then he would listen and remember.
The only one of the men whose example Elton finally had no use for was Tom Hardy. By some early learning or by nature, Tom Hardy was a satisfied man, content to be himself, to be where he was, and to have what he had, accepting of every day as it came and went, never asking or arguing for a better. But Elton, probably by nature and certainly by his circumstances, was not a satisfied man, not then and not ever.
Within the limits imposed by Elton’s mother’s used-up farm, which afforded little scope for their talents and desires, Elton and Mary could not have prospered during their seven years on Cotman Ridge. They had come there hoping merely to survive. But with the help of their neighbors, by their own unstinting work and determination, by taking every opportunity to rent more land or to work for pay, they improved significantly upon survival. They grew strong individually and together.
They grew strong as a couple despite their differences of temperament, and despite the burden imposed upon their marriage by Mary’s parents’ rejection. The Mountjoys’ legacy to Elton was his own retaliatory anger and defiance, preserved all his life by the fear, especially when he was at odds with Mary, that they had been right: that he was, or was in danger of becoming, nothing. To Mary their legacy, in addition to the wound they had given Elton, which she spent all their life together trying to heal, was the wound to herself, assuaged somewhat by the motherly women of Cotman Ridge, assuaged much more by the Christian faith that shone quietly and steadily in her to the end of her days.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that in their years on Cotman Ridge, Elton and Mary grew up. They became responsible and competent in many things. And so when Wheeler Catlett came looking for them in 1945, they were ready.
Wheeler Catlett was Old Jack Beechum’s lawyer, his kinsman by marriage, and his friend. He had been raised as Old Jack’s neighbor, for the Beechum and the Catlett places lay on opposite sides of the Bird’s Branch Road north of Port William. Wheeler knew Old Jack and his place probably as well as he knew anybody or any place. In the late winter of 1945 Wheeler was in the midst of a long and so far unsuccessful negotiation with Old Jack, not as his lawyer primarily, but as his friend and moreover as a family spokesman. This negotiation had begun with an understanding between Wheeler and Mat Feltner, Wheeler’s father-in-law and Old Jack’s nephew, that Old Jack, eighty-four years old and long-widowed, was too old to continue living alone in his big empty house. He needed to move into the old hotel in Port William where he would be properly fed and looked after by Mrs. Hendrick, who had turned her relict property into a sort of old folks’ home.
So far, Old Jack had resisted. In fact he had triumphed. When Wheeler in exasperation had played what he had withheld as his trump card—“We don’t want you to die out here by yourself” —Old Jack, returning point-blank the younger man’s stare, said, “I can do it by myself.” He went so far as to memorialize his triumph with a snort. Wheeler replied only with a snort of his own, partly of delight in the perfection of his defeat.
From the time of his middle years, and according to his principles, Old Jack had been doing his work mainly by himself, when necessary swapping work with his neighbors. As he did not wish to be bossed, he did not wish to boss. He had subscribed to a further principle common enough in the Port William community: “I’d not ask another man to do anything I’d not do myself.”
But age and wear and finally arthritis—“that Arthur, the meanest one of the Ritis brothers”—had forbidden him to do himself the work that needed to be done. There followed a procession of tenants or hired hands, who lived on nearby farms or else moved with their families into a fixed-up two-room log cabin that had stood below the barns since sometime during slavery, and whom Old Jack fired always a little sooner than they could be replaced. It began to seem to Wheeler and Mat that they were spending half their time looking for yet another “somebody who might do.” What they had to “do” was measure up to Old Jack’s standards of work, and one after another they failed.
“You can hire a fellow’s body,” Old Jack said, “but you can’t hire his mind. The mind, if he has got one, has to come along free. Can’t you find me somebody can think?”
Well, at last Wheeler could, and he did. He found Elton and Mary Penn who, according to available evidence, could think. They could think and do, both at the same time. “They’ll do,” Braymer Hardy told Wheeler. “They’ll satisfy. They’re a good pair of young people. You can depend on ’em.”
And so Wheeler had understood that they were not going to come as hired hands. He didn’t even ask. If they were to come, they would come as tenants, farming the place as full partners, half and half, expenses to be fairly divided. And so Wheeler asked them, and they agreed, provided that Wheeler could get Old Jack to accept them and their terms.
Wheeler laid the proposition before Old Jack that night. It was getting well into February by then. If the thing was going to be done, it had to be done soon.
They talked, sitting in chairs drawn away from the table in Old Jack’s kitchen, in the light of an oil lamp with a smoked chimney. He had spurned every offer and promise of rural electrification. Why should he pay for what he already had? His affirmation of certain things had made him good at refusal.
He had been through the motions, as he said, of what he called his supper. Now he sat and merely looked at Wheeler while Wheeler talked. His look did not make it easy for Wheeler to talk, for there was much of doubt and resistance in it. But Wheeler was confident he knew what he was talking about, and he made his case. “This is a good boy,” he said, “and he’s married to a good girl. They’re the right kind. They’ll do.”
Old Jack reached out with the end of his walking cane and touched Wheeler’s leg. “How do you know that?”
“I’ve looked and I’ve seen,” Wheeler said, allowing himself some emphasis. “Don’t you worry about that. And I’ve got Braymer Hardy’s word.”
Old Jack said, knowing better, “Braymer Hard
y don’t know big wood from brush.”
“Braymer don’t miss much,” Wheeler said. “He’s got sense, and he’s honest.”
There was a little while then when nobody said anything. Old Jack’s eyes quit looking at Wheeler while he turned his mind’s eye upon his thoughts. Finally he looked outward again at Wheeler. “Tell ’em to come on.”
And then Wheeler, who had a new trump card, had to play it. “Well, if they come, they’re not going to live here in two rooms. They’re going to need your house.”
Old Jack opened his mouth, and then he shut it again and looked down. To have what he wanted for his place, he would have to leave it. Wheeler, instead of snorting in commendation of his own triumph, had to look away.
When Old Jack looked up again, the burden of defeat and acceptance was upon him, but again he looked straight at Wheeler. “Tell ’em to come on.”
In the March of that year of 1945, Elton and Mary Penn moved into the house on the Beechum place, after Old Jack had moved—it was the first and last move of his life—to Port William and the hotel’s society of elderly widows.
The Beechum house, a far better house than the one on Cotman Ridge, bore the marks of long inhabitance by an old widower, but Wheeler had attached to it his promise that it would receive the improvements necessary to make it, by the standards of that time, “livable.” The outbuildings and the cellar were good. The garden plot was larger and richer than the one they’d had. The electric line finally was installed. The house—even after Old Jack’s daughter had come out from Louisville and carried away all the best dishes, silverware, and furniture—still contained furnishings enough, and more than enough, which made Mary happy.
She had come not far in miles from the Josies and the other neighborly wives of Cotman Ridge, but the few miles that now separated them made a difference. They were no longer within an easy walk of one another. There was no more “happening by.” Now when they visited it had to be by automobile, and only on Sunday afternoons. Sometimes they would be together in passing on Saturday night in Port William. The women of Cotman Ridge came over one day and helped Mary to make curtains and thus contributed to her “new start,” but the easy daily bonds of neighborhood were broken.
Now Mary had for womanly company and comfort mainly Dorie Catlett, Wheeler’s mother, who lived across the road. Dorie was of the generation of Aunt Frances Quail—old, old, as she seemed to Mary—but she was, in her abrupt and outspoken way, a kind companion and sometimes truly a comfort to Mary, whom she saw rightly as not only young but hurt and therefore needy. After she had finished her after-dinner housework, and if the weather was good, Mary would often take the shortcut across the fields to the Catlett place, to spend the rest of the afternoon sitting and talking on the front porch with Dorie. Dorie made her welcome, told her things of use or of interest, loaned her books from the glass-fronted small bookcase in the parlor, and listened as Mary told, in bits and pieces, her story. When Dorie had gathered in from Mary, and from Wheeler, the story of the Penns’ marriage and its hard beginning, she pronounced her judgment upon the Mountjoys. She turned down the corners of her mouth and said with perfect finality: “Hmh!”
For Elton the old place, new to him, was exactly the chance he had been needing, his chance to prove himself, to exert his mind and his strength. At last, as he said, he could stretch his arms out full length and turn all the way around. In coming to the Beechum place, moreover, he came within the friendship and influence of Wheeler Catlett and of Wheeler’s father, Marce, Old Jack’s contemporary and friend, and of Old Jack himself. The influence of those men would remain with Elton, a circumstance of his life that was essential and dear, long beyond the deaths of Marce and Old Jack and until Elton’s own death.
The neighborhood of the two families soon included Wheeler’s boys, Andy and Henry. For Andy Catlett the story of Elton and Mary Penn, from the time he was included in it, became one of the shaping forces of his life. Their example, reduced to instruction, told him this: Grow up. Learn to be a good hand. Learn to be a good farmer. Marry for love. Get a place, a farm, of your own. Shape your life to the needs of your place. So far as you can, without hurting it, shape your place to your needs. Live from it and for it. Always try to make it better.
But to reduce that formative example to instruction is to misrepresent it, for instruction cannot even suggest the passion and the beauty, the difficult requirement and the hardship, of the example. What Andy took from the Penns was not instruction so much as a series of memories, visions, that ruled over his young life and still imposed their attraction and demand upon him when he was old: visions of Elton and Mary delighted with the first ripe tomato from their garden; of Elton plowing in the spring, his mind alight with the thought of the made crop; of Mary and Elton butchering their meat hogs, and then of the cured hams, shoulders, bacons, jowls, and the sacks of sausage hanging in their smokehouse; of Elton’s best days lived from dark to dark in the excitement of going ahead, leaving a good difference behind him.
Andy’s first sight of Elton was from a distance, and it caused a memorable, if temporary, twinge to his conscience. On that early summer day in 1945, Andy’s conscience was on one of its frequent absences from the neighborhood. He was riding Beauty the pony, and in his left hand he was carrying a bow and an arrow. His grandpa Catlett had sent him to bring in the two Jersey cows for the evening milking, and on that practical level he was functioning probably as well as he needed to. But his mind, which he had stuffed with books and comic books about cowboys and Indians in the Wild West, had more than one level. On a level or two above the practical, he was an Indian hunting buffalo on the broad prairie.
And so when he found the cows resting in the shade of a strawstack, he rode up to them, dropped the bridle rein, and shot the nearest cow with his arrow. The arrow had been cut from his grandma’s mock orange and was about as harmless against cowhide as it would have been against steel. It was nevertheless a good shot, the arrow bouncing off the cow’s ribs at a point, Andy imagined, very near her heart. But then, allowing him only a second or two for satisfaction, his conscience came flying back to warn him that he might have been seen.
He was, after all, in one of the front fields and on a rise of the ground in plain sight of the road. He saw nobody, no vehicle, on the road. But beyond the road, on the crest of the ridge exactly opposite, he saw a man who had started digging a posthole, but who now was standing with his right hand at rest on the handle of his spade, and he was watching Andy.
Since it was nobody he was kin to, nobody he even knew, though pride forbade him to dismount to retrieve his arrow, Andy untwinged his conscience and drove the cows up to the barn.
Andy—who had just got free of school and who intended to stay with his grandma and grandpa, if he could, until his parents and the school teachers forgot about him—already knew the name of the man who had been watching him. He was Elton Penn, of whom he had heard his grandpa say, “Ay God, he’s the right kind, and he’s got a good woman.” Elton and his wife were the new people on the Beechum place.
New people being by far the most interesting items within reach, Andy got on the pony the first thing after breakfast the next morning and went over to see them for himself. At the road, he turned down the hill and then, halfway to the bottom, he turned into the graveled lane that made a long curve along a rock fence covered with moss and lichens and lined with trees. When he came in sight of the house and the yard, the fields adjoining, and the tobacco patch whose neat rows came almost to the yard fence, Andy stopped the pony and looked at everything.
The Beechum place was a good one, as Andy’s father had pointed out to him often enough and as Andy by then could see for himself. Old Jack had taken good care of it for a long time. It was a comfort to look at, and this was because the layout of its buildings and fields, even the woods along its steeper slopes and the trees in its fencerows, all fitted rightly together.
At first Andy saw nothing he was looking for. He heard a hen
cackling in the henhouse, but he saw nothing stirring. The stillness of the heat of the day had come early, and the place was in a sort of trance. And then, beyond the lilac bush in the yard, he saw a man in a straw hat at work with a hoe in the tobacco patch. The man was young, tall, and slender. He moved with a certain grace, his posture and attitude entirely conformed to the motions of his work.
Andy rode around to a gate and through it to the headland along the yard fence where the rows ended. At the end of the row in which the man was working he stopped the pony again, and again he sat and watched.
If the man was aware of Andy he made no sign. He had not looked up or altered at all the rhythm of his work. He was, as Andy felt then, as later he would articulately know, a master workman, and of no tool was he more a master than the one he was using at that moment. His hold upon the handle seemed to invest the steel of the blade with the sense of touch and an intelligent concern for the well-being of the plants. The hoe did not merely chop the weeds out from between the plants, but conveyed an exquisite attention to them, pulling and lifting and shifting the dirt about. Now and then he would lean down to raise the leaves of a weak plant and tuck fresh dirt gently in around it. He worked swiftly and yet with perfect care. The row as he left it behind him was groomed like a fine horse.
The man did not look up until he had finished the row. When finally he did look up, he looked first at the pony, not at Andy. He had turned the blade of the hoe upward. He held the handle like a walking stick in his left hand. He laid his right hand on the pony’s nose and made a gentle downward stroke.
“Whoa,” he said. He was a nice-looking fellow who wore his clothes as neatly as he had used the hoe.
When he looked up at Andy he was grinning. He was looking at Andy as he might have looked at writing hard to make out but interesting, also amusing. He reached under his hat to scratch his head. He had black hair that, young as he was, had begun to turn gray. He scratched his head slowly and then settled his hat again precisely as it had been before. He had never taken his eyes off Andy.
A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership Page 26