Now it is only with Burley Coulter that Mat feels at ease. Telling his news that night in the barbershop, he felt it was to speak to Burley that he had come. Common knowledge went between them as a bond. During the following days, in casual meetings on the street and at the card game, they seldom speak of those absences that are most in their thoughts, but they accompany each other into their talk with trust.
A Comforter
Early Wednesday afternoon Brother Preston leaves the parsonage and walks across town to the Feltner house. He walks quickly and attentively, sidestepping the puddles. The town is shut against the weather, and quiet except for the sounds everywhere of water dripping and running. He meets no one along the road. There is no sign of life at the Feltners' either.
Stepping up onto the porch, he closes his umbrella and props it beside the door. Leaning against the wall, he removes his rubbers and places them side by side next to the umbrella. He draws a small black leather Testament out of his coat pocket, faces the door, and knocks. His knock is itself an act of ministerial discretion; the sound is perfectly modulated, both quiet and loud enough. As he waits he continues to face the door, standing erect, lifting himself slightly forward now and then onto the balls of his feet, patting the little Testament with a sort of correct casualness against the palm of his hand.
Footsteps approach from the back of the house, and Margaret Feltner opens the door. Her apron is caught up in one hand, and he knows she has been at work in the kitchen. In a movement of understanding, his imagination sees her wiping her hands on the apron as she hurries along the hall toward the door. He takes off his hat.
"I'm sorry to break in on your work."
"That's all right. We were just finishing up the dishes."
She smiles, greets him, moves aside from the entrance in welcome. The openness of her welcome is a little disconcerting; she is putting him at his ease-which is not why he has come. He senses that she has anticipated him, foreseen his coming and his purpose, but greets him now on her terms, not his.
She takes his coat and hat, hangs them up on the hall tree, and leads him into the sitting room.
He goes to the chair she offers him.
"Make yourself at home a minute. I'll go take this apron off."
"Mrs. Feltner," he says, and she stops. "I hoped I'd find all of you at home is why I've come so soon after dinner. Is Mr. Feltner here?"
"He's out at the barn, I think. We'll call him. There's not much he can be doing."
Again he feels headed off. Her offer seems again an act of her own generosity, in no way a concession to his reason for coming.
He sits down as she leaves. Her footsteps go back along the hall. Again in his imagination he sees her: her hands reaching behind her as she goes, untying the apron. He sits erect in the chair, holding the Testament in his lap. The attitude of his body seems to isolate him from the room, to hold out to it a formality alien to it. Some part of his presence is withheld from it; he might be sitting in the tall-backed chair behind his pulpit.
Margaret's footsteps enter the bustling noises of the kitchen, which he now realizes to have been continuous since he came in.
"Net," he hears her say, "would you call Mat? Tell him we've got company."
Out of the sound of her voice-not speaking to him now, remote from him-and out of the look and atmosphere of the room where he sits, there comes to him the sense of the completeness of this household, the belonging together of Mat and Margaret Feltner, the generosity of these people, in which there is maybe no need for him. He feels himself alone here. He is alone in his mission which, whole in itself, surrounds him with its demands, and isolates him. Uneasiness coming over him, a swift tremor, he thinks of the burden of his duty. And then, as though under the pressure of his own hand, he knows his old submission to the mastering of this duty, and knows he will do it.
He stands as the footsteps approach the room. Hannah is with Margaret now. Greetings are exchanged again, and they sit down, he in his chair, Margaret and Hannah together on the sofa, facing him. They talk with a determined pleasantness about trifles-all of them conscious that they are delaying, waiting for Mat to come, that they digress from their feelings and from the purpose of the visit.
Nettie is on the back porch, calling Mat. She has difficulty making him hear, and calls several times before she comes back into the kitchen, slamming the door.
His mind only half-occupied by the conversation, the preacher watches Hannah. She is wearing a clean white smock, the sleeves turned back from her wrists. Her heavy hair is drawn neatly back from her face. She is a beautiful girl; he has thought so often before. And he thinks so now, as always a little startled to find that he does so emphatically think so. He watches her face, alert for some sign of what she must be feeling, but he discovers nothing. Her face is composed and quiet. He both wishes and fears to know her thoughts.
And he watches Margaret. He believes that he sees in her face the marks of her grief for her son-but no sign that she expects to be comforted, or asks to be. To the preacher she also seems to be a beautiful woman. But hers has long ago ceased to be the given beauty of a girl; it is beauty that she has kept, or earned, through all that has troubled her and aged her. In all she says there is an implication of Mat's presence in her life, an assenting to it. To Brother Preston, it is as if something in her leans in waiting, not for him to begin the business of his visit, but for Mat.
They hear him come into the kitchen. He stops at the sink to wash his hands, and then comes on through the house.
"Don't get up," he says, entering the room and stepping over to the preacher's chair.
Brother Preston, leaning forward, takes the hand that is held out to him. The hand is hard, weather-roughened, communicating the chill of the outside air. The brief tightening grip of it is an announcement of welcome, which doesn't, today, put the preacher at ease.
"I'm sorry to take you away from your work."
"You needn't be. There's not much we can do you'd call work."
And so they begin again, speaking now of the weather, the delay of work, the rising river. The preacher feels himself drawn again, helplessly, into the stream of pastime conversation, which moves by no force of its own but by a determination in all of them against silence. He speaks and listens with an increasingly uncomfortable sense of his own hesitation, feeling at every turn and shift of the talk that he is failing again the duty that brought him.
Mat's coming has added something implicitly formidable to the un certain pleasantness of the gathering. Now, in the faces of all three of the Feltners, there seems to Brother Preston to be a secrecy preserved against him. They have, none of them, made any acknowledgment of what they must know to be his reason for coming. It is as though their very grief is an affirmation of something that they refuse to yield to him.
At last, taking advantage of a break in the conversation, he begins, straightening in his chair and leaning forward a little, his eyes moving to the eyes of each of them:
"My friends, I've come because I know of your trouble."
He is surprised by what seems to him to have been the forcefulness of his voice. It is as if some barely perceptible stirring has moved among them, as at the first rising of a wind among tree leaves.
Now Margaret Feltner lifts her hand out of her lap and touches the tips of her fingers lightly to the side of her face.
But he has begun and he goes on, hastened, like a man walking before a strong wind, moved no longer by his intention but by the force of what he is saying. His eyes have become detached from his hearers; he might be speaking down from his pulpit now, looking at all, seeing none. But beneath the building edifice of his meaning, he is aware of something failing between them. It is as though in the very offering of comfort to them he departs from them. And now he is hastened also by an urgency of haste. He feels that the force of his voice is turning back toward himself, that he is fleeing into the safe coherence of his own words, away from those faces shut between him and their
pain. He speaks into their silence like a man carrying a map in a strange country in the dark.
At the beginning Mat only half listens. He sits, staring out the window, like a boy in church. But knowing what must be the difficulty of the situation for Margaret and Hannah, his attention is drawn to them, and his separateness from the voice of the preacher is destroyed. He watches the two women, sorry for them, determined to bear with them, as dumbly as he has to, what must be borne. It is of the loss, accomplished or to come, of Virgil Feltner that the preacher is speaking. And Mat's fear, which he has kept silenced until now, begins to take its words. It is the fear of the loss of his boy, his good and only son-the preacher's voice seems to search it out. The preacher's voice, rising, rides above all chances of mortal and worldly hope, hastening to rest in the hope of Heaven.
In the preacher's words the Heavenly City has risen up, surmounting their lives, the house, the town-the final hope, in which all the riddles and ends of the world are gathered, illuminated, and bound. This is the preacher's hope, and he has moved to it alone, outside the claims of time and sorrow, by the motion of desire which he calls faith. In it, having invoked it and raised it up, he is free of the world.
But in this hope-this last simplifying rest-giving movement of the mind-Mat realizes that he is not free, and never has been. He is doomed to hope in the world, in the bonds of his own love. He is doomed to take every chance and desperate hope of hope between him and death, Virgil's, Margaret's, his. His hope of Heaven must be the hope of a man bound to the world that his life is not ultimately futile or ultimately meaningless, a hope more burdening than despair.
It is from this possibility of meaninglessness that the preacher has retreated. So that the earth will not be plunged into the darkness, he has lifted up the Heavenly City and hastened to refuge in its gates. And Mat, in the very act of leaning toward that restfulness, turns away from it to take back his pain. His mind seems to steady and move out again to its surfaces. He watches Hannah and Margaret, anxious for them, sorry for their sorrow. He is conscious again of the room, the window, the wet street opening into the town. The buds on the maple trees leaning over the road have grown big. He notices this as he always notices it for the first time in the spring, with an involuntary pleasure, saying to himself that he is surprised to see it happen so early.
The preacher sits with his head tilted so that the lenses of his glasses reflect the window In his rapt intent face the opaque discs of light look exultant and blind.
Mat and Margaret seem to look at him now with a peculiar kindness, nodding their heads, not so much attentively as indulgently. He feels that he has become again the object of their generosity, that they are offering to him, out of some kind of hospitality, the safe abstraction of his belief. They are releasing him from the particularity of the time and place, and of the life he is talking about.
Concluding, preparing to leave them, he looks again at Hannah. She sits at the end of the sofa, beyond the light of either of the windows, looking down at her hand which lies beside her on the cushion. She reminds him of some white-petaled delicate bloom. "Surely," he thinks, "the people is grass."
He stands up abruptly.
"I must go."
Mat helps him into his coat and walks out onto the porch with him. They make the small sentences of leave-taking while the preacher puts on his rubbers and opens his umbrella. They shake hands.
"Come back," Mat says. "Thank you."
He stands on the edge of the porch while Brother Preston goes down the steps and starts out toward the street.
Coming into the house again, he thinks: "Well, that's done. That's over."
The living room, as he goes back into it, holds the quiet of a Sunday, as though the voice of the preacher is still present in it. Margaret has got up and is moving about in the room, halfheartedly and needlessly straightening the furniture and the papers on Mat's desk. Hannah is sitting as before. He goes over to her and reaches down to pat her shoulder.
'All right?"
"I'm all right." She nods, smiles.
And then as though suddenly jarred, she cries aloud like a hurt child:
"No! I'm not all right! I'm not!"
Margaret comes to her and holds her while she cries. Against Hannah's hair Margaret's face is turned to Mat. Their eyes hold them there a moment, admitting their sorrow for the girl and for each other and for themselves.
And then Mat turns and goes. In his life he has made this movement time and again, this turning away from himself or his loved ones, leaving them to bear what they must. With his children, time after time, he has come to this turning away.
His mouth set, thinking "If it has to happen, it'll have to happen," not daring to think what he means, he goes out of the house and turns down the street toward Jasper Lathrop's store.
Passing under a low maple branch, he breaks off a twig. He feels the softening bud at the tip of it, tastes the cold, bitter taste of the sap. And then, hating to waste it now that he has broken it off, he sticks it into the band of his hat.
The Sanctuary
Swollen by the wet weather, the door binds against the sill. Brother Preston shoves hard to open it, and the sound of its breaking loose falls like a long plank into the empty church. But entering, shutting the door behind him, he does not make a sound. He stands just inside the vestibule a moment, letting the quiet of the place come to him. To his right, within reach of his hand, the heavy bellrope hangs down, the lower foot and a half of it polished and darkened by Uncle Stanley's hands. It drops straight into the vestibule from the arm of the bell up in the steeple, the hole drilled for its passage through the ceiling worn whopsided by the rope's sawing through it, and the rope at that place fretted to half its original thickness. At the end there is a big club of a knot which Uncle Stanley can just reach, and which is just out of reach, it is hoped, of the members of the intermediate Boys' Sunday School Class.
On either side of the vestibule a door opens into a high narrow room, stark in its proportions and furnishings. Uncle Stanley has been in to clean up in preparation for the Wednesday-night prayer meeting, and everything is in a state of neatness and order which now, in the quiet, seems to deny its dependence on the likes of Uncle Stan. Unviolated now by any presence but his own, the old church seems to Brother Preston to stand erect and coherent, enclosing him.
As though the racket he made opening the door signaled a division between the church and the town, the sanctuary is now filled with quiet. He might be moving across the bottom of a deep pool. Tiptoeing, not making a sound, he comes on down the aisle and sits on a bench near the pulpit and directly in front of it.
He came away from the Feltner house grieved by the imperfection of his visit. It was not, as he had hoped it would be, a conversation. It was a sermon. This is the history of his life in Port William. The Word, in his speaking it, fails to be made flesh. It is a failure particularized for him in the palm of every work-stiffened hand held out to him at the church door every Sunday morning-the hard dark hand taking his pale unworn one in a gesture of politeness without understanding. He belongs to the governance of those he ministers to without belonging to their knowledge, the bringer of the Word preserved from flesh. But now, sitting on the hard bench in the chilled odors of stale perfume and of vacancy, he feels that he has come again within the reach of peace. On the back of the bench in front of him, like some cryptic text placed there for his contemplation, are the initials B.C. in deeply cut block letters four inches high. Leaning forward, his finger absently tracing the grooves of the initials, he bows in careful silence while his mind seems to stand in the pulpit above him, praying as always: "Our gracious and loving Heavenly Father, we are come into Thy Presence today with our burdens, our troubles, our sorrows."
The afternoon goes on, and he continues to sit there, his mind coming slowly to rest. He leans back, his hands folded and idle in his lap. Showers come and pass over without his hearing them.
The outside door clatters and slams,
and footsteps tramp in. The vestibule door is bumped open, and Uncle Stanley appears at the head of the aisle. In one arm he carries a load of kindling, in the other hand a gallon bucket of corncobs soaking in coal oil. Loaded as he is, Uncle Stanley manages a whole chorus of gestures which greet and exclaim and apologize. Peeping over his load, waving the bucket of cobs, he shuffles down the aisle, his walking cane, hooked into his hip pocket, trailing on the floor behind him like a tail.
"Go right on, Preacher," he yells. "Go right ahead. Don't mind me. Keep right on a talking to Him. I know you got it to do. Byjuckers, if you can squeeze it in anywhere, you can tell Him about me."
He drops the wood with a racking crash down against a leg of the stove. He opens the fire door and lays in cobs and kindling, and douses in coal oil from the bucket. He tosses in a lighted match, the fire ignites, and the crackling of the flames is immediate and steady. In all this he makes a large avoidance of looking at Brother Preston or speaking to him, leaving him to his prayers.
He goes out, and returns carrying two buckets of coal which he places beside the stove. He adds more kindling to the fire, throws in a few lumps of coal, and goes to the nearest bench and sits down, still wearing his hat. He has gone about his work, and now sits and rests, with utter familiarity toward the place. His attitude intimates that he is a fire builder by profession, the best in the trade, and that his skill and responsibility require a certain indifference to all other considerations. A large chew of tobacco is actively at work in his jaw.
Not wanting to appear unfriendly, Brother Preston comes back and sits near the old man-trusting that, by keeping a distance of four or five feet between them, he can hold the conversation to an exchange of formalities and then leave in a few minutes. But he is exactly as much mistaken as he was afraid he would be. Uncle Stanley gets up and spits into the stove, and then sits down next to him and claps a hand down onto his knee.
A Place on Earth Page 11