A Place on Earth

by Wendell Berry

  "If you're so hot on suicide," Uncle Stanley says, "why don't you just take that there rock and knock your blame selfin the head? I'd have to say you had a point then. Go on! Bust your durn head!"

  Jayber straightens up in the hole and points his finger at him.

  "One thing, old man. Just remember one thing. You can only speak for yourself. You never know what the other man has to go through."

  "Well," Burley says-he has had all he can stand, he is leaving now"we've all got to go through enough to kill us."

  It's Over!

  Much of the Feltners' house has been rearranged to make space for the coffin and flowers and undertaker's furnishings in the living room. A large part of the furniture belonging to that room has been carried out and crowded into other rooms or stored in outbuildings. This was accomplished before midnight last night, Burley and Jayber and Frank Lathrop helping Mat with the work. And toward noon today the coffin was brought in, flowers were placed around it, and a number of folding chairs set up. The effect of all this, because it seems to substantiate the greater and subtler change, is as persistently disturbing as if it had been the result of some natural calamity.

  Against custom-against the ill-concealed wishes of the undertaker, who was proud of his work-the coffin has remained closed. "It seems best that way," Margaret said. And that was all she said.

  Early in the afternoon, as the day grew hotter and the house more crowded, Mat invited the men to come out on the porch, where there was a breeze. And they have sat there until now, smoking and carrying on the allusive conversation of men who know much in common. Now there are only five of them-Mat and Old Jack and Burley and Jayber and Wheeler Catlett-the rest having gone home to eat or do their chores. The stillness of suppertime is beginning to settle over the town. The five men on the porch, all friends and comfortable with each other, have ceased to talk, each occupied in that wide quiet with his own thoughts. Through the openings among the treetops they can now and again catch sight of hurrying swifts.

  Across the street Frank Lathrop's door suddenly is flung open, and Frank appears, doing a sort of dance across his porch. He seems headed for the street, but as he reaches the edge of the porch, coming aware of those watching him, he stops and, looking sheepish and confused, turns and walks back into the house.

  All five of the men on Mat's porch have watched him with the same sense of improbability. Now that he has gone back into the house, none of them says a word, mystified and embarrassed at the impropriety of such a display then and in that place. The sight of Frank dancing for joy, oblivious to the mourning he danced in the face of, will stay in Mat's mind a long time.

  But Frank's behavior does not go long without an explanation. Less than a minute later a door slams somewhere down in town, and they hear a young strident voice crying:

  "It's over! It's over!"

  And that voice is quickly joined by others. Doors are thrown open, footsteps run in the street. From the lifting of that first voice, the commotion in the town builds toward a crest it will not reach for hours.

  Nobody has to ask what it is all about. Even those who failed to hear the bulletin on the radio recognize it at once, as though they have waited for it familiarly for four years.

  Within fifteen minutes after the first shout, crowded automobiles have begun to come in from the countryside. In front of the stores the street has begun to fill with erratically parked cars and trucks and milling people. And the bells have begun to ring-dinner bells, the church bell, cow bells-their sounds finally meshing into one sound beating and quaking in the air. Frank Lathrop comes out of his house again, and without looking across at Mat's house turns down the street, soon disappearing into the crowd. The makings of a bonfire have begun to pile up in the street in front of Jayber's barbershop.

  Against that tumult Mat's house holds its quietness. Like everybody else the men on the porch are grateful that the end has come, but they do not speak of what they feel. Perhaps Ernest's silence makes too heavy a claim upon them. Or perhaps if Mat should openly welcome the event they would speak gladly of it, would quietly celebrate it there among themselves. But Mat is thinking, with maybe more bitterness than he could disguise in speaking, of what this would mean to him if he could now expect Virgil to come home.

  The noise of the crowd seems to rise into the air over their heads and remain there and accumulate like smoke. But except for its racket, the crowd is orderly and peaceable, perfectly contained by the one aim of making as big a to-do as possible. As nightfall approaches there begin to be cries of "Light her up! Let's have a light!"

  Jayber gets up. "Mat, I hate to go, but I reckon if they're going to light that fire I'd better."

  "That's all right, Jayber." Mat walks withJayber out to the steps. The fire has been lighted. The flames are already high, casting a flickering globe of light over the crowd. "I expect you'd better, too."

  Burley's starting to get up now. "I'd just as well be going myself. It's getting late."

  "Stay, Burley, if you will," Mat says. "We'll have some supper in a little while, and there's plenty for you."

  So Burley sits down again, and in a few minutes Bess comes to the door and calls them to supper. As they get up and start into the house, they can hear somebody beginning to tune a fiddle.

  And long before their quiet meal is finished they hear through the open kitchen door two guitars spring into a wildly pacing beat, and then the curving and looping figures of the fiddle. Presently a cracked breathless old voice begins calling a dance.

  "That's Bill Mixter and his boys and Uncle Stanley," Burley says.

  At the head of the table Old Jack eats without looking up and without joining the talk. Though he has been at Mat's since morning, he has hardly spoken three sentences, and much that has been said to him he has not heard. He has been preoccupied, despondent, as if, added to all the other deaths he has known, Ernest's makes too many.

  His silence makes them aware of him. Margaret, who is sitting on his right, lays her hand on his arm.

  "Uncle Jack used to be quite a dancer," she says. "He used to never miss a dance."

  That makes a claim on his attention and he smiles and shakes his head.

  `Ay, Lord! I could work all day and dance all night. I had a good bay mare then that I used to drive to a buggy-a steady sensible thing, and you could trust her. I've woke up many a Sunday morning, sitting in the buggy with the reins in my hand, and that mare standing at the barn door."

  They laugh. As though following a change of meaning in what he has told, he shakes his head again, and goes on. "I had a lot of music in me then. I couldn't stay still where it was. Couldn't stay still if I knew there was some somewhere I could get to." He pauses. "But that was a long time ago."

  But then as if hurrying to qualify the sorrow of that, unwilling to imply to them that that ought to stand as his judgment on his life, he looks at Hannah and smiles.

  `And the pretty girls," he says. "I've always had a great admiration for pretty girls."

  When the meal is over the men go back to the porch. Now they can see the dancers around the fire-figures in silhouette, or lighted by the wavering light of the flames, and against the faces of the buildings their enormous wildly leaping and prancing shadows. When the women are finished with the dishes they come out too, to be in the breeze there. Nobody pretends to ignore the celebration, simply because it cannot be ignored, it has so filled and claimed the town. But watching that bright scene, lifted and moved and contained by the hurrying beat of the music, they are conscious of their separateness from it.

  Smoking one of Mat's cigars in the quiet, Burley is beginning to have trouble keeping still. In spite of his loyalty to Mat and his persistent good intentions, Ernest's death has moved far out of the center of his attention. What he is thinking about is Nathan: If he has lived until today he will be coming home. He will be here. As Burley has sat and thought about Nathan coming back, an exultation has grown in him. The music has begun to get into his head,
and his mind is wandering. Where he wants to be is down there where they are dancing, where he can find somebody to talk and laugh with. Half a dozen times already he has caught himself grinning and patting his foot. In a sort of dutiful shame at the vagrancy and disloyalty of his mind, he has so far made himself stay on. But he is beginning, by the same involuntary running of his thoughts, to supply himself with good reasons for going.

  He has been here since noon, and that surely is long enough. Mat and his people probably would be glad if he did go. The house has been full of company all day, and Mat and them surely will be glad to see the last one go. Also he is tired, and he really ought to go on home and get some rest-after mixing around just a minute or two down there in the crowd. Also he is making himself a living insult to the dead just by sitting there and wanting so badly to leave.

  At last he picks up his hat from the floor beneath the chair, and stands up.

  "Well.. ."he says.

  "Don't go, Burley," Mat says, and Wheeler says, "Burley, don't be in a hurry."

  "Well," he says, lying desperately, "I got a thing or two needs seeing about out home."

  He is staring intently down at the hat, which he can hardly see in the darkness, fussing at the shape of it with his hands.

  Understanding his need to escape, or just sensing his discomfort, Margaret comes to his rescue: "We understand about that, Burley. I appreciate your coming. All of us do."

  "That's all right, Mrs. Feltner." He goes to the steps and starts down. "I'll see you folks."

  Redounding and Sublime

  He walks off down the dark street toward the dancers and the fire. As he goes farther away from Mat's house and his mind comes free of the embarrassment of his escape, he walks faster, free to do what he cannot resist.

  On either side of the fire the road is choked with the dark bodies of automobiles that have simply been driven as far toward the dancing as possible and stopped. There is something exciting about the massive dis order of the cars jammed in the road, the light of the flames glancing off fenders and hoods. The crowd claps and shouts and talks and laughs, massing in toward a circle surrounding the dancers who surround the fire. From that tightly pressed and vividly lighted circle the crowd frays outward into the dark, smaller groups and couples scattered along the walks under the trees and in the spaces between automobiles.

  As Burley passes voices begin to call to him-"Hey, Burley!" "Come over here, Burley"-offering a drink maybe, or a good place to sit and watch, or some bit of talk. But he only raises his hand to these without stopping, not bothering even to make sure who is talking. He is impelled toward the very center, toward the music and the fire. He cannot rest until he gets there.

  Now he can see the musicians standing on the bed of a truck turned at a right angle off the road in front of Jayber's shop, making a high platform just at the edge of the circle of bystanders. Bill Mixter and his two boys and Uncle Stanley are on the truck bed under the shadowy and greenly flickering foliage of the sugar maples. The three musicians stand in a close triangle, their heads inclined inward. Bill Mixter bends a little forward over his fiddle, his eyes hidden under the visor of his striped cloth cap. The two sons, slats of oiled hair loose over their ears, stare fixedly ahead at the same invisible point over the crest of the fire. They have been playing almost without letup for an hour or more. They are sweating, beating their rhythms with their feet on the worn boards, listening to themselves, paying no attention whatever to the dancers or to the crowd. Uncle Stanley is four or five feet in front of them, as near the edge of the truck bed as he feels safe, beating his hands, patting his feet, uttering the calls and songs at the top of his voice. He is as much aware of the crowd as the musicians are oblivious to it. He is in a state approaching transport-in his element. Now and then he does a shuffling turn, his feet flying in a way that threatens to snap his spindly old legs, and the crowd laughs and cheers. He sings:

  And got it all greasy."

  The crowd whoops.

  "Yes!"

  "Sing it, Uncle!"

  "Swing your partner and promenade!" he says, and steps back with a wide sweeping gesture of his right arm as though turning the dancers around the fire.

  "Haw! Look a thar now!"

  After watching the labor on the truck bed for a few minutes Burley pushes on to the very edge of the crowd around the fire, and only then is able to stop with the sense of arrival. He is restrained from hunting a partner and going on into the dancing by a doubtfulness of the propriety of that so soon after leaving a place of mourning, but he is also aware of being fifty years old. He has not danced for a long time. And so he just stands, as near to the dancing as he can get without being in it, feeling the impulse of the music sway in the crowd around him. It comes into him too, and he begins clapping his hands and patting his feet. He has loosened his tie, and now he takes off his coat and hangs it over his left shoulder. His hat, as usual when he is resting or enjoying himself, is pushed back off his forehead. He is grinning, forgetful of everything. The music has departed from its occasion. Simply present and sufficient, it has freed itself of beginning; it involves no premonition of an end. It only continues, in profound union with the dancers-pulsing and urging, turning, whirling, tramping, and circling-the ground, the air, the dark leaves of the trees, the glancing firelight brought to a tranced obedience to it.

  With a few sharply declarative strokes of Bill Mixter's fiddle, seeming to tie a swift bowknot in the air, it stops. The silence hangs in the air and then descends slowly over the crowd. While it lasts they hear Bill Mixter laugh quietly and, turning to look, see him and his boys putting their instruments down. Bill Mixter walks over to the edge of the truck bed to take a cup that somebody is holding up to him over the heads of the bystanders. The crowd begins to murmur, loosening and dividing within itself.

  Let down from the music, the scene becomes ordinary. As he looks around him, it seems to Burley that he is in a place altogether different from where he thought he was. The crowd is made up mostly of women and girls and boys, and men his age and older. The young men, who ought to be the force and grace of it, are not there. Among the dancers, who still stand resting where the music left them, are a number of pairs of girls and young women who have been dancing with each other. It looks to him more aimless than he thought. Some that are not here never will be. And what does it mean? Has what they are celebrating happened yet? Or will it ever?

  There has come to be a fierceness in his thoughts, and no happiness. No, this is not where he was headed, or where he thought he was headed. He turns, and finds he has been standing in the midst of a group of school-age girls, who have been much amused by the involvement of such a grey head as his in such regardless exuberance. Thinking of it, he finds it amusing himself. He grins.

  "Hello there, girls. You all look mighty pretty tonight."

  They giggle, backing out of the way to let him pass.

  He wanders through the crowd, watching for Jayber, making two slowly widening turns around the fire. The music soon starts again, but it is as though it plays now in a more distant place, and he is headed away from it, outside the crowd that forms and tightens again around the circling dancers. Coming by the truck where the musicians are playing, he pauses and studies the bunch of men gathered in front of Jayber's shop. About every third one there, he estimates, has had more than enough to drink, and the rest have had plenty.

  "Uh-huh!" he thinks.

  Grover Gibbs wheels out into Burley's path and gives him a prolonged vacant grin, as though trying to hold his attention until he can think of a greeting suitable to the occasion. Finally he gives up and executes a knowing wink.

  "Howdy do, Grover."

  "Mighty fine, old friend. Mighty good. Glad to see you, Burley, old friend."

  He lands a great clap of affection on Burley's left shoulder blade. Burley steps around him and starts on. "I'd say you're feeling friendly, Grover."

  "I do," Grover says. "Yes sir! Yes sir!"

  Burley
goes around the corner of the barbershop, and there finds Whacker Spradlin with his wagon and cream can. Whacker stands, in his usual perfection of drunkenness, between his wagon and the wall of the shop, swaying to the music.

  "Uh-huh!" Burley thinks, not now in the tone of making a discovery, but of finding that things add up as expected.

  He goes on past the stairway that climbs the outside of the building to Jayber's living quarters, beginning to be certain now that he is close on the track. But certain as he is, it still scares him when a hand reaches out from behind the building and takes hold of his arm.

  He feels a bottle pushed against his breastbone, and Jayber's voice says: "Take a shot of that, pistol. It'll do you a certain amount of good."

  A piercing giggle follows that statement out of the shadow, and Burley recognizes the silhouette of Big Ellis against the white of the wall. He is glad to be with them. Comfort comes over him. He holds the bottle up against the sky.

  "Why, hello, Mammy," he says, and drinks.

  "We were looking for you," Jayber says.

  "Well, I thought you'd never find me."

  Big Ellis giggles.

  "How're you, Big Ellis?"

  "Fine. Better. Glad to see you, Burley."

  Burley corks the bottle and hands it back. "Thanks."

  "Well, just hold onto it," Jayber says. "When we want it, we'll ring."

  Big Ellis laughs. "Jayber says this is penthouse style. When we want anything, we ring."

  "Well, kind of keep your eye on me," Burley says. "I ain't used to this high society."

  He leans against the wall, holding the bottle by the neck until whoever wants it next will ring for it. It was a large drink that he took, and he feels the heat of it spreading through him. The celebration is far behind him now. Where they are it is quiet. They have ahead of them the dark slant of the pasture, and above them in the blackness the tremendous blooming of the stars. As Burley looks up, one suddenly loosens itself somewhere in the depths of the black, and falls. It makes a brief streak on the sky, so quick, so short, so arbitrarily placed that he immediately forgets where he saw it. For a moment that seems to matter a great deal. And then, as he recovers the sense of himself there where he is, it quits mattering.