A Place on Earth

by Wendell Berry

  Among the Dead

  Lying on his back among the headstones and mounds of the graveyard, Burley wakens, changed by his sleep, his head filled with a throbbing dull ache. He lies still for some time before he opens his eyes.

  He can hear the roosters crowing, close and far, and birds singing. He has got to get up. They have got to get out of there before the whole town is awake and watching. A kind of panic seizes him and he uncrooks his arm from over his face and begins to blink and squint, trying to accustom his eyes to the light. At every blink the light floods into his head, glinting and scratching.

  Finally he becomes able to hold his eyes open, and with a summoning of will pushes himself up. He sits there unsteadily, the ground for a moment threatening to dump him over onto his face. He props himself, and again risks opening his eyes.

  Somehow, as if in a dream, the possibility that the runaway automobile might have done great damage among the brittle slabs overpowered the knowledge that it did none, and now he looks around him in surprise and relief to see that the dead still lie undisturbed. The place is flooded with the weak first sunlight of the morning, and the dead are absent from it.

  As gently as he can he lies down again, easing his head back into the crumpled crown of his Sunday hat. He will be sorry about the hat, he knows, when he gets around to thinking about it. He has the wakened dreamer's sense of escape from something he might well have done. That eases a little of his anxiety, but not all. He will not escape so easily from what he did do. For now he thinks of the betrayals involved in his participation in the profane clamors of Whacker's funeral. He feels an urgent need to get up and get the others up and clear out, and at the same time an overpowering wish to lie there with his eyes shut, and never move. He is thirsty. The only good thought in reach is the thought of water. His head throbs.

  "Oh me," he says.

  `Are you awake, Burley?" Jayber asks.

  "Sort of."

  "I'm afraid I am too."

  "Jayber, we've got to get up and get out of here."

  "I know it. We don't want to get caught here, or be seen leaving either, if we can help it."

  "Yeah."

  But neither of them moves, and they say nothing else for some time.

  And then Big Ellis sits up. He shakes his head and says, "Shoo!" Looking around him he grins. "Resurrection morning, ain't it?"

  As though to confirm the unsuspected truth of that, Burley points down the slope. "Look!"

  Over the mound of loose dirt they see the broken crown of Whacker s straw hat slowly rising. His shoulders appear over the mound, and he stands up. And then, as though to sleep in a grave is no more remarkable than to sleep in a bed, he picks up the tongue of his wagon and moves off down the slope toward the gate.

  They watch him go, hardly believing that without help he could have drawn his bulk up the sheer six-foot walls of that hole. There is something apocalyptic about it, both ludicrous and sobering. Jayber says:

  "He'll never get a better funeral," Big Ellis says, "if he lives to be a hundred."

  And then, with all the force of a crucial realization that comes too late, it dawns on Burley that the possibilities have been out of control from the beginning. Suppose Whacker hadn't been able to get out by himself. They certainly had no idea how to get him out. Suppose he had got sick down there, or died. Suppose they had forgot him and left him there-as it surely did look like they were going to-and they had come bringing Ernest.

  He plunges to his feet.

  "Let's go! Let's get out of here!"

  They get up and follow him among the stones to where the car sits, doors and trunk still open, and in the daylight still appearing to labor myopically at the granite inscription. They set the wheels and, heaving mightily at the cost of much pain to their heads, push it back over the embankment into the road.

  "Well," Big Ellis says, "looks like there's no place to go now but home."

  "Get in the middle, Burley," Jayber says. "You'll be getting out last."

  But Burley feels a sudden reluctance to go with them. He wants to part from them now. Wants the night's doings to be finished now, and done with. Here is a day started, it seems to him, that is going to ask a lot of him, and he wants to get himself set for it.

  "You all go on," he says. "I'm going to walk. I think it'll do me good."

  Jayber gets in, but as the car starts to roll he says: "Wait! Listen!" The car stops and he opens the door and leans out. "Listen," he says. "I don't think anybody actually saw who it was making all the racket last night. So if we make it out of here without getting caught, it was all done by Unknown Citizens. You see?"

  They see.

  "Big Ellis," Burley says, "when you come around to where the drive forks, if you'd back out to the road from there it might look like you'd just pulled in to turn around."

  Big Ellis nods. The car rolls forward, picking up speed, lurches as Big Ellis throws it into gear, and, as the engine starts, grumbles off toward the gate.

  Burley stands there, watching them go. He should be going himself, but he does not move. As soon as he has seen them back out and turn and go out of sight toward town, the weight of his guilt comes down on him, too heavy to bear away. At the time when Mat may have needed him, and when he should have been sorrowful himself for the death of Ernest, and when he should have been attentive in some decent way to Tom's memory and the hope of Nathan's return-at that time of all times, that one and only and now past and unchangeable time, where was he?

  Drunk. Bawling and singing and laughing at the funeral of a live drunkard. In the graveyard, insulting the peace of the dead.

  And he lay down and slept among them. Among the dead in their graves he lay down and slept. And what awful quiet came on him then?

  He stands there, his suit and shirt wrinkled and dusty, his good hat battered into early old age, the knot of his tie slipped down to the third button of his shirt and jerked tight, his head full of pain and regret and difficult thoughts. He looks at his long shadow pointing down the gravel track ahead of him, and he knows for certain that he will die. He foreknows the stillness that, whichever way he walks, he is coming to. A tremor shakes him from head to foot.

  Even as he starts toward the gate he is strongly tempted to go the other way, to go home across the fences and through the fields. But he rejects that. The day summons him into the clear and that is where he is going to go.

  "No," he says to himself, "I may have to brazen, but I ain't going to sneak."

  He sees his shadow move its long leg, sees its foot separate from his foot, light flowing between. There will be a time when he will come here and not leave, but this is not the time.

  Part Five

  17

  Straightening Up

  Home again, Burley hangs his desecrated coat and hat on the yard fence and goes straight to the barn. He attends to the few chores that need doing there, and then, having put it off as long as he can, he goes outside to the pump. He cups his hand under the spout and pumps and drinks. And having filled himself, his thirst far exceeding his capacity, he douses his face and pumps water over his head. He keeps pumping, breathing in great spluttering gasps. Pumping on his head, the water flowing through his hair, around his ears, down the sides of his face, streaming off his eyebrows and nose and lips and chin, splattering and darkening the dry boards of the well top-that seems to him the finest quenching of his life. Bent, dizzy under the spout, hanging on to the pump with one hand to keep from falling, pumping with the other, he glimpses his brother approaching around the corner of the barn.

  He does not want to talk to Jarrat this morning and so he keeps pumping, hoping that Jarrat is just on his way someplace and will go on. But Jarrat does not. He stops and leans against the barn wall and watches.

  "That looks like a hell of a hard way to drown."

  Burley straightens up, shuddering as the cold water runs down the collar of his shirt. Blinded by vertigo, he quickly sits down on the edge of the stock trough and props
himself with both hands.

  "Huh?" he says. Though it does not matter, he feels caught, feels guilty and most uncertain of himself and of Jarrat. For the thousandth time, surely, he is the wayward younger brother, confronted by the righteousness of the older. Or is that how it is going to be this time? He risks a quick glance at Jarrat's face, and discovers to his surprise and relief that Jarrat is grinning at him.

  "I said there ought to be some easier way to drown."

  "There ought," Burley says, and he laughs. He looks directly at Jarrat now. "Did you know the war's over?"

  "I heard the commotion start up out there at town and figured that was what it was. And I came over here then and heard the news on your radio. I didn't reckon you would mind."

  "I didn't."

  "I listened a right smart while, sort of waiting for you to come back."

  Burley feels a pang of disappointment-of loss. That was the first time in years, maybe since the death of their mother, that Jarrat had come to the house just to visit-and him not there. There could have been nothing finer, nothing be would have liked any more, he realizes with grief, than to sit in the old living room with Jarrat late into the night, listening to that good news come in on the radio.

  "Well, I stayed pretty late at Mat's and then me and Jayber and Big Ellis spent the night with some folks there in town. Just to keep from having to come home so late."

  He can see-with relief, actually-that Jarrat does not believe a word of it. But he appears to be amused. He watches Burley with a skeptical, critical gaze that Burley knows will not neglect or misinterpret anything. But there is amusement in it too. Some change has come over him. Is it, Burley wonders, the war ending? Or what is it?

  "It was hard to sleep, I reckon, in all that racket."

  "Well," Burley says, "the folks we spent the night with, they was quiet."

  He wishes Jarrat would go on home now. Or go somewhere.

  "What time is Ernest's funeral?" Jarrat asks.

  "Two-thirty, I think. Are you going?"

  "I thought I'd go a little beforehand, and speak to Mat and them."

  "Mat'll appreciate that."

  "Well, I'll be seeing you," Jarrat says. He shoves himself away from the wall with a little thrust of his shoulder and starts home.

  "Be seeing you," Burley says. And then he says, "Come again! We'll listen to the radio!"

  As soon as Jarrat is out of sight Burley eases himself to his feet and, after a careful start, walks to the house.

  He builds a fire in the kitchen, puts on the coffee pot and a kettle of water, and sits down at the table to wait. His encounter with Jarrat has left him with a trying consciousness of his misery. To save trouble he just admits that he is totally corrupt and unsalvageable, and yields to the misery of that too. "Oh, me!" he says.

  The smell of the coffee rouses him. He sits watching the spout steam until it has boiled long enough, and pours himself a cup.

  It seems to him that from the minute he sits back down at the table and leans over the fragrant steam of that cup, he begins-surely, this time -to mend. He drinks it hot, sitting by the raised window, watching the wind in the grass down the hillside. The grass is green in the sun, and the wind combs it, laying it down, rippling it like water flowing over it.

  "Eat! Put something in your stomach!"

  Those are his mother's words, and they return to him in her voice, the weary, determined inflections of her old Sunday-morning efforts to sober him up and set him straight, revealing the strain between her persistent faith that this would be the last time and her suspicion that it would not. They come back familiarly and painfully, his inheritance from her.

  To silence them he gets up and obeys. He poaches two eggs, and toasts some light bread, and pours another cup of coffee. That puts some strength into him. That he will make it through until bedtime begins to seem likely. He begins to welcome the duty of going to Mat's and being there to do what he can. What there will be for him to do he does not know. Maybe nothing. For a few minutes he wishes, like a boy, that there might be some task of great difficulty that Mat will ask him to dosomething to redeem all the failures, past and to come, of his best intentions.

  He washes his dishes and makes things neat. And then, stripping off his clothes, he bathes and shaves and combs his hair. Everything he does now makes him feel better. This is the starting place. From here a lot can be imagined and hoped for.

  Standing naked in the breeze from the window, combed and shaved and thoroughly scrubbed, feeling better already than he expected to feel before tomorrow, he applies himself to the question of what to do about his suit. He picks up first the pants and then the coat, turns them this way and then that, and hangs them back on the chair post. He shakes his head. "Looks like they been slept in on the ground, boy."

  His hat turns out to be more or less salvageable. He whacks the dust out of it, and scrubs it lightly with a damp rag, and molds it into shape, and puts it on. His shoes, after being rubbed a little with a rag, look very well too.

  Carrying a shoe in each hand he goes through the house and up the stairs to his bedroom. Opening a bureau drawer, he finds a pair of socks quickly enough, and puts them on. Digging into another drawer, he finds at the very bottom an extra white shirt, put away hard to tell how long before his mother died. It has begun to turn a little yellow, but he shakes it out and holds it up. It will do, and he puts it on. He gets out his newest work pants and puts them on. He will have to go without a coat, but surely, he thinks, the weather is hot enough to justify that. He puts on his shoes. Rummaging in the closet, he finds his other necktie and stretches it out on the bed and studies it critically. It is a broad, bright red silky one with a large yellow flower on it. Too pretty for a funeral, he thinks, but he has no choice. Standing close and then far back, he examines himself in the mirror, and is reasonably satisfied. He is not what you would call finely dressed, but he has contrived an appearance of discomfort that ought at least to vouch for his proper sense of the occasion.

  Ready at last, he leaves the house with the sense of having perfected a narrow escape. He is still pretty shaky, and his head still hurts; he can surely remember mornings when he left home in better health. But he has begun to have a decent feeling in his mind.

  At the same time he keeps mindful of where he is going: to Mat's house, to Ernest's grave, sorrow and darkness. He is going, faithfully and uselessly, to be a comforter where there can be no comfort, and a friend where friendship is powerless-a duty a man cannot do gladly for another except for the love of him. And he goes bearing the thought of the death of Tom, which now begins its long outlasting of its cause. The words of Jayber's elegy still stand in his mind, seeming to open and contain the depth of his grief.

  But he goes into the light too. The sun is getting high and hot. He has already sweated through his shirt, and unconsciously has unbuttoned and turned back the cuffs. Several times he has caught his hand ready to loosen his collar and necktie, but so far he has resisted that. From the graveled track of the lane high on the ridge, he can sometimes see the river valley lying below him, and across the upland the town's gables and rooftops among the trees. All the country is astir with the wind, and he can feel it flowing steadily against him as he walks. Overhead big white clouds fly rapidly from the southwest; their hundred-acre shadows slide invincibly over the ups and downs of the land. Along the river the water maples, leaves blown underside-up, are silver and brilliant.

  It seems to him that time has now begun to shorten toward Nathan's return. Though still from far off, he feels approaching him a good day, the best of all. And then, in that deep wheel track on the ridge, he stops and deliberately savors the air. It is the first morning of another time.

  A Homecoming

  As soon as he has thanked the driver and the car door has slammed behind him, Gideon resumes the stride in which he has crossed the intervals between rides. He turns into one of the pounded wheel tracks of the creek road, and is soon out of sight of the blacktop.r />
  When he left in the early spring, the valley was still leafless and open to the eye as in winter. Now the road burrows through the foliage. And though the morning shade is still deep, the air is already close and hot, and he begins to sweat. The foliage along the roadsides bespeaks the length of his absence. And he walks faster, filled with the anxiety of one who is late.

  He comes out into the open bottom. There is a field of corn now to the left of the road. As he reaches the end of that he can see the house. A thread of smoke rises straight up from the kitchen chimney. Though the fields of the bottom are in full sun, the shadow of the hill still lies over the house. Ida comes around the house from somewhere in the back, carrying a bucket. Seeing him, she stops and looks while he walks perhaps fifteen steps, before she sets the bucket down, and runs down the slope of the yard and down the lane and along the path across the bottom. When he comes to the footbridge she is standing at the other end, waiting for him, smiling at him as he crosses the springing planks.

  "Gideon, I seen you coming. I looked, and there you were coming up the road."

  He comes to the end of the bridge and steps down.

  Ida looks away, and back at him. She asks: "You been gone a long way?"

  "Yeah. I have, Ida."

  "I imagine you're hungry, ain't you?"

  "I ain't eat yet this morning."

  "Well, come on to the house."

  He puts his face down into his hands. She comes to him then, reaching out to him.

  "Well. Don't, Gideon. Come on to the house."

  For some time after he is quiet he continues to stand there the same way, his face covered. Finally, at her urging, he allows her to take his hand and lead him toward the house, although still he does not look at her.

  "Did you come riding or walking?"

  "First one then the other. Sometimes folks give me rides. Sometimes I had to walk."

  "Hard as you look, it's a wonder you ever got to ride at all. You look worn out, Gideon. I bet you haven't taken any care of yourself at all."