She and her place never recovered from the war. Unable to manage it herself, and needing money, she sold the landing. She hired what help she could afford. She rented her croplands on the shares. After her daughters married and went away, she stayed on alone. To her young granddaughters, and probably to herself as well, the world of the first half of her life was another world.
No more would she be “Maxie” to anybody. Increasingly she would be “Aunt Maxie.” She was respected. By those who lacked the sense to respect her she was feared. She held herself strictly answerable to her necessities. She worked in the fields as in the house. Strange and doubtful stories were told about her, all of them perhaps true. She was said to have shot off a man’s ear, only his ear, so he would live to tell it.
And now her long life, so strongly determined or so determinedly accepted by her, has at last submitted. It is declining gently, perhaps willingly, toward its end. It has been nearly a day and now most of a night since she uttered a word or opened her eyes. A younger person so suddenly moribund as she would have been dead long ago. But she seems only asleep, her aspect that of a dreamer enthralled. The two vertical creases between her brows suggest that she is raptly attentive to her dream.
That she is dying, she herself knows, or knew, for early in the morning of the previous day, not long before she fell into her present sleep, her voice, to those who bent to listen, seeming to float above the absolute stillness of her body, and with the tone perhaps of a small exasperation, she said, “Well, if this is dying, I’ve seen living that was worse.”
The night began cloudy, and the clouds have deepened over the valley and the old house with its one light. The first frosts have come, hushing the crickets and the katydids. The country seems to be waiting. At about dawn a season-changing rain will begin so quietly that at first nobody will notice, and it will fall without letup for two days.
When midnight passes through the room, nobody knows, neither the old woman on the bed nor the young ones who watch beside it. The room would seem poor, so meager and worn are its furnishings, except that its high ceiling and fine proportions give it a dignity that in the circumstances is austere. Though the night is not quite chilly, the sternness of the room and the presence of death in it seemed to call for additional warmth, and the young wives have kindled a little fire. From time to time, one or another has risen to take from the stone hearth a stick of wood and lay it on the coals. From time to time, one or another has risen to smooth the bedclothes that need no smoothing, or to lay a hand upon the old woman’s forehead, or to touch lightly the pulse fluttering at her wrist.
After midnight, stillness grows upon them all. The talk has stopped, the fire subsided to a glow, when Bernice Gibbs raises her hand and the others look at her. Bernice is the oldest of the four. The others have granted her an authority which, like their grandmother perhaps, she has accepted merely because she has it and the others don’t. She looks at each of them and looks away, listening.
They listen, and they hear not a sound. They hear instead a silence that reaches into every room and into the expectant night beyond. They rise from their chairs, first Bernice, and then, hesitantly, the others. They tiptoe to the bed, two to a side, and lean, listening, at that edge which they and all their children too have now passed beyond. The silence grows palpable around them, a weight.
Now, as Andy Catlett imagines his way into this memory that is his own only because he has imagined it, he is never quite prepared for what he knows to have happened next. Always it comes to him somewhat by surprise, as it came to those who remembered it from the actual room and the actual night.
In silence that seems to them utterly conclusive, the young women lean above the body of the old woman, the mold in which their own flesh was cast, and they listen. And then, just when one of them might have been ready to say, “She’s gone,” the old woman releases with a sigh her held breath: “Hooo!”
They startle backward from the bedside, each seeing in the wide-opened mouths and eyes of the others her own fright. Oma Knole, who is clumsy, strikes the lamp and it totters until Bernice catches and steadies it.
They stand now and look at one another. The silence has changed. The dying woman’s utterance, brief as it was, spoke of a great weariness. It was the sigh of one who has been kept waiting. The sound hangs in the air as if visible, as if the lamp flame had flown upward from the wick. It stays, nothing moves, until some lattice of the air lets pass the single distant cry of an owl—“Hoo!”—as if in answer.
Callie Knole turns away, bends forward, and emits what, so hard suppressed, might have been a sob, but it is a laugh.
And then they all laugh, at themselves, at one another, and they cannot stop. Their sense of the impropriety of their laughter renews their laughter. Looking at each other, flushed and wet-eyed with laughter, makes them laugh. They laugh because they are young and they are alive, and life has revealed itself to them, as it often had and often would, by surprise.
Margaret Feltner, when she had become an old woman, “Granny” in her turn, told Andy of this a long time ago. “Oh, it was awful!” she said, again laughing. “But the harder we tried to stop, the funnier it was.”
And Andy, a hundred years later, can hear their laughter. He hears also the silence in which they laugh: the ancient silence filling the dark river valley on that night, uninterrupted in his imagination still by the noise of engines, the great quiet into which they all have gone.
The laughter, which threatened to be endless, finally ends and is gathered into the darkness, into the past. The night resumes its solemn immensity, and again in the silence the old woman audibly breathes. But now her breaths come at longer intervals, until the definitive quiet settles upon her at last. They who have watched all night then fold her hands. Her mouth has fallen open, and Bernice thinks to bind it shut. They draw the counterpane over her face. Day whitens again over the old house and its clutch of old buildings. As they sit on in determined noiselessness, it comes to the young women that for some time they have been hearing the rain.
Down in the Valley Where the Green Grass Grows (1930)
You would think a fellow whose paunch was bigger than his ass would take the precaution of underdrawers. Or suspenders. Or bib overalls. Big Ellis didn’t, of course. He never thought of precautions until too late. After it was too late he could always tell you what the right precaution would have been if only he had thought of it. “Burley,” he would say, “I see the point. I’ve got my sights dead on it.” But he saw it going away, from behind. And so when he was a young man, and had grown to his full girth, his pants as a rule were either half on or he was holding them with one hand to keep them from falling off.
Big was late getting married. Marriage was a precaution he didn’t think of until his mother died and left him alone to cook and housekeep for himself. And then he really began to hear the call of matrimony.
He was quite a dancer in his young days. You would think at first it was the funniest thing you ever saw. The fiddle music would carry him clean out of his head, and there he would be, swinging his partner like she didn’t weigh anything, with his hair in his eyes, his shirt tail half out, sweating like a horse, his pants creeping down, and that one hand from time to time jerking them back up. But if you paid attention to him, you would soon see that he really was a dancer. He was a smooth mover, a big man but light on his feet. His feet had ways of going about their business as if he himself didn’t know what they were up to. They were answering the music, you see, and not just the caller. He could really step it off. He could cut a shine.
He did all right in his socializing until he got his eye set on a girl, and then he would get shy and awkward and tongue-tied. He would figure then that he needed to get her cornered in some clever and mannerly way that would be beyond his abilities. And he would come up with some of the damnedest, longest-way-around schemes such as nobody ever thought of before and were always well worth knowing about. He edged up to a girl one time at the F
ourth of July and said, “I know a girl’s about the prettiest thing ever I looked at,” and was struck dumb when she said, “Who?” He wrote one a love letter in his outrageous pencil-writing and signed it “A Friend.” He brought one a live big catfish and held it out to her like it was gold-plated, and never offered so much as to skin it. Those times, I have to say, he was not very serious. What he had in his mind then was sport. As you might call it.
When he began to shine up to Annie May Cordle with the honorable intention of marrying her if she would have him, he outdid himself for judgment. She was about as near the right match for him as he could have found. But he went about the business as perfectly hind-end-foremost as you would have expected. For a while he just hung around her every time he got a chance, looking as big-eyed and solemn as a dying calf. If she looked at him or said anything to him, he turned red and grinned with more teeth than a handsaw and hitched up his pants with both hands.
After he got his crop sold that winter, Big did what he usually would do. He took it in his head to trade off the team of mules he already had, maybe adding a few dollars to boot, for a better team. He always thought he got “a good deal” on “a better team,” and that was why he never in his life owned a team that was better than passable. In fact he was too big-hearted and generous, especially if he’d had a drink or two, to be any account at all as a trader. Somebody always took his old team and his money, and he wound up with a team just a teensy bit better or worse than what he had before. And so of course he was always wanting to trade.
By springtime sure enough he had his new team, a rabbity pair of three-year-old red mules, not above fifteen hands. Dick and Buck. They sort of matched, and he was proud of them, though they were not hardly what you would call well broke.
The weather got warm. We needed rain, and then we got a showery day that was about what the doctor ordered and made us feel good. The next day it faired up. The ground being too wet to work and the day fine, I walked over to Big’s to see what I could put him up to. He was a good one to wander about with on such a day. He was a good companion, always ready for whatever you needed him for. I thought we might drop down to the river and fish a while, maybe.
But when I got to his place he was hitching his new team to the sled. He was going to take a bunch of broken tools to the blacksmith shop in town to get them fixed. It was never any trouble at Big’s to find broken tools, which wasn’t because he worked all that hard. He just used things hard, or he used them for purposes they weren’t meant for. He treated wood the same as steel. He had piled onto the sled a plow with a broken handle, a hoe with a broken handle, a grubbing hoe with no handle, a broken doubletree, and other such, too big a load to take in his old car.
“Why don’t you use the wagon?” I said.
“Oh,” he said. “I forgot. Here. Hold the lines a minute.”
He went into the wagon shed and came back rolling a wagon wheel with two broken spokes.
So there was nothing for it but the sled, which wasn’t the best vehicle on a gravel road, and with no tongue, behind a team the least bit touchous. And especially that little Buck mule, if I had pegged him right, was just waiting for a good reason to demonstrate his speed. He was the reason Big asked me to hold the lines while he went to get the wagon wheel.
Big had left himself a place to stand in amongst the load. I made myself a place and turned up a five-gallon bucket to sit on. Big told the mules to come up, gave the lines a little flip, and we started off with pretty much of a jerk.
When we hit the gravel, which we would be on all the way to town, you could see that both mules became deeply concerned. They got into a little jiggling trot and backed their ears so as not to miss anything that might be gaining on them. And the runners did screech and batter something awful. But Big was stout enough to hold them and two more like them, if his old lines and bridles held together. Just looking at the back of him, I could see how pleased he was with his team, showing spirit the way they were. And they matched, you know. To some people, and Big was one, a bad team that matches is better than a good team that don’t.
So we went stepping pretty lively into Port William. I unloaded the sled at the blacksmith shop while Big kept hold of the lines. And then we started back. There was no chance of loafing a while in town, for the mules couldn’t be trusted to stand tied. One backfire from somebody’s automobile and they might’ve disappeared off like two mosquitoes.
But when we got to the mouth of our lane, Big drove right on by. I saw then what he had on his mind. His real business for that morning wasn’t to take a bunch of broken tools to town. He was going on out by the Cordles’ place. If Annie May was where she could see, she was going to have the benefit of a look at that well-matched, high-spirited team of mules, and of old Big standing there holding the lines, calm as George Washington, everything under control.
The trouble was, by the time we were closing in on the Cordles’, after the extra mile or so, the mules had lost their fine edge. They had worn down to a civilized manner of doing business. They were walking along, nodding their heads and letting their ears wag like a seasoned team. Looked like they both together didn’t have an ounce of drama left in ’em, and the large impression Big was wanting to make had fallen by the wayside.
So without making a sudden motion I got on my knees and skimmed up a rock about the size of a pocket watch and settled back onto my bucket.
Big, among other things, was a lucky creature. For when we came in sight of the Cordles’ house down in the pretty little swale where their farm was, there was Annie May, sure enough, looking sweet as a rose, right out on the front porch. She was churning, working the dasher up and down at a steady gait. She looked patient, gazing off at the sky. Maybe the butter was slow to come and she had been at it a while.
I was wanting to help Big all I could, of course. I waited until I was sure Annie May had seen us coming, until we could almost hear the dasher chugging in the churn, and then I shied that little rock almost under the Buck mule’s tail where he felt it the most.
He lost no time in taking offense. He clamped his tail down and humped up in the back, which notified the Dick mule that the end of the world was at hand. They shot off both at once like their tails were afire.
I swear I had no idea I was going to need a handhold as quick as I did. Just as I was starting backwards off of my bucket, I grabbed a double handful of Big’s pants, and down they came.
He said very conversationally, “Burley Coulter, damn your impudent hide.”
But he stood to his work. He had to, of course. He made the drive past the Cordles’ as magnificent as you please, proudly and calmly in control of his spirited team that was plunging on the bits, with his pants down around his ankles and his shirttail flying out behind. As we went past, I glanced up at Annie May and, so help me Jesus, she was smiling and waving—a good-hearted, patient, forgiving, well-fleshed girl, just right for Big.
Well, old Big did keep his team in hand. He never let them out of a short lope. Pretty soon he stopped them and got his pants back up more or less where they belonged, and took the long way home so he wouldn’t have to pass the Cordles’ again. He never looked at me or said a word. He wasn’t speaking.
But when we finally got back to his place and had put away the mules, which were a good deal better broke by then, I felt obliged to have a serious talk with him.
“Big,” I said, “you’re going to have to ask that woman to marry you, after you’ve done showed yourself to her the way you have.”
You couldn’t beat him for good nature. He just grinned, clean back to his ears. He said, “All right. I reckon I will.”
So he was speaking to me again. And afterwards he told me all about it. He was giggling, red in the face, and absolutely tickled almost to death.
He gave up all his clever notions about courting, and was forthright. When he saw Annie May in town next time, he said, “Come here. I want to talk to you.”
She followed him out of ears
hot of the other people, and he said, “Well, you’ve done had a look at my private life. Don’t you reckon me and you ought to get married?”
She looked straight back at him and laughed. She laughed right into his face like the good old gal she was.
She said, “I would like to know why not!”
Burley Coulter’s Fortunate Fall (1934)
It has been a long, long time since old Uncle Bub Levers was called on to pray at the Bird’s Branch church for the first and last time in his life, and he stood up and said, “O Lord, bless me and my son Jasper. Amen.”
The Lord must have thought that was a good idea. For with His help, maybe, Jappy Levers grew up and got himself educated for a lawyer. When he hung out his sign in Hargrave, he wasn’t Jappy Levers any more. He was J. Robert La Vere, Attorney at Law. That might not have been all put-on. Some say that La Veres was what the Leverses were before they turned up around Port William. People in Port William don’t say things they haven’t heard of. They never had heard of La Veres. They had heard of levers.
With the Lord’s help maybe, maybe not, Mr. La Vere got to be a rich man. Getting rich, you know, does not always meet with everybody’s approval. There was always somebody, or several bodies, in Port William who would tell you confidently that Mr. La Vere got rich by finding out where the money was and helping himself to a good deal more than his share. In fact they didn’t know, and I don’t know. To find out how such things are done, you will have to ask somebody besides me. Maybe you can do like Mr. La Vere, who gaveth the credit to the Lord, at the same time keeping a good deal of it for himself, the Lord maybe not minding, maybe.
A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership Page 3
