Art went on to the wire gap into the pasture where they wintered the cows and let himself through. Adjoining at one of its corners the tobacco barn where the hay was stored, the pasture was a field of perhaps twenty acres now permanently in grass. It was enclosed by the best fence remaining on the place, but even that fence was a patchwork, the wire stapled to trees that had grown up in the line, spliced and respliced, weak spots here and there reinforced by cut thorn bushes and even an old set of bedsprings.
The place was running down. Art and Mart were getting old, and the family had no younger member who wanted such a farm or even a better one. After so many years as the Rowanberry place, it was coming to the time when finally it would have to be sold. Mart perhaps already would have sold it, had the decision belonged to him alone. Art so far had pushed away even the thought. He needed his interest in the farm. “A fellow needs something to be interested in.” He had pushed away the thought of selling, as Andy still supposes, because so far he could not think of it. He could not distinguish between the place and himself.
But the place, its life as a farm, continued only by force of old habit. The two brothers went on from day to day, from year to year, doing only as they always had done. They did nothing new, and as their strength declined they did less. They extended the longevity of fences and buildings by stopgaps, patching and mending, and by the thought, repeated over and over, “I reckon it’ll last as long as it needs to.”
Their earnings in any year were not great, but they spent far less than they earned. They grew most of their food, or gathered it from the woods and the river. They heated the house with wood they cut and split still as they always had. They were thrifty and careful. Mart kept a pretty good used car and went places for pleasure. Art stayed mostly at home and spent, by the standards of the time, almost nothing.
There were ten cows and, as of that morning, four calves. The cows were Nancy, Keeny, Yellowback, Baby Sitter, Droopy Horn, Brown Eyes, Doll, Beulah, Rose, and Troublemaker. They had their tails to the wind, grazing to not much purpose the short grass. The four calves were lying together, curled up against the chill.
Seeing only nine of the cows, Art set off to find the tenth. He crossed over the ridge to the south side. There, in a swale affording some shelter, he found Troublemaker, afterbirth still hanging, and her still-wet heifer calf uneasily standing.
“Well, look a-there what you’ve done!” Art said to the cow. “Ain’t you proud of yourself!”
He said to the calf, “You’re going to make it, looks like.”
He didn’t go near them. The cow would be ruled entirely now by the instinct to protect her calf. Her long acquaintance with Art would not have mattered. Not to her. She wasn’t named Troublemaker for nothing.
“Well,” he said to her, “I’ll leave it to you.” He turned around and went to the barn.
The timbers and poles that framed the barn had come from the nearby woods. The posts, girders, and top plates all had been squared by somebody—Grandpaw Rowanberry, Art thought—who had been a good hand with a broadaxe, for the work was well done. The barn, in its time, had been a fair example of good work with rough materials. Its posts rested on footers of native rock, and it had been roofed originally with shingles rived out of white oak blocks also from the woods of the place. The only milled lumber had been the poplar siding. Now the barn, like the pasture fence, had become as much a product of the last-ditch cunning of making-do as of the skills that first had built it.
From the hay rick, by now much diminished, Art carried five bales one at a time into the pasture, spacing them widely, cutting the strings with his knife, dividing and scattering the hay, so that even Doll, the timidest cow, would get her share.
Having scattered the hay, he stood a while watching, to feel the culmination of his trip and the satisfaction of hunger fed. Soon it would be warmer and the new grass would come. The time of surviving would be past, and the cows and calves would begin to thrive.
On out beyond the winter pasture, the upland narrowed and then widened again, becoming what they called the Silver Mine Ridge. A long time ago Uncle Jackson Jones, an old man nobody knew much about, had passed through the country, digging for buried money. A number of his excavations were in the Port William neighborhood. Andy Catlett and a few other old men still know where they are, shallowed by time to mere depressions in the woods. The largest was the one on the Rowanberry place. Art’s father had worked on that one when he was a boy. Uncle Jackson hired several of the local boys to help him dig. They made a hole long and wide and deep enough to bury a small house or a large corn crib. They had to use a ladder to get to the bottom of it.
While they were digging, Early Rowanberry remembered, another stranger, “a man with a needle,” happened by. The “needle,” Andy thinks, must have been the arrow on some sort of dial, some instrument of geological divining. The man with the needle took readings round and about. He then told Uncle Jackson that if he would dig a second hole, only a short distance away, he would strike a vein of pure silver. But Uncle Jackson said no, he was after coined money and nothing else. The man with the needle departed and was never seen again. The diggers dug on. But the only silver yielded by their big hole was in the coins paid out by Uncle Jackson to his crew of boys.
Every evening when they climbed out of the hole they left their picks and spades, spud bars, grubbing hoes, and other tools at the bottom. One night a terrific rain fell, collapsing the sides of the hole and burying the tools, which put an end to Uncle Jackson’s work at that place.
“After that,” Art said to Andy, “it was anyhow a tool mine.”
But nobody ever went back to dig for the tools.
“Too much digging for a few tools. And, I reckon maybe, too few tools to dig with.”
When the wind, pressing through his clothes, at last laid its cold touch against his flesh, Art turned to face it, buttoned the top button of his jacket, and started back the way he had come. Behind him, the small herd of cows, filling and warming themselves with hay for the night, seemed to him for the time being to have been completed, and he was free to go.
He went back the way he had come, again taking his time, seeing everything now from its opposite side. It was as though he made the place dimensional and substantial by his walking both ways over it, granting it the same interest in going as he had in coming. To his mind it was old beyond knowing and yet new, timeless and yet momentary, so that watching it as once more it opened before him, old as he was, he was renewed.
As the road began its slant downward and homeward, he let himself into the fall of it gladly, for he was tired now, and it was easier going down than coming up.
“If gravity wants to pitch in and help,” he told Andy, “I ain’t going to be the one to say no.”
Going this way, he was looking directly into the long view of the river valley, and he watched it as his passage opened it and then closed it again. And he watched for Preacher, thinking the old dog too might have got tired and decided to head in, but he neither saw nor heard him.
As it turned out, it was better that Preacher had not returned. If he had, the next thing that happened would not have happened.
Art had come down nearly to the bend where the road turned at last directly toward the house. He was looking down, taking care with his steps over the steepening descent, thinking of something he was not going to be able to remember—“of something else”—when a large buck with splendid horns stepped into the road not a dozen feet away. Art stood without moving, downwind as he promptly realized, while the buck walked calmly, looking neither left nor right, across the road and disappeared. That he did not hurry and yet instantly was out of sight made his appearance just barely believable.
“I don’t know if he ever even seen me,” Art said to Andy. “He must’ve been thinking about something else too. But I seen him. I didn’t make him up.”
“If you’d been deer hunting he’d have known it,” Andy said. “He wouldn’t have come that cl
ose.”
“Probably not. But if I’d had my shotgun I could a played thunder with him.”
“I reckon,” Andy said.
Art, however, had not finished his thought. “But if I’d a shot him with a shotgun, he might’ve gone two miles before he died.”
And so, for the second time that day, Art was glad not to have had a weapon.
He was sorry, though, to have forgot what he had been thinking about before he saw the buck. Nor could he remember, supposing he had counted them, the number of branches of the buck’s horns.
“Maybe I never counted,” he said to Andy. “He had more hatrack than most people got hats.”
The river valley was out of sight behind him now, the creek valley lying fully open ahead of him. Though the light had weakened, he could still see the house, the barns and outbuildings, the swinging bridge over the creek, at the end of nowhere the center of everything, and the day coming to rest upon it.
He knew he would walk on the earth a while yet, and then he would yield back his body to be with the old ones who had come and gone before him, and of this he made no complaint.
Sold (1991)
It’s about all finished now. I took sick in the night back in the fall, past frost. When Coulter Branch came over to see about me the next morning I was down and couldn’t get up. Coulter called Wilma on the telephone. He was afraid to leave me to go get her, and she had to come from their house on the tractor, driving with one hand and holding the baby with the other. That’s a good girl, I’ll tell you. They got me up and fairly dressed and took me to the hospital. The hospital helped me over my sickness, but seemed like I was old after that and not fit to look after myself. And so the place and all had to be sold.
They brought me from the hospital here to the nursing home at Hargrave. Rest Haven they call it, the end of the line. It’s all right. I don’t complain. But I was the last in Port William of the name of Gibbs.
Before I married Grover Gibbs, I was Beulah Cordle. Annie May Ellis was my first cousin. She was Annie May Cordle Ellis. I was Beulah Cordle Gibbs. Beulah means “a land of peace and rest.” A preacher told me that, back when I was young. It made him blush to tell me, and I knew why. But I wasn’t cut out to be a preacher’s wife, and I reckon he could tell.
I didn’t have but one boyfriend, to say a real one, before Grover. But that one didn’t last. He was from down at Hargrave. He went off to Tennessee and sent me a postcard that said, “Hoping to be up in your parts by Sunday night.” You can’t love somebody you’ve laughed at that way.
I was seventeen when I married Grover. He was twenty-two. We couldn’t wait. We ran off to Indiana and waked up a preacher. He stood us in front of the fireplace and tied the knot. When he asked Grover to promise all those things “until death,” Grover said, “Would you go over that a little slower?”
That was him exactly. The preacher had to stop and laugh.
By both of us being gone, my folks pretty well knew why. They had some objections, but after while it got all right. And it was all right, pretty much, until death.
Well, I reckon you could complain about anybody you’ve married and lived with a long time. But then they’ve died and gone from you, and you look back, and you’re grateful.
Maybe it’s not that easy to tell about Grover. He was good enough at work—better than good enough, I think. But he was not hardly workbrittle. What it was, I reckon, he didn’t have what they call ambition, but he suited me. What we both wanted from this world was a living, our daily bread, if that means plenty to eat and a sound roof over our heads. Came a time when we had more, but we knew the more was extra.
Grover mostly never minded being delayed or interrupted. He couldn’t finish a day without going off after supper, still picking his teeth, to sit talking in Port William till bedtime. That was the old Port William schedule, you might say. The men would go to town after supper and sit in front of the stores in good weather, or inside somewhere in bad, talking and laughing and carrying on, the way people do who have always known each other and are telling a long story that they all know as far as the night before. Grover did his duty and held up his end of the conversation.
Well, I loved him. I still do. He could be the funniest. You could look in his face, practically all his life, and see that he was just waiting to be invited to have a good time, and that as soon as the invitation came, he was going to accept. He always looked ready to grin, if he wasn’t already grinning, even when he thought he was by himself. Because of that, maybe, when he was sad his face would be the saddest you ever saw. But he was always looking for fun, and just about always finding it, until he was almost dead.
When things went to drifting towards what Grover called fun, seemed like Burley Coulter and Big Ellis would sooner or later be into it with him. It would be hard to tell all the doings they did. And fun lasted them a long time, for after it had happened they’d be years telling each other about it, and the longer they told about it the funnier it got.
As a usual thing, Burley and Grover didn’t work together. Burley mostly worked with his family or Elton Penn or the Rowanberrys. But Grover and Big Ellis often would be helping each other, at our place or at Big’s. Since they’d married cousins, they were sort of kin, and when one of them needed help the other one would likely go. And since Big Ellis and Burley were neighbors, sometimes Burley showed up too.
When it was just Grover and Big, they talked, probably, as much as they worked. Maybe they’d be in a tobacco patch with their hoes, where I could see them from the kitchen window. They’d hit a few licks and pretty soon stop and lean on the hoe handles. They’d look off at the sky and point and prophesy the weather. And then hit a few more licks. Or I would see Grover lean back and laugh at some outrageousness such as Big was always full of. Like that.
Grover would work as hard to play a joke as for a living. Well, I’ll tell you exactly how he would do.
After the pickup balers had been in the country a good while—this was after we had got settled finally on our own place—Grover and Big went in partners and bought a pretty good baler, secondhand. Big was worthless at anything mechanical, so Grover took charge of the baler, always pulled it with our tractor, and did the baling. Grover loved an old tractor. He liked to fix things and he liked to drive.
One summer Big had a field of red clover to put up for hay. He got it mowed, and in a couple of days Grover went over and raked it as soon as the dew dried. After dinner he went back with the baler. Big had got Burley to come to help with the hauling. They were sitting on the wagon, waiting for Grover to bale a round or two before they started to load.
It was a blustery day, and the wind blew Big’s hat off. He started after it but couldn’t gain on it. When it blew past Grover, he pulled out of the windrow he was baling, put the tractor in a higher gear and cut in ahead of Big. Burley was just paying careful attention to see how it was going to turn out.
So there went Big, stumbling along in his version of running, and there went Grover ahead of him as fast as he could go and stay on the tractor, and there went Big’s hat, tumbling over the windrows like it finally had a chance to be free.
Well, it was Grover that caught the hat. He baled it and slowed down and went back to baling hay. He never gave Big so much as a glance. He didn’t even grin.
He and Big worked harder when Burley was with them. Burley was tuned up a little different. The people he ordinarily worked with, they went at it pretty lively. Burley was another one maybe not easy to tell about. He wasn’t, you might think, all that serious, and yet he was. Time was, this country was full of tales about Burley Coulter. He was a right smart older than me, but I remember him when he was young. He had good looks and ways the women taken to. You’d accuse him of something outlandish you’d heard about him, and he’d say, “If they told it at the store, I reckon it’s a story.” Or he’d say, “That must have been the day I found myself lost.” And he had a way of looking at you. You had to love him. There was a time or tw
o, a night or two.
But he had that seriousness. More and more, I think. He saw his family through their hard times. His friends too. He was a neighbor.
But, Lord, how they did carry on—him and Grover and Big!
Well, them old times are gone forever, but people were neighbors then. Most were. You worked together. You saw each other in Port William on Saturday night, and in church like as not on Sunday morning. Now that I’ve got mainly nothing to do, I think and think about them all. It just seems natural to me now to expect to see them again over on the other side. I think of us all together, paid up somehow, and complete.
For a long time after Grover and I got married, we were tenants on other people’s places, taking half of what we earned from the crops, which I’ll say was hard sometimes. I mean you could have a hard thought or two about it. But for people with no land, that was what was possible, and was all right, a chance maybe to get ahead. We got half of the cash money, what there was of it, and back there in the twenties and thirties, there wouldn’t be much. But we had our old ways. We had a garden, of course, and milk from our cows and meat from our hogs, and meat and eggs from our chickens, and our patching and mending and making do. And so we had our living.
The place we lived on longest was the old Levers place. Mr. Robert La Vere grew up on that place in the old house that a long time later we lived in. He was known back then as Jappy Levers. But he made a lawyer out of himself, and then he went by J. Robert La Vere. He hadn’t been long dead when the tenant before us gave the place up, and we moved there. Run down as it was, it was the best place we’d had, and we stayed on there until my mother died and I inherited our home place.
After Mr. La Vere was gone, his widow, Miss Charlotte, saw to the farm, and I’m telling you! She was something like nothing else. To see her come riding up in the back seat of that big car, wearing her hat and her fur and her white gloves and looking straight ahead through her little specs, you’d have thought she was the queen of Hargrave, which in a way she was.
A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership Page 24
