A Place on Earth (Port William) (48 page)

"Hold him, boys, hold him! Take hold and rear back!"

Burley and Big Ellis do take hold and rear back, with the strength of
desperation, but there is nothing to do, seeing that Whacker is bound to
go, except slow him down. But the farther he slips into the grave, the
faster he goes. His arms are too large even at the wrists to take much of
a grip on, and Burley and Big Ellis finally hold him only by his fingers.
Below them in the grave they can hear Jayber grunting, yielding ground
inch by inch as the big man comes irresistibly down.

But they do at last get him laid down in the bottom of the grave without letting him fall. The big head comes to rest between Jayber's feet.
They pitch in his hat and Jayber places it over his face and folds his hands,
and steps up onto the mound of his stomach and is hauled out.

And now the difficulty and danger of their labor only serve to increase
their sense of accomplishment. They feel that they have achieved a rare
distinction. Up on the hill they can see Big Ellis's car lights growing dim,
the battery nearly played out, but that seems not to matter now

"Well, it did fit him," Big Ellis says.

Burley laughs. "It's not exactly what you'd call roomy, is it, Jayber?"

"No," Jayber says, 'Ais not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church
door, but 'tis enough, 'twill serve."

"Durn if that ain't fine, Jayber. Say some more."

"Say some more, buddy."

Jayber straightens himself at the head of the grave and raises his
hand. And as though seized by meanings he cannot resist, he speaks
slowly and with feeling:

Stooping, he lifts in his cupped hands some dirt from the mound at
the grave's edge and lets it sift slowly in.

Overtaken and sobered by Jayber's words-Jayber as much as the
others-they stand with their heads bowed after he has finished. Apart
from anything any of them could have intended or expected, Jayber's
words have transcended drunkenness and farce. The meaning of the
time has been lifted far above the snores that come with astonishing
power out of the grave. Jayber's words have returned them to the occasion they started with-the end of the war, the dying, the deaths-the
graves of the millions that, beyond knowing, peace has come to.

Mat wakes up in one of the folding chairs in the dim light of the lamp
left burning at the head of the coffin. He wakes to resume the heaviness
of Ernest's death, cramped from sitting asleep in the hard chair, the old
pain lying deep and keen in his shoulder. He knows he cannot have slept
long.

Slowly, so as to make no noise, he straightens himself in the chair,
feeling with that movement how tired he is. This is the second night in a
row that he has passed with little sleep-and, he might as well say, no
rest. Seeing from the slight paling of the windows that dawn has begun,
anxious for the night to be over, he reaches up and turns off the lamp,
letting the grey of the sky seep into the room. It is not as light as he
thought it might be.

His awareness of the room fades. All his attention is caught now by
the pain in his shoulder. The pain is like a four-inch sliver of hot light
burrowing in under his shoulder blade. Or like a bullet; the pain of a
wound would be the same as other pain. It could be borne. A man gets
used to pain, he thinks. He learns it. It gets to be familiar to him, a part of what his life is and feels like. And what good does it do him? It teaches
him to make light of the pains that are less, and to respect those that are
greater. It teaches him what he can stand. And what good does that do
him? He needs to know what he can stand because the chances are he
will have to stand as much as he is able. That is what is ahead of him-to
suffer and to stand it. And so is there virtue in standing it? Maybe. Surely.
But there are limits too, and suffering kills. Ernest stood a great deal, and
kept quiet, until there came a greatness of it that he could not stand. And
that-what it takes to kill a man, what his limit is-is his mystery. The
mystery of his death that becomes the mystery of his life. In the flow of
his strange half-dream, Mat becomes conscious of his own mortality
upon him. And he does not care.

He rouses. The light has grown stronger. The outlines of the room
have begun to emerge out of the shadows. Changed to accommodate
Ernest's coffin and the ceremonies of his death, the room has an austerity that seems to Mat not only to stand for the sadness of all else, but to
be in itself a cause for sadness. He longs for it to be the way it was.

In the paling gloom he can make out the figure of Old Jack slumped
in another of the uncompromising chairs, still asleep, his hands resting
on his knees, the cane propped against the seat between his legs.

They sat out on the porch until after midnight, listening to the music
and the noises of the crowd. After Wheeler had started back to Hargrave, it was decided that the three women would go to bed, leaving Mat
and Old Jack to sit through the rest of the night beside the coffin. Old
Jack had insisted on staying, over the protests of Bess and Hannah, who
thought he ought to rest.

All I do is rest, honey," he said to Hannah.

He and Mat sat in the living room and talked, Mat sitting at the head
of the coffin with his back to it, and Old Jack facing him, as they still sit.
Mat, as though to lead his own mind as far from that room and that night
as possible, turned the conversation toward the past. The old man spoke
of the names and landmarks and happenings of a time before Mat's
birth, and Mat listened, his mind drawn back before its own beginning,
held and quieted by the vision of another time, and by the sense of the
continuance of the land, the place, through all that has happened on it
and to it-its history of little cherishing and much abuse. For as always it was finally the land that they spoke of, fascinated as they have been all
their lives by what has happened to it, their own ties to it, the wife of
their race, more lovely and bountiful and kind than they have usually
deserved, more demanding than they have often been able to bear.

After the house grew quiet, Old jack's interest in the talk began to
flag, and soon he quit talking altogether. He yawned and rubbed his
eyes, and then nodded, and his head dropped forward. With a kind of
anger he shook himself, and roused. Looking up at the lamp by Ernest's
coffin, he scratched his head, and in the midst of scratching dozed off,
his hand came slowly down and found a resting place on his thigh. His
face, tilted forward, was shadowed, but the lamplight gleamed in his
white hair.

Mat remained wakeful a long time. In the silence then he seemed to
have reached the end not just of talk but of thought as well. He felt the
pressing in of it-the silence of Ernest's death, the ever-waiting silence
that surrounds all speech.

He was still sitting there in that suspension when he heard the
approaching clamor of Whacker's funeral procession. At first it seemed
only a fitful last resurgence of the festivity, an indecipherable mingling
of shouts and laughter, but as it drew nearer he made out the measured
heavy beat of a dead march and, above it, the strained wailing of a dirge.

Mat's first impulse was to take the irreverence of it as an affront. And
for that reason, though it seemed to him he recognized the voices, he did
not get up as the clamor drew near to try to see who was making it. But
as the procession drew even with the house, he felt himself irresistibly
drawn into the spirit of it. That following the giddy jubilance of its victory celebration the peaceful sleep of the town should be broken, not by
any song of victory or thanksgiving, but by voices singing a dirge-that
seemed to him to be fitting. For in his mind, at least, and the minds of
the others who had sat in silence on the porch, hadn't the night been burdened with the knowledge that the dead have lost and are absent from
victory?

But that they went by singing, voices raised in the rhythm of loss and
grief with unabashed glee, seemed to Mat to change the night, to start it
toward something else-though he was not able to say what.

He shifts in his chair, needing to be up and stirring now that he is awake. There is no longer a comfortable way to sit. But he does not want
to disturb the sleepers, and the silence still presses on him as with a
weight.

He thinks of the women and the baby, still asleep. And then there
comes to him not only the thought of Margaret but the sense of her,
lying asleep, alone in their bed in the dim room. He longs to go in and lie
down beside her and take her in his arms.

Though he does not go to her now, the longing to do so makes a small
cell of happiness in his mind. It has been a long time since his thought
has gone so freely toward her.

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: