That distant land, p.33
That Distant Land, page 33
“Two seventy-five,” Elton says.
The auctioneer looks at Earl Benson. His tone has grown quiet now and personal, the public auction reduced to a conversation among three men. He is asking Earl if he will pay $285.
For a long time Earl does not give any sign that he knows he is where he is. He is looking down, thinking, and Wheeler knows within a guess or two what he is thinking about. He has a mortgage against his home place. He has the bank to account to. He has interest and wages to pay. He has bills for fuel and fertilizer and seed and parts and supplies. He has something to gain, and perhaps more to lose. He stands with his head down while desire and pride argue with chance, mortality, and arithmetic. Finally he raises his head, looks at the auctioneer, looks away, and nods.
Before the auctioneer can begin his spiel again, Wheeler’s hand has tightened on Elton’s arm and Elton has said, “Two ninety.”
“That’s right,” Wheeler says.
And there is another pause, and Earl Benson bids $295.
“Go on,” Wheeler says, and Elton says, “Three hundred.”
They wait then while the auctioneer speaks to Earl, who shakes his head once, and again, and turns away.
The auctioneer brings his hand down. “Sold! To Elton Penn here, for three hundred dollars an acre.”
Elton, shaken, still shaking, looks at Wheeler and grins. “Is that me?”
And the auctioneer, overheating, laughs and says, “You Elton Penn, ain’t you, honey?”
Wheeler leaves Elton and Mary to complete their purchase, and goes back to his office. In the privacy of the dark stairway, he allows himself to grin at last, in relief and triumph, and in his mind he says to Old Jack, “How’s that?” And to himself he says, “And what’s next?” He pretty well knows what is next. He is still hurrying.
He shuts his office door and, without taking off his overcoat and hat, picks up a yellow pad with some figures on it, reads them over, and then sits down and rapidly works his way through another set of figures.
Elton and Mary have paid a hundred dollars an acre more than the two hundred stipulated by Old Jack’s letter. And so Clara’s dishonoring of that letter has earned her, and cost the Penns, $15,000. The place has cost $45,000, of which Old Jack’s legacy to the Penns will cover a third, and Wheeler assumes that they will have savings that will increase that by somewhat. By Wheeler’s own estimate, the farm would have been worth its price to anybody at $250 an acre, which puts Elton above the mark by $7,500. Going beyond $250, Wheeler thought beforehand and still thinks, might be justifiable for Earl Benson, who owns adjoining land, or for Elton, whose occupation of the place and whose familiarity with it, both from his own experience and Old Jack’s instruction, would have a practical worth. Whether or not that worth would reach $7,500, Wheeler does not know. But at that point he would, anyhow, shift the ground of justification: Elton and Mary ought to have the farm because they are worthy of it.
Studying his figures, considering all that he knows to consider, Wheeler concludes that the Penns are safe enough. Assuming that they can continue to do as well as they have done, they will own their farm—which is perhaps as good a chance as anybody could ask.
But Wheeler is not done assuming yet. If he assumes, as he must, that if left alone Elton would have stopped bidding at $235, then Wheeler must consider himself in some manner responsible for $9,750 of the Penns’ debt. He cannot come up with that kind of money without selling something that he ought to keep, and he does not need it now, anyway; he may not need it ever, but he knows that he must regard it as one of the possible prices of his own freedom.
He does another brief computation, and picks up the telephone. He calls the cashier of the Hargrave Farmers’ Bank and finds that he can spare a thousand dollars, and he arranges for the transfer of that sum to a savings account in the name of Beechum, Catlett, and Penn. “I’ll send the check right over,” he says. “Yes. That’s right. That’s the name of the company.” He hangs up, takes a check pad from the drawer of his desk, writes out a check, and seals it in an envelope.
He has been sitting upright on the edge of his chair, and now he leans back, pushes his hat off his forehead, and lapses into stillness. But even still, he remains expectant, listening, and soon he hears the street door open and shut and then footsteps coming up the stairs. Miss Julia opens the door. “Elton Penn is here.”
“Tell him to come in,” Wheeler says, and then, himself, calls, “Come in, Elton.” As Miss Julia goes out, he hands her the envelope. “Take that to the bank, please.”
When Elton comes in, Wheeler grins at him. “Well. You’ve come out all right, I think.”
“I don’t know, Wheeler. I might have made one hell of a mistake.” Elton is as tightly strung as a banjo, and there is a little glistening in his eyes.
“Sit down,” Wheeler says, and Elton does.
“Where’s Mary?”
“The grocery store,” Elton says. That is not what he has come to talk about.
“Well, it could have been better,” Wheeler says. “No doubt about that.” And then he grins again and says, “And it could have been worse.”
“This was bad enough, maybe. What do you think?”
“I think it was a shame it had to happen the way it did. A damned shame. I don’t understand—” Wheeler stops then and shakes his head. “But I suppose we mustn’t say everything we think.”
He picks up the pad with his figures on it and looks at it, thinking, for a minute, and then pitches it back onto the desk. “I know you’re worried about the price, Elton. But it’s an amount I think you can manage—if you live, of course, and stay on your feet.”
“I could get sick or die too,” Elton says.
Wheeler laughs. “Of course you could. But I don’t see how we can depend on that. I’m afraid we’ll just have to assume that you won’t. It’s a risky business.” He swivels his chair toward the window and looks at the sky a moment, recovering his thought, and then turns back to Elton. “In other words, I think you did what you should have done. You have the farm, and I believe you’re going to be glad of it. And I’m glad of it. It’s a great relief to me.”
“Well, of course, if I’d lost it, I’d have been sick. But I can still lose it.”
“No, my boy. You’re not going to lose it. Not if we both can help it. I told you to go ahead because it would be all right. You must understand that I meant that. If you need help, I’m going to help you.”
“But, damn it, Wheeler, don’t you think I ought to lose it if I can’t make it on my own?”
“No,” Wheeler says. “I don’t think that. I can see how a person might think that. It seems to me I thought something like that myself once. But I don’t think it anymore.”
“It’s the obligation, Wheeler.” Elton looks up at Wheeler and his eyes glisten again. “If it hadn’t been for you, Wheeler, I’d have lost that farm today. I know it, and I appreciate it. But why should you have done that? Why should you have felt obliged to help me get into a problem that now you feel obliged to help me get out of?”
Wheeler knows this longing for independence in Elton because he knows it in himself. He knows that he is a trespasser, and he feels suddenly heavy with the complexity and difficulty of what he has begun. But he is amused too and is trying not to show it. Like any young man who has won his heart’s desire, Elton wishes he had won it by himself, wishes to possess it on his own terms, its first and only lover.
“It wasn’t me,” Wheeler says, and is at once startled by his words and filled with a sort of glee by them. “It wasn’t me. If I had stood back and let you lose that farm, or let it lose you, that old man would have talked to me in the dark for the rest of my life.”
“You did it out of loyalty to Mr. Beechum?”
“Partly.” Wheeler studies the man sitting in front of him, who is sitting there studying him, puzzled by him at the moment, Wheeler guesses, and waiting courteously for him to say what he is talking about. And Wheeler again feels his great liking for this Elton Penn—a young man, as Old Jack would say, with a good head on his shoulders. An orderly man, who makes order around him.
“The place,” Wheeler says, “is not its price. Its price stands for it for just a minute or two while it’s bought and sold, and may hang over it a while after that and have an influence on it, but the place has been here since the evening and the morning were the third day. The figures are like us; here and gone.”
“The figures make it mine,” Elton says, “if I can be equal to ’em.”
“The figures give you the right to call it yours for a little while.”
“They give me the right to do a hell of a lot more than that.”
For some time now they do not say anything. There is more feeling in what Elton has said than he has found words for, and more than Wheeler wants to deal with in a hurry. Wheeler is amused by Elton’s predicament, and yet is moved and troubled by it. Here is a young man whose experience has taught him the meaning of debt, who wants above all to be paid up and in the clear, and who has become first the inheritor of a bequest that he did not ask for and did not expect, and next the beneficiary of an act of friendship that he did not ask for and, with part of his mind, does not want. Wheeler sits and looks at Elton while Elton sits and looks at the palm of his right hand, oppressed between gratitude and resentment. Watching him struggle, Wheeler realizes again the fatality of what he has undertaken. He has started something that he will have to finish. And how long will that be?
The office has faded away around them. They might as well be in a barn, or in an open field. They are meeting in the world, Wheeler thinks, striving to determine how they will continue in it. Both of them are still wearing their hats and coats.
“People have been exercising those rights here for a hundred and seventy-five years or so,” he says finally, “and in general they’ve wasted more than they’ve saved. One of the rights the figures give is the right to ruin.”
“You’re talking about something you learned out of a book, Wheeler.”
“I’m talking about something that I learned from Jack Beechum, among others, and something you’ll learn too, if you stay put and pay attention, whether I tell it to you or not.”
“Do you know what I want, Wheeler?”
“I expect I do. But tell me.”
“I want to make it on my own. I don’t want a soul to thank.”
Wheeler thinks, “Too late,” but he does not say it. He grins. That he knows the futility of that particular program does not prevent him from liking it. ‘Well,” he says, “putting aside whatever Mary Penn might have to say about that, and putting aside what it means in the first place just to be a living human, I don’t think your old friend has left you in shape to live thankless.”
He sees that Elton sees, or is beginning to. This man who longs to be independent cannot bear to be ungrateful. Wheeler knows that. But the suffering of obligation is still on Elton, and he says, “What do you mean?”
“I mean you’re a man indebted to a dead man. So am I. So was he. That’s the story of it. Back of you is Jack Beechum. Back of him was Ben Feltner. Back of him was, I think, his own daddy. And back of him somebody else, and on back that way, who knows how far? And I’m back of you because Jack Beechum is, and because he’s back of me, along with some others.
“It’s no use to want to make it on your own, because you can’t. Oh, Glad Pettit, I reckon, would say you can, but Glad Pettit deals in a kind of property you can put in your pocket. Or he thinks he does. But when you quit living in the price and start living in the place, you’re in a different line of succession.”
Elton laughs. “The line of succession I’m in says you’ve got to make it on your own. I’m in the line of succession of root, hog, or die.”
“That may have been the line of succession you were in, but it’s not the one you’re in now. The one you’re in now is different.”
“Well, how did I get in it?” Elton says almost in a sigh, as if longing to be out of it.
“The way you got in it, I guess, was by being chosen. The way you stay in it is by choice.”
“And I got in because Mr. Beechum chose me.”
“And Mary. He chose you and Mary. He thought you two were a good match, and that mattered to him. His own marriage, you know, was not good. Yes, you could say he chose you. But there’s more to it. He chose you, we’d have to say too, because he’d been chosen. The line is long, and not straight.”
Wheeler pauses for a minute. He’s leaning a little forward now, his elbows resting on the chair arms, his hands loosely joined in front of him.
“And then we’d have to say that, through him, the farm chose you.”
Elton looks straight at him. “The farm did.”
Wheeler smiles. “The land expects something from us. The line of succession, the true line, is the membership of people who know it does. Uncle Jack knew it, and he knew you would learn it.”
“Now wait a minute,” Elton says. “Hold on.”
But Wheeler sees a little of the way ahead now, and he keeps going. “We start out expecting things of it. All of us do, I think. And then some of us, if we stay put and pay attention, see that expectations are going the other way too. Demands are being made of us, whether we know it or know what they are or not. The place is crying out to us to do better, to be worthy of it. Uncle Jack knew that.”
Wheeler stops again and looks at Elton. “He thought you were worthy. Do you remember that spring day when he first came to visit, after you and Mary moved in?”
“In May 1945,” Elton says. “The day Germany surrendered.”
“Well, right then he started hoping that you and Mary would own the farm. He mentioned it to me that same evening. I remember it very well. I said, ‘Well, what do you think of Elton Penn?’ And he said, ‘I think he’s a good one.’”
“But, Wheeler,” Elton says, and there is a catch of tenderness in his voice now, and there is some fear in it. “Maybe he was wrong about me.”
“Maybe,” Wheeler says. “But he didn’t think so—he didn’t change his mind in seven years—and I don’t think so.”
Wheeler is remembering the first time he ever saw Elton. It was March of 1944, and Wheeler was trying to persuade Old Jack to leave his farm and take up residence in the hotel in Port William. Since his wife’s death Old Jack had lived alone and had done, as he said, a good job of it. But now everybody who cared about him was worried about him. He was too old, they thought, to be living by himself, and Wheeler had begun his argument, which he soon saw would have to be improved. If Old Jack was ever to be persuaded to move out, somebody Wheeler could vouch for would have to be ready to move in.
Because of the war, suitable people were even less available than usual, but finally Wheeler heard of a tenant on a rough farm on Cotman Ridge, a young fellow by the name of Elton Penn, who was looking for a better place.
When Wheeler stopped in Goforth to ask directions—it was a bright, warm, windy morning—his sometime client, Braymer Hardy, was sitting on a keg in front of the store.
Elton Penn was not at home, Braymer said. He was plowing some corn ground he had rented from Mrs. Cotman over across the creek, in the bottom over there.
Having got his directions, Wheeler asked, “What about this boy, Braymer?”
“He’ll do!”
“Well, what do you know about him?”
“He’s been on his own ever since he was fourteen, Wheeler. He’s sort of a half orphan, you might say. He’s made a crop every year since he was fourteen, and every damn one of ’em’s been a good one.”
“Can you depend on him?”
Braymer nodded. “Yessir. You can depend on him.”
Wheeler started his car.
“I’d a thought you’d a knowed this boy, Wheeler. Didn’t he sprout over about Port William?”
“I don’t know.”
“His daddy was Albert Penn. You knowed him.”
“Yes. I knew Albert. So this is Albert’s boy.”
“I expect Albert was dead and they was gone from over there before Elton got growed up enough for a fellow to know.”
“I expect so,” Wheeler said.
He followed the gravel road across the Katy’s Branch valley toward the farm he had been directed to, but before he reached the turnoff to the house he found his man.
Elton was plowing a field in the bottom that began level along the creek and then rose gradually up toward the steeper slope of the valley side. Wheeler saw that the plowlands were laid out correctly. He saw the quality of the thought that had gone ahead of the work, the design of the year’s usage laid neatly and considerately upon the natural shape of the field. Elton was working a team of black horses. He had them stepping, urging them and himself, and yet there was an appearance of ease in their work that to Wheeler bespoke the accomplishment of the workman: the horses were fitted and harnessed and hitched right; the plow was running right.
Having already stopped his car, Wheeler turned off the engine, and in the quiet that followed, in which he could hear the wind, he sat and looked. Watching Elton, he might, he felt, have been watching his own father as a young man, or Old Jack himself as a young man. He felt himself in the presence of a rare and passionate excellence belonging to his history and his country, and he was moved. He sat there a long time, watching, forgetting the year he was in.
“Maybe we were wrong about you,” he says to Elton. “You’ve still got time to prove us wrong. But it’s too late now for me to believe you will.” Elton sits with his head down, thinking. The question they have come to now requires a long proof. The burden of time is on him. When he dies, somebody will answer.
And then he looks up again at Wheeler. “So this has happened now because of all these things coming together—because Mr. Beechum wanted it to happen, and because the farm, as you say, wanted it to, and because you wanted it to.”
“And because you and Mary wanted it to,” Wheeler says.
Elton looks at him and slowly nods.
“And because what has happened has been desirable to a lot of people we never knew, who lived before us.”
