The Memory of Old Jack, page 15
The shadow of that time returns to him again and fills his mind. He bears it again. Though he has not moved, though he still sits on the porch as Andy left him, he has gone back into his old darkness, his eyes veiled with the sorrow of a man who must bear his own weight through the world as a burden. And yet it is not now as it was then, for ahead of him in his thought he is aware of the presence of Mat Feltner. Now his memory urges him forward. He would like to see Mat again as he was when he was a young man.
When he finally got clear of his debt to the bank—he had already paid what he owed to Ben Feltner—it was one of those days of false spring in late February, a day of clearing after rain, the shadows of clouds sliding over the country as fast, nearly, as a horse could run. He worked through the morning, and as soon as dinner was over rode to town with the check for his tobacco crop that he had sold the day before. He went into the bank and endorsed and deposited the check, and wrote out another in payment in full of the interest and the remainder of the principal, and received the canceled mortgage in his hand.
“Well,” the cashier said, as if to begin some goodhearted tribute, for he knew of Jack’s hardship. But Jack was already walking to the door; the old urging and haste were still upon him, and there was work he had to do. He folded the mortgage, creasing it twice, and put it in his shirt pocket and got on his horse.
It was a good black horse that Jack had named Socks because all four of his pasterns were white. Used to his rider’s haste, the horse went into a canter without a touch or a word as soon as he felt him mounted, and carried him swiftly out of the town. It was an easy, tireless canter that black horse had, and Jack rode with the unconscious grace that for years still to come would turn heads in the street
Sitting on the hotel porch, erect in the straight chair, he feels again the motion of that canter—pleased, now as then, by the horse’s fidelity to his gaits. And yet he is virtually thoughtless, the gray wheeltrack flowing backward beneath the unvarying beat of the shod hooves. It has been a long time since he has looked forward with his old free delight in the use of his mind; his thought has been freighted with necessities and urgencies, bound by the limits of present time and season and weather. And yet, now, he is aware of change, as a man preoccupied might be aware of the weather changing above his head. His life has changed; another hinge has turned. And after they have turned into the Birds Branch Road toward home he slows the horse to a walk, the better to think of it.
He touches the folded mortgage in his pocket; his fingertips press upon the crisp edges of that paper that had pledged him to the loss of everything and bound so many years of his labor to the fear of ruin; with his thumb he feels the flatness and smoothness of the paper, affirming the reality of that death pledge, now broken. After so long a time he is free. And the farm is free. He names in defiance and triumph the names of those who thought him beaten. But his words to himself are without strength, as though repeated from memory, and his deliverance remains unreal. Still, he rides along with a strange alertness, looking eagerly around him, as though his eyesight has been freed from a long confinement.
At the top of the rise beyond the ford on Birds Branch he comes in sight of the upland fields of his own place: the house and outbuildings and barns, the winter-deadened sod of the pastures, the veil of green wheat over last year’s croplands, the gray stone of the fences bending along the contour of the slopes, the trunks and the webbed and spiked branches of the unleafed woods. And now it seems to him that his soul breaks open, like a dull coal, shattering brilliance around him. He has been gone but little more than two hours, and yet he returns as from a long voyage or a war. Now he does consciously feel the open sky above him, the eye of heaven clear upon him. In that long, unwearying gaze he feels the clarity of his outline. Over his farm in the distance the broad cloud shadows pass, darkening and leaving bright again the rinsed air.
Clear and whole before him now he sees the object of his faith as he has not seen it for fifteen years. And he feels opening in himself the stillness of a mown field, such a peace as he has never known. For the last five years he has lived at the limit of his strength, not looking up from the ground, perishing at night into lonely sleep as though his bed was a grave from which he rose again in the dark, sore in his bones, to take up again the labor of repaying the past. And now, the shudder of realization in his flesh, he sees that he has come through. He has been faithful to his land, through all its yearly changes from maiden to mother, the bride and wife and widow of men like himself since the world began.
He lost his life—fifteen years that he had thought would be, and ought to have been, the best and the most abundant; those are gone from the earth, lost in disappointment and grief and darkness and work without hope, and now he is only where he was when he began. But that is enough, and more. He is returning home—not only to the place but to the possibility and promise that he once saw in it, and now, as not before, to the understanding that that is enough. After such grievous spending, enough, more than enough, remains. There is more. He lost his life, and now he has found it again.
Words come to him: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death ... Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil”—the words of the old psalm that Nancy had made him repeat when he was a boy until he would remember it all his life. He had always been able to see through those words to what they were about. He could see the green pastures and the still waters and the shepherd bringing the sheep down out of the hills in the evening to drink. It comes to him that he never understood them before, but that he does now. The man who first spoke the psalm had been driven to the limit, he had seen his ruin, he had felt in the weight of his own flesh the substantiality of his death and the measure of his despair. He knew that his origin was in nothing that he or any man had done, and that he could do nothing sufficient to his needs. And he looked finally beyond those limits and saw the world still there, potent and abounding, as it would be whether he lived or died, worthy of his life and work and faith. He saw that he would be distinguished not by what he was or anything that he might become but by what he served. Beyond him was the peace and rest and joy that he desired. Beyond the limits of a man’s strength or intelligence or desire or hope or faith, there is more. The cup runs over. While a man lies asleep in exhaustion and despair, helpless as a child, the soft rain falls, the trees leaf, the seed sprouts in the planted field. And when he knows that he lives by a bounty not his own, though his ruin lies behind him and again ahead of him, he will be at peace, for he has seen what is worthy.
Jack stopped the horse when he first reached the height of ground, and he stood him there as though to be observed by a critical eye—not consciously, he was not thinking about the horse, but that was the habit of his hand. And now he starts him on again, slowly so as to continue his thoughts and to savor the completion of his return. It seems to him that his life has come to its true beginning. He is forty-eight years old.
That his life was renewed, that he had been driven down to the bedrock of his own place in the world and his own truth and had stood again, that a profound peace and trust had come to him out of his suffering and his solitude, and that this peace would abide with him to the end of his days—all this he knew in the quiet of his heart and kept to himself. Who, in those days, could he have told? Not Ruth, for hers was a different faith, and no hardship or joy of hers would be apt to bring her nearer home; anyhow, he and Ruth did not speak of matters of importance. Not Clara; Clara was still only a little child—in a sense she would remain a child, for she would never be tasked with a burden that would teach her what he knew. To Ben perhaps, but Ben was old, and what Jack had to tell bore too strict a qualification of pain to be told to a man so near the grave and so much beloved. But it seemed to him that Ben already knew it, for when he told him that he was out of debt and on his feet again, Ben smiled and said: “Then it’s all right, Jack my boy. Didn’t I tell you so?”
It was only to Mat, after Mat had reached his manhood, after he had received the inheritance of Ben’s land and proved worthy of it, that Jack began to speak out of the exultant knowledge that had come to him. Then, fearing that Mat would look away from what he had undertaken or attempt in too much pride to go beyond it, Jack would gesture with his hand to the ridges and hollows that bore indelibly for them both the memory and the mark of Ben, and he would say: “That’s all you’ve got, Mat. It’s your only choice. It’s all you can have; whatever you try to gain somewhere else, you’ll lose here.” And then, taking hold of Mat’s shoulder, letting him see in his eyes with what fear and joy he meant it, he would say: “And it’s enough. It’s more than enough.” And he would quote that psalm: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.” He would ask as if half in jest: “Do you understand that, Mat? Do you know what it means ?” And he would put his eye on the younger man in order to keep him from saying glibly or too soon that he understood. And so he saw to it that when the time came when Mat had need of them he too would have those words in mind.
The renewal of his life made no change in the look of him or in his ways. By then he was determined and hardened; outwardly he had become what he was to be. From then on only time would change him. His hands and face and body were marked by his years of work and exposure; their shape and attitude were fixed as though his flesh had been annealed to the toughness of wood or live bone. And there was about him an air of stubbornness and withstanding; it was in the way he stood and moved, in the set of his face, in the directness of his stare.
Anyone who looked at him in those days sensed that he was a man who would do unflinchingly whatever he thought necessary, whatever affection or loyalty or obligation demanded. He had become a man whose presence changed other men; when he came among them his influence was discernible in the way they looked or stood or spoke.
But however little change there was in his aspect and his ways, the inward change was deep and permanent, and where this change was made visible was in his place. Coming home that February afternoon after he had paid his debt, he saw that under the oppression of his darkness and his long struggle the farm had grown stark. The yard trees standing nearest the house had died or grown too infirm to be trusted to stand, and had been cut down and not replaced, leaving the house without shade. The orchard that his father had planted had nearly died out. The buildings all needed paint. The new barn that he had built ten years before to replace the burned one never had been painted; now the boards had turned gray and were streaked with rust from the nailheads. Most troubling of all were the two or three of his fields that under the constraint of his debt he had neglected or overtaxed. Wherever he looked he saw the need for remedies and repairs, and he felt the satisfaction he would take in those attentions.
He remembered what he had understood after his fight with Will Wells: that he could not ask another man to work without hope; that therefore he would not acquire more land, but instead turn his effort with redoubled care in upon the land that was rightfully his, not because it belonged to him so much as because, by the expenditure of history and work, he belonged to it, and because he could properly attend to it by himself. The onset of that understanding had been the immediate cause of much of his hardship. Now it set him free. Its results slowly became visible around him and under his feet. His thoughts no longer ranged the distances of possibility but were contained inside the boundaries of his farm. He became again the true husband of his land. He still worked and went ahead as before, but now his work was healing; it restored the health of his place and his own satisfaction. He had come a long way from what he might have been. Now as he drove to the field in the morning and returned again at night, as he looked after his stock in the pastures, and made his rounds of the pens and barns, doing his chores, there was a joy deep in him, shining, reflecting the sky, like water in a well.
He began the restoration of his fields. As he had time and money he repaired and painted or whitewashed the buildings. He planted young shade trees in the yard and fruit trees in the orchard, and carried water to them in the dry spells of summer. He planted berry beds and an arbor of grapes, hedges and edgings and shrubs. Under his hands the place became abundant and beautiful as it had never been in the time of his memory.
He saw in Ruth’s face certain softenings of pleasure at what he had done. He knew that he was making her life more agreeable, and he was glad. But such acknowledgment as she made she might have made to a stranger. He expected no more. It was too late, and he accepted that. But he felt keenly the want of words between them. If they could have spoken with some candor of themselves, with some mutual pleasure of their place in the world, looking ahead with concern or with hope, that would have made them both different lives and different deaths. But she could not offer, and he could not ask. That was his failure: he had not united farm and household and marriage bed, and he could not. For him that was not to be, though the vision of what he had lost survived in his knowledge of his failure, and taught him the magnitude of his tragedy, and made him whole. It was too late for a woman’s love. And that was all that was lacking.
He is aware, in the cold, of the dark barn, the smells of hay and dung and the bodies of animals; the sounds of chewing, of hay drawn from mangers, of corn rattling in troughs. The mangers are full of hay, the stalls and pens fresh bedded. The north wind sings in the gable. His fingers and toes ache with the cold; he is hungry and tired. The work done, he can think of sleep. For a moment the apprehension of sleep comes powerfully over him, seeming to sway him in his tracks, the thought of the released weight of his body and its repose.
He goes out and draws the doors to behind him and turns to the winter twilight, the cold wind bending close over the farm out of the starless distance. The ground is whitening with snow, and he can feel the flakes melting on his cheek. For some moments yet he stands still upon the turning world, in the whirl of the snow, in the falling night. Closing the doors against the cold dark, he has closed and cherished in his mind the thriving that the barn holds, the vision of that harbored life emerging in green spring. This is his devotion. He tilts his face up into the long fall of the snow.
Again he thinks of Mat, ahead of him, but near.
In the summer of 1912 Ben Feltner died—he was killed, shot down in the road by a man whose friend he had been. Old Jack feels again the weight of that sudden grief.
Now, with Ben gone, Jack had his mind, and his eye too, on Mat. He had loved Mat through all his growing up and had had the satisfaction of seeing him become a young man worthy, perhaps, of his father. He kept that perhaps in mind, for he knew that the test had not come, and he waited for the test.
The test came, he knew, with Ben’s death, and it would not soon end. Knowing the lonely responsibility that Ben’s absence would make for Mat, he began spending more time on the Feltner place than he had before. When he could spare a half day or a day, he would get on his horse or take a team and go to Mat’s, and just step into whatever work was going on. He gave Mat his help; more important, he gave him his presence. As thirty years before Ben had been on hand for him, so now he was on hand for Mat. He gave him the steadiness, and he gave him the little uneasiness and the pressure, that a young man can only get from an older man’s knowing eye. It was one of the good fortunes of his life that when Mat needed him he was in the clear, for then the time of his solitude was ended.
Now he can see Mat again as he was when he was twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old—a little flighty yet, a little too impatient, a little too easily upset or discouraged, but a good man, and the time was coming when the two of them would speak and work together as equals. He can see Mat’s face as it was then: big ears that stuck out, nose a little hooked like the Beechums’ noses, his father’s clear, understanding eyes, hat tilted jauntily onto the back of his head; a grin—maybe a little uneasy, maybe a little defiant—turns up the corners of his mouth as he watches Jack’s eyes for some sign of what he thinks.
And again Old Jack raises and opens his hand.
Eight: Exile
Mrs. Hendrick has already stepped twice from the kitchen to the screen door and called sharply “Supper!” and though Old Jack heard her both times he instantly forgot. Or rather that crisp command fell upon the current of his thought like a dry leaf on the surface of a deeply flowing stream, to be borne forty years away. It is not until she deigns to come out onto the porch and stand before him, arms akimbo, that her summons penetrates the half-lit closet of his present consciousness, and she has the satisfaction of seeing him look up at her, his eyes deeply shaded and withdrawn beneath the bill of his old cap.
“Good evening, Suzy.”
“Supper’s ready. I already called you twice.”
