The Memory of Old Jack, page 16
“I thank you. I’m a coming.”
To make sure of him this time she waits until he has stood and then she follows him in through the door and across the diminutive lobby and into the dining room, where the rest of the derelict company—four old women and two other old men—are waiting.
It has been many years since Mrs. Hendrick’s hotel has had a guest in the usual sense. The roads have long been too good and the means of transportation too swift for any self-respecting traveler or politician or salesman to have been benighted at any such out-of-the-way place as Port William. And it has no doubt been even longer since any self-respecting wayfarer would have looked with relief or favor upon the accommodations afforded by the frugal Mrs. Hendrick. The hotel’s clients these days are permanent residents—that is, of course, within the limits of mortality. It is understood that they will be there until they die, or until they are carried away to die in a harness of tubes in some hospital bed, for they are the ancient widows and widowers of the neighborhood, too old or infirm to remain alone in their isolated farmhouses, either childless or unwilling or unable or uninvited to move in with their children who have gone off to jobs in the city. Their fate is to perish at modest rent under the care of Mrs. Hendrick, who, to give her due credit, does keep them warm and well fed, and who does keep a responsible eye on them. For years now Jayber Crow has referred to the establishment as the local airport: “Where are gathered those about to depart into the heavens.”
Under the eye of the ever-watchful Mrs. Hendrick, Old Jack goes to his accustomed place at the end of the one of the long tables that is occupied, the three others being bare. Thinking to remove neither his coat nor his cap, he sits down in his chair at the angle at which he has drawn it out from the table, and he keeps his left hand gripped onto the crook of his cane. His attitude thus communicates a most tentative and passing relation to the table and the assembled company. He appears ready at any second to rise and be on his way.
When the evening’s bowl of soup is placed before him he first pays no attention to it at all, and then, the sounds and motions of the others’ eating seeming to remind him, he begins absently to skim the broth off the top and convey it to his mouth, holding the end of the handle of the spoon tremulously between his thumb and forefinger. All this is observed by Mrs. Hendrick, for usually he addresses himself as straightforwardly to his supper as to whatever else demands his attention; usually he eats heartily and asks for more. She watches him closely, perhaps anxiously, perhaps even with sympathy, for she is not a heartless woman, though by her lights her relationship with Old Jack has not been rewarding.
“Are you all right, Mr. Beechum? Do you feel all right?”
“I’m fine. I thank you, Suzy.”
“Is there something else I can bring you?”
“No. No. I thank you, good woman.”
Their relationship, from her point of view at least, has been difficult. Old Jack’s character and habits and values and hours have in no way conformed to hers. He would be up, wanting breakfast, in what she considered the middle of the night. When she sought to be mild he would be uproarious. Where she was discreet he was blunt. Where she was modest he was oblivious. Where she was pious he was profane. And so on. For three or four years after he came to live there he oppressed her with a huge garden to which, without asking, he sacrificed her whole back lot. She had to admit that it was a saving and even a pleasure to have the vegetables that he grew at no cost to her. But to have them hove down by bushels at odd hours and without warning into the middle of her kitchen floor, to be nearly buried under them, to be called out of bed, along with her female boarders, four hours after midnight with the expectation that they would then and there commence canning several bushels of tomatoes—it was too much, and she was glad when it ended. It did end, of course, as in her calmer moments she knew it would. For in what she has perhaps had to consider her contest with Old Jack, time has been on her side. And the nearer she has come to triumph the more indulgent and sympathetic she has afforded to be. They have managed to live together under the same roof as long as eight years because, on his side, Old Jack has been largely oblivious of their contest and, on hers, Mrs. Hendrick has been constrained to balance her troubles with his rent.
Old Jack has thought of his residence there as merely an arrangement, an accommodation of his circumstances, in itself neither good nor bad. Or perhaps he thought it the best of bad alternatives. The worst alternative would have been to go to live with Clara and her husband, the banker Gladston Pettit, in their luxurious house down in Louisville, where in his judgment he would have been not only old and useless but hopelessly a stranger.
In choosing to go to live the last of his days in the hotel in Port William, Old Jack acted upon what he took to be two indisputable truths: that if he no longer belonged on his farm—if, living alone there, he had become a source of worry to his friends and kin—then at least he still belonged among the people he loved and knew well; and that Clara was his daughter only in name and, in some sad and irremediable way, in affection.
From the time of her birth Clara was Ruth’s child. He always knew that. He felt a sort of moral inferiority in the matter, having failed to be the man Ruth wanted him to be, and so he yielded in this, as he did so far as his means and his pride would allow in all matters of the household. Besides, unless the child had followed him to the fields, which she rarely even wanted to do, he could not have hoped to influence the growth of her character. And so she grew up in the house, under the persistent tutelage of her mother’s thwarted ambition. He foresaw early the way it was fated to go—well enough at least that he was not surprised at the way it went.
When she completed such education as was afforded by the one-room school on Birds Branch, Clara was sent away during the school term to a seminary for young ladies then flourishing at Acropolis, a town a few miles up the Ohio above Hargrave. And when she finished her courses at Acropolis she attended a small church college in central Kentucky. Though he was out of debt by the time Clara enrolled at Acropolis, Jack was by no means well off, and during the eight years that she spent away at school he was again forced to skimp and deny himself in order to pay her expenses. In the warm months he often worked without a hat or shoes. When he plowed his corn he frequently went bare-legged to keep the blades from fretting the cloth of his pants. No economy was too petty or too harsh for him, and by such measures he gave Clara her education. And Ruth was as self-denying and as frugal as he was. She saved and used every crumb and scrap and rag. She made Clara’s dresses. She sold cream and eggs so that the girl would have pin money. Clara emerged at the age of twenty-two—a pretty, bright-eyed, happy, and eminently marriageable young lady—out of the hardship and the bitter division of her parents, as innocent of any real knowledge at least of the hardship as if she had been the wealthiest of her schoolmates.
Clara spent the first two years after her graduation from college in a series of visits back and forth with her now-scattered friends. It was a long season of courtships and marriages. The old house was brightened up for another of its eminent occasions; this time it adorned itself for the final departure of its last blood heir. But until the day of that departure came, the house was lively as it had not been in his memory. Parties of young people would visit for days at a time. There would be great flurries and excitements of dressing and getting ready; there was eating and laughing and singing; the dust-covered automobiles of young men would be parked under the trees in the yard. The work of the farm went on as if far in the background now, Jack a solitary figure in the landscape.
Sometimes when she was at home alone Clara would invoke again their old half-sly comradeship of the time of her childhood when he would come in from the field with surprises for her hidden in his pockets, and he would listen, smiling, while she prated of events and people of no meaning to him. He would be again the remote, gentle man she remembered from what seemed to her a long time ago. But she was not a child now, and she could not speak to him as she was. He knew that he bore in her eyes also something of the strangeness and hardness, the implicit threat or danger, that Ruth saw in him. In the presence of her friends she covered him with the urban stereotype of the farmer: the man of the soil, the hardy plowman, rugged and proud, but somewhat comical in his speech and old clothes, with his quaint preoccupations and his stay-at-home ways. “Oh, Papa, you’re impossible,” she would say, “just impossible.” He saw it all, and knew what it meant.
Their estrangement was sealed forever by her marriage to one of the automobile drivers, Gladston Pettit of Louisville, a young man of some considerable attainment already, with brilliant prospects in banking and finance. They had the wedding at the house—an affair that embarrassed Jack by its multitude of formalities and by what seemed to him its ostentation, and saddened him by its gravity and finality. And this was Ruth’s triumph. She had done as she would have been done by.
Glad Pettit was a man of extraordinary good looks, as he well knew, with his athlete’s build, his regular features, his disarming, confident smile, and his wavy hair parted straight in the middle. He bore toward his father-in-law all the blandishments and observances of a generalized and perfunctory respect. Whenever Jack said anything Glad listened with what he deemed an excess of attention. He inquired, with a large show of interest and in as much detail as the hearsay of his knowledge would allow, about the goings on of the farm. For Glad Pettit was affability itself, and to him, as to Clara, Jack was the Man of the Soil. He loved to confide to his colleagues in the city that men like his father-in-law were the salt of the earth. But however much he admired the type, Glad was no more inclined to learn about it than he was to emulate it. His shoes were as innocent of the earth as a pair of newborn babes.
On their Sunday visits to the farm, which would occur about once a month, Clara and Glad would arrive in Glad’s automobile, which seemed year by year to grow larger and richer and brighter, its immaculate gloss bearing like an insult the dust of the country roads. During the time of his and Clara’s courtship Glad had always parked under a tree at some distance from the house, but now he drove to the very foot of the porch steps so that Clara could pass from the car into the house almost without touching the ground. She would go out to the kitchen, where her mother, just back from church, with an apron over her best dress, would be preparing dinner. And Glad, carrying in the Sunday paper, which he always brought to bestow upon his in-laws, would sit down in the rocker in the living room and cross his legs and light a cigar and read. When Jack came in Glad would rise, shake his hand, enact his ritual of interest in crops and weather, and resume his paper and cigar.
And always, when they left, the car would be loaded with the bounty of the farm. When the young people were getting ready to go Ruth and Jack would always be gathering up for them whatever was in season, from the first greens of the spring to the last turnips and parsnips of the fall, from the frying chickens of early summer to the turkey at Thanks-giving to the cured ham at Christmas. And in this again Jack felt his estrangement from them, and he sensed that Ruth did also. For what could their simple and hard-earned abundance mean to that beautiful, carefree pair who made such an unabashed show of needing nothing? The car loaded, the Pettits having gained its sanctuary again in their still immaculate shoes, Jack and Ruth would stand in front of the porch and watch them out of sight.
That all of this followed unerringly the line of the old breakage and division in his life, Jack knew. He knew that the shape of his undoing had entered the door of his house and feasted at his table. Perhaps he did not yet foresee in those Sunday dinners the solitary meals that he eats now among strangers in the exile of his old age. But these suppers at the hotel too often recall his memory to that bounty of smokehouse and henhouse and garden carried off in the banker’s gleaming machine to the satisfaction of such hunger as might be roused by the balancing of figures in a book.
He remains half-turned from the table, looking away. The bowl of soup, still unfinished, sits forgotten at his elbow. The others are starting on their pie. As though under a tangible weight of his silence, they have spoken little during the meal. And now at intervals they glance covertly at him and look away and glance at him again, for his right hand has begun to beat upon the corner of the table a rhythm as slow and unregarded and implacable as the ticking of a big clock. He is thinking of finality, the inescapability of finality. He sees in that marriage of Clara’s, that shiny car rocking and gliding almost soundlessly away over the bumps of the drive, the permanence, the final insignia, of the failure of his own marriage.
It ended in the failure it began in. He was seventy-five years old, and Ruth was sixty-four. It was April and he was plowing; though slower and less agile than he had been, he was still a vigorous and a strong man. The sun gleamed on the young grass. He was plowing an old bluegrass sod, and it broke well, the furrow crumbling as it turned, dark to light. With deep pleasure, with his familiar sense of the blessedness of that old return, he watched the earth roll dark off the moldboard and settle and lie still again in the long, straight furrow. At noon he watered and stabled and fed his team. He hung his cap on its nail on the back porch and stepped into the kitchen to find no one there and the stove cold.
He stands in the door a minute, only looking, a cool cell of fear opening low in his throat. And then he hurries through the back hall to the living room, and finds Ruth lying on the sofa, struggling for breath.
“I’m sick, Jack. I can hardly breathe.”
She has been stricken for several hours. She is nearly exhausted by her suffering, and the distraction of fear is in her eyes.
“Don’t talk,” he says. “It’ll be all right.”
He brings down a quilt and covers her and builds up the fire and goes.
He never rode such a ride again—an absolute demanding in his hands, the gathering and springing of the horse’s stride beneath him, the road reeling back.
By luck, he found the doctor in town, and started him on his way. He then turned his lathered horse up the street toward Mat’s. Mat had eaten dinner by that time and gone back to the field, but Margaret said she would send for him, that she would phone Clara, that she and Mat would come straight on as soon as he got to the house.
The doctor and Mat and Margaret and two neighbor women stayed through the afternoon and night. It was clear that Ruth had had a serious heart attack, that she might not recover. They watched by her bed until morning, and then Mat went back to town and called Clara again as they had arranged.
And shortly after noon that day Clara and Gladston Pettit, who were weathering the Depression in their accustomed style, drove into the driveway, followed this time by an ambulance. Weeping, Clara leaned over the bed and kissed her mother. “My dear,” she said, “we are going to take you home with us, where you can be comfortable.”
She might have said a better thing. She might have put it a kinder way for the sake of the ones there who had done the best they could. But what she said left nothing for them to say.
Now Jack stands at the door, holding it open to permit the men of the ambulance to carry Ruth out. Her face is white and drawn, and her hair is gray on the pillow, and her good gray eyes are weary and unresisting even to death. The bearers hesitate a moment, turning out the door, and Ruth reaches and takes Jack’s hand. Their eyes meet as though a great deal might be said now, were there time.
“Jack,” she says. “Bless you, Jack. Good-by.”
They carry her on. They slide the stretcher into the ambulance. Clara gets in beside her mother. The attendants shut the door and get in themselves. Glad Pettit waves to those on the porch and gets into his car. And then the two vehicles ease out, smoothly rocking, over the stones of the drive.
He goes back to his plowing, for that is what there is to do. But he remembers her hand that perhaps had never touched him so—the feel of her hand, its passing lightness, age’s loosening of the skin upon the delicate bone. He remembers her eyes, their tiredness, their unaccustomed gentleness upon him, as though wearied at last into some final and frail, hopeless and helpless love. He walks in the furrow, following his plow, an old man, white-haired, yielding his steps to their immutable finality. He knows the finality of life and time, of loss and grief. He knows the permanence of failure. His body is shaken now by cries that come strange to the ears of his team, and his tears fall into the furrow as it opens.
The sound of his cry alerts him only momentarily to the ranked pairs of old eyes along the two sides of the table, turned toward him in their various lights of alarm and amusement and concern. And then he turns from them again, passes them by, and goes back, as if his chair is a speeding vehicle swerving out of the past and into it again. There is no longer enough here to hold him.
Mat and Margaret or Wheeler and Bess Catlett would take him down on Sunday afternoons to the Pettits’ house, where Ruth lay dying in a sunny room, always attended by a nurse. He would sit, mainly silent, in that many-windowed room, while the others talked. It seemed to him that he understood little of what they said there, and he said to himself that he must be getting old. When he came in, and again when he left, Ruth would rouse out of her stillness and look at him and take his hand. Even the pain had somehow gone out of that; it had become a sort of duty. The old division between them had now been substantiated by real distance. Ruth was already in another world.
And each time Jack came he brought them the gifts of his faithful work: baskets of eggs, baskets of whatever was in season in the garden, ajar of cream, a joint of pork. That was what he had left for them in the way of speech. It was his message to them. Had it come to different people it might have been eloquent. In the circumstances, it was muteness itself, the helpless gesture of their estrangement. It would be dressed by the Pettits’ yardman, prepared by their cook, served by their maid. It was good food, such stuff as Glad Pettit could have purchased by the ton if he had wanted to. It might as well have been purchased.
