The Memory of Old Jack, page 20
Wheeler feels the abruptness of the first words that he must speak beyond Old Jack’s death and the change it has made: “Elton, Uncle Jack arranged in his will for you to buy this place. He set the price and left you half the cost.”
Elton looks at Wheeler quickly, a peculiar challenge in his eyes.
“He’ll begin to believe it about day after tomorrow,” Wheeler thinks. He grins at Elton and says: “He didn’t want to leave it to you outright. He thought you ought to work for it the way he did. It was his opinion, you know, that there were some essential things he never learned until he got in debt.” Wheeler laughs briefly, and then, as if to keep his mind strictly on its business, looks at the ground. “I was to tell you as soon as he was buried and not wait, so you could make your plans.”
There is another silence of some length, and then Elton says: “Well, Wheeler, I reckon the old boss has got a little too far away to thank.”
“He thought you were worthy,” Wheeler says. “You were a son to him.”
He hears Elton draw a long, careful breath, and after a moment draw another.
“I was going to work some of my tobacco ground this afternoon, Wheeler, while we’re not cutting. I reckon I’d better go do it. I thank you.”
“Sure,” Wheeler says. “I’ve got to be going myself. We’ll be talking.”
But he does not move. He stands still, listening, as Elton’s footsteps go around the barn. He hears the tractor engine start and move out the ridge. And then instead of getting into his car, Wheeler walks slowly up and down the driveway of the barn, the sense of change, of loss, of the passing of things suddenly heavy upon him. For years he has come here as Old Jack’s friend and agent and emissary, almost as his son. Now that is over, but he cannot yet bring himself to leave. It is as though he has carried and passed on some key, some vital power, from an old man to a young one, and he thinks of the distance he has come.
He walks the length of the driveway three times, at a loss, filled with an objectless grief, and then on an impulse opens the door of what used to be the harness room and steps inside. At first he sees nothing that he might have come looking for. The room is dim and orderly—a bin of feed, three empty barrels, hand tools, buckets, all placed neatly and handily around the walls, the floor swept, several old sets of harness hanging on pegs—but its present order supersedes by several years any order that Old Jack ever made.
Only after his eyes grow used to the dimness does Wheeler begin to see, hanging against the walls above shoulder level, the evidence of Old Jack’s time. Hanging from nails driven everywhere into the boards are various pieces of harness, collars, collar pads, an odd hame, a set of check lines, pieces of leather strap, short lengths of rope, iron rings, snaps, lengths of chain, the iron fittings for singletrees and doubletrees, a wooden pulley, lap rings, clevises, plow plates, rusty horse and mule shoes, bridle bits, a broken shovel handle—the leftovers and odds and ends of a lifetime of farming, too good to throw away.
In the days before Old Jack moved to town, Wheeler remembers, when one of his tenants would ask where something was, the old man would answer indignantly: “Hanging up!”
Of course it was hanging up! He had been hanging things up all his life, taking care of things, keeping his leavings out from under his feet. If what he picked up had no place, he drove a new nail and made one.
“Hanging up!” he would say, to the bewilderment and intimidation of whoever dared ask, for though he grew ever less likely to remember where he had hung it, he knew there was no need to look for it underfoot.
Among that assortment of possibly useful objects that Old Jack saved and hung up, Wheeler comes upon a 1936 campaign poster of Franklin Roosevelt, bearing in black capitals the legend: A GALLANT LEADER. Wheeler himself was county chairman for that campaign, and he must have given the poster to Old Jack, who admired Roosevelt mainly for the game look of him in his pictures and for his willingness to place himself in difficulty. The paper is badly worn, torn, creased, snagged, brown at the edges. All the white area of the paper is covered with figures and with writing in Old Jack’s hand, whose laborious engraving Wheeler had observed a thousand times. (“You don’t have to push it clean through the paper,” he would say. “Damn it, son,” Old Jack would say, “I been to school!”) At the top of the poster, above the legend, is written: “Gray mare bred May 10” and near the bottom, at a slant, in blacker pencil: ”spotted sow to Ware Clayborn’s boar March 17” and under that, at a slightly different slant: “10 pigs lost 2.”
There are several more dates without explanation, and the rest of the space is filled with figures, additions and subtractions as abstract and unmeaning now as a child’s exercises in arithmetic. But though the writings on it have shed whatever significance they may have had, to Wheeler, who knows something of the solitude and the passion and at times the desperation of that account-keeping, the scribbled poster appears as a sort of emblem of Old Jack. Now that he looks, the whole wall is covered with those dates and figures that when they were written were never just figures, but the visible tracks of Jack Beechum’s mind, planning and counting, saying what was lost, what was left.
Wheeler remembers the successor to that wall, the little notebook that Old Jack carried in the bib of his overalls during his life at the hotel, and all the fierce and sporting arguments it led to. He laughs. And then, without realizing that he is about to do it, he cries.
Standing there has become pointless, pointlessly painful. Making up his mind to go, he carefully takes the old poster loose from the wall. He intends, as he removes the nails, to make a keepsake of it. But once he has taken it down and is holding it in his hands, its meaning seems already to have diminished. In a kind of guilt, in the sort of haste with which one would stop the bleeding of a living thing, he nails it back where it was.
“No,” he thinks, “we’ll take no trophies, no souvenirs. Let it fall like a leaf.”
Epilogue
In mid-December of the year of Old Jack’s death they are all in the stripping room on the place soon to be known as Elton Penn’s: Mat Feltner, the Coulter brothers and Nathan, Elton, Andy Catlett, home from the university for the holidays, and his brother Henry. All that cloudy, cold day they have been working in the heavy scent of the cured tobacco, the wind heaving and sucking at the room’s little cell of warmth, the drizzle brushing the tin roof in fits. When night comes it will freeze and snow.
They have stood all day at the bench under the light of the row of north windows, each man stripping his grade from the stalks and passing them on, tying the leaves into hands, straddling the bound hands onto sticks, carrying the filled sticks to the presses. They have carried in great arm-loads of tobacco from the covered bulk in the barn, and have carried bundles of stripped stalks through the door at the opposite end of the room to a pile outside. They have speculated extravagantly upon Andy’s behavior at college and upon his prospects. They have teased both boys about their love life. They have anticipated first dinner and then supper. In the way of old comradeship they have spoken of what they know and remember in common; they have said much that they have said before. And now for some time they have said nothing. Their long standing at their work has put the ache of weariness in their backs and shoulders, and they are waiting for the day to end. Out the windows the light has already begun to deaden. It will not be long.
They hear an automobile pull up in the front of the barn and stop. Its door opens and shuts. Presently Wheeler Catlett steps into the room, dressed for the office. His day finished there, he drove up to see to things on his farm, and now has come here to visit a while in the warmth and to get his boys. He stands with his back to the stove, his hands opened behind him to its heat, while the others go on working at the bench.
Now, except for Old Jack himself, they are all here. There comes a brief gust of talk about the market and the weather, as if only to include Wheeler in the silence that follows, in which they hear again the wind, the hardening drizzle, the crackling in the stove.
Going to one of the presses, Elton removes a stick of bound bright leaves as long as a man’s arm and holds it to the light.
“How about that, Wheeler? Wouldn’t the old boss have loved to see that?”
Burley Coulter laughs and gives the well-remembered response: “By God, son, you’re a good one! You’re all right! You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, and you’ll do!”
And now, as though he is with them again, in the old uproar of his commendation and censure his words pass among them, possessing their tongues.
“Son, do you owe anybody anything? Well, you won’t amount to a damn until you do.”
“I know what a man can do in a day”
“If you’re going to talk to me, you’ll have to walk.”
“Ready hell! I been ready!”
“Out of my head, by God, that knew this business before you were born, and had a hat on it three hours before you were out of bed.”
“While there’s light to see by, they’d better have their eyes open.”
“Settle for the half-assed, and then, by God, admire it!”
“Hanging up!”
“Where are you, son? Damn it to hell. It’s daylight!”
In all their minds his voice lies beneath a silence. And in the hush of it they are aware of something that passed from them and now returns: his stubborn biding with them to the end, his keeping of faith with them who would live after him, and what perhaps none of them has yet thought to call his gentleness, his long gentleness toward them and toward this place where they are at work. They know that his memory holds them in common knowledge and common loss. The like of him will not soon live again in this world, and they will not forget him.
Copyright @ 1974, 1999 by Wendell Berry
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Berry Wendell, 1934-The memory of Old Jack / Wendell Berry.—1st Counterpoint pbk. ed. p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-582-43923-5
1. Port William (Ky.: Imaginary place) Fiction. 2. Aged men—Kentucky Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.E75M4 1999
813’.54—dc21 99-16086
CIP
Counterpoint
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Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
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Wendell Berry, The Memory of Old Jack
