The Memory of Old Jack, page 4
“There’s a lot of Humston in you, Burley.”
“Well, I can’t help it.”
“They were good people. Had a lot of wit about ’em. I knew ’em all.”
“Well, I expect I’d better go,” Burley says. But he adds, knowing the old man will be interested, “Me and Jarrat stayed home this morning and housed up a couple of loads we had to leave on the wagons last night. Andy helped us. We’re all going to pitch in on Nathan and Mat’s this morning.”
“Is Elton there?”
“He’s supposed to be.”
Burley turns and starts out, and then snaps his fingers and turns back to the counter. “What I came for was smokes.”
Grinning at him, Jasper tosses a pack of cigarettes onto the counter. Burley puts down his money and puts the cigarettes in his shirt pocket. He shakes his head.
“A man with a forgetter like I got—his mind ain’t burdened.”
He goes out.
It is time Old Jack was moving too. He will be nearly too stiff to get up if he does not move now. He gets up and starts to the door. As unobtrusively as possible, Jasper opens it for him.
“Thank you, boy. Thank you, Irvin,” Old Jack says, raising his hand to Jasper as he goes by.
As he steps into the open he is aware, as always, of the sudden widening of his horizon, the lighted sky above his head; he gives his shoulders a slight lift and shrug, as though having just rid himself of a confining garment. He can see Burley and Jarrat Coulter driving through the gate up at Mat’s with a tractor and two empty wagons. Old Jack hates tractors. They seem to him suddenly to be everywhere, roaring and stinking. With a sort of fierce grace, he has kept his hatred to himself, not wanting to interfere with a world that he is so nearly out of. But he hates their heaviness, their hulking and graceless weight. They remind him of groundhogs. They have the look about them of being just ready to burrow into the ground.
For a moment he glimpses a load of tobacco drawn by the team of black mare mules.
Stepping. Ay! Lord!
His thoughts have left him for another place and time. For the day it is and the time of year and the sound of the wagons going out have alerted him, as if at the sound of an old song in the distance, to the time when his strength was light in him.
Oh, he was something to look at then! He admits it now with a candor too impersonal to need modesty. There were days in his early manhood when it seems to him he walked in the air. He stood and moved with a lightness that was almost flight. His hand moved effortless as his eye. He looks back upon himself as he was, exulting in his great strength, indulgent of his eagerness and desire, as he might, had he been so favored, have looked upon a grandson. But he has had neither son nor grandson. It is the blessing and the trial of his old age that his mind goes back to inhabit again and again the body of the man he was.
In 1888 he was twenty-eight years old. Three years before, both his parents dead, the older children dead or gone from home, he had bought from his sister Nancy, now Nancy Feltner, her interest in the land his father and grandfather had farmed, and on which he had been born. Several years yet away from his marriage, he lived alone in the old house; an elderly Negro woman, Aunt Ren, the wife of the hired hand who had been his father’s slave, came in daily to cook and to keep the mostly forsaken rooms. The place was run down, the bank’s interest having fed heavily on it during the father’s last years, and the debt against it was large. But in those days Jack was free of other obligations, he was strong, he had the sort of overreaching intelligence that pleases itself with difficulty, and so hardship and debt did not burden him. What moved him then was a sense of the possibilities that lay yet untouched in his land. The rest of his own life seemed to him to lie unborn in the soil of the old farm.
By Jack’s time, the farm had been reduced by his father’s money troubles to about a hundred and fifty acres. It was bounded in front by the road, and on the other three sides by the winding courses of Birds Branch and two of its tributaries. The hollows of these streams were narrow, offering little bottom land for crops. But there were cleared pastures on the slopes above them. Above the openings of pasture, where the hill steepened, the land was in woods. Wooded draws cut deeply into the upland, so that the long ridge that formed the backbone of the farm was broken into three almost symmetrical broad hilltops. The upland fields had been divided from the steeper land by stone fences that followed faithfully the contour of the ground, keeping the line where the steeps gentled at the top of their rise. The house with its company of barns and outbuildings faced the road, set back from it in a yard shaded by big sugar maples and oaks. It was a farm that required a great deal of care, so much of it being steep. But its design had been cunningly laid out to preserve the land and to be convenient and pleasing to the eye.
He had known no other place. From babyhood he had moved in the openings and foldings of the old farm as familiarly as he moved inside his clothes. But after the full responsibility of it fell to him, he saw it with a new clarity. He had simply relied on it before. Now when he walked in his fields and pastures and woodlands he was tramping into his mind the shape of his land, his thought becoming indistinguishable from it, so that when he came to die his intelligence would subside into it like its own spirit.
The work satisfied something deeper in him than his own desire. It was as if he went to his fields in the spring, not just because he wanted to, but because his father and grandfather before him had gone because they wanted to—because, since the first seeds were planted by hand in the ground, his kinsmen had gone each spring to the fields. When he stepped into the first opening furrow of a new season he was not merely fulfilling an economic necessity; he was answering the summons of an immemorial kinship; he was shaping a passage by which an ancient vision might pass once again into the ground.
He remembers those days for their order, the comeliness of the shape his work made in each one of them as it passed. It was an order that came of the union in him of skill and passion, the energy that would not be greater in him than it was then. But it also came of solitude. He had no help except for the aged Negro man, Uncle Henry, whose greatest usefulness by then was to tend the garden and do the chore work around the barn. That set Jack’s mind free in the fields, and except at the times of planting and harvest, when he teamed with his neighbors, he worked alone. His solitude assured that his work would have the coherence of his character. He went free of the awkwardness that comes of the mismatching of two men working together. He knew how much work he could do in a day, and how to do it. It was as if he worked always in the open then, and there was a clarity between him and the eye of heaven. He was in the clear with those gods of the fields about whom the men of his kind spoke sparingly and carefully: the Old Marster, whose inscrutable ways were known to Job; and the sun, Old Hanner, indifferently harsh and kind.
It was only on Saturday evening that the strenuous order of his workdays opened to let him escape—or be driven out by the desire that the very sunset of that day made strong in him, for women, for company, for music, for the free exuberance that his workdays did not allow. Most Saturday nights he knew of a dance to be held at a house or schoolhouse, sometimes miles away. And he would go, washing and dressing after work in haste to be gone, often not waiting to eat. For he loved the music and the mingling, the drink and talk and laughter of the dances they used to have back in those old days. Women moved him. And he was a man subject to music as grass to wind. He was a gifted dancer. He could be carried away.
He comes alone and late to where the horses stand hitched at the yard fence of a house brightly lighted, the air around it filled with the high-riding tune of “Wildwood Flower.” And he goes in to where the light is and the bystanders ringing the room and the fiddle urging from its corner; a girl’s hands are held out to him and he takes them, the music lifting him, and steps light into the circle of the dancers. Carried away in the wild drift of the dance that will bear him through the night, he forgets where he is. He has to reach down with his feet to tread the floor.
In the casual way of men to whom such things come by nature, he had got to be handy with the women—handy enough to have caused himself more trouble than he did, had he talked about it. In a crowd of strangers at some dance or gathering far from home there would pass between him and some one of the women a strand of delight that would draw them together to the dark that he loved to let himself go thoughtless into.
It was his own extravagant nature that he traveled in, and he was learning its formidable distances and perilous heights. He did not mind the going. That was light and eager. It was the coming back that required a change and a recognition that troubled and vaguely frightened him. He felt the strangeness of his absence. He returned with the anxiety of one who has been absent a year, considering what might have gone wrong. The few mornings when he returned to find that something in fact had gone wrong, he knew the anger of regret for which he could find no fitting act. Though he did not know it then, it was an emotion that would be one of the powerful themes of his life.
It was not only in Jack’s character but also in his place and time that the way was so ill prepared and the going so difficult between the wakeful days that he aspired to and the joys and transports of the night. How much his tragedy that has been he well knows, now that his lightness and most of his light too have gone from him, and he has learned by their loss to look back and know and lament the single vital strand that bound the day and the night together. From where he stands now, sixty years and more and a long descent from the best of his nights and days, he knows that those nights of mirth and music issued out of and celebrated his strenuous days, and that his days sought an indispensable portion of their meaning in those nights. But back so long ago, a young man who had in him such a devotion to the light and such a calling to the dark, he had yet to learn much that he knows now.
He looks up at Mat’s to see if he can see any sign of Elton Penn. This is the seventh year now that Elton has lived on Old Jack’s place—a proven man, young as he still is. He keeps tight up against his work all the time, and does it right. And not because somebody expects it. He does it because he expects it of himself. He has the right kind of head on his shoulders. He has become the last keen delight of Old Jack’s life—the inheritor of his ways. He has been willing to listen, and Old Jack has taught him some things. He has made a kind of son of him.
He does not see anybody. They are all in the field. And he lets the world return into its blurred distance, aware as often before of the tragedy that all his true heirs—all who have had a use for such a head as his—have come to him as if by chance, without the heat of his own desire.
There was something he had in mind to do. And then it hits him again, the pain of his filled bladder ringing in him like a bell. He heads up the street, careful of the divided and tilted sections of the old pavement. At the back of an outbuilding behind the hotel he relieves himself, and then he comes back along the shady corridor between buildings into the open sunshine of the street. The day has turned warm now, will be hot by noon. He goes under the shade trees in front of the hotel and back into the sun, past Jasper’s and the drugstore. At the corner of the barbershop he has to stop and rest. He turns to face the street and props himself with the cane.
He is going on horseback down the driveway. It is a Sunday morning early in the May of 1889. The weather is clear and warm. There has been rain, and the littlest streams are brimming and shining. The spring is at its height. The grass of the yard and the pastures is lush, the green of it so new that it gleams in the sun. The trees are heavily leafed, their new growth still tender, unblemished. The whole country lies beneath an intricate tapestry of bird song. He is on his way to church—one of the pilgrimages that he occasionally makes in uneasy compensation for the extravagances of Saturday night.
But he hardly feels like a penitent. He feels good, as much wrought upon by the joyousness of that morning as a bird or a tree. He is wearing a black suit, fairly new, so made that he keeps a continuous awareness in his waist and shoulders of the perfection of its fit. And he is riding as fine a saddle horse as he ever owned—a big red sorrel gelding, groomed until the light melts and flows over his neck and shoulders as he moves. Jack feels himself contained and carried in the brilliant harmony that can occur between a gifted horseman and an excellent horse. He looks his best, and none of the considerable force of his good looks is lost on him. It was not until he got old that Jack was willing to admit, even in his own mind, the extent of the pride that he took then in his looks. But there it is. He is in the service of nature, a cock bird plumed and preened, the world his reflection. The service he is going to, he has already arrived at. The morning sermon will be his occasion, no matter what he supposed when he decided to go. His hands delicately enact the connection between his own strength and that of the horse. Under him the horse moves powerfully and lightly, his every move suggestive of an abounding energy suppressed by the rider’s hand. And Jack feels that same checked and conserved abundance in himself, his shoulders pressing against the good broadcloth of his suit. The whole country around him, in fact, is full of it, the abounding of energy and desire, threatening to overwhelm the forms of growth and song that provide for its release; to accommodate it, the birds must repeat their songs over and over so that the air around his head seems swollen with music.
The road follows a long backbone of the upland, rising and falling with the rises and falls of the ground. At the tops of the rises he can see the steeple of the church in town lifting white out of the green cloud of massed treetops, and smaller, beyond the steeple, the cupola of Ben Feltner’s barn. Beyond town he can see the misty opening of the river valley. And then he comes to the Birds Branch Church, a neat white building without a steeple, standing on a stone-walled terrace leveled in the hillside. The old oaks throw over its roof and walls the new shadows of the spring. He rides into the churchyard and hitches his horse among the others already there. The service has begun; the congregation is singing “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,” the song pouring out the open doors and windows of the old church, mingling, beyond its intent, into the wild fecundity of the day.
He steps in and finds a place on the end of a back bench. Fresh from the outdoors, he breathes in and examines the rich mixture of smells: the staleness of the old building more often closed than open, the smell of the ground and of new growth from outside, the odors of soap and clean clothes, and, insistent among the rest, the perfumes and sachets of the women. The service continues to prayers and more singing; the collection is taken; the sermon begins. Jack settles himself as comfortably as he can in the angle of the arm and the back of the bench. He is both there and not there, full of pleasure in the day and a sort of idle interest in what is going on around him. He is not listening to the sermon. The sermon is merely a presence, a distant drone among the humming and singing that the air is already full of, borne away on the fragrance that draws through the windows.
His sight drifts and gazes upon the heads ranged in front of him, picking out, recognizing, the heads of the girls and young women. His consciousness hovers and moves now over the congregation, like a bee over a patch of flowers, in search of nectar, alert to what is bright and sweet and open.
And now, five or six rows in front of him, he sees a head he doesn’t recognize—as beautiful a head, surely, as he will ever see, the hair heavy and rich, the color of honey and butter, but worn with a simplicity, a lack of ostentation, that moves him strangely. There is something about that head that is both opulent and innocent. For a moment, though he does not move, he strains toward her, looking at her as though to memorize every tiny detail of the look of her; it is a memory that will stay with him, clear as his eye was then, for sixty-three years. And then he settles back into himself. Well! But he tells himself to wait a while; no use being misled by a head of hair, fine as that one is. There is a cautionary instinct—the deliberately critical eye of the experienced stockman, perhaps—warning him to make no quick judgments, to be careful, to take his time. But he sits through the rest of the meeting with all his senses sharpened and expectant, like a hungry man who has had a whiff of a good meal. She is sitting with the family of Perry Clemmons from down in the river bottom not far from Port William—come visiting kinfolks, he supposes.
The sermon ends. They rise to sing the final hymn. As the girl stands and turns a little to share her book with one of the daughters of the family, Jack can see—he has been waiting to see—that she is well made, her figure ample but delicately and neatly formed. Again the sight of her moves him, touches him as though inside his skin, and he feels a clenching and sinking of his vitals. His imagination is moving over her now like a water witch over a buried vein of water, sensing beneath the yellow summer dress she wears the presence of her body, both marvelously rich and marvelously fine. And still he tells himself to wait. Wait, for there is more yet to be seen.
The singing ends. The preacher says the benediction. The order of the congregation loosens within itself. A stir rises as neighbors turn to speak to each other, and then there begins a general movement toward the door. Jack moves out of the way, but only to step back and stand again between the back of the bench and the wall, just inside the door. He watches the girl move out from between the benches and then step into the aisle. When she turns to face the door, because Jack is then directly in her line of vision, they look straight into each other’s eyes. The veins of his head dilate with the suddenness of a blow, so deeply has he prepared himself and desired to see her face and so openly do their eyes meet. The look holds only an instant, for she smiles a little confusedly at the force of his stare and looks away. But he does not look away. Her face is astonishingly fine, fair, lightly freckled across the nose, the eyes gray, grave, and clear. It is a face almost austerely beautiful. But what seems to him most remarkable is its innocence. It is a face that does not seem to belong at all to such a woman’s body as hers. There is in her countenance no acknowledgment, as there is perhaps no awareness, of the great earthly power of her beauty that has so shaken him that he cannot look away. The look of her reminds him of a young girl on a horse, simply trusting herself to a power she has not measured and does not know.
