The Memory of Old Jack, page 5
She neither looks at him again nor avoids looking at him. She comes on up the aisle and past him and out the door. He sees now that his long, oblivious gaze at the girl has been noticed by certain ones of the congregation. “Well,” he thinks. “Well, then, if she doesn’t know, she’ll be told.” He moves into the aisle and goes out. He does not look again at the girl, but goes to his horse.
He is twenty-nine years old, accustomed to an exacting manhood. He ceased to be childish before he ceased to be a child; he knew too much solitude and came to a workman’s competence too early. By the time he had reached the age when a young man might be thought puerile or callow, he had already lived past that possibility. And so what he does now, though it is full of pride, has none of the brashness of showing off. The face and the body of this strange girl have so entered his mind that from head to foot he feels luminous and light with the thought of her. He wants the attention and respect of such a woman, but he pretends to nothing, the possibility of pretense does not cross his mind. His pride is simply that of an accomplished man who wants to be seen and known for what he is. He loosens the rein and backs the gelding clear of the other horses. Feeling the bit, the horse is suddenly alert as a deer, quivering to be gone, but held back as if by the mere presence of his rider. And then, as Jack gathers the reins over the gleaming withers and steps into the stirrup, the horse moves off in long, powerful, somehow delicate strides, seeming to rise to meet his rider as he settles onto his back, one with him. There is a breathless perfection about it, as though two powerful opposites have met without impact or sound. There is swiftness but not haste, strength but not violence. It is all power and light, that beginning, like the beginning of the flight of a falcon. Yes, there were watchers—Jack knew it, though he never turned his head.
He never turned his head. And all week, though he thought of her, each time with the quickening and sinking that he had felt in the church, he did nothing different for the girl’s sake. The week’s work held him, and he gave himself to it. But on Saturday evening he did something different. Instead of going off to a dance that he knew about, and instead of staying at home as he sometimes did when he felt the dances to be taking him too far, he went out to town and bought a few groceries and loafed and talked. He had given his whole attention to the girl again and he was watching for her. But though he waited until long past bedtime she did not come, and he rode home, late, strangely disappointed and anxious. He had, by bringing the talk around to the subject of a good brood mare that belonged to Perry Clemmons, discovered the girl’s name: Ruth Lightwood.
The name changed him. He was now a man who knew the name of what he wanted; he had spoken it to himself. The next day he went to the church again—afraid that she would have finished her visit and returned he did not know where. But there she was. Again, when the sermon was over, he placed himself in her way. This time, he noticed, she did openly look at him, and behind the mask he had made of his face he exulted. He saw that she had asked about him, for she looked at him not just with interest but with something of the curiosity of a child, her eyes asking what manner of man might do what she had heard he had done. He did not wait, that time, for her to walk past him, but turned and went out ahead of her and, without looking back, mounted his horse as before and rode away. But by then his mind had turned from aspiration to labor; as he rode home he was thinking of the possible worth of a mare like that one of Perry Clemmons’s that, bred to the right kind of jack, would have a good mule.
And a little before ten o’clock on Monday morning he was on the road again, shaved, wearing his best everyday clothes. He went to Port William and down the hill and upriver through the bottoms to Perry Clemmons’s. He found Mr. Clemmons, with several of his men, planting corn in a long bottom near the river. They talked at the row end, and Jack mentioned his interest in the mare. He let himself be traded out of the good mule that he had decided beforehand to offer as a last resort, and then was invited to dinner as he had expected.
When he came into the dining room with his host, Ruth was already seated at the table with Mrs. Clemmons and her daughters. He saw that she was surprised to see him, and he saw that she blushed, pleased and embarrassed about it. He grinned at her, admitting everything: that he was there, that he had made himself something of a rascal, that he would do it again for her sake. But not to embarrass her further, he paid no special attention to her during the meal. He took part in the talk, minded his manners, praised the meal, ate moderately, and forbore to linger, though he wanted to, after Mr. Clemmons got up to return to the field. The women had already begun to clear the table, and as Jack followed Mr. Clemmons out of the room he hung back a little, giving himself a chance to meet Ruth in the hall. She came out of the dining room with her hands full of glasses. He bowed slightly and smiled.
“Oh!” she said.
“Fine to have you in this part of the country, Miss Ruth.”
“Thank you.”
“How long you going to stay?”
He intended that to be a little too much, and it was.
“I’ve heard about you, Mister Beechum.”
But then, as if she wanted her chastisement to be acceptable and instructive to him, as if she could not bear only to punish him, she offered him a hesitant smile as she turned away.
He knew what she had heard. Or he could guess. That he was a dancer, a drinker, a wencher, a fighter. He had been none of these ruinously and it had not occurred to him to feel guilty. But he knew that she held him guilty, and he knew that her censure would not quibble over degrees. For the first time, then, he felt the force of a past that was his own, and he felt it with a peculiar mixture of regret and defiance that would become familiar to him. But he thought, too, of her smile, and of her eyes with their childish candor, as though she only observed the effect of a desire that she did not know she had caused. He wanted to see her eyes own and acknowledge and accept, yes, and celebrate the heat that she had stirred in him, her power over him. As he rode home, leading the old mare, the prospective mother of mules, he was saying to himself, “Well well well. Well. Well well.”
He had to go back to deliver the mule, but in his parting conversation with Mr. Clemmons he had deliberately put that off until the middle of the week, so as to draw out and conserve the pleasure of looking forward to it. He guessed that his chances were fairly poor, but when he went back, toward sundown on Wednesday, she was watching for him though she pretended not to be, and this time they spoke at some length on the porch as he was leaving, Jack pressing her to agree to let him come again, she putting him off with veiled allusions to his misdeeds—which she would not accuse him of, he knew later, because she could not bring herself to name them.
And yet they fascinated her. Their darkness fascinated her, for they represented a dark energy in him that she wanted, not to know, but to capture for herself, to control—to convert, in her word, to ends that she could smile upon in the open daylight. She was a spirited woman, in her way, and she had her claims to make. Without saying yes or no, she managed to convey to him that, if he did come, he would be expected to live up to higher marks than he usually did. It was another teasing chastisement, baited with smiles that were hesitating and uncertain, perhaps bewildered, perhaps a little frightened.
That was the pattern of their courtship. He would return to her again and again in all the audacity of his desire and pride—to be welcomed on the condition that he become better than he was. He was an ardent and a reckless lover. After she returned to her home, ten miles down the river, almost to Hargrave, he would make that trip two or three times a week, sacrificing his rest to save his work. She shone before him in those days; when he turned his mind to her he saw nothing else. One Sunday afternoon he went to see her, driving a half-broke three-year-old to a buckboard. Seeing her standing on the porch as he drove up, he leapt down and ran up the walk and held her in a long embrace—while behind him the colt was running off, tearing up buckboard and harness and all. She laughed at him, and yet her laughter, even while it exulted in him, refused him as he was. “Oh, Jack,” she said, “look at you!”
She took to lecturing him, in a way that he loved to indulge and humor, on the sort of prosperous, churchly, respectable man she wanted him to be. That was the curious, nearly obsessive fantasy of their courtship: the sort of man that she would have him become. It delighted him to be thought worthy of her redemption; he half believed in it himself. And all the time he had before him her eyes, her innocent beautiful eyes, and the wonder it would be when they acknowledged his desire.
He won her with his vices, she accepted him as a sort of “mission field,” and it was the great disaster of both their lives. He bound her to him by disavowing the very energy that bound him to her. She was bound to him by a vision of him that she held above him—that he, in fact, neither understood nor aspired to; and he was bound to her by a vision of her that she would discover, by her own lights, to be beneath her. Her ambition would be forever as strange and estranging to him as the great heat and strength of his desire would be to her. It is a cruel thing for him now, looking back, to see the two of them working out the terms of their agony. He was a fool—a simpleton and a fool—to have loved so to see the extravagance and grace of his youth reflected in a woman’s gray eyes, not by straightforward love or desire, but by what he now knows to have been fear—fear of what she even then instinctively knew to be her opposite, even her enemy. She accepted him as no doubt Saint Paul would have had her accept him—as a challenge to her hope and to her will.
They were extraordinary people, those two. Had it not been so, had they not been so evenly matched, their contest—for that is what it was—might have ended short of marriage. As it was, it had to go on, it had to accept the terms of a final defeat for them both.
Jack was near enough out of debt that he felt he could ask her to marry him. He had a little extra cash that he had laid by. He spent that, and even borrowed a little more, to paint the old house and make the place presentable and cheerful ahead of his wedding day. With the help of Aunt Ren and Uncle Henry, he cleaned the house from top to bottom, opened and aired the disused rooms, let in the light and the wind. They unpacked and washed and returned to the sideboard and the cupboard in the dining room the silver and china that had been his grandmother’s. It was an uproarious time they had of it, the three of them—Jack playing as largely as he was able the part of the nervous bridegroom ignorant of the refinements of feminine taste, burlesquing what were, often enough, his real dilemmas, and Aunt Ren and Uncle Henry taking the part of those who knew but, for reasons that he would understand later, chose not to say.
Unwrapping china in the back room upstairs, they came upon his grandfather’s ornate chamber pot.
“Now that’s a beautiful dish, Aunt Ren,” Jack said. “I can just see that full of soup.”
“Pore little thing,” Aunt Ren would say. “Pore little yellow-headed thing.”
And Uncle Henry would laugh until the tears ran down and dripped off his nose.
“So it gets to be nighttime, Uncle Henry, and you take her and you go up to the bedroom and you get undressed and you get in bed, I know about that. Then what do you do?”
He was carrying on partly to make them laugh, but mainly because delight was in him and he could not contain it. He was preparing himself and all that he had to be given to Ruth in return only for herself. He felt opening in him the depths of a generosity that he had never known. As their preparations advanced, he would walk through the house alone at night, looking at what they had done, imagining the coming of Ruth, imagining her approval. Once they were married, he thought, once he had brought her here and delivered his place and his life as fully into her hands as he meant to, then her reticence would go away. It would no longer be a matter of his always reaching toward her, always drawing her to himself, pressing his attentions on her, but she would turn freely to him, open to him, in gratitude, seeing that he gave her everything.
He was wrong from the start and did not know it. The powers that had brought them together, that they had played with, bringing themselves together, had played with them, and they did not know it. The thought of it makes him groan aloud and shake his head. He shakes his head and turns and looks—vision returning to him—up the street through town, as if to see relief coming from that direction. But he cannot turn away. He was misled not by Ruth but by his own desire, so strong for her that it saw possibilities that did not exist, and believed in what it saw. And Ruth—an old tenderness wells in him like a flooding stream choked with wreckage and debris—Ruth too was misled, by him, by his foolish willingness to win her by indulging her misconceptions.
What she hoped for perhaps even she herself was not sure. It is only certain that she had not hoped for what she got. Nothing in her experience had prepared her to recognize—much less to value—such a man as Jack Beechum was. Years before, her father had opened a hardware business in town, leaving the work of his farm to a succession of tenants and hired hands. The business did not prosper—it would not until he died and left it to his sons—and neither, in the circumstances, did the farm. At any rate, before Ruth was born her family’s ambition had already turned away from the land of its home place toward the business of the town of Hargrave, following the myth of impending prosperity that hovered there over the meeting of the two rivers. But what the town was actually waiting on for prosperity was not the boat traffic of the Kentucky and the Ohio; whether it knew it or not, it was already dependent upon the railroad—and the railroad, when it came, missed the town by several miles.
Their business nevertheless seemed to them to promise ease and wealth such as they could not expect from farming, and once the Light-woods had turned to the town they did not turn back. Living just beyond the outskirts, they became, in effect, town people. The country bounty of kitchen and garden and orchard and smokehouse served to entertain guests from town: merchants and professional men and the bright young ministers of the various churches. And so when he became her suitor and then her husband, Jack did not exactly occupy a vacancy; he usurped the place of some well-educated young minister or lawyer or doctor whose face and name were perhaps not yet known to the mother and daughter but whose place had nevertheless been appointed. It was this hypothetical and shadowy figure that she held up to Jack as a standard.
He was not a man who could be much dreamed upon; he lived too close to the ground for that. The illusions and false hopes of their courtship could not survive the intimacy of their marriage, and in the failure of their courtship their marriage failed. From the ignorant pleasures of her maidenhood she was transformed on her bridal night to the martyrdom of sexual sainthood. That was as far as it went. That was as far as it was going to go—though he would be years giving up.
There was no joyful arrival, no grateful acceptance of his place and himself and his preparations for her coming. Once the wedding and the festivities were over and they drove away from the crowd of well-wishers at her father’s house, together at last outside the bounds of convention and ceremony, there was only a terrible nakedness, in which they saw, before the buggy had gone two miles along the dirt road that led them to the remote place that she had chosen for life, that they were strangers to each other, that they did not know each other at all.
“I hope you’ll like the house,” he said, suddenly uneasy, seeing it, as he felt she would see it, for the first time, from a distance.
“Oh, I’m sure I will,” she said. “I’ll like it because it’s yours.”
But she was watching him. She was withdrawn from him. He felt it, and felt the awareness of what he had done begin to quake in him.
“But it’s yours,” he said. “You can’t like it just to be polite.”
She said nothing, and he drove perhaps half a mile before he could bring himself to speak again.
“Wait till you see it. Me and Aunt Ren and Uncle Henry, we fixed it up.”
When they drove up to the house he helped her down and loaded himself with her baggage and led the way into the house. The sun was down; the old house, silent as if they were not there, was full of edgeless shadows and the smell of the emptiness of the rooms long unlived in. He felt her sudden desolation. He set down his load and opened a door off the hallway at the foot of the stairs.
“Here’s the living room. I’ve got to take care of the horse. I’ll be right back. You make yourself at home.”
When he came from the barn a few minutes later and stepped in through the kitchen door, she was sitting in a chair she had drawn away from the table on which Aunt Ren had left their wedding supper over-spread with a cloth. She was looking down across the open field into the woods. It was a long warm still evening of late spring. The spell of it was on him, and he came in quietly, stopping just inside the door. For a time, while he stood there, she did not move. And then she stood and turned and walked toward him, but not looking at him, as if she followed some vague instruction.
“Did you look around? Is it all right?”
She nodded. “It’s fine.”
But she did not look at him. And when he reached out to her and drew her to him and held her, she did not look at him.
A year and a half later, when he sold his crop and returned and laid the canceled mortgage in her hand, it was the same. He wanted her to rejoice, to turn and touch him in her gladness. And he knew that she knew his need. But she could not. Knowing what he wanted, she could not look at him.
By then he knew that she stood in some moral fear of him. He had come to recognize her fear and to feel it. He knew that the touch of his hands had become repugnant to her, and he knew why. His hands were not fastidious, and she had learned their ways, their willingness to do whatever was necessary, to grasp whatever hold was offered, to castrate and slaughter animals, to compel obedience from horse or mule, to cover themselves with whatever filth or dirt or blood his life required. His hands did not hesitate and they did not coax. They did willingly and even eagerly what, before, she had seen only black hands do reluctantly. He had chosen necessities that she had believed a man could come to only by compulsion. That he should touch her, that he should lay his hands on her, as flatly, as openly, with as eager delight, as he laid them on whatever else it delighted him to touch, she could not bear. Under his hand her flesh contracted. He could feel it, her flesh drawing away beneath his hand. He was overpowering to her. His body bent above her in the dark was like a forest at night, full of vast spaces and shadows and the distant outcries of creatures whose names she did not know. He was a strange country and a loneliness to her. And she was doubly lonely because he feared nothing; so deeply did he belong to the place he had brought her to that even its solitude was not lonely to him.
