The Memory of Old Jack, page 6
He was intact, sustained within a tradition that she had renounced, or that had been renounced for her before her birth—the yeoman’s tradition of sufficiency to himself, of faithfulness to his place. That he was comfortable within the conditions of his life, that he was, in consequence, utterly direct, without disguise or euphemism, in the face of his necessities, made him strange to her. He did not notice that his work clothes stank of manure and horse sweat and his own sweat. She was dismayed to discover that in summer he went without socks and that in winter he slept in his shirt. She spoke of these things, correcting him, and so far as he was able he did as she asked. He studied her wants and fulfilled them as best he could. But he was too thoroughly and deeply formed in himself to change except by deference that rose not out of his desire for her but out of his disappointment. And the deference, even, became always shallower and more perfunctory, for, unable to disguise her estrangement from him and her disapproval of his rough ways, she was forcing him to cease to be simply what he was, and to become defiantly so.
She had the fierce ideological integrity of her ambition. She had the closely ordered calm of her household and her ways. And Jack threatened both with his wildness, his love of ranging in the dark, which she did not feel or understand and so feared. She could not accompany him into the dark. She could not release herself into what she did not know and could not see or foresee. It was not so much that he violated her as that he asked her to violate herself: his rough hand reaching into her bodice, or insinuating itself upon the inside of her thigh, his eye that watched, first gaily and then fearfully, for her response to his hand—they asked her to be broken, to desire what she could not provide, to open herself to a completion of which she would be ever afterward a fragment. And so, though his hand went its way, though he sought the clefts and shelters of her flesh, though he entered her with the awe of a pilgrim, though he drove into her like the taker of a city, though the storm of his desire cast him ashore upon her at last, as meek and strengthless as a child asleep, yet there remained some prize, some vital gift that she withheld. She hid her eyes from him. As much as before their marriage, she remained to him an unknown continent. She offered him no welcome, afforded him no prepared ways. Each time he made his way to her, he came upon her as if by chance, a newcomer, blundering in the dark. He returned each time more fearfully, and at greater expense.
Held by him, overtaken and held in the delayed and violent gusts of his desire, she felt betrayed, victimized; it seemed to her that the roof and walls of the old house fell away, exposing her to the stars and the dark distances. It seemed to her that she was not there at all, but alone, lost, exiled in a dark wilderness whose trees she was afraid even to lift her hands to touch. And she would be deeply still then, in fear of being overheard by whatever followed, hearing the wind and the distant cries. He was her cross, and she bore him with a submission that, afterwards, chilled him to the bone. They lay beside each other in solitude, as rigid and open-eyed as effigies.
And so it seemed to Jack a continuation of a misery already begun and familiar when he stood, drenched with her cries, to receive into his hands the shrouded body of the only son they would have, dead.
Four: Will Wells
“What’s the matter, old friend?”
“Who’s that?”
“Are you all right?”
Now there is a hand on his shoulder, friendly, careful of him.
“I’m all right. I thank you, Irvin.”
And now that he is paying attention again, he sees that it is Jayber Crow.
“I thank you, Jayber. How are you, son?”
“I’m fine. I thought a minute ago you didn’t sound all right.”
And now Old Jack remembers the sound of his outcry, and feels the coolness of tears on his face.
“Ah,” he says, “ay Lord,” ashamed to have made a fuss, not having meant to.
Jayber is standing in front of him now, watching him. Everything about Jayber is long—body, legs and arms, hands, face, nose. He is all a morose, downward-hanging length, except for his mouth, which is customarily turned up like a saucer in a lean, boyish smile. And his eyes—his eyes are large and brown and round, full of little glistenings and foretokenings of humor. The men who know him will always remember him in profile, that alert brown eye watching from its vantage in the long face like a squirrel looking out of a hole in a tree. Just now he has his barber’s comb stuck over his ear. And he is smiling at Old Jack, beginning to believe that he is indeed all right.
“Why don’t you come in and sit down a while?”
Old Jack nods, and Jayber leads him to the door and up the step into the barbershop.
“Right over here now. See if that chair won’t fit you,” Jayber says, guiding him toward the back of the room, to what he considers the best of his mixed collection of chairs.
With Jayber’s help, Old Jack lets himself down.
“Ah!” he says, glad to be off his feet.
Besides himself and Jayber the shop is occupied at present by a fat young woman with three little boys getting their hair cut in preparation for the start of school.
The shop settles down now and Old Jack settles with it. He can smell the mixed smells of talcum and lotion and soap. The burner on which Jayber heats his shaving water whispers busily, and there is the rhythmic snick-snick of Jayber’s scissors. The barber’s face has taken on the bemusement of his work. Old Jack recognizes the mood and takes comfort. Eased again of the present, his mind resumes its task: to come through, to survive yet again its old trial.
The stillbirth of their son does not bring them together, as in the first moments he desperately hoped that it might. He has little more than stepped over the threshold into the room where Ruth lies when he understands that it will not. Aunt Ren and the doctor have gone out to the kitchen. The hard brightness of winter dawn, sunlight on snow, has filled the room. It is deeply still, the enormous quiet of the cold day reaching inside to meet an answering quiet that seems to him as great. Both he and Ruth seem to be held, suspended, in a palpable silence whose pressure he can feel in his chest and throat. He goes and stands at the foot of the bed. Ruth lies straight and still, her body as formally composed as a corpse, her eyes shut. He knows that she knows he has come in, but she does not open her eyes. Her eyelids are seals upon the stillness. For what seems to him a long time he stands there, unable to speak or move, aware of his intrusiveness, his solitude, as a man might be who stands alone on the horizon of a treeless plain of snow. And then he makes a business of building up the fire, and goes out. He has the cold wind to face. He has his stock to feed, drinking holes to chop in the ice of the ponds.
If she had acknowledged then a need that he could have answered, it might have changed, might have been different. Or it might have been different—as he has thought many times since her death—if he had had the grace or the forbearance to have gentled and humbled himself then, while he was still there in the room with her. If he had just sat down in a chair beside her and waited, maybe finally he would have been able to offer something that she needed. In the seventeen years that Ruth has been dead his mind has gone back again and again to that moment, pondering over it as one might ponder over the dead, dry bud of a flower, sensing beyond it, lost in it, the possibility of a gentle and welcoming efflorescence that, had there been some mysterious difference, might have opened toward him. What if he had been a gentler, humbler man? What if their son had lived? Through all the years he has never lost his first vision of her, and never ceased to mourn the descent of that vision into the diminished reality that he knows he helped to make, though he has never understood exactly how. Was it his pride, his defiance of her attempts to change him, his silence for want of grace or humility when he stood that February morning at the foot of her bed? Whether it might have changed anything or not, he should have sat down beside her and waited.
He could not. He did not. His own pride and pain were too great. He had already too many times been driven to her as a supplicant by an unconquerable need for her, who acknowledged no need for him. As his suffering was so much less respectable than hers who had borne the child, he carried it off in himself and said nothing. However he mended it over with the skin of silence, it festered in his depths and grew.
After that birth the house again became for him a place of sorrow and failure, as it had been during his childhood. Again he sought his comfort in the fields. But now he was seeking for it with a man’s need and a man’s desperation, and he found little enough. He was working hard, making his days longer than ever, saving some money, for what he did not yet quite know. But his workdays no longer had the order and clarity that he had known in them before. Now it was as though his bafflement stretched like an opaque membrane between him and the sky, and he was darkened. He went to his fields nevertheless with the sense that he belonged to them more than he belonged to the house. Before, between him and Ruth, there had been the strain of pretense that all was as it should be—a strain that nevertheless had permitted her to attempt to correct him, and him either to comply or to resist. Now there was silence between them. And as the weight of what was unacknowledged grew, it became a silence that he was less and less able to bear.
In all outward things Ruth was a good wife. Since their marriage, she had gradually changed the house, so that now, with the help of the odds and ends of money that he encouraged her to put into it, it was better cared for and more comfortable than he had ever known it. Aunt Ren had continued to come to the house to work as before, but she was failing now and most of the work fell to Ruth, the old woman serving as a self-appointed teacher and companion, puttering at what suited her, talking indiscriminately to Ruth or to herself. Ruth cooked and washed and cleaned and sewed and canned and preserved and looked after her chickens and turkeys and, except for the plowing, kept the garden. She went faithfully to the church—more and more frequently she went alone—and became a member of the Missionary Society. And in all this she made a life for herself that, though it served and even pleased him, was different and remote from his life. Surrounded and contained by this life of hers, she seemed happy, even serene. He loved and suffered from the glimpses he caught of her bent over her sewing, or at work in the garden, unaware of him. Then her face would be eased and lovely, in absentness of concentration, unresisting. His entrances broke the gentle surrounding of this life, and then her silence would become a withholding. The set of her face would change. Her beauty had become a ghost to him; it vanished from his direct vision as from his touch. His presence was an invasion, a violation of the house. And except to eat and sleep, he began to stay away.
Now, instead of going into the living room or out on the porch after supper to sit until bedtime, he went back to the barn, if the weather permitted, and kept himself busy there until dark. Or he would sit, resting, on an upturned bucket in the open doorway, his horses and mules feeding and stirring quietly in their stalls behind him. On wet days he would work at the barn, or rest there, or he would walk the fences and the boundaries of the farm, his feet and hands as restless as his mind.
He was no longer thinking about the possibilities of his own place that had once so held and exalted his mind. Unrealized as many of them remained, they no longer seemed to be enough. He no longer seemed to himself to be enough. He knew that he had been found wanting in Ruth’s eyes, which meant, since her eyes had become the only qualification of his, that he was now found wanting in his own. Her judgment of him, however he might have resented and defied it, had entered into him, and her judgment was that though he might have pride and desire, growing out of his sense of himself and his place, he had, properly speaking, no ambition. He did not want to improve himself or enrich himself or come up in the world. He was a limited man, and offensively so insofar as he appeared satisfied within his limits. And so he began to move now, as he thought, in defiance of her judgment, but actually in unconscious obedience to her judgment’s chief implication: that no place may be sufficient to itself, but must lead to another place, and that all places must finally lead to money; that a man’s work must lead not to the health of his family and the respect of his neighbors but to the market place, to that deference that strangers yield to sufficient cash.
What he had in his mind now as he sat and thought, or walked the lengths of afternoons and thought, or worked and thought, was more land. He wanted more land. A man falling in his own esteem needs more ground under his feet; to stand again he may need the whole world for a foothold. His thoughts now ranged over the resources within his boundaries, and over the possibilities that lay outside them, seeking the terms of some new balance. His mind played over and over again the airy drama of ambition: how to use what he had to get what he wanted—a strange and difficult undertaking for him, who until then had wanted only what he had. Once he had hungered for the life his place could be made to yield. Now he would ask it to yield another place, at what expense to itself and to him he could not then have guessed.
The current of his thoughts had now resurrected, without consciousness of its source, one of the fantasies that Ruth had persistently woven about their courtship and that he had indulged at that time: the idea that the two of them would better themselves, that he would become a great landowner, that they would have the respect of the best people who knew them, that they would send their children to the best schools and see them started in careers that would make them even more wealthy and respected than their parents. He had once taken this merely as an extravagant compliment to himself, very pleasing, since he reckoned without much thinking about it that he more or less deserved it. Now he turned to it desperately, as to a last hope.
It happened at that time that the farm known as the Farrier place, adjoining his, was about to be offered for sale. The main stem of the family that had owned it had died out, and the heirs were scattered. While they had bickered over the settlement of the estate, the place had been rented to Sims McGrother, a neighbor on the other side, who had subjected it to a good deal of abuse and neglect. The old Farrier house had burned down in the year after its abandonment, leaving its two stone chimneys standing, the fireplaces opening blankly into the daylight once enclosed by the log rooms. Yard and garden had grown up in weeds and bushes, shutting off the house’s outlook on its fields. It was on this place that Jack’s restless thoughts and hopes now came to earth and took form.
The farm was not large—something less than a hundred acres. It was generally steeper and rougher than his land, and he knew the weakness of its south slopes that lay along the West Fork facing his good north ones. But half of it was ridge land that could be mended and made good. That the house was gone was not a great disadvantage to him, who would not be living there, and the other buildings were good, as were the fences. A number of times he walked over it, looking at it, loosening the earth in the rows of the crop ground with his heel, picking it up and crumbling it in his fingers. He examined through a whole summer the quality of the growth in all the fields. He drank from the well and the spring and lingered by the waterholes along the creek. He looked at the foundation and the framing and the roof of every one of the buildings.
He was learning a new desire, the subtlety and power of which surprised him. Like the “strange woman” whose delights were so carefully understood by Solomon, this new place claimed an ample space in his mind, which it implanted with its impulse and will, and filled with visions. It possessed as much of his consciousness as might stray from his work; it kept him awake at night. He wanted to see that place respond to him. He wanted to see it dress itself in green and be fertile and abundant for his sake. Before long there was not a building or a field inside the Farrier line that was not invested with a plan or a vision that bore the by then unmistakable mark of the character and the ways of Jack Beechum. They were the good and saving ways that had doubled the health and the abundance of his own place in the years since his father’s death.
One hot day late in the summer he ate his dinner and went out and sat down in the doorway of the barn, giving his mules time to rest before starting back to the field. Sitting there, he began to think of the Farrier place, and on an impulse saddled his horse and rode down to the line fence. He hitched his horse in the shade and crossed the dry bed of the creek and climbed slowly up through the heavy heat of the little valley onto the Farrier ridge. He crossed a tobacco patch, walking between two rows, and stopped in the shade of a big walnut tree that stood just beyond the row ends. He was high up and could see along the ridge ahead of him to the chimneys of the burned house and, beyond, to where its lane started down the bluff to the creek. And back the way he had come he could see over the ridge tops of his own place to his house and barns. All around the distances were blue in the heat haze. The ridges stood open to the sun above the woods, and everywhere in the downward leaning of the slopes was the intimation of shade along the streams—deep shade, and here and there the still gleam of a pool of water, or the constant small splashing of a spring.
