And then Roy seemed to realize that if anybody was going to say something it would have to be him. He said, “Well, boys, if we’ve got anyplace to get, I reckon we had better get.”
And so we too straggled off in our various directions.
That worter dranking party turned out to be one of the most famous social events in the history of Port William. It started some things that kept happening, and continued some things that were already happening and that went on happening afterward. And in true Port William style, it had achieved its full renown by bedtime Sunday night.
The preeminent topic, of course, was the dramatic entrance upon the scene of Cecelia Overhold, and what she had done and what she had said. You could no more have kept that quiet than you could have prevented thunder from following lightning.
But also Bill Thacker, walking home over the Katy’s Branch bridge, blundered into the railing and mistook it for his yard gate. Finding that he could not unfasten it, he climbed over and fell fifteen feet into a field that Webster Page had plowed for corn. Fortunately, the backwater had just withdrawn from the bottom at that place, and instead of breaking his neck Bill only made a deep impression in about a foot and a half of mud. The mud was so soft and comfortable that he took a good nap before he got up. This story would have been hard to learn except that Bill Thacker himself thought so highly of it that he walked to town the next Saturday afternoon to tell it on himself.
And Julep Smallwood, to put a good face on things, had started home at the crack of dawn. But he made the trip in slow, difficult stages, being often obliged (as he said) to lie down. At Sunday school time he was standing by no means far enough from the church, as stupefied as Lot’s wife.
And that was the moment that I happened to make my own entrance into town. I did not know the time; I did not see the talkers standing in the churchyard before it was too late to stop or go back. I went on by, pretending not to see, and keeping to the far side of the road. It was not a situation in which a bachelor barber newly come to town would prefer to be seen with a bloody lip and his clothes all covered with wood ashes and dead leaves.
11
An Invisible Web
Ernest Finley used to say, at about the time I returned, “In Port William we don’t distinguish the masses from the classes.” And in a way that was true. People did freely mingle in the gathering places of the town. Even Joe Banion, the last black man ever to live in Port William, was a participant and subject in the town’s ever-continuing conversation about itself. People loved and befriended one another and were loved and befriended, talked with and about one another, quarrelled with and resented and sometimes fought one another, all pretty much without thought of “special privilege.” The only one in my time who might have been accused of putting on airs was Cecelia Overhold, and in her younger days even Cecelia didn’t do it all the time.
And yet certain lines were drawn that weren’t much spoken of or much noticed. You would be aware of them only if they were overstepped or if you came into the town as an outsider. I could see, for instance, that Joe Banion was treated pretty much as an equal in talk and in work and in other ways, but also that he never sat down with white people indoors. The white people, who called him “Nigger Joe” to identify him among the several other Joes who lived around, never did so to his face.
I pretty soon found out too that several lines were drawn around a bachelor barber who was known to take part in social events such as the Little Worter Dranking Party at the Grandstand. The barbershop, for one thing, was a precinct strictly masculine except on Saturday mornings, when mothers with small sons would bring them in for haircuts. At other times, the small boys would be brought in by their fathers and you would have been just as likely to find women in the poolroom. This was not my rule; it was just what the arrangement was and, I suppose, had always been. Anyhow, as the barber of the town, I was pretty effectively divided from its womanly life. I mingled a little, of course, when I went into the stores, and also when I would go out in the mornings and evenings with my buckets to get water at the town pump across the road.
As the barber I was placed also within economic limits that were generally recognized. The shop, as I had been told at the start, and as I had to agree, would not support a man with family responsibilities; it might support a bachelor, if he was careful. The barber lived on what would nowadays be called a “renewable resource” and so would never be out of work, if he could keep going on what his customers could reasonably be charged, but the resource itself was limited.
At times it could be severely limited. I nearly went under, for instance, in the first full month I was in Port William. Almost nobody came to the shop—for a haircut, that is; I had plenty of talkers—and I couldn’t imagine what was the matter until I learned that a lot of the people thought it unlucky or unhealthy to get a haircut in February. My income varied also according to the weather, the stages of farmwork, and the state of the local economy. What I had, Grover Gibbs said, was a full-time part-time job.
Such jobs were not highly esteemed. One day I made the mistake, while cutting Mr. Milo Settle’s hair, of referring to my “line of work.”
“Boy,” said Mr. Settle, “you ain’t got what I call a job. You got what I call a position.”
When I set up in Port William I was going on twenty-three years old. I was what I would prefer to call not-pretty, which is to say balding, long of face and frame, without resemblance to any movie actor or electable politician. Also I was a man of limited means and prospects, and a bachelor. By “bachelor” I mean, as was generally meant, a man old enough to be married who was not married and who had no visible chance to get married. A bachelor was, by nature, under suspicion. The women did not turn their backs as I passed along the street; they were, in fact, polite and friendly enough, as a rule. And I did learn (a little too late) to pursue my bachelor’s aims and satisfactions with some discretion. But nobody ever told me pointedly or even casually that any eligible maiden was a good cook. I was not held up as an example to the young.
And so, in a society that was in some ways classless, I was in a class by myself. I was soon identified as a man who now and again wouldn’t mind to take a drink, or join a nighttime party of fox or coon hunters, or attend a water-drinking party at the Grandstand or a roadhouse dance.
The biggest disadvantage, maybe, was that I remained a sort of bystander a lot longer than I remained a stranger. They were calling me “Jayber” a long time before I was involved. Most people treated me well from the start, and some a lot better than well. But it only takes one or two, like Cecelia Overhold, to keep you reminded of how you fit in. So far as she ever let me see, Cecelia never looked straight at me again in her life. I got so that when I met her in the street I would tip my hat to her, if I was wearing one; if not, I would make a little bow. She always went by without looking at me, her head tilted to indicate not that she did not see me but that she had already seen me, and once was enough.
As for advantages, they were there right from the start, and there were several of them.
One was, I felt at home. There is more to this than I can explain. I just felt at home. After I got to Port William, I didn’t feel any longer that I needed to look around to see if there was someplace I would like better. I quit wondering what I was going to make of myself. A lot of my doubts and questions were settled. You could say, I guess, that I was glad at last to be classified. I was not a preacher or a teacher or a student or a traveler. I was Port William’s bachelor barber, and a number of satisfactions were available to me as the perquisites of that office.
Burley Coulter was correct, for instance, about the goodness of having your dwelling place and your place of business right together. When I came down the stairs and into the shop I was “at work.” When I went back upstairs I was “at home.” This was handy in a lot of ways. The stove that heated the shop heated my bedroom-living-room-bathroom-kitchen (my “efficiency apartment”) upstairs. Often, in the winter, while I was
at work (which included loafing and talking) in the shop, I would have a pot of beans or soup or stew simmering on the stove.
People respected the difference. The shop was a public place, but the upstairs room was private. I’ve had people in the shop or down there banging on the door all hours of the day and night, for Port William never went altogether to sleep, but I expect I could count on my fingers the number of times anybody ever came to the door upstairs. And most of those times it was Burley Coulter, who, up there, would be mannerly and reserved, very formal—as opposed to his behavior in the shop where, like nearly everybody, he felt at home.
My occupancy of the ramshackle little building seemed to give him immense satisfaction, as if he had foreseen it all in a dream and was amazed that it had come to pass. He didn’t harp on the subject, but if it came up he enjoyed talking about it. And he made occasions to review my situation and accomplishments.
One day he came in and walked all around the shop, looking at everything in it and out every window. He then sat down and rubbed his hands together. “Yessir,” he said, “it’s fine. You got your working and your living right here together.”
And then the others took it up:
“Yessir, it’s hard to tell whether he’s working or living.”
“Especially when he’s working, it’s hard to tell if he’s living.”
“When he’s working it’s hard to tell if he’s alive.”
And so on.
Burley Coulter himself was one of the best perquisites of my office. Burley was nineteen years older than I was, old enough to have been my father, and in fact he was the same age my father would have been if he had lived. He was the most interesting man I ever knew. He was in his way an adventurer. And something worthy of notice was always going on in his head. I found him to be a surprising man, unpredictable, and at the same time always true to himself and recognizable in what he did. I had lived in Port William several years before I realized that Burley was proud of me for being a reader of books; he was not himself a devoted reader, but he thought it was excellent that I should be. It must have been 1940 or 1941 when he first came all the way into my upstairs room and saw my books in my little bookcase.
“Do you read in them?”
“Yes,” I said.
He gave the shelves a long study, not reading the titles, apparently just assaying in his mind the number and weight of the books, their varying sizes and colors, the printing on their spines. And then he nodded his approval and said, “Well, that’s all right.”
I knew him for forty years, about, and saw him endure the times and suffer the changes, and we were always friends.
Among the other perquisites of my office, I might as well say, were all my customers. I remembered a surprising number of them from the days when, for one reason or another, they would turn up at Uncle Othy’s store at Squires Landing. And a surprising number of them sooner or later acknowledged that they had taken notice of me back in those old days. I liked them varyingly; some I didn’t like at all. But all of them have been interesting to me; some I have liked and some I have loved. I have raked my comb over scalps that were dirty both above and beneath. I have lowered the ears of good men and bad, smart and stupid, young and old, kind and mean; of men who have killed other men (think of that) and of men who have been killed (think of that). I cut the hair of Tom Coulter and Virgil Feltner and Jimmy Chatham and a good many more who went away to the various wars and never came back, or came back dead.
I became, over the years, a pretty good student of family traits: the shapes of heads, ears, noses, hands, and so forth. This was sometimes funny, as when I would get a suspicion of a kinship that was, you might say, unauthorized. But it was moving too, after a while, to realize that under my very hands a generation had grown up and another passed away.
My most difficult times were the early hours of Saturday when the parents would bring in the littlest boys. You talk about a trial—it would come when a young mother would bring her first child for his first haircut. At best it was like shooting at a moving target. At worst the boy would be a high-principled little fellow who found haircuts to be against his religion, and whose mother was jumping half out of her chair all the time, saying things like “Be still, sugar—Mr. Crow’s not going to hurt you.”
About as bad were some of the old men. They would forget they had faces until their beard began to itch, and then would come in for a shave. They were good-mannered old men who thought that when they were in company they ought to have something to say and that they ought to look at the people they were talking to. While I shaved them they would talk and look around as if I was not even present, let alone working around their ears and noses and throats with a straight razor.
But I must say I always liked having the old ones around. I sort of had a way of collecting them. There was a long string of them who made a regular sitting place of my shop after they got too old to work; some came in every Saturday and some came in every day, depending on how close by they lived. Some of them were outlandish enough, like the one everybody called Old Man Profet who, when he talked, breathed fiercely through his false teeth, which he took out, he said, only to sleep and to eat. Mr. Profet was inclined toward boasting and self-dramatization and belief in whatever he said. To hear him recount the exploits of his youth (in love, work, and strife) with the wind whistling in and out between his gritted teeth, you would think yourself in the presence of some dethroned old warrior king.
Uncle Stanley Gibbs, Grover’s father, had no teeth at all and talked like a bubbling spring, and would say anything at all—anything—that he thought of. And sometimes he said, as Grover put it, “things that he nor nobody else ever thought of.”
“Did you know,” said Uncle Stanley, “that they cut a rock out of old Mrs. Shoals’s apparatix as big as a hen egg?”
“No,” I said. “I did not.”
“Well, they did.”
Mr. Wayne Thripple, on the other hand, never said much at all. He was a loose-skinned old fellow who just sat and stared ahead, glassy-eyed, as if about to go to sleep, but he never went to sleep. He spent a lot of time clearing his throat, loudly. “Humh!” he would say. “Unnnh uh-hum! Uh-hum! Hmmmmh! Uh-hum, uh-hum, uh-hum! Uh-hum-ahum!”
But there were also men such as Uncle Isham Quail and Old Jack Beechum and, later, Athey Keith and Mat Feltner, intelligent men who knew things that were surpassingly interesting to me. They were rememberers, carrying in their living thoughts all the history that such places as Port William ever have. I listened to them with all my ears and have tried to remember what they said, though from remembering what I remember I know that much is lost. Things went to the grave with them that will never be known again.
Uncle Marce Catlett would ride in on horseback to get a haircut and a shave the first thing every other Saturday afternoon, hitching his mare to the sugar tree in front of my door. There came a time when I would have to help him off and back onto the mare. Uncle Dave Coulter, Burley’s father, always walked in, to save his horse. Neither of them ever loafed.
I came to feel a tenderness for them all. This was something new to me. It gave me a curious pleasure to touch them, to help them in and out of the chair, to shave their weather-toughened old faces. They had known hard use, nearly all of them. You could tell it by the way they held themselves and moved. Most of all you could tell it by their hands, which were shaped by wear and often by the twists and swellings of arthritis. They had used their hands forgetfully, as hooks and pliers and hammers, and in every kind of weather. The backs of their hands showed a network of little scars where they had been cut, nicked, thornstuck, pinched, punctured, scraped, and burned. Their faces told that they had suffered things they did not talk about. Every one of them had a good knife in his pocket, sharp, the blades whetted narrow and concave, the horn of the handle worn smooth. The oldest ones spoke, like Uncle Othy, the old broad speech of the place; they said “ahrn” and “fahr” and “tard” for “iron” and “fire” and ?
??tired”; they said “yorn” for “yours,” “cheer” for “chair,” “deesh” for “dish,” “dreen” for “drain,” “slide” for “sled,” and “juberous” for “dubious.” I loved to listen to them, for they spoke my native tongue.
Among the best things that could happen (and that happened less and less often as time went on) were the nights when we would have music. I never quite knew how these came about. In my early days in the shop and on for a good many years, Bill Mixter and his brother and his sons had a band that would go about playing at square dances and such. Maybe there would be times when they would be in need of a place to gather and play. Maybe they had taken notice of my habit of keeping the shop open at night as long as anybody was there.
Anyhow, there would be a night now and then when they would wander in, one after another, a little past a decent bedtime, carrying their instruments. Maybe Burley Coulter would take down his old fiddle and come too. They never said that they had come to play; the instruments seemed just to be along by accident.
They would come in and sit down as people did who had come in to loaf, and the conversation would begin about as usual.
“Good evening to you, Jayber.”
“Good evening to you, Bill.”
“Well, what do you reckon you been up to?”
“Oh, no good, as usual.”
If I had no customer, as I probably would not have at that hour of the night, I would climb into the seat of my profession and make myself comfortable.
They would greet me and one another as they came in. They took chairs, sat down, commented on the weather and other events, smoked maybe.
And then one or another of them would pick up his fiddle or guitar or banjo (you could never tell who it would be) and begin to tune it, plucking at the strings individually and listening. And then another would begin, and another. It was done almost bashfully, as if they feared that the silence might not welcome their music. Little sequences of notes would be picked out randomly here and there. (Their instruments just happened to be in their hands. The power of music-making had overtaken them by surprise, and they had to grow used to it.)