Jayber Crow

  Some coped with their times of fear and worry by becoming awfully quiet. Some would become noisy. Burley Coulter was one who would be noisy. The elder Coulters had died by then and Burley was living alone. After the war started, there would be times when he more or less made my shop his living room. His nephew, Tom, was with a battalion of engineers, first in North Africa and then in Italy. Tom would sometimes have to work under fire, being shot at while he concentrated his mind on something else. I knew that Burley was worrying about Tom when (just two or three times) I saw him fall away from a conversation into thought, and heard him grunt at what he was thinking. Mostly, when he was most worried, he would be working hard to stir up something to laugh about.

  He would get up in the midst of the crowded shop, interrupting the conversation, and start outside to relieve himself. “All who can’t swim, mount the highest bench,” he would cry out, “for the great he-elephant will now make water!”

  Or in the latter part of a late-winter Saturday afternoon, his mind turning (as he would not say, but as we knew) to the prospect of a visit to his might-as-well-be wife, Kate Helen Branch, he would stand up and stretch. “Well, boys, I reckon I better get on home and shine, shave, clean up, and sandpaper my tool.”

  What quieted him was grief. Tom was killed as the invasion fought its way up through the mountains of Italy—somewhere up in the cold and the rocks. For a long time after that, Burley went through the motions, doing about as he had done before, but he made no noise. Tom and Nathan, the sons of Burley’s brother Jarrat, had lost their mother when they were little and had come across the hollow to live with their grandparents and Burley. Jarrat, after his wife died, had become a distant, solitary, work-brittle man, and Burley had taken a large share in the raising of the boys. They were his boys as much as their father’s, and the raising of them had changed him.

  After we got the bad news about Tom Coulter, there was nothing, of course, that anybody could do. Maybe because I wished I could do something and could do nothing, I began to have this feeling that I was watching over Burley. I would be keeping an eye on him, aware of him in a way that I had not been before. The times when he fell away into thought came more often then, and he would have an expression on his face like that of a man who is looking at something he can’t quite see. And many a night I sat on with him in the shop, talking of other things, to help him put off going home until he was sure he could sleep. By the time Tom was dead, Nathan had crossed the waters and was in the fighting.

  I was learning what I had meant when I decided that I would share the fate of Port William. I had not gone off to war, but the wounds and deaths of Port William boys were happening in Port William. They were happening to me. I was involved; I was being changed. The war years were long because we were always waiting for what we feared and for what we hoped. We felt, I think, that we were failing one another, for we needed to have something we could do for one another and mostly there was nothing. And yet, even in failing one another, even in our silence we kept with one another. People had their ways and kept to them. The crops were planted and harvested; the animals mated and gave birth in the appointed seasons, were fed and watched over; the endless conversation of weather and work went on; memories were kept, stories told, and everything funny treasured up and spread around. The old studied their memories and mused and spoke. We younger ones began to see that we knew things that never had not been known.

  New grief, when it came, you could feel filling the air. It took up all the room there was. The place itself, the whole place, became a reminder of the absence of the hurt or the dead or the missing one. I don’t believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.

  “What can’t be helped must be endured,” Mat Feltner said. And he was a man who knew.

  When Mat’s boy, Virgil, was reported missing in action, and remained missing until “missing” slowly came to mean “dead,” things changed between Mat and Burley. Before, they had been friendly acquaintances, as you might say; now they recognized each other and were friends. They were men of two different sorts but they had stepped onto the common ground from which young men they loved were gone.

  Mat had the worst of it, maybe. In loyalty to his boy he had to try to believe that “missing” meant alive somewhere. And yet lengthening time insisted, like a clock ticking, that it meant dead.

  Maybe it helped him to have Burley to sit with and talk. Like Burley, he went through the old motions of his life, taking care of what needed caring for, keeping mostly quiet about what was on his mind. But his hard waiting changed him; you could see it in his face.

  One night, not long before the war ended, I was sitting in the shop after bedtime. It was a hot night and I had thought I would read a while downstairs to give the upstairs room a chance to cool. There was a pretty good breeze. Nobody had come in, and I sat in the barber chair, which really was the most comfortable chair I had.

  I was reading a good book (The Woodlanders, by Thomas Hardy, which was in a box of books I had bought for a quarter at an auction), and I stayed on even after I knew it had cooled off upstairs. People went to bed and the town got quiet. For a long time all I could hear were the candle flies fluttering against the screens.

  And then I heard footsteps on the walk. It was Mat Feltner. He hesitated, seeing the light, and looked in.

  I called to him, “Come in! Come in! Have a seat!”

  I knew what he was doing. He was walking away from his thoughts, but his thoughts were staying with him. He was tired but he couldn’t sleep.

  He seemed glad enough to come in. He sat down, and I closed my book. We talked just aimlessly for a while. We went over all the local goings-on, which neither of us needed to hear about and were not much interested in, but both of us seemed to feel that we needed to be talking.

  And then we spoke of the weather, which had been awfully hot. After that, unable to think of anything more to say, we fell into a silence that was troubled and unwelcome.

  Trying to end it, I said finally, “Well, we’ve had a time,” speaking of the weather.

  And Mat said, “Yes, we’ve had a time,” speaking of the war.

  We spoke in very general terms, then, of the war and other trials of life in this world.

  Mat said, “Everything that will shake has got to be shook.”

  “That’s Scripture,” I said, and he nodded.

  Thinking to try to comfort him, I said, “Well, along with all else, there’s goodness and beauty too. I guess that’s the mercy of the world.”

  Mat said, “The mercy of the world is you don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  And then after a pause, speaking on in the same dry, level voice as before, he told me why he had been up walking about so late. He had had a dream. In the dream he had seen Virgil as he had been when he was about five years old: a pretty little boy who hadn’t yet thought of anything he would rather do than follow Mat around at work. He looked as real, as much himself, as if the dream were not a dream. But in the dream Mat knew everything that was to come.

  He told me this in a voice as steady and even as if it were only another day’s news, and then he said, “All I could do was hug him and cry.”

  And then I could no longer sit in that tall chair. I had to come down. I came down and went over and sat beside Mat.

  If he had cried, I would have. We both could have, but we didn’t. We sat together for a long time and said not a word.

  After a while, though the grief did not go away from us, it grew quiet. What had seemed a storm wailing through the entire darkness seemed to come in at last and lie down.

  Mat got up then and went to the door. “Well. Thanks,” he said, not looking at me even then, and went away.

  14

  For Better, for Wore

  Ernest Finley may have been right in saying that in Port William we were more or less a classless society. On the other ha
nd, we may have been a two-class society: Cecelia Overhold, and everybody else. Or maybe we were a three-class society: Cecelia Overhold, and everybody else, and me. I couldn’t imagine Cecelia in those early days as well maybe as I can now, but as I have said, she was a good part of the reason for my social ineligibility. She was my enemy.

  But she was Port William’s enemy too. Cecelia never liked Port William. She was from Hargrave, and she had some of the social smuggery of the Hargrave upper crust. She married Roy Overhold because he was handsome and she was in love with him, I suppose, and then found that Port William was beneath her—and therefore that Roy, who belonged to Port William, was beneath her. What, after all, would a proud and socially ambitious young woman from Hargrave do with a husband who could be fully entertained by talking or playing cards beside some public stove in Port William for half a winter day? She did not like Port William pronunciation, diction, and grammar. She did not like its public loafing and spitting. She did not like its preoccupation with crops, livestock, food, hunting, fishing, and weather. She did not like its taste in church windows. And so on. She remembered all the personal affronts and insults that she had suffered, going back, I think, to about 1928, when she and Roy got married.

  Her particular cross (or curse) was her sister Dorothy in Los Angeles, whom she had a few times gone out to visit. California, in Cecelia’s mind, was the one Utopia of the world. “Oh,” she would say, “it’s a real place, a wonderful place. You can see the stars of the picture shows alive. You can step right out your back door and pick an orange from a tree. Everything out there is up-to-date. Dorothy has such lovely friends.” This “California” was the stick she used to measure Port William, and to beat it with. And her mythological sister measured us Port Williamites with a foot or so to spare. Cecelia, as with every look and gesture she let us know, was entirely at ease only in the company of her equals—a company that included, besides herself, only her sister. And of course Cecelia held some secret doubts about herself; you can’t dislike nearly everybody and be quite certain that you have exempted yourself.

  Cecelia was a regular churchgoer. I would say that she was safely within the definition of “a pillar of the church.” That, you might have thought, would have helped a little to ease the difficulty between her and Roy, but I don’t think it did.

  How much the church meant to Cecelia I really don’t know. (I know it provided her with most of her best occasions for high-hatting me.) So far as I could tell, she was not a forgiving, forbearing Christian, and yet I have wondered if at times the church, to her, didn’t stand for some kindness or gentleness that she yearned toward in her heart. But in her practice it seemed to stand merely for gentility and righteousness that, so to speak, justified her in her difference from Roy, who was not a pillar of the church. When he went, he went in a kind of self-embarrassment, utterly failing to see the connection between it and himself, which caused him to sit as far from the pulpit as possible and as near the door.

  The church, I would guess, meant little enough to many of the men of Port William, who (if they went) were not comfortable in it and whose chief preoccupation with respect to it was to keep the preacher from finding out how they really talked and thought and lived. Like, I think, most of the people of Port William, Roy lived too hard up against mystery to be without religion. But like many of the men, he was without church religion. Which is to say that, especially in his own eyes, he was without an acceptable religion. And so in her dealings with him Cecelia thrust the church out like a lion tamer’s chair. And Roy, who had never claimed to be a lion, would thereupon be discovered to be not on the attack, or even on the defense, but merely not present. Which surely must have been a further disappointment to her, which maybe seemed to her to verify or justify her general disappointment in him. He, anyhow, was out, and she was in, and neither of them ever could quite forget it.

  Roy, I guess, was about as ordinary as a man could be. He was ordinary even in his religious discomfort. In all his life he never did anything that surprised Port William. Except for the sometime extremity of his misery, I don’t think he ever surprised himself.

  By the time I knew him, Roy was showing some wear, and he was a baldy like me. But once he had been handsome, maybe even pretty. He’d had black curly hair and blue eyes as startlingly clear, almost, as the glass eyes of a doll. One time, with a pride that also embarrassed him, he showed me a picture of himself as a young man. In appearance, at least, he must have seemed a fit match for the beautiful young Cecelia, ever stylish, ever slender. Maybe in the time of their courtship he had looked malleable to Cecelia—good raw material, a man she could make something out of.

  As it turned out, Roy was not malleable. What he was already was what he was going to be; what he was already was all she got. She couldn’t make anything out of him that he hadn’t already become by the time she got started on him. She couldn’t even reduce him to anything less than he was.

  She was disappointed in him. And this wasn’t just her disappointment, for I think he was disappointed in himself for being a disappointment to her. It was a disappointment like a nail in your shoe. It wasn’t completely disabling, but it couldn’t be ignored either. It didn’t go away. It wore worse.

  But I don’t think Roy maintained himself as he was by resistance. I don’t think he fought with her or made much of an argument in his own favor. When she raised the pressure, he just escaped. He just quietly shifted off into one of the maybe innumerable precincts of Port William or the surrounding outdoors where she disdained to go. (Her invasion of the Grandstand on that fine morning in the spring of 1937 was not usual. It was provoked by I don’t know what extremity of grief and rage.) As a rule, when the pressure was on, Roy eased away. He was not by nature a man who was very much in evidence.

  If a soft answer turneth away wrath, maybe no answer stirreth wrath up. It was something like that. Roy had the aspect of a man who had eased away from trouble he had not got rid of. He was a quiet, smiling man, a humorous man who never laughed aloud—a good man, I always thought, whose only severe critic was his wife.

  Cecelia would have liked a husband she would have been proud to display, a man who looked good in a suit, who was affable, talkative, and charming, desirable (but not too desirable) to other women. She would have been an excellent wife, maybe, to a certain kind of doctor, maybe even a preacher. Roy finally failed to measure up to any of her standards. Dressed up, he never looked like he was wearing his own clothes. In social situations, if he could not find one of his own kind to talk with about grass and livestock and the other things his kind talked about, he was little better than deaf and dumb. And he was not desirable to other women—not, at least, to any woman Cecelia could imagine.

  The time she took him on a trip to visit her sister in California was (for reasons that Port William saw as clearly as if the whole town had gone along) the only time she ever took him. The whole week he wore his Sunday suit, in which he looked like a badly stuffed animal. He smiled at everything and said almost nothing. He walked about, looking for nobody knew what, like some forest or swamp creature newly acquired by a zoo. Or so the talkers in my shop imagined.

  When he got home I asked him, “Well, how was it?”

  He only smiled and gave one little shake to his head.

  When he died, Roy’s dead body, in his last ill-fitting Sunday suit, seemed to preserve the integrity of his long discomfort. He looked (unless you deliberately reminded yourself otherwise) as if he would lie there, the center of far more attention than he had ever sought, in mere embarrassment forever.

  If Cecelia was my enemy, that was because (as I now believe) she saw me as her enemy. As the town’s barber, as the host of that mostly masculine enclosure, the barbershop, and as the town’s permanent bachelor, a piece of raw material permanently raw, forever to be unimproved by a woman of her discriminating powers, I must have seemed to her to be the very gatekeeper of that unregulated other world that Roy eased away into whenever he eased away. r />
  15

  The Beautiful Shore

  In the last spring of the war, Uncle Stanley Gibbs more or less ran aground as Port William’s grave digger and church janitor. He could still dig a grave, he said, but was having more and more trouble getting out of it after he dug it. But also he got fired, first as grave digger and then as janitor, for his inability to control his mouth. He had modified the worst of his vocabulary when he assumed the dignity of associating with preachers and undertakers, but vocabulary really was the smallest end of the problem. Uncle Stanley had no more sense of privacy than a fruit jar. He would tell you at length about his manner of coping with the piles, or his plans for bachelorhood in case Miss Pauline died before he did. His plans for bachelorhood rested on the premise that as soon as Miss Pauline breathed her last, he would cease to be rickety and toothless and deaf and would become a tomcat around the women, as he had been once upon a time.

  “Well,” Uncle Stanley would be saying for the further enlightenment of whomsoever might be listening, “the madam goes around committing virtue left and right. She looks like the last of pea time now, and you would never know it, but me and her fell together after the fashion of hemale and shemale, same as everybody.”

  And so on.

  Anyhow, as his successor Uncle Stanley chose me, because he thought I had both time to spare and the necessary intelligence—for, as he said, “not just anybody can dig a grave.”

  I accepted because I was going on thirty-one by then and beginning to see that I needed a little something extra to put away for my old age, in case I lived to be old. Digging graves and cleaning the church were not going to put me in a penthouse in Miami, but I thought they might get me into a nice camp house down along the river, where I could fish when I felt like it.