Jayber Crow

  It is hard, too, to say that anybody was exactly blamable for this—or anybody in particular.

  Old farmers like Athey Keith, who understood or at least felt what was happening and what it would cost, were ignored, laughed off by young farmers like Troy Chatham. Young farmers who ought to have understood just didn’t. People followed their own ideas of their own advantage, and it was clear only later, and too late, that everybody’s idea led off in a slightly different direction from everybody else’s. After the Depression and the war and the years of work that they were now beginning to think of as slow and too hard, the country people were trying to get away from demanding circumstances. That was why I bought the Zephyr. We couldn’t quite see at the time, or didn’t want to know, that it was the demanding circumstances that had kept us together.

  Troy went into debt and bought his new equipment because he didn’t want to be held back by demanding circumstances. He was young and strong and ambitious. He wanted to be a star. The tractor greatly increased the power and speed of work. With it he could work more land. He could work longer. Because it had electric lights and did not get tired, he could work at night.

  When it came time to plan for the next year, wishing them to be friends and eventual partners before Athey would die and Troy would become the farm’s farmer, Athey walked Troy over the sod ground that was to be broken for row crops, showing him the outlines of the plow-lands and where the backfurrows were to run. And then he led him on to show him the next year’s cropland, and then the next year’s, laying the pattern before him. None of what I’m telling now is guesswork. Troy talked about himself in town as if he were the subject of a news broadcast. To not know what was going on, I would have had to be deaf and maybe also blind.

  Such knowledge ought to have passed from Athey to Troy as a matter of course, in the process of daily work and talk. And it would have, if Troy had been willing to have Athey as a teacher, let alone a friend. But the connection between them was already strained. Troy wanted to go in his own direction—or so he thought, poor fellow. His way, even when he had to work with Athey, was to hold himself a little aside and keep quiet. It was the quietest he ever was, probably. He was protecting himself from knowing what he did not want to know, thinking that his silence signified his superiority. He did his talking in town, and Port William listened, nodded, scratched its ears, grunted, and kept its opinions mostly to itself.

  Troy’s sole response to that winter afternoon’s walk with Athey was: “We need to grow more corn.”

  This brought Athey to a stop. The law of the farm was in the balance between crops (including hay and pasture) and livestock. The farm would have no more livestock than it could carry without strain. No more land would be plowed for grain crops than could be fertilized with manure from the animals. No more grain would be grown than the animals could eat. Except in case of unexpected surpluses or deficiencies, the farm did not sell or buy livestock feed. “I mean my grain and hay to leave my place on foot,” Athey liked to say. This was a conserving principle; it strictly limited both the amount of land that would be plowed and the amount of supplies that would have to be bought. Athey did not save money at the expense of his farm or his family, but he looked upon spending it as a last resort; he spent no more than was necessary, and he hated debt. You can see where my sympathies were. He was, in his son-in-law’s opinion, “tight” and unwilling to take the necessary risks. “Risk is necessary in this farming game,” Troy said. He meant extraordinary financial risk—as if the risk of hail, wind, flood, drouth, pests and diseases, injury and death were not enough. “You’ve got to spend money to make money.”

  Troy’s demand to grow more corn was a challenge, Athey knew, not only or even mainly to himself but to the farm and its established order; he felt a shudder fall through him, and he knew that he was being changed; he was being pushed toward something he had not imagined, let alone intended. He looked down at his feet and thought, his right wrist caught as usual in his left hand under the tail of his jacket. And then he looked away and thought.

  “If you raise more corn,” he said, “you’ll have to buy fertilizer.” He said “you,” for he had determined that he himself would not grow the corn or pay for the fertilizer, and he knew that Troy would have to borrow against the crop for the fertilizer.

  “Hell, I don’t mind buying fertilizer!” Troy said.

  Athey agreed to let him grow ten extra acres. Which, Troy thought, was not enough. He arranged to grow thirty more acres, on the shares, on a neighboring farm. Pretty soon he would be working away from home, into the night, while Mattie, carrying the baby on her hip, went about doing his barn chores.

  And so the farm came under the influence of a new pattern, and this was the pattern of a fundamental disagreement such as it had never seen before. It was a disagreement about time and money and the use of the world. The tractor seemed to have emanated directly from Troy’s own mind, his need to go headlong, day or night, and perform heroic feats. But Athey and his tenant and his tenant’s boys were still doing their work with teams of mules. Troy liked to climb on the tractor, open the throttle, and just go, whatever the time of day, his mind invested with the machine’s indifference to weariness and to features of the landscape. A day, to Athey, was measured by daylight and by the endurance of living bodies; it was divided in two by dinnertime; it ended at suppertime. Athey worked at a gait that in his time some had found to be too swift, but which was now revealed as patient.

  The conflicts were inescapable, were just there as part and parcel of the farm and what was happening on it. The work of the farm now went on at two different rates of speed and power and endurance. It became hard to cooperate, not because cooperation was impossible but because the tractor and the teams embodied two different kinds of will, almost two different intentions. It was a difference of character and history. At the time all this began, Troy was twenty-three years old and Athey sixty-seven. Athey belonged to that life that had, in fact, ended with the war; he could not imagine the life that was to come. Troy, who could not imagine the older life, was overflowing with the impatience of the new one.

  And Troy felt also that he had a lot to prove. As it turned out, he would have more reason every year to feel so.

  Year by year, he increased his rented acreage elsewhere, thereby increasing the pressure on Athey to give him more say-so over the Keith place. For Troy would one day farm that farm, and Athey wanted his interest there. Little by little, he began giving way to Troy’s wants and ideas, and the old pattern of the farm began to give way.

  Judging from what Troy repeated in town, conversations between him and Athey finally degenerated into one-sentence exchanges. Athey would tell what he had done in the last half day or day, and Troy, laughing or in anger, would repeat some version of his final judgment on all things slow and old: “Shit! I could’ve done that in two hours!” Part of Troy’s resentment came from knowing, without needing to be told, that “the old man” thought his work was too fast and too rough, that he lacked sympathy and was too hard on things. Athey had only to stand by and look and say nothing, and his point was made.

  Troy had begun to see Athey and the others as “in the way.” He would tell of working with them, for instance, on the same mowing land, and having to slow down until they could pull out at the turns to let him and his tractor go ahead. “By God,” he would say, “I just wanted to drive right over the top of ’em!”

  I confess that I heard this with a sense of guilt, for by the time Troy began to say such things I had bought the Zephyr and had succumbed to something of the same impatience. My wonderful machine sometimes altered my mind so that I, lately a pedestrian myself, fiercely resented all such impediments on the road. Even at my sedate top speed of forty miles an hour, I hated anything that required me to slow down. My mind raged and fumed and I cursed aloud at farmers driving their stock across the road, at indecisive possums, at children on bicycles. Ease of going was translated without pause into a principled unwi
llingness to stop. Hadn’t I been there and didn’t I know it? And so, self-accused, having begun by resenting the insult to Athey, I ended by yielding Troy a little laugh and a nod of understanding, which shamed me and did not make me like him any better.

  In 1949, Mattie gave birth to their second child, named as if, and perhaps intentionally, for nobody: James William, called Jimmy.

  18

  Untold

  It was impossible to know of the trouble down at the Keith place without supposing that Mattie was caught somewhere in the middle, and isolated. Her mother could only have been torn and troubled by the conflict, but Della was free in the privacy of her own heart to take sides and stand by Athey. Athey, mostly in silence, was entirely on his own side.

  But Mattie, I thought, was divided. Though she was in love with her young husband, she was her father’s daughter still. Somewhere, sometime, the full force of their difference would have to be suffered—and Mattie would be the one who suffered it. That she was her parents’ child meant, as Troy’s ambition and his arrogance grew clear, that she would finally have to love him without approving of him. In fact, their marriage settled early upon the pattern it would always have: she was trying to wind up at home the thread that he unraveled elsewhere. He had been seized by a daydream of “farming big,” having what he wanted. What he wanted, as time would reveal, was to be a sort of farming businessman, an executive who would “manage” the “operation” from an office with a phone while other people (and machines) did the actual work. He got so far finally as to build and furnish a “farm office,” which he never really had time to sit down in. While he connived and contrived and borrowed, and drove day into night, trying (as he learned to put it) to “increase the profit margin by increasing volume,” she gardened and canned and tended to her hen flock and milked the cows and did whatever else Troy “didn’t have time to do,” and of course she took care of the children.

  She was taking up the slack. We all knew it. One Saturday afternoon somebody waiting for a haircut said something about Troy Chatham’s tractor equipment, for he already had more than anybody around. And Burley Coulter, who had my razor hone on his thigh, sharpening his knife, said without looking up, “The best equipment he’s got is his wife.” Somebody laughed, and somebody said, “Yep,” and everybody nodded.

  But the remarkable thing was that Mattie Chatham never looked like a woman who was put upon and divided in her loyalties and having a hard time; she didn’t look as though she would have welcomed sympathy, or as though she needed it. She was not her parents’ child for nothing. She was going about her life, taking her pleasures as she found them, suffering what was hers to suffer, doing what she had to do. She had about her no air of self-pity or complaint. And this could only have been because, in her own heart, she was not pitying herself or complaining. It was as though her very difficulties had confirmed her in her sense of herself and her capabilities.

  I knew Mattie Chatham a long time, and I never knew her to falsify or misrepresent herself. Whatever she gave you—a look, a question, an answer—was honest. She didn’t tell you everything she knew or thought. She never made reference even by silence to anything she suffered. But in herself she was present. She was present in her dealings with other people. She was right there. She was, to my eye, a good mother who liked and enjoyed her children, leaving them free within limits that both she and they understood. But she was also coming into responsibility for the community.

  You don’t have to know Port William long before you see that whatever coherence it has is largely owing to certain women. Maybe, since I no longer live in Port William, I shouldn’t generalize about it, but this is the way it seemed to me then. Art Rowanberry was surely right (mostly right) in saying that “people in Port William don’t have their own business.” One result is that people know who needs help. In Port William the women, like the men, talk. It is wonderful how secrets, always told secretly, can get around; I have been told the same secret three times in one day, each time with a warning to tell nobody. But some women seem more likely to act on what they know than most men. The men are not uncharitable; they are quick to get together to harvest a crop for a neighbor who gets sick. But it is the women more than the men who see to it that cooked food goes where it is needed, that no house goes without fuel in the winter, that no child goes without toys at Christmas, that the preacher knows where he should go with a word of comfort. This is a charity that includes the church rather than the other way around. Margaret Feltner was one of the women who saw to such things; so was Della Keith; so, as she came into her time, was Mattie Chatham.

  Of course, my semipublic participation in the nightlife of Hargrave was known in Port William. I had no more of “my own business” than anybody else. And of course, my reputation as an ineligible bachelor barber, grave digger, and church janitor (known to partake of the manly nightlife of Port William and to favor the society of bold women in the nightspots of Hargrave) made me perhaps always a little more hopelessly marginal to the womanhood of Port William.

  And yet I was something more than an observer. I was more or less tolerated because of my usefulness, and also, I believe, because of the remote chance that even so black a sheep might yet be washed whiter than snow. I continued to attend the services and other gatherings at the church, just in case I was needed to open or shut the windows or bring in extra chairs, and to make sure all the lights were turned off afterward. And so I was having a good bit to do, in a servantly way, with the women, who often had reason to tell me what needed to be done or what needed getting ready for. Mattie Chatham, as time went on and the older women became less able, had a way of being involved and seeing to things. Her way was quiet and unobtrusive—and effective; she got things done. She was never bossy (as, for instance, Mrs. Pauline Gibbs always was) but was just simply and quietly kind. She certainly made nothing special of me. But when she asked me to do something, she asked clearly knowing that she was putting me to trouble. She would say, “Jayber, would you mind?” And she always thanked me. She was considerate. That was one of the reasons I remained aware of her. Looking back, when the time came to look back, I could see that I was extraordinarily aware of her even then.

  She had come into her beauty. This was not the beauty of her youth and freshness, of which she had had a plenty. The beauty that I am speaking of now was that of a woman who has come into knowledge and into strength and who, knowing her hardships, trusts her strength and goes about her work even with a kind of happiness, serene somehow, and secure. It was the beauty she would always have. Her eyes had not changed. They still seemed to exert a power, as if whatever she looked at (including, I thought, me) was brightened.

  And then one Friday not long after the summer solstice of 1950 (at the start of another war), the most deciding event of my life took place, and I was not the same ever again. Vacation Bible School was going on at the church. I went up in the early afternoon as usual to clean up and prepare the building for the Sunday services. I finished my work in the sanctuary, and then because classes and “activities” were going on I went outside to putter around until the building would be empty.

  It was a pretty afternoon, not too warm. Mattie had brought the littlest children out into the yard to play games, her own Liddie among them. I picked up some trash along the road in front of the church, then began pulling some weeds out of the shrubbery, aware all the time of Mattie and the children, and pausing now and again to watch.

  To be plain about it, I didn’t think much of Vacation Bible School. As a product of The Good Shepherd, I didn’t think much of confinement. If I had ever gone to Vacation Bible School, I thought, I would not have liked it; I would have been too much aware of the invitation of the free and open summer day. It was nevertheless a great pleasure to me to watch Mattie and the children. She was guiding their play and playing with them, not being very insistent about anything, and they all were having a good time.

  I knew well the work and worry she had pending at h
ome, and yet in that moment she was as free with the children as if she had been a child herself—as free as a child, but with a generosity and watchfulness that were anything but childish. She was just perfectly there with them in her pleasure.

  I was all of a sudden overcome with love for her. It was the strongest moment I had known, violent in its suddenness and completeness, and yet also the quietest. I had been utterly changed, and had not stirred. It was as though she had, in the length of a breath, assumed in my mind a new dimension. I no longer merely saw her as one among the objects of the world but felt in every nerve the heft and touch of her. I felt her take form within my own form. I felt her come into being within me, as in the morning of the world.

  This love did not come to me like an arrow piercing my heart. Instead, it was as though Port William and all the world suddenly quietly fell away from me, leaving me standing in the air, alone, with the ache of acrophobia in the soles of my feet and my heart hollowed out with longing, in need of what I did not have.

  For a time—how long I don’t know—I was lost to myself, standing there still as a tree, and I have always wondered if she saw and knew. And then somehow, as uncertain of my contact with the ground as Julep Smallwood drunk, I made my way out of town into the woods, and sat down and put my head in my hands.

  Such a thing is maybe one of the liabilities of ineligible bachelorhood. Maybe it is one of the liabilities of manhood. For a long time I did not know what to make of it, and I suffered from my ignorance. What business had an ineligible bachelor to be in love with a married woman? Had it been only an infatuation, a desire striking and wounding and passing on by, it would have been a waste of pain. And how was I to know that a waste of pain was not what it was? I felt much and knew nothing. I had been touched by power but not by knowledge. There was nothing to do but submit to the trial of it. After a long time, it proved by its own suffering that love itself was what it was, and I am thankful.