Jayber Crow

  After they had found and mowed and neatened the graves of every known Feltner and Coulter and Catlett and Wheeler and Beechum and other kin, the family lines branching back into the viney older part of the graveyard that nobody much thought about anymore, they righted a leaning stone that belonged to Pvt. Avery Wheeler, C.S.A., who, as he walked back into Port William after Appomattox, was killed by a Union soldier already home. And then Mat led them to the graves of other dead who had awakened again in his thoughts and made their claims upon him:

  “Here, boys, let’s put in a few licks here. This is old Aunt Ret Overhold. She gave me a many a biscuit with butter and jam.”

  “Here, boys, this is old Uncle Royal Burgess. When she was just a little bit of a girl, Bess stole a primer out of his store, and I made her take it back and confess, and he gave it to her.”

  “Over here, boys. Let’s do a little something for Elder Johnson. The man was an artist at putting a shoe on a horse.”

  And so it would go until his homages and his remembered debts were paid.

  I was there because I had learned his ways and loved to hear him when he went back into his memories. When I knew he had gone out to the graveyard with his hands, I would get free if I could and go there myself, to be in his company for a while. I would be there, you might say, in the line of business.

  I would listen while he talked, and while he talked the mute stones spoke. Or we would sit together and not talk while he smoked his pipe and watched the younger men at work. He was a man you were comfortable in sitting with and not talking. But that day, maybe because of the memory of the young soldier killed in his homecoming, Mat dwelled upon the violence that had been in the town in his own early days. Port William had had three saloons then and, in its isolation, no law to speak of. For a while there had been a town board that hired a marshal, who, when he went to make an arrest, would be much inclined to ask permission of the arrestee. Election days were dangerous, for political arguments would lead to fighting or rock-throwing. Or to shooting, which Mat thought might have been the least dangerous, because often the shooters were too drunk to aim straight—though his own father had been killed by a drunk man with a gun.

  One day his mother was sitting on the front porch when a man, badly cut and bleeding, came running up the walk, pursued by several other men. She got up, opened the door into the house, shut it behind the hurt man, and stood in front of it. But the pursuers said, “We’re his friends!” And she opened the door to them also, and helped them to wash the man and bind up his wounds.

  Having finished his story, Mat fell silent and looked away. I knew his homage then was to his mother.

  And then he told about Uncle Ive Rowanberry and his sister Verna.

  When the Civil War was starting up, Uncle Ive, then just a big boy whose mother was still calling him, instructively, “Iver William,” went off to join the Confederacy. The Rowanberrys, as a matter of fact, owned a family of slaves who, after emancipation, were also Rowanberrys. Still, I don’t think Ive Rowanberry was drawn to the Confederacy because of the issue of slavery. I think he went because, as he is said to have said, “Home is home, and I don’t want any other son of a bitch telling me what to do.”

  At about the same time Verna Rowanberry married a boy by the name of Sylvan Shoals, who had already enlisted in the Union Army for reasons not exactly opposite to those of his brother-in-law, but he did believe with religious fervor in the national union and he did not want slaveholders telling him what to do.

  Uncle Ive’s military career was not heroic. He was captured by the Home Guard on his way to enlist and spent the entire war in a Union prison at Louisville. He believed he would have enjoyed the war, for he had been intending to join the Fourth Kentucky Cavalry and he liked to ride. But he did not enjoy prison, which obliged him for a long time to be pent up indoors with other sons of bitches telling him what to do. He had gone off to enlist as a rather thoughtless and exuberant Confederate. He came out of the prison an embittered and principled one. He was by nature a good-humored and even a happy man, but he held his grudge.

  Sylvan Shoals went to the war and fought and came home with a wound that he eventually died of. And the breach never healed between Ive Rowanberry and his sister. With them, as with the country, the war did not end the division but only gave the two sides a high-toned language that kept the differences raw. Although Ive, in fact, never fired a shot in anger in his life, it was to Verna as if he personally had given the death wound to Sylvan Shoals. And although neither Sylvan Shoals nor Verna had even known where Ive was after his departure from home, it was to Ive as though they personally had turned the key that locked the prison door.

  Perhaps, after it was all over, Ive and Verna met and had words—Mat didn’t know. Anyhow, the breach between them widened. Time, which is supposed to heal, only made them old. Their difference was principled, having to do with two versions of freedom, and so they were free from each other. Uncle Ive settled on a little hillside place on Catlett’s Fork and lived his life. Verna married again and passed her days and years over on Willow Run. It was easy enough not to meet, and they didn’t see each other (knowingly at least) for fifty years. And then one winter day Verna happened to be at the store at Dawes Landing. She was a widow for the second time by then, dressed in black. As she left, she met Uncle Ive, who was coming in, carrying a sack of shot and gutted rabbits to sell at the store, an old man bent over under his load.

  “Howdy,” said Uncle Ive, and kept going.

  When he got into the store, he swung off his load and asked, “Who was that old woman?”

  Presently Nathan and the others finished their work, loaded their tools into the back of Nathan’s old pickup, and left, taking Mat with them. And I sat on a while by myself in the quiet. I had been the barber in Port William for fourteen years by then, and the grave digger and church janitor for six years. My mind had begun to sink into the place. This was a feeling. It had grown into me from what I had learned at my work and all I had heard from Mat Feltner and the others who were the community’s rememberers, and from what I remembered myself. The feeling was that I could not be extracted from Port William like a pit from a plum, and that it could not be extracted from me; even death could not set it and me apart.

  History overflows time. Love overflows the allowance of the world. All the vessels overflow, and no end or limit stays put. Every shakable thing has got to be shaken. In a sense, nothing that was ever lost in Port William ever has been replaced. In another sense, nothing is ever lost, and we are compacted together forever, even by our failures, our regrets, and our longings.

  My vision of the gathered church that had come to me after I became the janitor had been replaced by a vision of the gathered community. What I saw now was the community imperfect and irresolute but held together by the frayed and always fraying, incomplete and yet ever-holding bonds of the various sorts of affection. There had maybe never been anybody who had not been loved by somebody, who had been loved by somebody else, and so on and on. If you could go back into the story of Uncle Ive and Verna Shoals, you would find, certainly before and maybe after, somebody who loved them both. It was a community always disappointed in itself, disappointing its members, always trying to contain its divisions and gentle its meanness, always failing and yet always preserving a sort of will toward goodwill. I knew that, in the midst of all the ignorance and error, this was a membership; it was the membership of Port William and of no other place on earth. My vision gathered the community as it never has been and never will be gathered in this world of time, for the community must always be marred by members who are indifferent to it or against it, who are nonetheless its members and maybe nonetheless essential to it. And yet I saw them all as somehow perfected, beyond time, by one another’s love, compassion, and forgiveness, as it is said we may be perfected by grace.

  And so there we all were on a little wave of time lifting up to eternity, and none of us ever in time would know what to make of it. How c
ould we? It is a mystery, for we are eternal beings living in time. Did I ever think that anybody would understand it? Yes. Once. I thought once that I would finally understand it.

  What I had come to know (by feeling only) was that the place’s true being, its presence you might say, was a sort of current, like an underground flow of water, except that the flowing was in all directions and yet did not flow away. When it rose into your heart and throat, you felt joy and sorrow at the same time, and the joining of times and lives. To come into the presence of the place was to know life and death, and to be near in all your thoughts to laughter and to tears. This would come over you and then pass away, as fragile as a moment of light.

  With that presence around me in the still evening, I got up and walked from the older part of the graveyard to the newer and back over the crest of the ridge away from the road. The day ending, winter coming, I walked in the spell of knowledge that I knew I could not keep intact for long.

  And then I saw what I at first thought was a sack or a large rag that the wind had blown onto the earth of a new grave. And then I knew what it was.

  Walking in her grief, she had followed the old path that in her childhood she and the other children had followed, coming up out of the river bottom to school in the days before school buses, and then she had cut across through the Feltner place to the graveyard. She lay on the raw mound of the grave as if trying to shelter it with her body, ever so still and given up and small. Her face was turned away. I could hear her crying. She drew in her breaths as if they were forced upon her, she having not the will either to breathe or not breathe. I knew that in all the world I was the only one who knew where she was.

  I knelt beside her, according to my calling in this world.

  I said, “Mattie.”

  And then, after a while, again: “Mattie.”

  She nodded her head to say that she had heard.

  I laid my hand on her shoulder. I said, “You can’t stay here.”

  20

  How It Held Together Partly

  Anybody would think that by being a bachelor a man could keep clear of trouble with a woman. On the basis of common sense (of which I have always had just short of enough) that is what I would have thought. But my experience has proved otherwise.

  Trouble with a woman is not something I ever greatly desired, though at times I have greatly desired women. If you think that is one more serious failure of common sense, you are right. However, the trouble that comes from desiring women is not exactly what I mean by trouble with a woman.

  The trouble I mean is in being actively and somewhat joyously disliked by a woman you may not much desire in the way of a man with a maid, but all the same would rather not be disliked by. I see I am going to have to tell you what I am talking about.

  Cecelia Overhold forgave her husband Roy now and again as they traveled the broken terrain of their marriage; not often, but now and again, they would arrive at the same place at the same time, and then I think she forgave him, at least temporarily. But she never forgave me. She disliked me perfectly and steadily, so far as I know, for the rest of her life. And this I have always minded. Sometimes I have resented it; mostly I have been sorry.

  To mind being disliked by a woman you don’t desire and are not married to is yet another serious failure of common sense. So be it. I have always counted being unmarried to Cecelia Overhold as a privilege; it surely is better to be disliked distantly than intimately. It surely is far better to be disliked by somebody you don’t love than by somebody you do. Even so, I mind. Even so, failing to love somebody is a failure.

  Therefore, of course, I have turned over and over in my thoughts the events of that Sunday morning at the Grandstand so long ago. I ask myself: If I had climbed that tree like the others, would she have liked me better? Was it my passivity in the face of attack that she detested? Did she see it as indifference to her, or disrespect? A gentleman, after all, does not customarily lie supine on the ground in the presence of a lady. Did she think I was lying there in case of an opportunity to look up her skirt? Did she have a natural aversion to bald-headed ineligible bachelors? Was it that I had seen her in her rage? Sometimes the effect seemed so to outweigh the cause that I would have to test the evidence again by touching with my tongue the notch she had made in my grin. Often her dislike of me, when I have had it on my mind, has made me feel unlikable. And so, though I have been unmarried to her, I have not been free of her.

  You knew merely by looking at her that Cecelia had a case to make. She thought the human condition was a calculated insult to her personally, the fault of certain people in particular. If she wasn’t the president of the United States, or Mrs. Rockefeller, or at least happy, it was somebody else’s fault, not hers. Her stinger was always out.

  This was generally known, of course. I don’t think she would have had to say anything to publish her thoughts and feelings. People generally suppose that they don’t understand one another very well, and that is true; they don’t. But some things they communicate easily and fully. Anger and contempt and hatred leap from one heart to another like fire in dry grass. The revelations of love are never complete or clear, not in this world. Love is slow and accumulating, and no matter how large or high it grows, it falls short. Love comprehends the world, though we don’t comprehend it. But hate comes off in slices, clear and whole—self-explanatory, you might say. You can hate people completely and kill them in an instant. Cecelia knew how to deliver the killing look and the killing refusal to look. She could give the tiniest little snub that would cause your soul to fester with self-doubt and self-justification and anger. And these were things she could pass along to you because all of them were festering in her.

  She knew that I had taken courses at the university and was a reader of books; that I had become by choice a mere barber, grave digger, and church janitor in Port William. Maybe that was what she could not forgive me for. Her favorite way of revenge was to ignore me, and she did this not just by not noticing me but by appearing to be as yet uninformed of my existence. But when I was near at hand, as I often was at church functions and such, she liked also to stand with her back to me and say to another person, for my benefit, bad things about Port William and my friends. She would damage everything in order to triumph over one thing. And I will have to hand it to her: She was a master of contempt. At her whim, I would have to tongue the gap in my teeth to verify my existence, or spend two hours muttering about in my mind, constructing an argument in self-defense.

  And so maybe I know something of how it was with Roy. Roy and Cecelia never had the child who might have been a bond and a comfort between them. And was it fate, justice, or mercy that the failure of that child to appear may likewise have become a bond, though not a comfort, between them?

  Cecelia thought that whatever she already had was no good, by virtue of the fact that she already had it. The things she desired all were things she didn’t have. The failure of the entire population of Port William to live up to Cecelia’s expectations brought heavy pressure to bear upon any newcomer or outsider who happened in. She was always latching on to new preachers or schoolteachers—anybody from away who supposably might prove to be as superior to Port William as she was. And they invariably disappointed her, either by liking the commonality of Port William or by regarding her as one of its members. Which, as a matter of fact, was correct. She was one of us. If she suspected as much, that must have been the unkindest cut of all.

  The only unbridgeable chasm between Port William and Hargrave or Port William and California was in Cecelia’s mind—and this, really, was a chasm between herself and everybody else. Maybe there were times when she knew it. When I think of that, I am sorry for her. She could fill a room with hate just by walking in. That was her impact, the way she made you feel at first. And then, if you were willing, you finally could see through that to the mere human she was. A mere human whose hate came from misery.

  Looking back now, after so long a time, the hardest knowled
ge I have is of the people I have known who have been most lonely: Troy Chatham and Cecelia Overhold, the one made lonely by ambition, the other by anger, and both by pride always clambering upward over its rubble.

  The problem, you see, is that Cecelia had some reason on her side; she had an argument. I don’t think she could be proved right; on the other hand, you can’t prove her wrong. Theoretically, there is always a better place for a person to live, better work to do, a better spouse to wed, better friends to have. But then this person must meet herself coming back: Theoretically, there always is a better inhabitant of this place, a better member of this community, a better worker, spouse, and friend than she is. This surely describes one of the circles of Hell, and who hasn’t traveled around it a time or two?

  I have got to the age now where I can see how short a time we have to be here. And when I think about it, it can seem strange beyond telling that this particular bunch of us should be here on this little patch of ground in this little patch of time, and I can think of the other times and places I might have lived, the other kinds of man I might have been. But there is something else. There are moments when the heart is generous, and then it knows that for better or worse our lives are woven together here, one with one another and with the place and all the living things.