Jayber Crow

  Given the numbers involved, it really wasn’t much of a fight. The hog-killing crew were on average a good deal younger than the Regulators, they were more offended, and they weren’t wearing hoods. A hood is far from an ideal garment to wear in a fistfight. Several of the Regulators had trouble aligning their eyes with their eyeholes.

  And so the fight didn’t take long. On the other hand, it didn’t end in a rout as it ought to have done. Nobody felt good enough. The defeated did not feel like running and the victors did not feel like pursuing. Finally the fight just subsided in place like a fire burning out.

  The victors were all standing and the others sitting or lying down. Athey heard the Blue Wing blow out on the river. Her engine seemed hardly to hesitate as she went by the landing. And then almost too soon Carter Keith had stepped into the barn lot in his black suit and hat, having stayed in Louisville only long enough to receive payment on his shipment of tobacco and catch the next boat home.

  Now that he was standing there, they saw the shambles they had made of the place. Carter Keith stopped and stood looking, and he was white around the mouth.

  Athey went to face his father. “I ought to busted that keg as soon as it was set down,” he said. “It’s all my fault.”

  “I don’t believe so,” his father said, and he put his arm around Athey.

  He said to the Regulators, “You goddamned sackheads get out of here and go home.”

  He told Athey, “Run yonder and tell Aunt Molly to make some coffee. Tell her to make it strong.”

  Mr. Fields and Webster Page and the others had begun to stir, trying to get themselves back to work. Athey’s father walked among them as if he were wading.

  “If there’s anything I can’t stand,” he said, “it’s a damned nasty hog-killing.”

  In the new day Athey ran to the house to tell Aunt Molly to make coffee. She would in a short while fix breakfast for them all, but she grunted as she lifted herself out of her chair at the window where she too had kept awake all night. “Rest me, Jesus!” she said. The Regulators were now filing past the house, carrying their saddles.

  The sight of the Regulators had, to Athey, the force of revelation. He saw them now wholly apart from power, seniority, even meanness. They were only men. Peg Shifter, in person, had never been friendly to Athey; as a Regulator, he had seemed terrible. Now he hopped along like a one-legged crow, not keeping up with the others. It occurred to Athey then that it might be possible to feel sorry for Peg Shifter, and in later years he did.

  22

  Born

  As much as you will let it, Port William will trouble your heart.

  I remember the McEndry brothers—Pistol and Hamp and Lank and Spiz—who were just more or less grown boys back in the late thirties. They would come walking into town every Saturday night with their hair oiled and combed in waves, their shirtsleeves turned back two turns above their wrists, lighted cigarettes dangling from the corners of their mouths. They always obliged Whacker Spradlin by drinking all of his whiskey they could hold. When they were drunk they always wanted to fight. When they fought they always got whipped. All four of them.

  Hamp and Spiz were killed in World War II, and Pistol was wounded. They received medals. They were heroes.

  And poor old Focus Fanshaw, unsound in the head and drunk too, one night jumped off the wall in front of Dolph Courtney’s store headfirst into the road to demonstrate the proper form of diving. They brought him down to me bleeding and barely conscious. I washed and disinfected his wounds and made him stay until he could walk without help. When he could talk again, he said, “Boys, that ain’t a good place to dive. The bottom’s too close to the top.”

  Of course we laughed. And remembered and told again and laughed again. There were always woes enough, and Port William savored its own comedy—which of course had to do more often than not with somebody’s woe.

  And I remember Roger Roberts, called by everybody according to his own pronunciation “Woger Woberts.” Woger was famous for his reply to Burley Coulter, who had suggested that Woger’s newly broken crop ground was rich enough to grow maidenheads: “Nope. ’Twon’t. Too many woots and wocks.”

  The big boys used to like to distract Woger while one of them slipped up and locked his arms around him; they wanted to hear him say, “Turn me awoose!”

  If they were bothering Woger when Athey Keith passed by, he would say, “Boys, don’t do that,” and they would stop and stand away. Athey would give them a nod.

  Such was Athey’s influence when he walked among us. As he got older he seemed to become always more tender. He cared for his mules and his cow and spoke of them as if they were members of his family. He always had something to say to babies and small children. He talked to the dogs he met in his passages through town.

  Of a lame hound named Gnats, who belonged sort of to everybody in those days and who got around in a three-legged lope, Athey would say with amusement and respect, “There goes old Gnats, doing his arithmetic, putting down three and carrying one.”

  He had been a good man always, I think, but this tenderness was new. It was the tenderness of an old man who had been busy all his life but now had time to pay attention to useless things. But it was more than that. It came to Athey, I think, also because of his difference with Troy Chatham and all that it had led to and meant, which was a suffering he neither complained of nor denied. He was (as he did say) a man who had outlived his time, and maybe this gave him the freedom to speak to creatures that could not answer.

  When they left the river and moved to Port William, Athey and Della retained title to the farm. About this I know more, probably, than anybody concerned ever intended for me to know. The barbership of Port William was, as I’ve said before, a privileged position. People sometimes confided in me deliberately; sometimes, almost forgetfully, they handed me puzzle pieces. A man is not to blame, I hope, for mere consciousness. How could I help but notice that some pieces fitted others?

  Athey and Della retained title to their farm on the advice of their lawyer, Wheeler Catlett. When Athey raised the question of whether or not to sell the farm to Mattie and Troy at a cheap price and take their note for it, Wheeler said, “Hell, no! You’re not dead yet.”

  This forced Troy to decide (it would have been his decision) whether to stay as a tenant on his in-laws’ farm or try to do better—that is, it forced him to admit that he could not do better. Nothing I know causes me to believe that Troy could have financed the purchase of the farm (or any comparable farm) on reasonable terms at that time—or, for that matter, at any time later. Still, you can see that he could find reason to feel affronted by his enforced tenancy on a farm that he wanted to own but that was not for sale to him.

  And that wasn’t all. At about the same time, Athey and Della made their wills, by which the farm, after both their deaths, would go to Mattie alone. This too was done on the advice, or anyhow with the concurrence, of Wheeler Catlett. I don’t know for certain when or how Troy learned of this. What happened not much later (something I am about to tell you) makes me think he learned of it pretty soon. Knowing that, he knew also that unless he exerted himself powerfully (and got much luckier than he had been) he would sooner or later become not his in-laws’ tenant but his wife’s.

  You could argue, if you wanted to, that Athey and Della were ungenerous in this and misused their power. You could propose that if Troy had not, at this time, felt himself chosen against and excluded, he might have done better than he did. You could propose that Wheeler gave bad counsel—that he, who had seen so much of division, ought to have known the danger of dividing husband and wife.

  I concede the weightiness of these thoughts, and I acknowledge that I am well acquainted with Wheeler Catlett’s prejudice in the matter. Wheeler was no longer a young man by the time he wrote Athey’s will. He may not have known yet that he too was a man outliving his time (though such was the case), but he loved Athey and understood exactly what Athey was and what he stood for, and he
had no time for Troy, whom he also understood.

  The problem with Troy was that he was a dreamer. He was a dreamer in the most demanding practical circumstances, increasingly taking the advice of people who were not in his circumstances. He was a man who, because of his nature and the nature of his circumstances, always had everything at stake. He had no margins. After he had reached a certain extremity of commitment and debt, he had no room to turn around in, even if he had wanted to turn around. And the country had entered a time when it was easier for a man like Troy to “get big” than to save himself, if need be, by getting smaller. Some such men walked a tightrope, balancing debt and equity, to a sort of desperate “success.” Others swelled until they burst.

  At any rate, leaving the farm to Mattie alone would prove a useless precaution, for it only put her in exactly the same predicament in which her father had been: She would have to secure Troy’s loyalty to the farm (and perhaps to herself and their children) by permitting him to abuse the land and put it at risk.

  Port William, watching Troy, would be (by turns or all at once) skeptical, impressed, envious, dismissive. Mattie, I think, finally withdrew her approval of his ambitious plunging and wished him to be kinder to things and more careful. Her naming of her third child after her father may have bespoken this. She may have expressed her difference to Troy, but I don’t think she would have brought it to a quarrel. She was a woman of patience and steady affection; I doubt that she had qualified, even in her own thoughts, her loyalty to her husband. When you saw them together (which was not all that often) they did not appear to be in any way estranged.

  And yet she had ceased to believe in his plans and promises and maybe in him. Troy, knowing this, and knowing, if he did, that she was to be the sole heir of the farm, which he could not buy, must have felt forsaken and therefore (as self-sorrowful married men might wish to think themselves) “free.”

  You might say that I was pretty “free” myself at that time. My mind had got to where it would return to Clydie and be with her when we were together, which was a relief in its way. It is in fact possible for one man to be strongly attracted to two women at the same time. But according to my experience, two are about enough.

  Finally, two would be too many. I was going to have to choose one. As it turned out, I would have to choose the one by whom I could not be chosen.

  At about that time, as I remember, I made up a poem about Clydie and quoted it to her one Sunday afternoon as we were taking a walk:Clydie’s pretty everywhere—

  Lithe and blithe and finely fair.

  And that got me a blush, a hard nudge in the ribs, a very excellent kiss, a straight look, and a laugh.

  Well, things went along and went along until we got to the cold downward end of 1954, and pretty soon it was Christmastime. The young people who were away at college all came home. Word got around that there was going to be a big Christmas dance up at Riverwood. Henry Catlett’s band was going to play. It was going to be a blowout.

  “Oh, we’ve got to go to that, Jayber,” Clydie said. “We’ll go and watch those young ’uns and do like they do. And then we’ll go and do like we do.”

  “Count me in,” I said.

  The proprietress of Riverwood was Mrs. Doozie FitzGerald (with a capital G). Riverwood had seen better days. NIGHTCLUB and MIXED DRINKS had once blinked alternately on and off in neon out front, and in those days it was open for business from noon to exhaustion. But no more. The locals had never called it a nightclub; they called it a roadhouse. By 1954 it was a roadhouse only now and again. Doozie (or Mrs. Fitz, as she was often called) had lost her liquor license, her old cook had died, and she had got too stingy to meet the wage demands of anybody young. She was living by then on Social Security or dividends or who knew what, and she supplemented her income by opening Riverwood on Saturday nights or “special occasions,” charging admission (always a dollar more than advertised) to dance to a band or the jukebox, and selling setups to the customers. Her staff now consisted only of one old waiter and general handyman named Chum.

  On the appointed evenings, Mrs. Fitz stood behind a small table at the door, collecting the payments of admission plus the dollar surcharge, which was always expected, routinely protested, and routinely paid. Her dyed-black hair chopped off in bangs at about her eyebrows, her lips painted rosy red, she wore a blue dressing gown and fuzzy blue slippers open at heel and toe.

  The night of the Christmas dance was starless. A few snowflakes were floating down out of the dark sky into the aura of electric light in front of Riverwood. I was moved to see the snowflakes melting in Clydie’s hair as I helped her out of her coat. She was wearing a light green dress with a full skirt that set off her figure, and I reached around her waist and gave her a little hug.

  We protested and paid and went past Mrs. Fitz’s table into the darker room. The band already was playing and couples were dancing. Mindful that we were older than most, we took a table a little off to itself and yet where we had a good view of the floor. For a while we just watched. The boys were wearing their good suits. The girls were in party dresses, all dolled up. It was a pretty thing to see them dancing. The room was lighted by rows of shaded electric candles along the walls, an imitation log fire in the fireplace, and (so far) by a few lamps overhead that cast a soft glow onto the dance floor. Everybody (including, of course, me) had brought a pint or a half-pint stuck away in his pocket or in his date’s purse. From various places in the room you could hear the young people calling for setups: “Chum! Chum!”

  The parents of some of the younger young people may have thought that these Riverwood parties were chaperoned by somebody. In fact, they were chaperoned only by Mrs. Fitz, who (belonging to the laissezfaire school of roadhouse management) went early to bed, and by old Chum who was an impartial witness. Chum was by nature unalert, and not able to see very well even in daylight. He was, moreover, slow and clumsy. To hire him alone to wait on that uproarious and bedazzled crowd was a form of punishment, though Mrs. Fitz evidently had no motive for it except greed.

  From start to finish—four or five hours—the boys would be hollering, “Chum! Chum! Over here, Chum! Where the hell you at, Chum?” And Chum would be desperately ignoring them all until in his good time he got to them, poking his way through the crowd, holding up his tray.

  The band was playing a fast number and the floor was full of jitter-buggers when Andy Catlett came in with Nell Gale, who had been recently the sweetheart of his brother, Henry. Henry, seeing them from the bandstand, brought his hand down, stopped the song they were playing right where it was, and started playing “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” Andy began to dance with the girl, holding her close and whirling round and round. Henry made his saxophone sob and moan as if his heart would break—and then, while the piano player took a solo, reared back and laughed at his brother, so maybe his heart was not too broken, after all. As the song finished Andy made another spin beside our table and dipped low, leaning the girl backward onto his arm, and we could hear her suck in her breath through her teeth. She was quite a girl.

  Pretty soon (as usual) somebody turned off the overhead lights, which made it a lot cozier and somehow quieter, and a lot harder on poor old Chum. The music seemed to penetrate better in the dimness. The band was playing “Stardust,” and Clydie and I got up to dance.

  We danced to the slow songs and sat and watched during the fast ones. We spiked our setups and toasted each other and a number of other things that came to mind. We sat close together. Clydie took my hand and held it in her lap. A wonderful feeling came over us. Outside was the cold, dark, starless night. Inside was warmth and music and mellowness and gaiety. Inside Clydie and me was the good, even, friendly, growing warmth of desire, and our hands held one another in Clydie’s lap. It was lovely to dance and watch the young people dancing. Most of the dancers (including, of course, me) began to have the illusion that they were dancing better than they actually were. Still, the young people were fine to watch, and sometimes funny too. br />
  Andy Catlett, ecstatic but less than graceful, picked Nell Gale up in his arms and, whirling round and round, crossed the dance floor and fell down in front of the fireless hearth.

  And Alfred Pindle, after he got a few drinks in him, danced just by trotting back and forth in a rhythm having nothing whatever to do with any song that any band had ever played. He trotted along rather quietly, with his eyes filmed over as if he heard an entirely different music far off. Before long, his girl began to have the limply resigned and submitted look of a small animal carried by a cat.

  But most of them danced well enough, and there were two couples who danced beautifully. I mean they would have danced beautifully if you had seen them cold sober dancing in broad daylight in the middle of the road.

  The band played “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” They played it slow, slow. It was as if the musicians and the dancers and the whole room were in a trance. Clydie and I swayed to the slow beat, and it seemed that the feeling inside us made us light so that we were floating on the music. We were dancing close, barely moving. Clydie really knew how to put herself against you. She was a snuggler when she wanted to be.

  I said right into her ear, “Clydie, my sweet, you feel heavy on the branch and ready to pluck.”

  She said, “You got it, boy.”

  When I looked up again, I looked directly into the face of Troy Chatham, who was dancing with a woman whose face I did not see, but her long blond hair could not have been Mattie’s.

  Troy gave me a wink and a grin, raising his hand to me with the thumb and forefinger joined in a circle.

  I stopped dancing. What I felt must have showed in my face, for Clydie pushed away from me and said, “What’s the matter with you, Jayber? Are you sick?”

  I said, “I am. I’m as sick as a dog.”

  And I headed for the men’s room.

  Andy Catlett was there, drying his hands, ready to go out.