Jayber Crow

  And yet for a while Port William kept on as pretty much itself. (Maybe something of itself will always be there. Who is to say?) There remained among the men those who, at least in the daytime and some even at night, would rather sit and talk in my shop or the poolroom or the garage or one of the stores than sit at home and watch TV The rowdy boys still held a sort of loose party way into Saturday night in bearable weather, talking in the sitting places in front of the stores, driving back and forth in their cars, playing the radio loud, smoking, talking, laughing, scuffling, drinking some. Now and then they would build a fire and sit around it. They were noisy enough, but as a general thing in those days they caused no serious trouble. (It had been a longish while since anybody from Port William had been shot in Port William, and it would be a longish while again. Of course, though all things don’t come to all men, all things sooner or later come to somebody, and Port William had had and would have its allotment of shooting.) About the time the boys all dwindled off to sleep, Athey Keith and the other old farming men grew tired of their beds and began to stir out to their chores, if they had any, or they came to the sitting-and-talking places to wait for daylight.

  I went through the days about as the others did, keeping to my habits, as a rule not overly concerned, not too often surprised. The days came one at a time, filling their length according to the season. People grew hair, came and went through the shop door and the church door, lived and died, assuming that I would do my duties. It was as though the covenant I worked by was not between me and the Port Williamites, but between them and the world, which somehow had agreed to furnish me. I had been granted, it seemed, and I was happy enough to be taken for granted.

  My strange marriage (which not a soul on earth knew about but me) seemed to have placed me absolutely. I was where I was, in body and mind and heart too. Though I was divided from the female society of Port William as much as before, I did not feel estranged from it as before. I was involved, a participant. The community I lived in and served by my unillustrious yet needful work was Mattie’s community also. I had become eligible to understand it in that way. We were thus joined. I lived as I thought she did: hoping for good, reconciled to the bad, welcoming the little unexpected happinesses that came.

  But to be the keeper of a solemn, secret vow is no easier than it sounds. Of course I could say to myself (and I did), “Since you’re the only one who knows about it, you don’t have to keep it. Who would blame you?” I was no Jephthah, but I knew that what I had done made me, by some standards, a fool.

  And yet I could not give it up. I don’t know if I can explain. It was not just that I needed my love for Mattie, and needed to feel that I had a right to it, and could not imagine myself without it. My thoughts as I walked through the dark after the Christmas dance remained with me. It seemed to me that, because of my vow, a possibility—of faith, of faithfulness—that I could no longer live without had begun leaking into the world.

  My vow was not something I thought much about in the daytime. Then it would be just a presence in the background, steadying and reassuring, even pleasurable. Maybe I won’t desecrate it by saying it was a little bit like a bank account: something won, decided, no longer needing to be decided, available in time of need.

  At night (not every night, but often enough) was when it shook me. Past a certain hour of the darkness, a certain tick of the clock, the strands of habit, expectation, common sense, and small pleasures that had held me through the day slowly broke apart. It was like watching the V of a goose flock disintegrate as the birds circle down to land. It would be as though I stood off on the edge of my life, watching it being lived by somebody else. I felt no resentment against the man I saw living my life, but he was unimaginable to me, just as he seemed unable to imagine the observer who watched him under cover of darkness. I saw as a bird sees, each eye looking out on its own in a different direction, no two images ever resolving into one. To save myself, I would try to summon up a vision of Mattie, but I could not see her. I could not imagine her. Some nights in the midst of this loneliness I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone.

  And then I would wake up and be in awe to see the daylight coming and my old familiar workaday life taking shape again in the dear world. Coherence and clarity returned. I could imagine myself again. I could imagine Mattie Chatham. I could imagine Port William.

  24

  A Passage of Family Life

  From the time he could walk, and maybe before, Jimmy Chatham wanted to be with his grandpa. Mattie and Troy never brought him to town that he didn’t beg to stay, and of course it often suited Athey and Della to have him stay. You could probably say that it always suited Athey.

  The attraction was not just Athey himself, though I judge that might have been enough. Jimmy loved Athey’s place and his ways of working. He loved working with Athey at whatever Athey did. Troy’s work was too high-powered, fast, and dangerous by then to permit a small boy to stay along with him, let alone help him. But Athey’s ways of working permitted company. Wherever Athey went, Jimmy could go with him. Whatever Athey did, Jimmy could help him do. And Athey didn’t just pretend to be helped, either. He gave the boy real jobs to do, and paid him in pennies and nickels for his work. He showed him things that needed to be picked up and carried and put down. He let him gather the eggs, each one perfect, out of the straw of the nests, and put them into a basket. He showed him how to shell corn for the hens. When Athey plowed his little crops or his garden, Jimmy would be on the old mule’s back, guiding him between the rows and turning him at the row ends, saving Athey the need to bother with the lines. Athey paid the boy a nickel a hundred to catch bean beetles. He taught him to pull weeds, and later to use a hoe. When Jimmy got big enough to use a pocketknife, Athey bought him a two-bladed one and taught him how to sharpen it. He taught him how to make willow whistles, and popguns out of elder stalks, and corncob pipes to smoke corn silks in.

  By the time Jimmy was big enough to go about on his own, the students were being gathered in to Port William School in buses. The children’s path, from the river road through the Rowanberry place and up through the woods to town, had been abandoned. Jimmy rewore it, or wore his version of it, tracking back and forth between his house and Athey’s. This pleased Mattie, of course, for it pleased her father and her son. To her, that path had been a happiness that she was glad to think had now been handed down.

  The problem was that, for Jimmy, it pretty soon became a path of escape. Of necessity, because of the long hours and the hurry of his work, Troy had left to Mattie the worry and care of the children. As long as Jimmy was small, Troy didn’t much care where he was, just so he was presumably safe and out of the way. And then Jimmy, who obviously was a capable boy, got big enough to reach the brake and clutch of a tractor with his feet and to be useful to his father in a number of ways.

  But by that time Jimmy had become a fair master of the work on Athey’s little place. He could milk. He could drive a team. He was learning something of the use of judgment. He was excited by the way his grandfather’s art gave beauty to their work and brought it to fruitfulness. Boylike, not quite realizing what he had done, he had made his choice. Between Troy and Athey, he preferred to work with Athey. Between Troy’s way of farming and Athey’s, he preferred Athey’s.

  This was not because Athey spoiled him. He treated the boy lovingly but he made him toe the mark too. He didn’t settle for fractions.

  And it wasn’t because Athey was competing, even in his own thoughts, for the son against the father. Athey would not have done that. If Jimmy had not wanted, on his own, to be with Athey, Athey would not have tried to entice him.

  It just happened. It happened because Jimmy was attracted to Athey and took to his ways, and because Athey was generous and in need of a boy. And of course the need grew greater. Athey was failing, and Jimmy was coming along just barely in time to take up the slack. Finally, when they would go to work together, it was the boy who was wo
rking and the old man who was tagging along, giving instruction now and then, and comforted to find that the instruction was less and less necessary. What should have happened between Athey and Troy had leaped over a generation and happened between Athey and Jimmy, but in a way too late for them both, and certainly too late for the farm down in the river bottom.

  Troy must by then have begun to feel, even though he didn’t (he wouldn’t) know, the disarray that had entered into the world. He was in appearance irritated and in his heart maybe angered by the defection of his son. He complained about it openly in town. “Every time I need him for something he’s up here with the old man, fiddle-farting around with a half-dead team of mules.”

  I remember Jimmy Chatham well from those years. He was the kind you don’t forget. He clearly was going to have his father’s good looks and physical capabilities. But he was better natured than his father. For one thing, he never complained. He seemed to have no instinct for the making much of oneself that complaining requires. For another, he had a sense of humor. From the time he was just little, he would look straight at you, and he never looked at you without grinning.

  He had mischief in him, you could see that. Behind that grin were notions and energies wanting to be let loose. Now and again Athey would have to check him, but all he needed to do was speak. “Nup!” he would say. “Look out, now.” Jimmy would look at him to see if he meant it, and then come to heel. Athey always meant it, and Jimmy always looked at him to see if he did.

  Athey began to suffer little strokes. No one of them was enough to bring him down. Little by little they whittled him away. It happened slowly, but not so slowly that you couldn’t see it happening. A kind of fumbling in both speech and motion grew upon him. It took him longer to make his daily trips to my shop, longer to get through the door. There were more times when he had to stand back from his work and let Jimmy do it alone. It was a blessing that Jimmy was willing and able.

  And then for a couple of days I didn’t see Athey. It was early March, the weather mean, and I laid it onto that, though I couldn’t remember when he had missed a day.

  The third morning, Mattie stepped into the shop. That was something unexpected and rare; for a moment I was just sort of caught up by the beauty of it. And then I was afraid. I said, “How’s your dad?”

  “Not very well.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “I don’t think he’s going to be up to the trip,” she said. “For a while.” I saw the moisture come into her eyes, and she blinked it away. “So, Jayber, we were wondering if you could come to the house to shave him, maybe every couple of days, and cut his hair when he needs it. Would you mind?”

  I said, “I’d be glad to do it. You know I would.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I know you would.”

  And so I knew that Athey had taken another step down. I knew more than that. I knew he was fighting for every scrap of independence he had left, not to be imposing on anybody. If he could no longer shave himself, Della or Mattie either one could have shaved him, and would have been glad to do it. But he didn’t want them to do it. He didn’t want to require that of them. They understood. If I did it, he could pay me and it would be all right. Also they knew it would do him good to have company. He would be glad to see me.

  I did as they asked. Every other day, usually late in the afternoon, I went to Della and Athey’s house. Athey sat in a chair in the kitchen and I shaved him. When he needed a haircut, I brought my equipment and cut his hair. Always I tried to come when I didn’t need to be in a hurry. When I finished my work, I would pull out a chair and sit down, and Athey and I would talk. Mostly I talked. He was finding it hard. I told him the news; I saved up anything odd or interesting or funny so I could tell him. And he would nod or laugh or make a comment, usually only a word or two.

  Della (and Mattie, if she was there, which she often was) would leave the kitchen to Athey and me until I had finished my work and we had had a visit. And then she (or she and Mattie) would come out and offer coffee and maybe cookies or a slice of pie, and then sit with us and we would carry the conversation on a little further. Sometimes they would ask me to stay to supper. Sometimes Mattie and her two boys would stay for supper too, and we would all sit down together.

  Sometimes Troy would be there, but not often and never for long. He was coming by dutifully, keeping up appearances. He didn’t want to be there. Troy didn’t want Athey to matter to him, didn’t want to be bound to an old man dying, couldn’t bear to be enclosed by a house where death had come as a patient guest. He shrugged it off like an ill-fitting jacket, calling over his shoulder without turning his head as he went out, “Well, if you need anything, let me know.”

  Jimmy came regularly in the mornings and evenings and did up the barn chores, and hung about at other times when he could. The two of us patched together made Athey a sort of son-in-law-come-lately.

  And so for a while there I took part in a little passage of family life, and with the family I would most have chosen if I had had the choice. It was something I might have prayed for, if I had thought of it, but it was not among the possibilities I had foreseen. It was just a good thing that came.

  You can imagine maybe what it meant to me to be acting as almost a family member, and to be treated by Mattie as one who had been in a way chosen and who had something of use to offer. To have her feel free to ask me for help was to me freedom itself.

  It was strange that Athey’s growing weakness should have brought forth so kind a pleasure to me, but it did. That grief should come and bring joy with it was not something I felt able, or even called upon, to sort out or understand. I accepted the grief. I accepted the joy. I accepted that they came to me out of the same world.

  Athey became less and less able. For a while, just propping himself with his cane and dragging his feet out to the kitchen was a job that took a long time and a lot of rest afterward. And then he could manage that only with help. And then he couldn’t manage it at all. He still insisted on getting up early in the morning and, with help, dressing as he always had in overalls and workshirt, though now he spent most of the day sitting in his chair. On Sundays he wore over his clean overalls and shirt a blue coat that once had belonged to a suit.

  He had become in body only a reminder of himself, bent and somehow loosened in form, weak and inexact in motion. His hands had become soft as cushions, the skin on the backs of them papery and pale. The women kept him clean. The room he sat or lay in was neat and bright. I kept him shorn and shaved and looking nice. We preserved his pride.

  He never complained. He was stubbornly principled, doing for himself the little, and the less and less, that he could do. And his eyes to the last looked back at you as they always had. I had known him well for twenty-three years. I had seen him change from a vigorous man whose thoughts were all of life to a man who knew he was dying and who still lived willingly and thoughtfully and humorously. As I carried my bits of news to him and did for him what I could, I had already begun to mourn him, as I saw that Della and Mattie had also.

  It got to be late April. We’d had some lovely weather. The woodlands were strewn with wildflowers and overhead were making shade. Everybody was busy about the fields and plant beds and gardens. The season had made its claim. And then there came a day of brittle-feeling showers driven over the town by a cold wind that, after the warm days, seemed to come through your clothes in slices.

  I went to the back door as I always did and knocked twice, and nobody answered. I opened the door and leaned in. The kitchen was empty. As a kitchen was apt to be at that time of day, it was cool and formal, full of the reduced, mingled smells of seasonings and cold food. A cloth, as always, was spread over the things on the table, the chairs all shoved in at their places. There was a great pressure of silence in all the house.

  I called quietly, “Anybody home?”

  And even more quietly Della called back, “In here, Jayber.”

  I laid down my barbering tools and tip
toed, suddenly full of knowledge, to Athey’s room. It was the sitting room, where they had moved in a bed for him when he could no longer climb the stairs. I stopped in the door.

  Della was standing on the far side of Athey’s bed, holding his hand. He had felt poorly after dinner and had wanted to lie down for a nap, something he had resisted doing. She let him sleep a long time and then could not wake him. His eyes were open, but he was staring at nothing. She could not allow herself to leave him even to call Mattie on the phone. She looked at me and shaped silently the words, “He’s going.” The words tugged at her mouth, but she was not crying. Seeing me hesitate, she smiled and said, “I’m glad you’ve come.”

  I went over to the bed then and picked up Athey’s other hand. He was breathing, but already he was not there. I could feel a small tremor in the hand I held. There was almost no pulse. We stood a while with him, holding his hands. And then he ceased to breathe.

  The eyes have a light. They give a light. I saw it go out in Athey’s.

  When the light had gone, Della, looking down, gently laid her fingers on his eyelids and closed them. She placed his hands together. She touched his forehead.

  When finally she looked up at me, the light of our own eyes seemed to startle and glitter in the air between us.