And the farmers, some of them at least, were worrying. They knew that farming was in decline, losing diversity, losing self-sufficiency, losing production capacity. A sort of communal self-confidence, which must always have existed, had begun to die away.
You could hear it in the talk. Elton Penn, say, would come in on a Saturday night for a haircut, and then another good farmer, Nathan Coulter maybe or Luther Swain, would come in, and then others. Prices and costs would be quoted, news exchanged, comments made, questions asked. It would be a conversation that I could pretty well have written down word for word before it took place. They would talk quietly, humorously, anxiously about what was happening to them. They were feeling their way through facts they could not help but know toward a hopeful prediction they could never make. “If things keep on this way,” they were asking, “what is going to become of us?”
Well, they already suspected what I now know. They were going to die, most of them, without being replaced. Some of them would die alone, in houses from which everybody else had gone, to the graveyard or “away” Poor old Luther Swain was dead alone for two days, lying on his face in his barn lot. (To his grandchildren, wherever they were, if they could have known him, he would have been no less strange than Abraham.) But they weren’t worrying just about themselves. They were worrying about the fate of their life, what they had lived by and for, their work, their place. They ventured even to worry about the fate of eaters (who were not worried about the fate of farmers). I’ve heard it a thousand times: “I don’t know what people are finally going to do for something to eat.”
And one night Elton grinned, I remember, and said, “I’ve wished sometimes that the sons of bitches would starve. And now I’m getting afraid they actually will.”
The others laughed, knowing what he meant. They are dead now, most of them. Most of them kept on farming until they died. They kept on because they had no choice, or because that was what they had always done and was the way they knew themselves, or because they liked it. Or for all of those reasons. And as long as they farmed they worried about farming and what was to become of it. This worry was maybe the main theme of conversation in my shop for a long time. The older men and some of the younger ones returned to it as if dutifully. But it wasn’t a duty. It was just a continuation of the pondering and the wondering and the fear and the great sorrow that had been in each of their minds as they went about their often lonely work.
I don’t think that such thoughts had ever been in the minds of farming people before. Before, no matter how hard they worked or how little they earned, farmers had always had at least the assurance that they were doing the necessary work of the world, and that before them others (most likely their own parents and grandparents) had done the same work, which still others (most likely their own children and grandchildren) would do when they were gone. In this enduring lineage had been a kind of dignity, the dignity at least of knowing that the work you are doing must be done and that it does not begin and end with yourself. Now the conversation in my shop was burdened with the knowledge that their work might come to an end. A good many of them already knew to a certainty that they did not know who would be next to farm their farms, or if their farms would be farmed at all. All of them knew that neither farming nor the place would continue long as they were. The dignity of continuity had been taken away. Both past and future were disappearing from them, the past because nobody would remember it, the future because nobody could imagine it. What they knew was passing from the world. Before long it would not be known. They were the last of their kind.
Troy Chatham, if he was there, would hold himself outside this conversation. But he could not be too much aloof from it, because he needed to stay close enough to look down on it. He despised their fear and the old-fashioned, nearly lost hope that was the cause and meaning of their fear. To Troy, in his zeal for newfangledness, they and their thoughts were as out-of-date as last year’s snow. They were leftovers, obsolete. The world, ever advancing toward better things, was just waiting for them to get out of the way. He never said as much outright, but he made his point by his standing aloof, by his looking down, by his refusal of their hope and their worry. He made his point by not bothering to make it.
He did say, and said often enough, that he had the answer: modernize, mechanize, specialize, grow. They were all involved (unavoidably, as they saw it) in the industrialization of farming, but they didn’t believe Troy. A few of them—Elton Penn, for one—returned his contempt. How could you thrive if you were buying everything you needed and your costs were increasing faster than your earnings? If you were losing money or breaking even on growing corn, how could you correct that by growing more corn?
Troy would answer by talking about man-hours, efficiency, economy of scale, and volume. He was attending meetings, listening to experts, and he had their language.
Or one of them would say, “Well, I reckon maybe that’s all right, if you don’t mind borrowing the money”
Troy had a ready answer to that too. “Debt is just an ordinary business expense,” he would say.
And then, knowing they knew he was, by their standard, too much in debt, he would say, “I never expect to be out of debt again in my life. If you’ve got anything paid for, borrow against it. Use it. Never let a quarter’s worth of equity stand idle.”
Was he talking to persuade himself?
They knew too that he didn’t have any equity to speak of, beyond his equipment. But he was going to have some, or Mattie was. So far he had only borrowed increasingly for operating expenses, using as collateral his paid-for equipment and the next year’s crops on an ever-larger rented acreage. When Della died and Mattie inherited the Keith place, he would all of a sudden have at least within reach enough idle equity to suit maybe even him.
Troy Chatham was not the only one listening to the experts. In 1964, acting on the certified best advice, the official forces of education closed the Port William School. It was a good, sound building, with swings and seesaws and other playthings on the grounds around it, and they just locked the doors and sent the children in buses down to Hargrave. It was the school board’s version of efficiency, economy of scale, and volume. If you can milk forty cows just as efficiently as twenty, why can’t you teach forty children just as efficiently as twenty? Or for that matter, a hundred or two hundred?
Having no children of my own, I may have no right to an opinion, but I know that closing the school just knocked the breath out of the community. It did worse than that. It gave the community a never-healing wound.
It was a great personal loss to me, for I had loved seeing the children gathered and let loose, as if the schoolhouse breathed them in and out. I liked hearing the children’s voices suddenly set free at the end of the school day. Some of the teachers, of course, had been bad and some good. But how good or bad they were Port William knew, and knew without delay. Whether the parents interfered for good or ill, the school was right there in sight and they at least could interfere. The school was in the town and it was in the town’s talk.
When the school closed, the town turned more of its attention away from itself. If people are driving down to Hargrave on school business or for school events, they might as well shop in Hargrave, or get their hair cut there. Port William lost business. I did. I don’t want to sound mercenary, but of course a community, to be a community, has to do a certain amount of its business within itself. Did somebody think it could be different?
The old Port William Hotel, with its long front porch that had once accommodated the rocking chairs and summer-evening conversations of drummers and other travelers on the river, had become first a sort of happenso old folks’ home, and then a sort of happenso apartment house. And then one night in 1964 it departed from history altogether by burning very quickly to the ground.
Mat Feltner died in 1965. It was late August, the busiest time of the year. His funeral took place just in a little pause in the workday.
When the gathering at
the graveside had dispersed and driven off, I was surprised to see that Burley Coulter still hung around. He hung around while the undertaker, Petey Tacker, and his assistant gathered and loaded their equipment. Though the time for my work had come, I stood with Burley making talk.
Digging a grave is one thing. I was always glad for company when I was digging a grave, which can be lonesome and a little depressing. It is a descent that maybe nobody can make altogether willingly.
Filling a grave is another thing altogether. There is something just about unbearably intimate about filling a grave, especially if it matters to you whose grave it is. I would rather do it by myself. I would rather, if I had my rathers, not be seen doing it. It is the very giving of the body to the earth, the sealing over of its absence until the world’s end.
But Petey and the assistant went their way and there Burley still was, talking with me on the subjects I managed to bring up and showing no signs of leaving.
So I said, “Well—,” and went over to the big stone where I had put my digging tools out of sight.
Ordinarily in Port William usage, when you say “Well—” with a certain intonation, the other person says, “Well, I reckon I better get on home,” and then you can get on with your work or close your shop or whatever you need to do.
But when I got back with my spade, Burley had taken off the jacket of the suit he had been keeping to wear to funerals for maybe thirty years. He had rolled his shirt cuffs back three turns, loosened his tie, and tucked it into his shirt. He smiled at me, saying nothing, and took the spade.
I saw the point then, and went to the little toolshed and got another spade and came back and helped him.
We didn’t say anything more. We worked until the last little clods had been scraped out of the grass and tossed onto the grave. We tapered and smoothed the mound to Burley’s satisfaction.
And then he handed his spade to me, swung his jacket over his sweated shoulder, and walked away.
By that time the interstate highway was boring its way into our valley and across it and out again on the other side. Everything it came to looked smaller than it had looked before. Whatever it came to that was in its way, it destroyed. It was a great stroke of pure geometry cut through the country maybe five miles down the river from Port William—close enough that, now, when the town is quiet, it can hear the sound of more traffic in a few minutes than ever went through it in a month.
The interstate cut through farms. It divided neighbor from neighbor. It made distant what had been close, and close what had been distant. It interrupted the flow of water through the veins of the rock. All the roads that had gone through our part of the country before had been guided at least somewhat by the place—by features of the land, older roads, property boundaries. This one, this great casting away of the earth, respected no presence, no limits. It remembered nothing. Anything that was in its way had to move or be moved, house or hill, barn or field, stream or woods. Big bulldozers cut the land away down to the rock. Power drills bit into the rock. Explosions cracked and shook the rock and the pieces were hauled away. Places where lives had been lived disappeared from the face of the world forever.
The older men of Port William would drive down to look at the machines as they worked and to marvel at the expense and the power and the upheaval. One day a worker whose chainsaw had quit cranked it several times and then in disgust flung it in front of an oncoming bulldozer, which covered it up. Port William had never before thought of such a possibility.
More even than television, the interstate brought the modern world into Port William. More even than The Economy and The War, it carried the people of Port William into the modern world. It was a thing of unimaginable influence. People in Port William would find it handy to drive to work or to shop in Louisville. And Louisville would find it handy to grow farther out into the countryside. City lots would be carved out of farms, raising of course the price of farmland, so that urban people could enjoy the spaciousness of rural life while looking evening and morning at the rear ends of one another’s automobiles.
Port William shrank yet further. The interstate dwarfed it in scale and made light of its needs. Fuel, money, and people gathered to the interstate as water gathers to the river. The time would come when Mr. Milo Settle would be on the phone to the Standard Oil Company. “This is Milo Settle here at Port William,” he would say, as if he were calling no farther than Hargrave. “Milo,” he would say. “M-i-l-o.” The problem was that the company would no longer deliver as much gas as he needed for his customers. They were squeezing him out in favor of the service stations on the interstate. “I’ve been selling your products for fifty years,” he would say, justice and indignation shaking his voice, to some powerless secretary or receptionist in some place that he knew no more about than she knew about Port William. He might as well have been talking to the chairman of the board. “Fifty years!” he would say, unable to believe that so many years could mean nothing.
That great road—moving, it seemed, purely according to its own will—was the mark of an old flaw come newly ordered into the world. Who could doubt that if everything stood in its way, nothing would be left?
26
Finalities
It was late at night, a Saturday in the winter. I heard a light, hesitant tapping on the glass pane of the door, which I thought at first was a dream, and then I heard it again. And then I heard her call quietly, “Jayber?” I knew who it was.
I said, “Yes. Wait a minute.”
I felt in the dark for my pants and shirt and put them on, and then turned on the lamp by the bed.
When I opened the door, feeling the cold flow in on my bare feet, she said, “I’m awfully sorry to bother you, Jayber.”
I said, “It’s all right. Won’t you come in?”
She said, “I will just step inside, if you don’t mind.”
She stepped in like a girl, light over the threshold. She had the lightness of a girl, a woman’s gravity in her eyes.
It was cold out, but that was not why she stepped inside. She didn’t want to be seen where she was. She had left Troy’s old pickup well up the street, he being gone in their car. But she was smiling as if everything was all right, which I knew it could not be.
You might say that this was the ridiculousness that a married ineligible bachelor barber’s upstairs room was specifically prepared for.
I dragged my one chair out from the table and turned it toward her. “Would you like to sit down?”
She was fully aware of the social awkwardness and wanted to hurry past it. “No. Thank you, Jayber. Jayber, I need your help.”
“Well, you can have it.”
“Or maybe I do. Maybe you can’t help.”
“Well, let’s see if I can.”
She said, “They’ve arrested Jimmy down at Hargrave.”
I could guess why, so I didn’t ask.
“Drunk,” she said. “He was driving that old car down the sidewalk in front of the courthouse, but this time they’re just calling it drunk. I don’t want Troy to find out, if I can help it.”
There was trouble enough in her eyes and voice, but no appeal for sympathy. She had a problem and had set about solving it.
“Is it bail money you need?”
“Yes. I don’t have the cash and I don’t want to write a check.” She named the amount. She said, “Jayber, if you can, would you mind? I knew I could ask you.”
“You were right,” I said. “You can ask me.”
I had the money. I was using the bank by then, but I had kept my old habit of stashing away a little account on my own. I had maybe three or four hundred dollars stuck between the pages of an old copy of Paradise Lost. I was embarrassed to reveal this to Mattie, but it was also the only time in my life when I was sort of grateful and proud to have been so sly.
I handed her the amount she needed.
She said, looking straight at me, “Jayber, thank you. I’ll get this back to you before long.”
 
; I wanted to say, “Take it. Keep it. It’s yours.” But of course I couldn’t. It would have been like sending her a valentine.
I said, “You’re entirely welcome.”
She had taken off her gloves to put the money into her purse, and now she was putting them on again.
I said, “Do you want me to go get him?”
She kindly did not ask me how I was going to do that in the middle of the night without a car. She said, her hand on the knob of the door, “No, thank you. I had better be the one to do that.”
And then, looking back at me, she said, “Of course I’ve warned him. And his daddy has.”
“I know,” I said.
I knew too, and knew that she knew, that Troy’s warning had been coal oil on a fire.
For a little while after she was gone her fragrance stayed in the room.
Jimmy Chatham was a problem that couldn’t be solved at home. Maybe it couldn’t be solved anywhere anytime soon. You could describe the problem easily enough by just adding and subtracting. All there was to it was visible, I mean. Jimmy was not dishonest or shy or sly. He didn’t have many secrets, if any. For one reason, everything he did had some reference to his all-out battle with his father. He could make no secret of what he did because what he did was intended in the first place to be an announcement.
Unlike Troy, he was attractive in a way that people didn’t envy or resent. Everybody liked him. He was always right into whatever fun was available, and he was not very particular about what he called fun. He was, I can tell you, plenty smart, though not a good student. He might have been a fine athlete, but was as willfully disappointing in that as in other things. He would be ineligible because of bad grades, or he broke the training rules, or he made some kind of mischief. Aside from the work he did grudgingly for his father to earn the little freedom that he made much of, he was what you would have to call a wild boy. He made a few brief token submissions, enough to get by, but in general nobody could do anything with him. He was beyond appeal.