Jayber Crow

  The problem with Jimmy was, he had liked the place he was born in until Athey died; after that, he hadn’t liked it. Since then his aim had been to defy that place when he was in it and to get out of it as far as he could whenever he could. As soon as he was sixteen he bought an old car that he was then, as he saw it, enslaved to his father to pay for, and that kept him in the unhappiness of breakdown and repair and new parts and envy of better cars. He was stuck in the momentary life of having fun, enduring work to earn money to have fun, and getting into trouble. When the car was running he would be in Hargrave on Saturday nights and sometimes on other nights.

  In Hargrave he turned that big grin of his to the world. The grin said, “Come on, world, show me what you got.” And the world understood him perfectly. The world came up with beer, girls, gasoline, dances, boys in need of a fight, and pretty soon marijuana. Jimmy’s message home was trouble and a kind of fame. He pretty well won the wildness contest of his generation.

  He was having (when he had it) no end of fun, and of course was not making himself happy. A part of the cost of making his father unhappy was the unhappiness of his mother. That by itself was enough to make Jimmy unhappy, for he was not a hard-hearted boy and he loved his mother. He was wild, but he was also bewildered. He was caught (as his father was caught) and he didn’t know how to get loose.

  People were sort of awestruck by him in a way, and yet worried about him too. He was coming to no good, and nobody wanted that. They hoped that something would settle him down. Maybe even he hoped something would.

  Nobody knew when or how he decided to enlist in the army. Nobody knew whether or not he had been sober when he did it. We just heard one day that he had done it, and that he was soon to be gone. He had done it the minute he was old enough. At least he had solved his problem with his father. In Port William people mostly were relieved. They could quit worrying about him if they didn’t know what he was doing.

  It was not maybe the best time to join the army. The War had broken out again, this time in Vietnam. Everybody hoped Jimmy Chatham would not have to be in a war. He had, it seemed, a fair chance not to be. The army, after all, was scattered over half the world. People thought the army would give Jimmy a look at the world, teach him some things, and help him to settle down. Even I, sad to say, thought it might. I hoped it would.

  When I looked at him in his wildness and sadness and bewilderment, ready to leave us, I would think what love had led to. Ever since, remembering him, I have thought of that.

  Once Jimmy was gone (as you might have predicted, as maybe Jimmy predicted), Troy realized how much he had depended on him. He missed him, thought better of him, and excused his faults. In town he reported on his travels and bragged on his accomplishments.

  Troy also became a fierce partisan of the army and the government’s war policy. The war protesters had started making a stir, and the talk in my shop ran pretty much against them. Troy hated them. As his way was, he loved hearing himself say bad things about them.

  One Saturday evening, while Troy was waiting his turn in the chair, the subject was started and Troy said—it was about the third thing said—“They ought to round up every one of them sons of bitches and put them right in front of the damned communists, and then whoever killed who, it would be all to the good.”

  There was a little pause after that. Nobody wanted to try to top it. I thought of Athey’s reply to Hiram Hench.

  It was hard to do, but I quit cutting hair and looked at Troy. I said, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.”

  Troy jerked his head up and widened his eyes at me. “Where did you get that crap?”

  I said, “Jesus Christ.”

  And Troy said, “Oh.”

  It would have been a great moment in the history of Christianity, except that I did not love Troy.

  Burley Coulter and Big Ellis had come in for a haircut, riding in Big Ellis’s car. It was the late winter of 1969. Late February or early March. The sun was shining for the time being, but the ground was too wet to plow. It was the between-times that comes every year. The farmers were still feeding the stock and doing their other wintertime chores. Their minds were still wintery. But now they could feel spring coming. As soon as they could get into their fields, the new crop year would begin.

  Burley and Big Ellis were old. They were looking forward to the spring work, but also they were dreading it. Some would have said they were too old to work, but they were still working. For a while they were going to be sore and too tired. Toward the middle of the morning, needing something to do, Burley had wandered over to Big Ellis’s. And then they had wandered into town—literally wandered, for Big Ellis tended to drive hither and yon between the ditches.

  Both of them had got their hair cut and had sat back down, wearing their hats again. They were in no hurry. I climbed into the chairman’s chair and sat down myself.

  Big Ellis yawned, took his hat off and rubbed his head, looked out the window at the sky, in which there were again a few clouds. “It would be fine if this weather would get cleared on out of here now. Fellows like me have got to get to work.” He giggled a little, knowing that we knew that fellows like him were not overeager to get to work. He put his hat back on.

  “Well, it’s not going to clear out for a while,” Burley said. “It’ll rain again by dark.”

  “Now, I’ll just bet you it won’t,” Big Ellis said.

  “How much?”

  “One dollar.”

  “I’ll take that bet,” Burley said. “I’ll give that dollar a good home.”

  The bet, I knew, meant nothing. Neither of them, if he won, would take the other’s money.

  “Fair and square, now,” Big Ellis said. “No praying.”

  “No. Even Steven,” Burley said. “If you won’t, I won’t.”

  About then we heard a car pull in behind Big Ellis’s and stop.

  Big Ellis leaned to the window and looked out. “Now, who would that be? I don’t know that car.”

  We heard the car door open and shut. There were some brisk steps on the walk and then the shop door opened and a man we had never seen before came in, a young man, dressed up, carrying a clipboard with some papers on it. He pushed the door shut, consulting the clipboard, and looked at us.

  “Is there a Mr. Crow here?”

  “That would be me,” I said.

  He was (I believe he said) Mr. Mumble Something of the Forces of Health and Sanitation. He put out his hand and I shook it. He did not look again at Burley and Big Ellis.

  “I’m here to make an inspection,” he said. He propped the clipboard on his belt buckle and began to look at various things and make check marks on a ruled page.

  Maybe you are used to this sort of thing and don’t mind. Maybe you have inspected inspectors and found them worthy of the highest approval. But I have to admit that I minded.

  It was not as though I was running a barbershop in a prison. I was running a freewill operation. Except for the small boys who came in under parental orders, my customers were volunteers, who inspected the property and equipment every time they came in. They could see for themselves. I wasn’t barbering in a school for the blind, either.

  That I was still charging fifty cents a haircut when most barbers had gone to a dollar might have had something to do with bringing some of them in, but only some of them. Most of my customers, I think, were satisfied enough. But they came to my shop, really, because they had always come, and because they felt at home.

  Maybe you can understand why I minded if you recollect that my shop was only partly my place of business. Partly it was my living room. It was Port William’s living room, or one of them.

  How would you feel if a government inspector, even the most approvable of government inspectors, walked into your living room, ignored your guests, and began looking over your furniture and making check marks on a clipboard?

  Burley and Big Ellis were embarrassed. They sat, saying nothing, gl
ancing now and again at the inspector but mostly looking out the windows. Even the inspector seemed to be embarrassed. He didn’t look at any of us. He strolled about in the shop as if he were alone, looking at things, making little grunts under his breath, and checking various items on his paper.

  For him himself, I sort of felt sorry. But he was not there as himself. He was the man across the desk, the one I had so dreaded to meet again. But this time, I thought, it was not a desk but a whole building full of sub-assistant-secretaries. He did not speak for himself but for a man behind a desk who spoke for a man behind another desk, who also did not speak for himself.

  The inspector, or the man inside the inspector, was just a young fellow with black wavy hair and black-rimmed glasses who had got Somewhere and made Something of himself.

  “Mr. Crow,” he said, as if from quite a distance, his voice echoing up the levels of authority, “I don’t see any fixtures. Do you have hot running water?”

  I had a big metal urn with a spigot at the bottom. It sat on a little coal-oil stove. I could regulate the burner and keep the water at just the right temperature for shaving.

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t want to say anything. I got down from the barber chair, picked up my shaving mug, carried it over to the urn, put it under the spigot, and turned the handle. The water ran. It was hot. The inspector made a check mark.

  Actually, I didn’t even have cold running water. The town pump across the road no longer pumped, but Mr. Milo Settle had put a pipe into the well to pump water from it into the garage. I carried my water in buckets from a spigot in Mr. Settle’s garage.

  The young man inside the inspector looked at me and smiled. “Where does your water come from, Mr. Crow?”

  I smiled back. I said, “From the heavens.”

  And then the young man disappeared again. The inspector said that I was in violation of Regulation Number So-and-so, which required that all barbershops should be equipped with hot running water.

  I pointed to the urn from which I had just run some hot water.

  He said the hot water had to run from a proper faucet at the end of a pipe, not from a spigot on an urn. He signed and dated the sheet with the check marks on it and gave me a copy.

  The young man inside the inspector said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Crow”

  I said, “Your sorrow is noted and appreciated.”

  And then Burley, who had not yet paid me, stood up, reaching for his wallet.

  “Jayber,” he said, “it’s fine of you to give all us Port William people free haircuts. But I think a little donation from time to time is only right.”

  He fumbled in his wallet, finally plucked out a dollar bill, and laid it on my cigar box on the backbar.

  “I ain’t out anything,” Burley explained to the inspector. “That’s just the dollar I’m about to win off of Big Ellis here.”

  Big Ellis, who had paid me, started giggling then, and he got out a dollar bill. He got up and put his donation on top of Burley’s.

  “I ain’t out anything,” he said. “Same reason.”

  And just then, from a cloud we had not seen coming, it began to rain.

  Wheeler Catlett always came into my shop in a hurry, with momentum. If the latch hadn’t opened when he turned the knob, it would have been too bad for the door. Wheeler was my lawyer, you might say, if you don’t mind speaking informally. I had never been to his office. If I wanted to know anything in the legal line, I consulted him while I cut his hair. Wheeler was maybe too familiar with that sort of thing, but also it amused him.

  “Suppose,” he said, “that you ever actually came to my office as a paying client, and I said, ‘Jayber, while you’re here, how about giving me a haircut?’”

  And I said, “Why, Wheeler, I’d do it, of course, and wouldn’t charge you so much as a thin dime. So I reckon we’re even.”

  “I reckon we are,” Wheeler said.

  The inspector’s visit had stayed on my mind. I wasn’t mad at the inspector. I wasn’t mad, period. I had progressed enough to know there was nobody to be mad at. The inspector was a hand in a glove. The hand wasn’t responsible, really, and the glove without a hand in it was merely empty. What I felt, properly speaking, was just a sinking or an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach every time I thought about that ruled sheet of paper with the check marks on it. I could feel change coming and I didn’t want it to come. I didn’t know what it would be. Like, I suppose, every stray dog and cat, I would like a change for the better, but I fear changes made by people with more power than I’ve got.

  And so the first time Wheeler came in after the inspector’s visit, which was pretty soon, I brought the subject up.

  “Suppose,” I said, “that I just ignore it and don’t do anything. Just keep on going the way I’ve always gone. What can they do to me?”

  Wheeler snorted, maybe to announce his awareness that he was being solicited yet again for free legal advice, maybe with a certain amusement at the fix I was in. “Well, sir,” he said, “I have never defended a barber for neglecting to have hot running water, and so I don’t know. They can do something to you, you needn’t to worry about that.”

  He thought a minute and then said, “You can find out what they can do to you. They’ll be glad to show you, I imagine. It’s just a question of how much you’re willing to pay to find out.”

  “I don’t want to pay anything to find out,” I said.

  Wheeler said, “I didn’t think so,” still amused. But then he became serious. He could be a friend. “That’s the point. You want to stay clear of those people, if you can.”

  “That’s what I want. If they don’t bother me, I surely won’t bother them.”

  “I understand. But they’re in the business of bothering you. If you don’t get into compliance, they’ll come back and find it out, or one of your competitors will report you.”

  “Who would compete for Port William heads?” It was too innocent of me to say that, but I hated to face the truth. I thought of Violet Greatlow, and then I thought, “Surely not.”

  “Hell fire, anybody!” Wheeler said. “Any barber in driving distance. So instead of paying to be out of compliance, why don’t you pay to get into compliance?”

  I said, “Wheeler, you can see what’s here. A water line, a water pump, a water heater, faucets and a sink, maybe a cistern—all that would be worth more than the building, and just for a few drops of shaving water a day”

  “Well, you could put in a proper bathroom.”

  “What would a proper bathroom be worth to one bachelor?”

  “I don’t know,” said Wheeler, who of course had one, or maybe two, and was not a bachelor. “Not much, maybe.”

  I tried one more shot. The donation business had caught on. Burley had been telling people about it. And most people who donated were paying a dollar. I was getting a raise without even asking.

  I said, “Well, suppose I just give away haircuts and live off of donations ? Go out of business and into charity, so to speak.”

  “It’s just a question of how much you’re willing to pay to find out,” Wheeler said. “It would be an interesting case. But do you want to be the subject of a case?”

  It came clear to me then. I had come to another parting of the ways. I didn’t know what the next step would be, but I knew I was going to have to take a step.

  I wiped the lather from Wheeler’s neck and sideburns, brushed off the loose hair, and whisked away the cloth. “Well, anyhow,” I said, “this is one of my free haircuts.”

  I meant to mean that I was trading him a free haircut for free legal advice, but Wheeler said, “I know it,” and he laid his donation on the backbar. It was a dollar.

  When Jimmy Chatham was killed in Vietnam it was not something anybody could easily believe. The War had come again and we were in it, there was no doubt of that. And yet it had changed. It was not what it had been before. It was not, for instance, World War II. It was smaller and seemed f
arther away. We at home were less involved. We sent fewer of the young. We made no sacrifices. There was nothing we used less of. People did not try to save gasoline, but drove their vehicles just as much and just as fast as ever. It was easy for people to guess that things were mainly all right.

  And then all of a sudden we had among us this dead boy in a coffin—a dead boy who was one of us, whom we had known (and not quite known) for a few years in the time of the world as Jimmy Chatham, the child of Mattie and Troy, grandchild of Della and Athey. And the sun and the moon shone on us as before, as if we had not heard the news.

  I dug the grave. I waited while the pallbearers—Jimmy’s friends, unbelievably young—bore the flag-covered coffin to the grave and the mourners gathered. When they had assembled, instead of standing well out of the way as I usually did, I took off my hat and stepped in under the edge of the tent.

  The preacher spoke his words and prayed his prayer. The salute was fired. The bugler sounded taps: “Day is done, gone the sun—” The flag was folded and handed to Mattie, who received it like a child wrapped in swaddling clothes and shed not a tear. She sat erect. She tossed her head backward slightly once, as if to shake rain from her hair, and that was all. Troy, who had been stoic at the time of Liddie’s death, wept with one hand over his face.

  Afterward, it seemed for a while that Troy had been almost unmade by his grief, but then, having nobody else to be, he became himself again and continued on. I think he was ashamed that he had been seen in his weakness. He seemed to assert himself again in order to deny that he was weak. He was still young enough to believe in his strength. And, really, he had no choice; his life had been determined by then. Until he died he would have to stay in it and live by its established terms the best he could.