Of course I had no more right to stop and grieve than anybody else. For a while, though, I felt that I too was being unmade by grief. Grief and bewilderment. Jimmy Chatham had been so much alive in my imagination that I could not easily imagine him dead. I could not imagine him dead without grieving, or without imagining his mother’s grief, which made me grieve.
Before he died, I wondered, had he imagined that he could die?
Both sides, in making war, agree to these deaths, this dying of young soldiers in their pride. And afterward it becomes possible to pity the suffering of both sides, and to think of the lost, unfinished lives of boys who had grown up under hands laid with affection on their heads.
It seemed, after he was killed and buried, that my own left hand kept the memory of the shape and feel of Jimmy Chatham’s head when he was little and I would have to clamp my hand above his ears to keep him from looking around while I cut his hair.
Somewhere underneath of all the politics, the ambition, the harsh talk, the power, the violence, the will to destroy and waste and maim and burn, was this tenderness. Tenderness born into madness, preservable only by suffering, and finally not preservable at all. What can love do? Love waits, if it must, maybe forever.
In any moment when I was quiet, tenderness and madness would come upon me and contend to no purpose, to the making of no sense. I could hardly bear to read the newspaper, which filled me with disloyalty and unbelief. We were, as we said again, making war in order to make peace. We were destroying little towns in order to save them. We were killing children in order that children might sleep peacefully in their beds without fear. We were raping and plundering a foreign land (and our own) for the sake of “love of country.” We were carrying into the heavens this cruelty and emptiness of heart. I felt involved in an old sickness of the world. I was sick with that sickness and could see no end. We had waded halfway across a bloody mire and could not get out except by wading halfway again, either forward or back.
For a while again I couldn’t pray. I didn’t dare to. In the most secret place of my soul I wanted to beg the Lord to reveal Himself in power. I wanted to tell Him that it was time for His coming. If there was anything at all to what He had promised, why didn’t He come in glory with angels and lay His hands on the hurt children and awaken the dead soldiers and restore the burned villages and the blasted and poisoned land? Why didn’t He cow our arrogance? Lying awake in the night (for again sleep was coming hard) I could imagine the almighty finger writing in stars for all the world to see: GO HOME.
But thinking such things was as dangerous as praying them. I knew who had thought such thoughts before: “Let Christ the King of Israel descend now from the cross, that we may see and believe.” Where in my own arrogance was I going to hide?
Where did I get my knack for being a fool? If I could advise God, why didn’t I just advise Him (like our great preachers and politicians) to be on our side and give us victory and make sure that Jimmy Chatham had not died in vain? I had to turn around and wade out of the mire myself.
Christ did not descend from the cross except into the grave. And why not otherwise? Wouldn’t it have put fine comical expressions on the faces of the scribes and the chief priests and the soldiers if at that moment He had come down in power and glory? Why didn’t He do it? Why hasn’t He done it at any one of a thousand good times between then and now?
I knew the answer. I knew it a long time before I could admit it, for all the suffering of the world is in it. He didn’t, He hasn’t, because from the moment He did, He would be the absolute tyrant of the world and we would be His slaves. Even those who hated Him and hated one another and hated their own souls would have to believe in Him then. From that moment the possibility that we might be bound to Him and He to us and us to one another by love forever would be ended.
And so, I thought, He must forebear to reveal His power and glory by presenting Himself as Himself, and must be present only in the ordinary miracle of the existence of His creatures. Those who wish to see Him must see Him in the poor, the hungry, the hurt, the wordless creatures, the groaning and travailing beautiful world.
I would sometimes be horrified in every moment I was alone. I could see no escape. We are too tightly tangled together to be able to separate ourselves from one another either by good or by evil. We all are involved in all and any good, and in all and any evil. For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless. It is why God grieves and Christ’s wounds still are bleeding.
But the mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief, either. After death and grief that (it seems) ought to have stopped the world, the world goes on. More things happen. And some of the things that happen are good. My life was changing now. It had to change. I am not going to say that it changed for the better. There was good in it as it was. But also there was good in it as it was going to be.
Burley said, “Well, have you seen your buddy lately?” I knew he meant the inspector.
It was late March or early April by then. Burley was waiting out another wet spell.
“No,” I said. “I hope not to become any better acquainted with the inspector.”
“How’re you going to keep from it? You’re inspectable, ain’t you?”
“Well,” I said, a little fearful of what I knew I was about to say, for I had not yet said it even to myself, “I suppose I’m going to have to shut her down.”
“What!” Burley said. “You can’t do that! Hell fire! What’ll we do without a barbershop?”
“Well, barbershops’ days are numbered, anyhow. The boys and young men don’t want their hair barbered anymore. They’re wanting it ‘styled.’ And I reckon I don’t want to learn how to style. I’m not up with the times, and I reckon I’ll just stay behind.”
“You’re just going to live here, then?”
“No, I reckon I’m going to leave.”
“Leave! Where? I mean where to?”
“I don’t know. To the river, maybe. I always thought that if I lived on the river, I’d fish. More, I mean, than I have so far.” I was listening to myself with some interest, for I certainly had not thought it through.
“Fish?” Burley said. He was often enough a fisherman himself, but he knew that to some respectable people fishing was a vice, an addiction of sorts that led to worse things. And so he said “Fish?” as though to warn me of what others might think.
“I thought,” I said, and I had to clear my throat, for I was going to speak of an old dream that I had not thought of in a long time. The dream came from about the time I became Uncle Stanley’s successor as grave digger and janitor. Or maybe it came all the way from my days at The Good Shepherd. “I thought I’d buy me a little patch down by the river, with trees and maybe a garden spot. I’d build me a little house out of secondhand lumber. I’d end my public life and commence a private one. I’d build a little boat.”
There it was. That was what I wanted to do. I could see my boat, my green boat, floating light as a leaf by the shady bank at the end of a path coming down from the house.
Burley was grinning. He saw. He knew. But he said, “You don’t have to build no house. I got a house I’m not using. Lord, I don’t expect I’ve stayed two nights in it since Mam died.”
He was talking about his little camp house, where we’d come ashore out of the flood that morning in 1937. I hadn’t seen it many times since then, but I knew the look of it. I saw what he saw.
“Elnd you’d be willing to part with it?”
“No need for me to part with it. I’ll just give you the use of it.”
27
A New Life
To feel at home in a place, you have to have some prospect of staying there. The inspector’s visit and my talk afterward with Wheeler had forced me to think of leaving and to suffer the thought. My mind didn’t really give up on my shop until Burley Coulter offered me his camp house on the river and I imagined my boat floating on the water. I knew fo
r sure then that I was going, because I knew where I was going to go.
It is strange the way your mind withdraws from a place it knows you are going to leave. I didn’t plant my garden in town that spring. I leveled it and sowed it in grass. I didn’t replenish the coal pile when it ran low. Looking ahead to the possibility of renting the building, I used my spare time in painting the outside, roof and walls, and re-puttying the windows. And so I began my farewell.
I was no sooner convinced that I was going to leave than I became eager to be gone. Staying and thinking of going, for one thing, made me sad. I had lived and worked there, after all, for thirty-two years. I had come when I was twenty-two, hardly more than a boy. And now I was fifty-four, pretty old to be making a new start in life. But also I was looking forward to this new start. That little house down there among the trees by the river had become a new vision of my mind. I longed to go. I began putting things I wasn’t using into cardboard boxes.
I know better by now than to try to predict what is to come. But of all the stages of my life—Goforth, Squires Landing, The Good Shepherd, Pigeonville, Lexington, Port William—this one here on the riverbank bids fair to be the last. Unless of course I fall and break something or become an emergency of some other kind, and give up the ghost finally in front of an institutional TV set down at Hargrave. Who knows?
Some of the changes in my life were imposed, and some were chosen—if by “chosen” I may mean that I chose what I seemed already to have been chosen by, desire having obscured the alternatives. And each change has been a birth, each having taken me to a new life from which I could not go back. And I have asked myself, “Would I have known such births if, from Pigeonville or Lexington, I had taken one of the paths by which people get somewhere and make something of themselves?” But of course I have no answer.
The night before I left, I boxed up the last of the things I would take with me, leaving out only what I would need to pass the night and to fix breakfast. The few electrical gadgets I had I put in a clutch beside my little refrigerator to give to whatever ones might rent the place, for I would have no electricity on the river. I put everything in order. And then I went to bed.
And then, unable to sleep, I got up again and stripped the bed, folded the bedclothes, put them in a box, stuffed the pillow in on top, shut the box and tied it with a piece of twine. I tried sitting in my chair by the window then. But I was too stirred up to keep still for long. Thirty-two years had seemed a long time to me when I first thought of leaving. Now that I was ready to go, it seemed that almost no time at all had passed since I had come there and slept the first night cold, having no fuel to make a fire. It seemed all to have been a passing, and I was again what I had been during so many of my younger years, a stranger and a traveler.
I went out. It was late. There was enough moonlight to brighten the trees and the roofs and walls of the houses and throw their bottomless black shadows beyond them. The town, filled with sleep, was just wonderfully quiet. Nobody was out. The young had finally gone to bed. The old had not yet begun to wake up.
Loafing and wakefulness are two of the principal arts of Port William. Maybe, too, they pass in Port William for public duties. In the business places and the street, people loaf and talk to the point of discomfort and the neglect of other things. They stand in the cold and think of yet more to say until their noses are red and their toes half-frozen. Some carry the conversation on into the night, long after the stores have closed. Some rise early and begin again before daylight.
In its conversation, its consciousness of itself, its sleep and waking, Port William has always been pretty much an unofficial place. It has, really, nothing of its own but itself. It has no newspaper, no resident government, no municipal property. Once it owned and maintained the part of the road that passed through it, two dug wells with pumps, and a stout-walled, windowless jail in which one malefactor had spent one night. These were all of its public domain. For the supervision of these things and the keeping of the peace, there was a town board, a mayor, and a constable. With the revenue from licensing saloons and fining (with their permission) the local troublemakers, they maintained the town properties. Their one great civic feat was causing the first telephone company to whitewash its poles. But all that was a long time ago. Port William would remember bits of it occasionally, but mostly it forgot. Mostly the town’s history had become its ways, its habits, its feelings, its familiarity with itself.
In the quiet, in the fall of moonlight upon it that last night of my life there, Port William slept and dreamed the dreams its history had brought it to. In the time of my stay it had suffered its own history, of course, but also the history of the larger world that contained it. In those thirty-two years that now seemed almost no time at all, the town had shrunk and declined. Some of its quiet that night was the quiet of sleep. Some was the quiet of emptiness and absence. The blacksmith shop was long gone. The hotel was gone; the empty lot where it had stood had become (in the way of Port William) a sort of happenso parking place for cars and pickup trucks. Burgess General Merchandise, which would remain standing for a little while yet, was closed, useless, as still as a grave. The poolroom was closed. The school was closed. Mr. Milo Settle and the garage were in decline and soon to be gone. The barbershop would be closed forever. In many of the houses, now, widows and widowers slept alone. Even in the daytime those houses had begun to give off the feeling of vacancy. Their windows had begun to have the look of sightlessness.
If you knew the place, if you had known it for long, you could not look at it without feeling that its life was being irresistibly pulled at by larger places. It was stretching itself farther and farther in order to hold together, traveling farther in order to stay in place. It was like a spider’s web that will stretch so far and then break.
I thought, “Here once, forever gone.”
But then, in the flimsiness of time, in the moonlight, the presence of the town so strong upon me, I thought, “Now and forever here.”
It was a little port for the departure and arrival of souls, and was involved in more than time. It seemed all alight with the ghost that, so to speak, wore it. I walked slowly out of town and past the graveyard and on out to the Grandstand, from where I could see the valley a long way up and down. And then I walked back again. I fixed my breakfast and washed and packed up the dishes and the skillet. Daylight came. Soon Elton Penn was there with his truck. And then Burley and Nathan Coulter came, and Andy Catlett and Martin Rowanberry. We were ready to load up and go.
With so many on hand to help, I was embarrassed at having so little to move. Subtracting the few things I was going to leave, and the things not worth keeping that I had kept only because I was used to them and now had thrown away or burned, I really didn’t have very much. There was room to spare in Elton’s truck. The only thing that taxed us much was the barber chair, which I was taking because it was comfortable. I had never moved it from its place in all the time I had been there. There was something shocking about taking it away, as though we were loading the chimney. There was something inconsolable about the bare circular print it left on the floor, unpolished by footsteps over fallen hair.
I was touched by a kind of pity when I saw the two rooms emptied at last. The little building that for thirty-two years had been as familiar to me as my own clothes now looked as if neither I nor anybody had ever lived there. Separated from the daily human life that had been lived in it, it looked almost unbearably flimsy and temporary and inadequate and purposeless and poor: “Ye must be born again.” I took Barber Horsefield’s paper clock whose hands always pointed to 6:30, wrote GONE on the back of it, and hung it up once more in the window.
It was good to have the others there. They made of that momentous day and my grief only a practical job of work. And I needed all the help I had in bringing the stuff down through the woods. It was a longish carry, and steep until we got to the narrow bench where the house stood.
But now the mood had changed. Even mine h
ad. It was a pretty place and a pretty day. The spring wildflowers were blooming and the birds were singing all around. The river was up almost to banktop, with considerable current, calling forth thoughts of distance and drifting away as the risen river always does. Everybody was excited by the thought of new life beginning in a new place.
The others got to joking about the wild way I was apt to carry on, away off there by myself. Mart Rowanberry, who knew stories of certain social events that had occurred in Burley’s younger days, jigged his knees a time or two to make the floor vibrate. “It ain’t as stout as it used to be, Burley.”
Burley wagged his thumb at me in comment upon my age and solitary habits. “It won’t need to be as stout as it used to be.”
By midmorning all my furniture was in place, my friends were gone, and I was unpacking my boxes of clothes, bedclothes, books, and kitchen things. I had a kettle of water boiling on the stove and was feeling pretty much at home.
The camp house was built by Ernest Finley, the carpenter and wood-worker who was Mat Feltner’s brother-in-law. He built it on a bench well above the river on a two-acre patch of land between the river and the road, bounded on the upriver side by Katy’s Branch and on the downriver side by the property known as the Billy Landing, owned in those days and for a good while afterward by Beriah Easterly, who kept a little store there that never amounted to much and amounted to less and less as the years went by.
Ernest built the house in 1916 or thereabouts, when he was scarcely more than a boy. Even in those days, he was a solitary, quiet sort of fellow who loved to fish the rockbars and slips for bass or bream or new-lights. At that time, there wasn’t a proper road going along the river. When Ernest went down to camp and fish, he considered himself to be pretty well beyond the workaday world of Port William.
He set the house on good stout yellow locust posts. He salvaged poplar framing and siding from a tumbledown half-log house on the Feltner place. He bought new pine tongue-and-groove flooring and new galvanized tin roofing, which were delivered to him by boat at the Billy Landing. He built a tight two-room cabin. The part of his work that is under roof is still good to this day.