His wife, Lyda, was a good match for him, except that she would sometimes oppose his fiscal reluctance when it came to the children. There would now and then be some joking about Danny—to the effect, for instance, that he could mash the face off of a dime between his thumb and forefinger, or that he walked on his heels to save his toes—but he was pretty generally respected too. He and Lyda, in fact, were generous people, good to Burley, to their children, and to their neighbors. They were tight of pocket, you might say, but free of heart.
Danny and Lyda’s economy included the woods and the river. They ate a lot of wild game—fish, deer, squirrels, rabbits, and such. When their farmwork wasn’t pressing them, Danny and his boys would keep a boat in the river down by my camp house. Their boat would seldom be the same one two years in a row. Occasionally they would have no boat at all. The boat, like a good many things the Branches had, would be one they had made or had got cheap and had fixed up. Like a good many things they had, it was for sale if the price was right. More often than not, their boat (like mine) would be powered only by oars. But sometimes it would have an outboard motor that they had picked up cheap or dragged out of a junk pile and fixed up and made to run. The Branches seemed uninterested in getting somewhere and making something of themselves. What they liked was making something of nearly nothing.
After a late start, Danny and Lyda had seven children: Will, Royal, Coulter (named Coulter Branch, Danny said, for the stream that ran down off the Coulter ridges), Fount, Reuben, and then (“Finally!” Lyda said) the two girls, Rachel and Rosie. I won’t need to make much mention of the children; I name them all together now to give them my blessing. If the world lasts, there are going to be Branches around here for a long time. As the boys grew older, they made do with old cars and old farm equipment as they earlier had made do with old bicycles and outboard motors. This is the way they will survive—by being marginal, using what nobody else wants, doing well the work that nobody else will do. If they aren’t destroyed by some scientific solution to all our problems, they will go on though dynasties pass. By this late year of 1986 Danny and Lyda have already got a whole company of grandchildren.
As long as I lived up in town, neither Danny nor his boys ever came to me for a haircut. Lyda did the haircutting in that family. I would see the children and Lyda fairly often, especially while the school lasted, but I never saw much of Danny. He was less sociable than Burley, not a town person at all. He was good-humored, perfectly friendly, but a little standoffish, shut-mouthed until you knew him well, not easy to know. Some of the Coulter in him favored Nathan more than Burley.
After the crops were all laid by, in that first summer of my life here on the river, Danny and Royal and Coulter and Fount turned up one morning with their boat in the back of Danny’s ramshackledy old pickup truck. I looked out and the four of them were standing on the hillside by the house, looking at the river. They hadn’t knocked or called or maybe even looked at the house. When I came out on the porch, all four of them gave me a grin and raised their chins in greeting.
Danny said, “It wouldn’t bother you, I don’t reckon, if we put our boat in.”
“Why, of course not!” I said. “Put in all the boats you want to.”
“Well, if you wouldn’t care, we might put it in about where you’ve got your boat.”
“Fine,” I said. “Use my cable there to tie up to.”
Danny granted my offer the consideration he felt was its due, and then said, “Well. All right.”
From then on he came to me for haircuts, though the boys never did. Danny came, I thought at first, because he didn’t want to be my neighbor, having his boat in the river here and going by so often, without giving me his trade. But finally I realized it was more than that. He was making common cause with me. A barbershop in town, run in the usual way, did not interest him much. A barbershop in the woods on the riverbank, giving free haircuts in return for which people gave away dollars, a barbershop bootlegging haircuts in defiance of authority, dispensing and receiving lawless charity—that appealed to his fundamental dissidence and contrariness. Pretty soon we got to know each other and were friends. Behind or beyond the smiling reticence with which he maintained his distance from other people’s curiosity, he was watching this getting-and-spending modern world cautiously and with suspicion, as I understood well enough, but also with an amusement that I liked but couldn’t reach on my own.
Oftentimes his amusement rose up to merriment. Watching the pleasure boats swarm in the river on a Sunday afternoon, he said, “One of these days they’ll trade them things off for a mess of pottage. I know what I’m going to do with mine, Jayber. What are you going to do with yorn?” And he laughed a laugh that came more from the Proudfoots than the Coulters.
To get my own hair cut, I had continued to go down to Hargrave. When I lived in Port William, this was easy enough to arrange. I would hear that somebody was going and would speak for a ride. From the house on the river, it was not so easy. Sometimes it would come to hitchhiking, which could take half a day. I happened to mention this to Danny.
He said, “Why, Jayber, you don’t need to go to Hargrave to get your hair cut. Lyda can cut it.”
It was evening. He had finished running his lines and was going home. “Come on,” he said.
So we went up to his truck and I rode home with him.
“Lyda,” he said, “Jayber here needs to get his hair cut.”
She said, “Well, he’ll have to eat his supper first. I can’t stop now.”
I said, “Oh, now, I hate to put you to the trouble.”
“One more mouth won’t make any difference here,” she said.
“Naw, Jayber,” Burley called from the porch swing, “it won’t be any trouble. Come on up. I’ll have supper on the table in a few minutes.”
Lyda took a swipe at his shoulder with the rag she had in her hand. “You’ll have it on the table! That’ll be a fair fine day in Hell!”
“That’s where they’ve got something cooking all the time,” Burley said. “Come on up, Jayber.”
By then all the children and dogs knew there was a stranger on the place, and they had come to look. They all crowded around me as if maybe I had my pockets full of candy.
“Get back! Get back!” Danny said. “Give a man room to walk!” He made a parting motion with his hands.
Children and dogs fell back to each side like the waters of the Red Sea, leaving a sort of aisle that Danny and I walked through to the washstand by the rain barrel at the corner of the porch. Danny picked up the washpan, smote the surface of the water in the barrel with the bottom of the pan to drive the wigglers down, dipped the pan half full of water, set it down on the washstand, and stepped aside, gesturing welcome with his hand. “There’s soap and a towel if you’d like to wash up,” he said to me, and then to the children and dogs who had clustered around again, “Get back!”
The children and dogs fell back, never ceasing to watch me. I washed up, threw the water out, dipped the pan for Danny, and made my way amongst the children and dogs up onto the porch. “Sit down, Jayber,” Burley said, and I sat down.
When he had washed, Danny refilled the pan and stood there watching while the children washed, the bigger ones seeing to the littler ones, who wanted to splash more than wash. Danny said, “Keep your hands off of them dogs, now, till after supper.”
You might think that so many young children would make a considerable uproar at a meal, but when Lyda called us in to supper those children (from Will, who was fourteen, right down to Rosie, who was four) went in and sat down in their places and never made a peep. I thought at first that that probably was because I was there, but in fact it was pretty much according to rule. But this wasn’t spiritlessness: It was discipline. Out from under Lyda’s gaze, the children were noisy enough. When Reuben and the two girls were little, they talked all the time, all at the same time, in high chirps, like a tree full of sparrows.
When the meal was over, the children scraped
and stacked the dishes, which Burley then washed and Will dried and put away.
There was a running joke between Burley and Lyda about Burley’s reluctance and incompetence at housework, but of course Burley had lived alone for a long time before Danny and Lyda came, and he could do all the household work, if not to Lyda’s taste at least well enough. When they came, since it was his house, he might have treated them as the beneficiaries of his hospitality, but instead he made himself their guest. They responded, as maybe they didn’t have to do, by being hospitable to him. He was, I think, a good guest, helping especially Lyda in every way he could. She caught his trick of dealing with this arrangement and their large affection for each other as an endlessly branching joke, in which they said the opposite of what they meant. If Burley complained that he was behind in his housework because she was always underfoot and in the way, he meant that she was anything but in the way and he was thankful to have her there. If Lyda said that it would have been a mercy if she had married one husband instead of two bachelors, that meant that she loved them both more than enough to put up with them. And so on.
While Burley and Will did the dishes and Danny and Royal and Coulter and Fount went out to feed the dogs and do a few last chores (the children having milked and fed before supper), Lyda gave me my haircut. The sight of their mother cutting a stranger’s hair was so shocking that Rachel and Rosie whispered and giggled throughout the operation, and Reuben could bear to watch only from under the table.
And so I began what I suppose is my final passage of family life, which has not ended yet. I became what Lyda called her “third bachelor, as if I needed another one.”
Lyda, of course, took no money for cutting my hair. That I was not to offer to pay her was something I did not even “understand.” I just knew it, you might say, from looking at her. It would have been as big a mistake as offering to pay for my supper.
And I, of course, started watching Danny to see that he didn’t lay down a dollar somewhere after I had cut his hair. He offered it once more, I believe, and I refused it, and that was all. We were neighbors after that. We kept no accounts.
Lyda was a good barber. Slow, but good. She’d had, after all, a fair amount of practice. She would cut a few snips and step back and look, or maybe walk all the way around you as if you were a public statue, and then cut a few snips more. Several of the family would usually be watching, and there would be a big conversation going on.
If Lyda was a good barber, and if she cut my hair (what there was of it) and all her children’s hair, why didn’t she cut Danny’s? She just didn’t. From the time I came to the river, Danny came to me for his haircuts. Don’t try to make too much “sense” of this. It was gift-giving, it was manners, it was visiting. It was (last of all) economic—somebody had to do the haircutting—but we weren’t trying very hard to make economic sense.
I didn’t make too regular a thing of going to Lyda and Danny’s to eat. I would go sometimes, but not as often as Danny invited me. When I did go, it was fine. Lyda was a good cook, they always had a lot to eat, and it was a fact that one more mouth didn’t make much difference there.
But often I would walk up through the woods along the Coulter Branch hollow when I was done with my own supper, and would get to the Branches’ about the time they had washed up the dishes. I would sit till bedtime, talking with Lyda and Danny and Burley and whoever else might be there—sometimes Hannah and Nathan Coulter, sometimes Flora and Andy Catlett. In summer, if the weather was fair, we would sit out in the front yard. In winter we sat in the living room by the stove. On the winter nights we would have popcorn, and sometimes Burley would go to his room and bring out his shoebox full of keepsakes, which he would take out one by one and identify and pass around for everybody to see. The smaller children would be playing around quietly or sitting in laps or lying beside our chairs to listen. I so much loved the quiet of those times of talk, when the children were listening or asleep, and we were all aware of the darkness spread over the ridgetops and the valley.
Burley continued to be a hunter almost until he died. As he got older he gave up coon hunting but kept on foxhunting, which required less walking. His legs were giving out. So, for that matter, was his hearing. I had run out of interest in night hunting by then, and so I didn’t go, but Danny or the Rowanberrys would tell me how it was with Burley. When the hounds were far away he couldn’t hear them. When they were close he thought they were far away. Then he would listen and tell the others where the dogs were running, though the dogs were not where he thought they were at all. He believed he heard them running in someplace he hadn’t been able to walk to for a long time, and he would describe the course of the hunt that was both real and a sort of dream.
He loved to go. It was his freedom and his comfort. Some nights when I walked up there, Burley and Danny and the older boys would be gone. Some nights, it would be Burley alone who would be gone. Some nights when he might have hunted, company would come early, and he would stay and visit.
“If you all hadn’t come, he would be out somewhere with those dogs,” Lyda said, pretending to scold but in fact proud of him.
“No, now,” Burley said. “I’m too old to go every night.”
“Well, you’ve been going every night.”
“Well, every other night ain’t often enough.”
Forty years Burley Coulter was my friend. When he died—or, rather, disappeared clean out of the present world—my life was changed. You will know how much, practically and otherwise, my life in Port William and here at the river had been his gift. In a way, I had been living out a vision that he had seen. I had, after all, lived as a man who’d had his dwelling place and his place of business right together, as he had said at the beginning.
He was a man aboundingly evident, and yet one who belonged in some part to mystery, who lived the life of the place in a way that none of us entirely knew. I felt his absence as an abiding presence that I lived in and learned about, as I lived in and learned about the place, now that he was entirely beyond its knowing.
After Burley was gone, it must have been three weeks before I realized that Danny Branch was now my landlord. He never mentioned it, and so I thought I would mention it. The change seemed to call, maybe, for some kind of recognition.
I said, “Listen, I think I ought to be paying you some rent. Let’s get Wheeler to draw us up a lease or a contract or whatever’s right. I want to be square with you, now.”
Of course we were long past that. I had thought so, but when he looked at me I knew it.
“No,” he said, “I’ll just give you the use of it.” And he looked away.
29
On the Edge
Once I was on the river, it became clear that I had to resign as grave digger. A grave digger, as Uncle Stanley enjoyed pointing out, cannot plan his work. People generally don’t die on schedule or at other people’s convenience. When I was barbering in Port William, I was findable without too much trouble and in not too long a time. Somebody always knew more or less where I was, or which way I had gone. Part of Port William’s business is to have such knowledge.
I was harder to find on the river. It was awkward for everybody, too much to ask, and so I gave up grave digging. (By now, of course, they dig and fill the graves with a backhoe, which is not the right way to do it.) Anyhow, it was a load off my mind to be a load off other people’s minds.
I kept on as janitor of the church, which is scheduled work. I still walk up on Fridays to clean, as I have always done, and on Sunday mornings I go up to ring the bell and sit through the service. I don’t attend altogether for religious reasons. I feel more religious, in fact, here beside this corrupt and holy stream. I am not sectarian or evangelical. I don’t want to argue with anybody about religion. I wouldn’t want to argue about it even if I thought it was arguable, or even if I could win. I’m a literal reader of the Scriptures, and so I see the difficulties. And yet every Sunday morning I walk up there, over a cobble of quibbles. I am,
I suppose, a difficult man. I am, maybe, the ultimate Protestant, the man at the end of the Protestant road, for as I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think.