Jayber Crow

  I kept dreaming these dreams after I had waked up. I could not stop dreaming them. I would lie with my eyes wide open, awake and dreaming, the dark room as bedeviled as if the Old Scratch himself stood breathing beside my bed.

  The trouble with many of my dreams was that they were perfectly rational, or they came from perfectly rational fears. They came from The Economy and The War—that is to say from The News. It really didn’t make any difference whether I was asleep or awake. All I needed was to be alone and quiet and in the dark, so that my mind could concentrate itself on fearful things, and it could not be unconcentrated sometimes until daylight.

  Lying in my bed in the dark, asleep or awake, I would know for a certainty that at the headwaters of the river heavy machines were cutting their way along the mountainsides. I could see the trees falling, the roots tearing out of the ground, the ground being shoved aside. I could hear the bedrock shudder and crumble.

  I would know that cars and trucks were speeding in narrow lanes day and night along the roads of the world. I would marvel that all of them did not crash into one another, and would flinch in my soul at the certainty that some of them would crash. Out of the general blur of haste, one place suddenly would assert itself: a patch of pavement, roadside weeds, crumpled metal, oil and blood, throbbing lights, and then calls going out into the dark distance, people waking up already afraid in a world utterly changed.

  And I would know that across the world always, always were wars and rumors of wars. Boys like Forrest Finn and Tom Coulter and Virgil Feltner and Jimmy Chatham were going out to be killed. Boys who had never seen one another, let alone harmed one another, were being taught to kill one another. And the wars grew always worse, as for their own reasons they had to, and the world grew always smaller and more frail.

  For a long time then I seemed to live by a slender thread of faith, spun out from within me. From this single thread I spun strands that joined me to the good things of the world. And then I spun more threads that joined all the strands together, making a life. When it was complete, or nearly so, it was shapely and beautiful in the light of day. It endured through the nights, but sometimes it only barely did. It would be tattered and set awry by things that fell or blew or fled or flew. Many of the strands would be broken. Those I would have to spin and weave again in the morning.

  But of course the story of my life is not finished yet. I will not live to tell the end of it.

  My life, though, has been something (as only now at last I am able to see), but it is something that it has made of itself, not something that I have made of it. All I seem to have done is avoid wherever I could (so far) the man across the desk—for (so far) the world has afforded a little room for a few of us, lucky or blessed, to go around him. And now I wonder if I can die quickly enough and secretly enough to make the final evasion.

  “No, Jayber,” Lyda said, “you are not going to end up in any damned nursing home.”

  She is always sending Reuben down to me with a hot meal. “She says she cooked a good deal too much,” he’ll say, or, “She says you need to taste of this. It’s good.”

  That evening she had sent him to bring me up to supper, as now she often does. We were talking afterward, sitting at the table. I meant to make a joke, realizing only after it was too late to stop that it could be no joke. It was fear, and I should have bitten my tongue. I said, “That was mighty good, my dear Lyda. Something to remember when I’m peeing on myself and watching TV down at the Fair Haven.”

  The others laughed, to grant me my joke and ease my embarrassment. But Lyda didn’t laugh. “No, sir!” she said. “Not if the Lord spares me!”

  Bless her.

  But she has not yet thought of everything that I have thought of.

  If my bad night dreams needed daytime confirmation, I have not needed to leave the river to find it. It might seem to you that living in the woods on a riverbank would remove you from the modern world. But not if the river is navigable, as ours is. On pretty weekends in the summer, this riverbank is the very verge of the modern world. It is a seat in the front row, you might say. On those weekends, the river is disquieted from morning to night by people resting from their work.

  This resting involves traveling at great speed, first on the road and then on the river. The people are in an emergency to relax. They long for the peace and quiet of the great outdoors. Their eyes are hungry for the scenes of nature. They go very fast in their boats. They stir the river like a spoon in a cup of coffee. They play their radios loud enough to hear above the noise of their motors. They look neither left nor right. They don’t slow down for—or maybe even see—an old man in a rowboat raising his lines.

  The fishermen have the fastest boats of all. Their boats scarcely touch the water. They have much equipment, thousands of dollars worth. They can’t fish in one place for fear that there are more fish in another place. For rest they have a perfect restlessness.

  I watch and I wonder and I think. I think of the old slavery, and of the way The Economy has now improved upon it. The new slavery has improved upon the old by giving the new slaves the illusion that they are free. The Economy does not take people’s freedom by force, which would be against its principles, for it is very humane. It buys their freedom, pays for it, and then persuades its money back again with shoddy goods and the promise of freedom. “Buy a car,” it says, “and be free. Buy a boat and be free. Buy a beer and be free.” Is this not the raw material of bad dreams? Or is it maybe the very nightmare itself?

  But wait. Also there were times when good dreams came to me. They still come.

  Not so long ago I had dreamed, I thought, all night such dreams as I have told. I was exhausted. I thought, “Won’t morning ever come?”

  And then, asleep or awake, I looked out and saw the stars, and a deep, peaceful sleep came upon me.

  The phone rang, which was strange because I have never owned a telephone in my life. I let it ring a long time because, as I told myself, “My phone couldn’t be ringing because I don’t have a phone.”

  When I answered it, it was Athey Keith. He said, “Jayber, if you haven’t already done something too silly, come on up to Art Rowanberry’s and sit with us for a while.”

  “All right,” I said, and hung up.

  I thought, “What’s Athey doing calling me up? Athey’s dead. And Art Rowanberry. He’s been dead two years.”

  But I got up and put on my clothes. It was still night and the air, when I opened the door and stepped out, was damp and fresh.

  I walked along the river road to the Sand Ripple road and up into the smaller valley. It was day by then, perfectly cloudless and bright. I crossed the creek on the little swinging footbridge.

  As I went along the lane below the house, I looked up and saw Athey Keith and Art Rowanberry sitting on the porch. Elton Penn was there. Burley Coulter was there. They were smiling, lifting their hands to me, glad to be together, glad to see me.

  “Howdy, Howdy!” Art called. “Come up!”

  Elton was sitting beside him in the swing. I had sat there with the four of them many a Sunday afternoon, resting and talking. I went up and sat below them on the top step. To be there seemed strange, but it was all right.

  “Well, ain’t it a fine day overhead,” Art said, as he always used to do. And Elton picked up Art’s hand and kissed it. There were tears of joy in his eyes.

  I sat with them a long time, listening to them talk of the things they had always talked about before. But I didn’t know the time. The sun seemed to be standing still. I knew that Uncle Othy’s old silver watch was in my pocket, but I knew also that it was not running.

  Finally I realized where I was.

  30

  The Keith Place in the Way of the World

  Della Keith lived to be eighty-four years old. She died in 1971, and the whole Keith estate then passed to Mattie Chatham, who was the only heir. The family name of Keith survived in Port William then only in the given name of Mattie and Troy Chatham’s one s
urviving child, Athey Keith Chatham, known as A. K. And A. K. by then was only technically countable as a citizen of Port William. In the fall of 1971, A. K. enrolled in the college of commerce at the university in Lexington. Within a few years he would realize his father’s ambition. He would become a real businessman, sitting at a desk, with other people working for him. By then he would be a long way from home.

  When Mattie Chatham inherited the Keith place (and also, of course, the little place in town), she became her husband’s landlady. That may partly explain Troy’s progress through the years afterward. Mattie was all of a sudden, and merely by inheritance, the owner of a five-hundred-acre farm. Troy, who had been going all-out for twenty-six years, had nothing to show for it but a continuous debt that he claimed to be reconciled to, his status (mostly with himself) as a big operator, and the goad and burden of unquenched ambition. So he must have felt himself, from then on, to be engaged in a contest with fortune, or whatever you might call that power that distributes the goods of the world, giving more to some, who rarely feel that they deserve less, and less to others, who usually feel that they deserve more.

  But Troy’s life was not determined entirely by fortune. He had in his pride, as a matter of fact, chosen against his father-in-law and his ways. In doing so he had left out of account the possibility that Athey might choose against him, which Athey (and Della) did when they left everything to Mattie alone. In making this choice, Athey and Della (and also Wheeler Catlett, their lawyer) obviously thought that they were protecting Mattie against Troy’s haste and his bad judgment. What they failed to consider (or did consider, and couldn’t help) was something that I believe all of them knew: that Mattie could not be protected from Troy’s haste and bad judgment. By dividing Mattie’s fortune from Troy’s, they made Troy, in effect, her enemy. He would have to make her party to his bad judgment.

  In describing the course of Troy’s life after Della Keith’s death, I am supposing a little, but not much. More than likely I would not be speaking from knowledge if the barbering trade had not followed me to the river. But talk, as I have said, draws to a barber as water draws to low ground. My customers would park on the side of the road and walk down the path to the house, bringing always their small donations to leave in return for my small service (also donated), and always also they brought a small burden of talk, which they would want to be lightened of before they climbed the path back up to the road again. The times were changing, nobody could doubt that. And in the minds of the older Port Williamites, Troy Chatham seemed to signify what the times were changing to. They pondered over their knowledge of him because they (or most of them) were skeptical and uneasy about change of any kind, and they were uncertain what to think about Troy. They were not sure they got the point that he was so sure he had got. He had simply outdistanced them all, not only in the scale and speed of what he called his “operation,” but also in his fearlessness of debt. It is a fact that nearly all the farmers of Port William who were born as late as the 1930s were brought up to distrust debt at the very least, and some of them greatly feared it. To owe what you had not yet earned, to have to work to earn what you had already spent, was a personal diminishment, an insult to nature and common sense. Most of them knew this from experience.

  But Troy did not fear debt. He preferred to see himself as a man ahead of his time. He had got so he liked to speak of his creditors as his “business partners.” And this was true enough, for he always owed them so much that they could not easily afford to let him fail. The bank continued his loans, and even increased them, to keep him afloat. By owing them he came, in a manner of speaking, to own his creditors. In his applications for credit, he was holding them for ransom. In this way, by having a net worth of probably less than nothing, he had become a man of power.

  I know what I know of this partly because Troy was one of my faithful customers who followed me from town to the river. He lacked almost completely the inclination, which was otherwise pretty general in Port William, to keep private business private. In Port William, people usually prefer to talk about other people’s business. Troy preferred to talk about his own. He had at least the virtue of not being a gossip. He talked to anybody who was on hand about his financial affairs, apparently without the least suspicion that his hearers were not respectful or even envious of the magnitude of his debts. He would talk in this way to (for instance) Nathan Coulter, who never said more than a little about himself or anybody else, and who probably could have paid for all of Troy’s assets and some of his liabilities too without borrowing a cent.

  If nobody else was available to talk to about his “operation” and his finances, he talked to me, without suspecting in the least that I did not concur in his high opinion of himself. Except for quoting Scripture to him occasionally to heap coals of fire on his head, I acted toward him with tolerance and politeness, and he assumed that I liked him. Maybe he thought that since he liked himself everybody liked him. But, really, I don’t think he liked himself. If he did, why would he have worked and suffered so to be something he wasn’t—to make “something” of himself ? Maybe he disliked himself but thought he was smart enough to convince everybody that he was likable. Maybe he thought he liked himself because he thought he was that smart. Because I never openly disagreed with his financial pronouncements, he assumed that I agreed and was impressed. Why would anybody living as I did not secretly want to be like him?

  In fact, of all the trials I have experienced, he was the hardest. He was the trial that convicted me over and over again. I did not like him. I could not like him. Maybe I didn’t need to like him, but I needed at least not to dislike him, and I did thoroughly dislike him. I also enjoyed disliking him. In his presence I was in the perfect absence, the night shadow, of the charity that I sought for and longed for. I had got far enough that I could see how, in this hard and sorrowful and sometimes terrible world, charity could light and ease the way, if a person could be capable of it. I could see how it could show an opening that a man like me might, after all, squeeze through. And in the presence of Troy Chatham, which was getting to be about the only place where I really needed that charity and really suffered for the want of it, I didn’t have it.

  When Mattie inherited her parents’ estate, she used the moneys from the estate and the sale of the property in town to clear the Keith place of the inheritance taxes and all outstanding debts. And then here is what Troy could have done. He could have made it safe in Mattie’s keeping. He could have seen that, safe in her keeping, it would have made both of them safe for the rest of their lives. If he had to keep on in his debt-driven plunge toward whatever grandeur he thought would satisfy him, then he could have left her and her inheritance clear of it. But that is not what he did. He followed the way of “business,” not of farming or family or marriage. When the apple fell from the tree at last, he was there waiting, with his own hands cupped to receive it.

  What he did was persuade her to mortgage the whole thing, first to build a grade-A dairy (milking parlor, loafing shed, silo, Holstein cows, and equipment), and then to “leverage” the purchase of more land. By the time the estate was settled, we were in the bigtime, big-farmer, land-buying jamboree of the 1970s. Men of power were saying again, “Get big or get out.” The talk was all of leverage. Land prices were going up, which meant that farmers of ambition could borrow more and more on the land they owned in order to own more and more land.

  It was at about that time, I believe, that Troy began to call himself an “agribusinessman.” He would quote a great official of the government who had said, “Adapt or die,” meaning that a farmer should adapt to the breakneck economic program of the corporations, not to his farm. Troy was sure that he was an adapter and would not die. He loved that word leverage. And I remember that one day, when he was talking of this, Nathan Coulter said, “A lever has got two ends. Where is the fulcrum going to go?”

  So far as I remember, that was Nathan’s only comment on the economics of Troy Chatham. As it turne
d out, he was right. It turned out that Troy, who proposed to be the lifter, was lifted.

  Troy miscalculated the movement of the fulcrum, but that wasn’t what was really wrong. If he couldn’t control the movement of the fulcrum, why should he have allowed everything to depend on the position of it in the first place? What was wrong was not the movement of somebody else’s fulcrum, but Troy’s own point of reference. He never knew where he was.

  At first, his point of reference was himself, his own wants and his ambition. There is nothing surprising or unforgivable about that, maybe, in a young man. But Troy never outgrew it. I don’t think he ever caught on, despite what it cost him, that one of his reference points might have been and ought to have been Mattie. His vanity and pride and self-assurance (pretended or not) obscured her to him from the start. You can imagine that early in their marriage some awareness of her wishes and her sense of things might have distracted him a little from himself and given him a power of thinking that apart from her he didn’t have and could never have. But that didn’t happen. Maybe Troy’s contempt for Athey caused him to ignore what really was the best opportunity of his life, which was to love, honor, and cherish Athey’s daughter. Or maybe Troy was, in the ways that counted most, just an incurable chucklehead.

  He enlarged his pride by investing it (as well as a lot of money, usually borrowed money) in equipment. And so then the equipment, the power to do things mechanically, became his point of reference. His question was what his equipment could do, not what the farm could stand. The farm, in a way, became his mirror. The farm never at any time was his reference point, and this was his bewilderment and his (and its) ruin. This was why he was reduced by everything he did to enlarge himself; it was why his life was all spending and no gain.