Jayber Crow

  Finally, of course, his debt became his point of reference. What he did, finally, he had to do to get the money to pay his creditors. He, his equipment, the farm, and all were just dragged along by debt. He had to keep going because his creditors were on his heels. He had worked like a slave, and he was one.

  All the way along—from his first adventures into the postwar mechanization, to the installation of the dairy, to the installation of the confinement hog-raising barn that replaced the dairy, to the final wrack and ruin—he was under the influence of expert advice, first in the form of magazine articles and leaflets and pamphlets, and then in the persons of the writers of the articles and leaflets and pamphlets, who instructed him, gave him their language and point of view, took photographs of the results, spoke of him in public talks as an innovator and a man of the new age of agribusiness, and who had simply nothing to say when their recommendations only drew him deeper and deeper into debt.

  Over the years, I pretty much made a point of staying away from the Keith place. I remembered it from way back. Just from what I could see from the road, I knew that it was going down, and I really didn’t want to see the rest of it. Besides, I wanted both to spare myself Troy’s company and to avoid any appearance of desiring Mattie’s.

  But one winter day not long before Christmas (this was a year or two before Mattie fell ill), I did go down there. There was a good big slue on the Keith place well back near the river. The wild ducks were gathering there and I proposed to myself to drop down close to the slue in my boat to see if I couldn’t maybe shoot me the makings of a good supper.

  I rowed down the river into a stout wind that I hoped would last long enough to help me row home against the current. I tied up at a place where the bank was not too steep, clawed my way to the top, and crept across the bottom to the slue. After a long sneak through the standing corn and the tall weeds and the trees, making never a sudden move, never a sound, I came into sight of the slue and found it (as you often do in that kind of hunting) perfectly empty. I found a sitting place on a log in a weed patch and sat there a long time, but nothing came.

  Finally I had to move. The cold had got into my clothes, and my hips and knees were so stiff I could hardly stand up. Now that my hunt was over, I began to look around. I told myself that I might kick up a rabbit and have a good supper out of my efforts, after all. But I wasn’t really hunting anymore. It had struck me, walking in, that the still unharvested corn crop that I was walking through was poor for the year, and so overgrown with Johnsongrass that you could hardly see the rows. As I looked now, paying more attention, I could see that the soil was pale and hard, lifeless, and in places deeply gullied. I thought of Athey. “The land slopes even in the bottoms, and water runs.”

  Troy had bulldozed every tree from along the drains and water-courses where Athey had allowed them to stand and get old. He had bulldozed every tree from every foot of ground where you could drive a tractor. The fences were gone from the whole place. Troy was a hog farmer now. Hogs were the only livestock on the farm, and they were all inside pens in the large hog barn that I could smell a long time before I could see it. Except for the larger ones where machines were stored, the other farm buildings looked abandoned—paintless and useless, going down. The buildings in use looked only a little less abandoned. It was no longer a place you could see anybody’s pride or pleasure in. In front of the farm buildings, toward the road, the house and yard and garden looked neatly kept—an entirely different kind of presence and feeling there. Behind the barn lots was what I had heard Troy, in his devil-may-care way, call his “parts department.” This was a patch of two or three acres completely covered with old or broken or worn-out machines. And here a kind of reforestation was taking place: Weeds and vines and sapling trees of various kinds were growing up all around and even through the machines.

  I got to where I could see that and stopped. I didn’t go any farther. Every scrap of land that a tractor could stand on had been plowed and cropped in corn or soybeans or tobacco. And yet, in spite of this complete and relentless putting to use, the whole place, from the house and garden all the way back to the river, looked deserted. It did not look like a place where anybody had ever wanted to be. It and the farming on it looked like an afterthought. It looked like what Troy had thought about last, after thinking about himself, his status, his machinery, and his debts.

  All of a sudden I felt ashamed, as if I had walked without thinking into some total and embarrassing privacy. I had been, until then, sort of fascinatedly eager to see, and then I realized that I did not at all want to be seen seeing. I crept back to my boat even more stealthily than I had crept up on the absent ducks.

  Mattie Chatham was the true child of her parents and their ways. As Mat Feltner used to say, “You can’t beat out of the flesh what’s bred in the bone.” She belonged to the good farm that Troy was turning into paper. And she was a true child of the revelation of the 1930s. She seemed always in some way mindful of the Depression, when the Keiths had held life together by living from the place. She knew what the place had meant to Athey and Della, and what they had meant to it. Through all the time and the troubles of her marriage to Troy, she held as well as she could to the old ways. She never let the economies of her household sink down. She was a woman of great energy, whose movements always had a certain force and momentum and resolution, as well as grace. She kept house, kept a flock of chickens, gardened, canned and preserved food, made clothes, practiced every sort of ingenuity and frugality.

  Troy depended on her. Surely he knew he did. For a long time, he took her work and his dependence for granted. And then he got embarrassed. He began to feel that she (and, therefore, he) was degraded by the part she played. He was, after all, following the line of what was supposed to be a “success story”—how a smart and talented country boy started out with nothing and finally gained a big acreage of land and made something of himself. And here he was, gaining nothing, and his wife was working to raise the food they ate, which he ought to be able to buy for her. And she would be milking the cows or, later, feeding the hogs, when he had nobody else to do it, when he ought to be able to hire somebody to do it in her place.

  She became in a way the sign of his torment, of the failure that he felt but couldn’t bear to see, and he began doing something he had never done before. He had always, in his humorless humor, made jokes about women and wives. But now he began to make jokes that were disparaging directly of her. “I’m going home,” he would say. “If the woman don’t have dinner ready I’m going to raise hell, and if she does I ain’t going to eat it.” So far as I know, he was joking, or trying to. But it was the wrong kind of joke.

  Anger is not a sin for no reason. I think I can say truly that I am a man slow to anger. I don’t like anger in myself any more than I like it in other people. But when anger comes to me, it comes full force; I remember Elton Penn saying, “Hell flew into me in a minute!” My skin seems to get all of a sudden tighter, my vision gets bad, as if I’m looking through a little hole, and I feel light and joyful and careless. When Troy would let out one of those remarks, I would have to stop and take hold of the chair-back with both hands. A barber, you know, is often holding a deadly weapon.

  Sometimes if I was alone after he had left, I would seem to wake up from a dream in which I was imagining how I could nick his throat with the razor and make it look like an accident.

  Why didn’t I do it? I wish I was sure why. Pacifist that I was and am, I am not sure. There were times when, without benefit of any conscious thought whatsoever, I wanted to wreck him in one neat stroke of perfect violence. Was I so good, so deeply convinced of the wrong of killing, that I refrained from doing it without benefit of thought? Was I a coward? Was I afraid of the man across the desk and the clash of the jailhouse door? Or was I too finicky to want him bleeding on my floor? Waking up from a dream of violence is much the same as waking up from a dream of love. You must go on living your life.

  I did not love Troy Ch
atham. I was no longer capable of the effort of will it took to understand why Mattie did. Which would sooner or later remind me that I could not understand why God did. That was my sanity.

  Did Mattie, in fact, love Troy? I think she did. I have lived some time beyond my hatred of Troy Chatham by now, and I think she loved him. I think she loved him to the end, and pitied his struggle even as she suffered it. I think so because she was not downbeaten. However she may have submitted herself and her place to what Troy was, and to what he meant to other things that she loved, what she was remained intact. If she had not loved Troy that could not have been so. But she loved him, however at odds with him she may have been, for however long. She remembered and kept treasured up her old feeling for him. She treasured up the knowledge that, though she was not happy, happiness existed. And so as Troy’s character wore lower and more awry, her own grew straighter and brighter.

  Why did she stay with him and stay loyal to him so many years until death, through so much sorrow and trouble and damage? There were two reasons, I think: She was married to him, which she took as seriously as, after all, I would have had her take it; and she understood, not just his ambition and his foolishness, his selfishness and lack of judgment, but also his fragility. She sacrificed everything to hold him together—maybe wrongly, but I lack the intelligence (or maybe the will) to see how she might have done otherwise, once she was married to him. After all, it wasn’t just Troy himself that she was dealing with but the way of the world in her time. It would be hard to argue that one woman ought to have found a way to stand up against a whole drove of experts and their salesmen, who spoke for the way of the world and were certain that there was no other possible way.

  And so she was defeated, a good woman who had too early made one bad mistake. And yet she persevered with dignity and good humor, and with a kind of loveliness that was her own. How do I know? I know because from time to time during those years we would be together.

  31

  The Nest Egg

  The Nest Egg was the fifty or so acres of big timber that Athey Keith kept and protected “in case of need,” until finally just having and holding it came to mean a great deal more to him than any possibility of need. It lay on the upriver side of Coulter Branch, cut off from the rest of the Keith place and made inconvenient to get to by the branch and its rough hollow, and therefore never even fenced and pastured in the memory of man. Whether or not it was an absolutely “virgin” woods is another question. There were some double-trunked white oaks, big ones, and so there must have been some cutting in there, a long time ago, but only in a few spots. Other places, I thought, had never been touched. Trees were standing in the Nest Egg that had been there when D. Boone and the others came hunting through, and when the first old Keiths and Coulters and Rowanberrys came in and settled: oaks and walnuts and tulip poplars that you couldn’t reach halfway around with both arms and that went way up without a limb. It took, as Burley Coulter said, a mighty good rifle (and a mighty good eye) to shoot a squirrel out of the top of one of them. Where the wind had blown one over and its roots had come up, there would be a hollow in the ground bigger than a grave.

  One of the happinesses and finally the greatest joy of my life on the river was my nearness to the Nest Egg. It was only half a mile or so away. I would go downriver along the road and then turn in to the Coulter Branch hollow by a lane so little used as to be almost invisible. It really was just a footpath kept worn by occasional hunters or trespassers (like me) and the wild creatures. The path went along between a low wooded slope and a little patch of bottom that had been cropped occasionally in Athey’s time but was now covered with thicket. There was a dense patch of the bamboo that we call “cane,” about six or eight feet high, which once stood in huge brakes and fed the buffalo before the time of the white people. For some distance in the cane the path was almost a burrow. And then you stepped out of that confinement into a swale wooded with big water maples and ashes and walnuts and sycamores, a sort of entrance hall, spacious and airy. Backwater from the floods often stood there, and the floor was covered with pieces of drift, which in turn were covered in the growing season with a solid stand of nettles. In spring when their foliage was new, these nettles seemed a rich and perfect carpet, though they stood taller than your knees and stung like fire if they touched your skin.

  From this place of entrance, being always careful of the nettles, you could make your way up a low, steep slope into the drier woods, untroubled by flooding, where the dark trunks went up so tall, and among them you would see here and there the silver of beeches or, along the hollows, the sudden whiteness of sycamores. This was a many-storied place, starting under the ground with the dark forest of roots and the creatures of the dark. And then there were the dead leaves and the brilliant mosses and the mushrooms in their season. And next were the wildflowers and the ferns in their appointed places and times, and then the spice bushes and buckthorns and devil’s clubs and the patches of cane. And next were the low trees: ironwood, hornbeam, dogwood, and (in openings made by fallen big trees) redbud. Above those, the big trees and the vines went up to the crown of foliage at the top. And at all these aboveground stories there was a moving and singing foliage of birds. Everywhere there were dens and holes and hollows and secret nests. When you were there you could be sure that you were being seen, and that you more than likely would not see what was seeing you.

  Everything there seemed to belong where it was. That was why I went there. And I went to feel the change that that place always made in me. Always, as soon as I came in under the big trees, I began to go slowly and quietly. This was not because I was hunting (I hunted in other places), but because in a place where everything belongs where it is, you do not want to disturb anything. I went slowly and quietly. I watched where I put my feet. I went for solace and comfort, for a certain quietness of mind that came to me in no other place. Even the nettles and the mosquitoes comforted me, for they belonged where they were.

  There were, in the hot, muggy summer days, sure enough a great plenty of mosquitoes. Big ones. And hungry. They could smell your blood beneath your skin at a distance of a hundred yards, and they came whining to the feast, so ecstatic with appetite that they didn’t even look up to see if you were watching. You could swat them several at a lick and they didn’t seem to mind. They were outlandish big. Burley Coulter used to say that they could stand flatfooted and deflower a turkey. If you went there in good mosquito weather, you were inclined to keep walking; you never thought of sitting down. In general it was best, after the weather heated up, to go to the Nest Egg only on the cooler, drier, breezier days.

  On a warm day, a bright day in late April, a Sunday afternoon, I passed right on through the swale where the nettles were and went up that first low, steep slope. From there the woods went back on a sort of platform or terrace that was broken by slue hollows where backwater was still puddled from the late rises. In those places the mosquitoes about added up to a mean dog; you could fairly hear their guts growling. I kept to the high ground and went on to where the slope of the valleyside began to rise. At that point Coulter Branch ceases to be a sluggish, mud-banked stream and becomes a steep, rocky one, coming down in a series of little falls and pools like a stairway. Well up the slope I turned away from the stream and walked out along the face of the bluff to a sort of point near the upper boundary of the Keith land. The woods opened up in that place and, as I expected, there was a fine breeze. I sat down and leaned my back against a big red oak. As I often did, I had brought a book to read.

  But I didn’t read much, or long. Because of the breeze, the place was full of the motions of shadows and lights. The day was still warming up, and I was not far past a pretty good dinner. A woodpecker was halfheartedly pecking on a hollow limb as if he were neither feeding nor sending a message but just idly whittling or talking to himself. My book slipped out of my hands and woke me up. I stretched out on my back on the dry leaves, then, and went to sleep in earnest.

  One
of the best things you can do in this world is take a nap in the woods. I slept soundly and without moving for half an hour. As often happens at such times, my mind woke up before my body did. My eyes opened right out of sleep, and I was looking up at the gently stirring treetops and the bright sky, with no other thought on my mind, and my body still deeply resting. It was delicious and I did not want to move.

  The woodpecker stopped his drowsy pecking and flew. I raised my head and looked around. Mattie Chatham was coming along the slope about the same way I had come. She was just idly wandering along, looking at everything as she went. She had picked a little bouquet of violets, both the blossoms and the pretty leaves, and was carrying it as she might have done when she was a girl, pleased to have their beauty with her. She seemed surrounded by almost a singing of her sense of rest.

  You can maybe imagine my astonishment at waking to the sight of her there, and also my discomfort, for she had not yet seen me. It was a moment of great social awkwardness. I felt it a shame to intrude on her. I knew in an instant that, like me, she had come there for solace and comfort. I could feel, as later I would know, that she was a familiar of the place. Coming there, she stepped over a threshold where her troubles, if they did not quite go away, at least stopped and waited. And so I could hardly assume that this was an offhand encounter, as if we had met in the post office in Port William. I thought of just lying still and letting her go by, or even pretending to be asleep. But I didn’t want her to think, if she came nearer and saw me, that I had been slyly watching her. When she turned her head away, I sat up. When she looked back in my direction, I raised my hand and gave a small, noncommittal wave.