She said, “Oh!” in surprise, and not exactly with pleasure. And then, as if we were in the post office in Port William, she gave me her good general-purpose smile and said, “Hello, Jayber. How’re you?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “It’s a good day.”
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
She came on, not to where I was but nearby, and sat down.
She said, “I thought I would find a breeze here.”
She hadn’t looked at me when she spoke. Fearing she had spoken just to be polite, I didn’t reply. I didn’t know whether she had sat down in friendship, or because she was feeling socially awkward herself, or because she was tired.
And then she did look at me and smiled again, seeming to endow our encounter with a sort of permission. She gestured with her bouquet toward the treetops, through which the sky sent down upon us a network of gently shifting lights. “Lovely,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “It is.”
We sat there, thus apart and together, for a long time.
After a while she stood up, brushed the leaf chaff from her clothes, and said, “Well, I guess we ought to be going.”
She said “we.” What did she know? We never spoke of such things. This was in 1970, the year after I moved to the river. She was forty-six years old that year. I had loved her, had belonged to her, then, for a long time. When I think of her now, I am sometimes persuaded that she already knew that. Is this because any man believes, or fears, that a beloved woman not only knows more about him than he knows himself but also knows it sooner than he can hope to know it? Or did she really know?
She said “we,” and I stood and followed her by another way back to the path through the cane and on to the road, where she went her way and I mine.
After that, from time to time we would meet, as you might say by accident, somewhere in that patch of woods that her father had named the Nest Egg. It is of the utmost importance that you should understand that these meetings were not trysts. They were not planned—just as, I imagine, such meetings within an ordinary marriage are not—because they could not be. They were not, until they happened, even intended. They happened only because Mattie and I were alive in the same little world of Port William at the same time, and because both of us loved the Nest Egg. From that first day, I knew that these meetings must not be planned, expected, depended on, or looked forward to. They were a hope seen afar, that must be with patience waited for. And in fact a strange unforeseeing patience had come over me, a patience until death. Though I remembered a time when it seemed to me I would gladly have died even just to touch the back of her hand, now I was not disturbed.
At first I would ask myself, “Can this be?” Later, I knew it could.
We would not see each other maybe for many days. When I went to the Nest Egg, I went only to be there, to see what was there, to grow quiet enough to hear its sounds and voices. And then one day again she would be there. Our paths would cross and we would go along a ways together while the season warmed and the leaves unfolded overhead, while the leaves fell or the snow. We walked always in beauty, it seemed to me. We walked and looked about, or stood and looked. Sometimes, less often, we would sit down. We did not often speak. The place spoke for us and was a kind of speech. We spoke to each other in the things we saw. As we went along, ways would open before us, alleys and aisles and winding paths, leading to patches of maidenhair ferns or to a tree where pileated woodpeckers nested or to a place where a barred owl gazed down at us backward over his tail. The woods showed us its small brakes of cane (especially lovely when their green foliage was laden with snow), its ascending vines, its lichens and mosses and ferns, its nests and burrows. We saw warblers, wood ducks, thrushes, deer. Around us always were the passing graces of moving air, lights and shadows, bird flight, songs, calls, drummings. Each of us knew what the other saw and heard. There was no need to ask, no need to say.
We went from paths into pathlessness. The woods has many doors going in and out. It is full of rooms opening into one another, shaped by direction and viewpoint. Many of these rooms are findable only once, from a certain direction on a certain day, in a certain light, at a certain time. They could not be returned to either now, after years, or then, after an hour. Windows opened in the foliage, through which, maybe, we would see a hawk soaring or a distant treetop suddenly shaken by a gust of wind. Sometimes these walks and rooms and vistas seemed arranged for us, for our pleasure, as in a human garden. But these, of course, do not constitute the woods, which is not a garden and is not understandable or foretellable even so much as a garden is.
We would come sometimes into a place of such loveliness that it stopped us still and held us until some changing of the light seemed to bless us and let us go.
We came in April to a slope covered with bluebells, and knelt to smell their cool perfume, so fresh and delicate and unrememberable as to seem to have come from another world.
One afternoon in the spring when we were standing still and silent by the side of Coulter Branch where the water fell with a hundred voices down steps and glides among the rocks from pool to pool, where the mosses were bright green on the rocks and the tree roots and the stonecrop was in bloom, we saw a red fox step out of the undergrowth into a shaft of sunlight where he paused a moment, glowing, and disappeared like a flame put out.
It was a winter afternoon and the snow was falling without wind, straight down. The snow was gathering like blossoms on the green leaves of the cane. In the woods beyond us, we could hear woodpeckers calling. We had not said much. We were standing as still as the trees. The only thing we saw that was moving was the snow.
I said, “It’s like time falling, and we and the trees are standing up in it.”
“No,” she said. “Look. It’s like we and the woods and the world are flying upward through the snow. See?”
We stood without saying any more for a long time, flying higher and higher to meet the feathery big flakes as they fell. The evening began to darken. I looked and saw that she had gone, her tracks leading away through the deepening snow. And then I too went away.
These meetings happened from time to time over a period of fourteen or fifteen years. I don’t know how many there were—fewer than you would think, perhaps, seeing that they made up so important a part of my life. Since none was ever planned, each one was different, surprising in its way. And yet the terms never changed. Mattie always preserved a certain discretion, not in anything she said, but in the way she was, the way she carried herself and looked. She was with me, but not for me, if you can see what I mean. There was a veil between us. We both kept her vow, as I alone kept mine. I knew there was a smile of hers that I had never seen. And that was well. That was all right.
I dreamed that I was Mattie Chatham.
At first it made me happy to be dreaming that I was her, and then I just was her.
I was walking in a field of October flowers. I was gathering them and laying them in the crook of my left arm. The sun was shining.
Among the drying stems and grasses and the fallen leaves, I saw scattered some whitened bones.
I laid down my bouquet and began picking up the bones that still had the reek of death about them.
As I gathered them up, the bones hurt me. I wept and my tears fell on them.
I thought I would die of the pain of them, but I picked them up, one by one.
From my tears the bones took life and flesh. They became a little girl in a pretty dress, lying asleep in my arms.
My tears fell on her and she woke. She looked up at me and smiled.
And then the light changed, and the vegetation of the ground. It was April and the freshest flowers of the year were blooming under the trees. The little girl was Liddie.
I set her down and she ran about among the flowers, picking the blossoms and putting them in her hair.
She looked at me and laughed.
She said, “Momma! Look how beautiful I am!”
This is a book about He
aven. I know it now. It floats among us like a cloud and is the realest thing we know and the least to be captured, the least to be possessed by anybody for himself. It is like a grain of mustard seed, which you cannot see among the crumbs of earth where it lies. It is like the reflection of the trees on the water.
One afternoon when I had been to the Nest Egg, and Mattie and I had walked together and had parted, I was thirsty and I stopped at the well by the road to draw a drink. It was late in the fall and all the leaves were down. It had been a gray day, November in the world and in the soul. I filled the cup and lifted it. As I did so, I saw something glowing on the horizon. It was one of the hilltops across the river where a patch of sunlight had broken through the overcast. The hilltop was bright, and the valley where I watched was nearly filled with shadow. And then I saw that two nearer ridgetops on the far side of the Katy’s Branch valley were also glowing, just the woods at the very top, perfectly golden. And then I saw the shaft of a rainbow dimly to my left across the river. As I watched, the whole arc came gradually visible and grew brilliant over the glowing ridgetops, and I could see just the ghost of the second arc. The sky within the bow was bright, and outside it was dark, the difference increasing and then diminishing as the light left the ridges and the rainbow faded.
When Mattie became ill, she did not tell me. She left it to Port William to tell me, knowing it would. Port William told me, of course, but that (as she also knew) did not grant me permission to speak of her illness to her. We seemed, in fact, to have less and less need to speak of anything. Knowing what we knew, knowing in common much that we knew, not speaking, we preserved the common kindness of those meetings that, never foreseen, seemed yet to have been appointed to us from before the time of the world.
We would meet, walk or stand together a little while, and part—while she suffered the course of her illness, the course of hope and renewed hope, and loss of hope. Finally, as her sickness grew upon her, she came no more.
And, of course, Port William told me the rest—except for the last thing left to tell (which I am going to tell you shortly) that so far is known only to me.
In the days after she died, the world seemed filled with a harsh, caustic, almost shadowless light that it hurt to see.
I am an old man now and oftentimes I whisper to myself. I have heard myself whispering things that I didn’t know I had ever thought. “Forty years” or “Fifty years” or “Sixty years,” I hear myself whispering. My life lengthens. History grows shorter. I remember old men who remembered the Civil War. I have in my mind word-of-mouth memories more than a hundred years old. It is only twenty hundred years since the birth of Christ. Fifteen or twenty memories such as mine would reach all the way back to the halo-light in the manger at Bethlehem. So few rememberers could sit down together in a small room. They could loaf together in the old poolroom up in Port William and talk all of a Saturday night of war and rumors of war.
I whisper over to myself the way of loss, the names of the dead. One by one, we lose our loved ones, our friends, our powers of work and pleasure, our landmarks, the days of our allotted time. One by one, the way we lose them, they return to us and are treasured up in our hearts. Grief affirms them, preserves them, sets the cost. Finally a man stands up alone, scoured and charred like a burnt tree, having lost everything and (at the cost only of its loss) found everything, and is ready to go. Now I am ready.
32
Seen Afar
This is not an exactly true account of my life. The necessity of telling it has caused me to divide it into strands. Things that happened at the same time, different and even opposite feelings and thoughts that came all at once, have had to be strung out to be told. In fact, many things have always been happening all at the same time. Some of the funniest things have happened on some of the saddest days. Sometimes I have been happy in the midst of sorrow, or sorrowful in the midst of happiness. Sometimes too I have been perfectly content, in the amazing state of ignorance, not yet knowing that I was already in the presence of loss.
This is, as I said and believe, a book about Heaven, but I must say too that it has been a close call. For I have wondered sometimes if it would not finally turn out to be a book about Hell—where we fail to love one another, where we hate and destroy one another for reasons abundantly provided or for righteousness’ sake or for pleasure, where we destroy the things we need the most, where we see no hope and have no faith, where we are needy and alone, where things that ought to stay together fall apart, where there is such a groaning travail of selfishness in all its forms, where we love one another and die, where we must lose everything to know what we have had.
But the earth speaks to us of Heaven, or why would we want to go there? If we knew nothing of Hell, how would we delight in Heaven should we get there?
There is Hell enough, maybe, just in the knowledge of what you might call the leftovers of my life: things I might once have done that are now undoable, old wrongs, responsibilities unmet, ineradicable failures—things of time, which is always revealing the remedies it has already carried us beyond.
What became of Clydie Greatlow? I know only a little. After her mother died, Clydie tore loose from her fierce old Aunt Beulah, married the tobacco buyer, and went to live in Georgia. But what happened to her after that? I know I made that none of my business. And yet I wonder. I would like to know.
When Roy died, Cecelia Overhold sold the farm for more money probably than Roy had ever thought of and went to California without so much as a look back. Her sister in that paradise was dead also by then, but there was a nephew, the hero of Cecelia’s last will and testament, from whom she anticipated a joyous welcome. The nephew welcomed her by enrolling her into an old folks’ home where, forsaken, she did not live long. All Cecelia accomplished in her latter days, really, was to transfer from Port William to Los Angeles the pretty penny she got for the Overhold place. A long time ago, when I had grown up a little, I forgave her easily enough for her dislike of me—though, of course, she never asked me to do so. To forgive her for her own principled misery, her contempt for all available satisfactions on the grounds merely that they were available—that was harder and took longer.
Maybe you think it was a hard thing (I think it was) that Cecelia and Roy endured and suffered through so many years of their trial by marriage. But here is maybe a harder thing that I have thought of at last: What if they endured and suffered through so many years because, even failing each other, they loved each other?
As for Troy Chatham, whose enemy I was for so many years, even against my will, though he never knew it, or cared, if he did know it—I have forgiven him too, even him, even if I cannot say yet that the thought of him gladdens me. Of Troy I will have a little more to say. For now, it is enough to tell that he lost the Keith place, and with it his own life’s hard work, which finally amounted to nothing.
I am a man who has hoped, in time, that his life, when poured out at the end, would say, “Good-good-good-good-good!” like a gallon jug of the prime local spirit. I am a man of losses, regrets, and griefs. I am an old man full of love. I am a man of faith.
But faith is not necessarily, or not soon, a resting place. Faith puts you out on a wide river in a little boat, in the fog, in the dark. Even a man of faith knows that (as Burley Coulter used to say) we’ve all got to go through enough to kill us. As a man of faith, I’ve thought a considerable amount about a friend of mine (imagined, but also real) I call the Man in the Well.
The now wooded, or rewooded, slopes and hollows hereabouts are strewn with abandoned homesteads, the remains of another kind of world. Most of them by now have no buildings left. Everything about them that would rot has rotted. What you find now in those places when you come upon them are the things that were built of stone: foundations, cellars, chimneys, wells. Sometimes the wells are deep, dug to the bedrock and beyond, and walled with rock laid up without mortar. Virtually every rock in a structure like that, if it is built right, is a keystone; it can’t move in o
r out. Those walls, laid underground where there is no freezing and thawing, will last, I guess, almost forever.
Sometimes the well is the only structure remaining, and there will be no visible sign of it. It will be covered with old boards in some stage of decay, green with moss or covered with leaves. It is a perfect trap, and now and then you find that rabbits and groundhogs have blundered in and drowned. A man too could blunder into one.
Imagine a hunter, somebody from a city some distance away, who has a job he doesn’t like, and who has come alone out into the country to hunt on a Saturday. It is a beautiful, perfect fall day, and the Man feels free. He has left all his constraints and worries and fears behind. Nobody knows where he is. Anybody who wanted to complain or accuse or collect a debt could not find him. The morning that started frosty has grown warm. The sky seems to give its luster to everything in the world. The Man feels strong and fine. His gun lies ready in the crook of his arm, though he really doesn’t care whether he finds game or not. He has a sandwich and a candy bar in his coat pocket. And then, not looking where he is going, which is easy enough on such a day, he steps onto the rotten boards that cover one of those old wells, and down he goes.
He disappears suddenly out of the lighted world. He falls so quickly that he doesn’t have time even to ask what is happening. He hits water, goes under, comes up, swims, or clings to the wall, inserting his fingers between the rocks. And now, I think, you cannot help imagining the way it would be with him. He looks up and sees how far down he has come. The sky that was so large and reassuring only seconds ago is now just a small blue picture of itself, far away. His first thought is that he is alone, that nobody knows where he is; these two great pleasures that were his freedom have now become his prison, perhaps his tomb. He calls out (for might not somebody chance to be nearby, just as he chanced to fall into the well?) and he hears himself enclosed within the sound of his own calling voice.