They stand in front of the store, talking disjointedly on the verge of going home, leaning against the face of the building now to keep out of the wind. The departure of the rain seems to them to have altered the terms of their own departure, and they stay on—a little precariously, without definite reason, but deliberately nevertheless—to observe and speak of the difference.
“It’ll turn cold,” Frank Lathrop says.
“It’s March now,” Old Jack says. “You can’t tell what it’ll do.”
“Well,” Jayber says, “after it’s stayed one way long enough you’ll settle for nearly anything as long as it’s different.”
Burley nods out the road in the direction of the river. “Speaking of anything, here comes Whacker.”
Even at that distance he is immense, his great paunch flaring his coat around him like a funnel. And at that distance it is already obvious he is drunk. They knew he would be before they turned to look at him. Drunkenness is no longer simply his habit; it has become, for them as much as for Whacker Spradlin himself, his natural state.
They watch him pass in front of the most distant of the houses and come slowly down the row of them toward town, his walk a little unsteady but neither awkward nor faltering; he never strays out of his direction. It is the gait of a man intricately skilled and practiced in being drunk. There is a ponderous grace about it like that of a trained elephant or a locomotive. He sways heavily back and forth across the line of his direction, like a man carrying a barrel across a tightrope, his progress a sequence of fine distinctions between standing up and falling down. His drunkenness has become precise. He walks with pomp, his knees lifting as though he is climbing a stairway. By the time he comes even with Mat Feltner’s house they can see the smoke rising from his pipe.
He bears down on them, puffing his pipe, his overcoat held together at the neck by a safety pin and at the waist by a piece of twine. He wears a wide-brimmed straw hat, the crown full of raveling holes, which seems to them as much a part of his character as his drunkenness. They have never seen him without it. The hat sits on his head emphatically, bending his ears down. Behind him, in a child’s red wagon, he hauls a rusty cream can, the establishment of the bootlegger’s trade by which he subsists.
As Whacker goes past the front of the store, the five of them nod and speak to him. And Whacker nods to them without looking at them or altering his gait, moving implacably forward, the downhill momentum of his great body seeming to dominate and threaten the pavement in front of him. He goes on past the drugstore and the poolroom.
He goes on past Jayber Crow’s barbershop at the bottom of the hill and starts up the next rise, looking straight ahead, his movements the same going uphill as going down, precarious and deliberate, as though he will go on through the town and beyond it in the same direction forever.
They watch him out of sight, and then start, separately, home.
Chapter 2
PORT WILLIAM
It used to be asked, by strangers who would happen through, why a town named Port William should have been built so far from the river. And the townsmen would answer that when Port William was built they did not know where the river was going to run.
The truth is that Port William no longer remembers why it was built where it is, or when, or how. In its conversation the town has kept the memory of two or three generations haphazardly alive. Back of that memory the town was there for a long time—there are a few buildings still standing that are surely twice as old as anybody’s certain knowledge of them. But the early history has to be conjectured and assumed.
It is as though in their crossing to this new place, the first-comers lost everything to the wilderness but their names. And for a considerable length of time after they arrived, the wilderness continued to make demands of them. It asked, among other things, too much of their attention and energy to leave time or strength for record keeping. That the town had been begun, and was there, was more important than explanations and motives and reasons and memories. That they half exhausted the country, in surprisingly few years, testifies convincingly enough to the intensity of their preoccupation. The black ground broke open to their plows like a pile of ashes. There was never anything like it—that black humus, built up under the forest for thousands of years. There it was, dark as shadows under the trees, abundant and deep, waiting to be opened. Surely no dirt was ever more responsive or more alive. You could believe, for once, that the earth might give back to a man more than it took from him. It welcomed him everywhere he put down his hand or his foot or his seed. It had advanced through millennia to break itself open on the coulter of his plow; he could not have helped but feel that jointure and breaking in every nerve.
In two or three generations the country was imponderably changed, its memories, explanations, justifications fallen away from it. The first-arrivers left it diminished and detached from its sources. It was like an island, the past washing up to it, in fact, as the force of its becoming, but not as knowledge. Past and future bore against it under cover of darkness. Whoever wanted to make a beginning, then, had to begin with something already half-finished. And scarcely known.
COMPANY
Across the street from Jasper Lathrop’s store the white steeple ascends and narrows to a point above the green-shuttered belfry, higher than the tallest trees in the town. As he looks up at it from the sidewalk in front of the store, and at the clouds moving steadily southeastward in the deep wind, it seems to Mat for a moment that the clouds are still and only the earth moves, drawing the point of the steeple in a curving stroke through the sky.
Up the street, divided from the church by a vacant lot that contains a single broken-branched old locust and a stone chimney with the ruin of a hearth and mantel, is Mat’s house, its weather-boarded white walls visible through the branches of the maples in the yard. From the angle of the boundary in which his house stands, Mat’s farm extends in a wide irregular triangle to the river. The west line of the boundary follows the road out of town; at the top of the first ridge it makes shape for the graveyard, and then follows the road again to the top of the farthest ridge and down the wooded bluff; at the foot of the grade it turns away from the road and crosses the bottomland to the river. The land has been shaped by water. It has kept something of the nature of water in the alterations of its shape and character as it moves away from the high ground Port William is built on, descending to the river.
At the top of the ridge above the river bluff is the cluster of farm buildings that has been known to the Feltners since Mat’s father’s time as “the far place.” In the field below the barns white-faced Hereford cows graze with their new calves around the banks of a little pond.
The house and the land beyond it have become intimately the possessions of Mat’s mind. Before he looked he knew the lay and the shape and color of the field, and knew where the cattle would be. Even their erratic distribution over the field seems familiar to him as though, turning his head, he did not begin but continued to look.
Looking back at the house now as the gathering breaks up in front of the store, he sees his grandson running toward him out of the corner of the yard.
Old Jack, who has already gone halfway to the post office, stops and turns around. “You’ve got company at your house, Mat.”
“I see I have.”
“That’s a fine boy there,” Old Jack says. “He’ll grow up to be a shotgun of a lawyer like his daddy, you watch and see if he don’t. Tell Wheeler I said so.”
“I’ll do it.”
The boy waves. “Wait, Grandad.”
Mat goes on across the street and waits on the sidewalk in front of the church.
“Hello, Grandad.”
“Hello, Andy.” Mat puts his hands on the boy’s shoulders and hugs him. “When did you come?”
“After school. Daddy had to go down on Bird’s Branch, and he brought us by.”
“Who’s us?”
“Mother and Henry and me. We’re going t
o eat supper with you.”
“You are? Well, you haven’t asked me if you can.”
Andy laughs. “Can we eat supper with you?”
“I reckon so.”
“Granny’s already told us we can.”
“Well, you’re all right then, if both of us say so.”
“She said tell you to go down to Burgess’s and get a box of salt, and stop and tell Uncle Ernest to come home. Supper’s going to be ready as soon as Daddy gets back.”
“All right.”
And they go down the street, past the old stone building that houses the bank, toward Burgess’s store.
Neither of them hears the plane approaching. It has come in low over the town, and appears suddenly; the four engines and wings and grey fuselage take shape abruptly among the tops of the trees. For an instant it seems to have risen vertically, out of the top of the rise beyond the store. The racket of the engines comes on them all at once, so near they not only hear it but feel the vibration of it in the air and in the ground under their feet. As it comes nearer they can see the blur of the propellers, the black gun-barrels spiking out of the glass blisters, the rivetheads along the fuselage and wings.
It passes above their heads, shaking the ground.
“A big one,” Andy says.
The plane goes on beyond the town, becoming toylike, familiar, as it gains distance and altitude, circling eastward over the river.
The overcast has thinned, become dappled. The light glares on the town. Going into the dim interior of the store, Mat shuts the door slowly, allowing his eyes time to adjust.
Milton Burgess, his striped sleeves rolled two neat turns above his wrists, sits on a tall stool behind the counter, his elbow propped against the cash register. He has been talking with the band of loafers congregated on the opposite side of the counter, two of whom have hefted themselves up to sit in front of the cash register, their backs to Milton. With the loafers Milton allows himself a choleric indulgence in whatever news or argument is current—the one prolonged conversation that he has grudgingly allowed to continue there for forty-five years.
The store is a sprawling frame building, the foundation of which bridges the small creek that runs down out of the pasture behind Jasper Lathrop’s store and around Jayber Crow’s barbershop and under the road, so that after the creek goes out of sight in the culvert below the barbershop it does not come into the light again for two hundred feet or so. Beneath them, in wet weather, in the lapses of speech, the talkers in the store can hear it running.
With the loafers Milton condescends to loaf, his condescension apparent enough that he seems not to join their gathering but to permit each of them separately to intrude on him, so that above his idle participation in their talk his proprietorship still reigns undiminished and austere.
Seeing Mat and the boy come through the door, he climbs down off the stool and stands erect, his sparrowlike face becoming alert. He poises there, his spread fingers delicately touching the countertop, ready to jump instantly right or left at the slightest command from his customer. The quick sparrow face poises above the counter, waiting as if time halted when the door opened and will start again from the beginning the moment the customer speaks his order. It always happens. Mat knows that if one of the loafers, in the midst of their talk, should glance at the tobacco case and reach into his pocket the thin fingers would immediately graze the surface of the counter, the eyes quicken. “What can I do for you today?” Here, in this dim big room containing nothing that isn’t for sale, Milton Burgess has made his life. The husband of his ledger, he never married. Over the years, wringing every possible penny out of his business, spending nothing more than is necessary to keep him and his old mother alive, he has made what the town confidently believes to be a solid fortune, which he puts to no use. Nothing interests him unless it can be made to add up. Though he is growing old and has no children, his ambition is still to squeeze out every other merchant in ten miles. At present he is enjoying the absence of Jasper Lathrop.
“What can I do for you today?”
Mat gives his order, adding a box of cigars.
The plane comes over again. The store is caught up, lifted, shaken in the noise of the engines, the windowpanes rattling.
Andy runs to the door, too late, to see.
The men at the counter follow the sound of it with their eyes.
“What in the hell’s going on?”
“That boy of Grover Gibbs’s, I reckon. They made a pilot out of him.”
“He come cutting didos over Grover’s place that way a week ago. Said he about tore the roof off his daddy’s barn.”
They laugh.
“Said Grover’s mules run off when he done it.”
Milton looks up at Mat, inquiring. “Will that be all for you?”
“That’s all.”
Andy, who has come back to where he was standing in front of the candy counter, becomes conscious that Mat is watching him, and not wanting to appear to hint, he moves away and begins to look at a stack of tinware in the window. Mat takes a nickel out of his pocket and steps up behind him.
“What’s that you’ve got in your ear?” He takes hold of the boy’s ear and pretends to pull the nickel out of it.
“Oh,” Andy says. He turns around, laughing, and takes the coin.
“Thanks, Grandad.”
The men at the counter laugh.
“Is that Wheeler’s boy, Mat?”
“He’s Wheeler’s.”
“He’s a Catlett all right.”
Milton Burgess’s fingers are touching the glass top of the candy counter now, his eyes cocked at Andy, who has gone back to stand in front of it. “Something for you today, young man?”
Mat leans against the counter with the loafers now, waiting for the boy to be done.
“You all heard from Virgil, Mat?”
Mat starts to say what they have heard, but then, on the verge of speaking, hesitates. The truth, divided from his own love for his son, seems a betrayal. He does not want to expose himself to any drawing of conclusions, any offer of sympathy. Sympathy for what? For what?
“Not in a while.”
“Well, when you write to him tell him I asked about him.”
“I will. I appreciate it.”
Mat turns to the storekeeper, handing him another nickel. “Give me one more of those, Milt.”
Milton hands him another bar of candy and he puts it in his pocket.
“Call again,” Milton Burgess says. The door swings shut behind them. Andy takes Mat’s hand as they start across the road.
LIKE A BIRD
When the plane made its first pass over the town, Burley Coulter and Jayber Crow, having walked that far together, had stopped again in front of Jayber’s shop. Jayber stood with one foot on the step, his hand holding the doorknob turned, ready to go inside.
The sounds of the plane’s engines dropped down onto the town roofs like rocks, crashing and tumbling into all the crannies of their hearing, and then seemed to fill up the air above the town like water pouring into a glass jar.
“What’s that thing doing here?” Jayber said.
“Billy Gibbs, I imagine. He flies one of them.”
“They’d better hurry up and send him to the war before he kills somebody.”
“Or gets killed.”
Jayber stepped through the door. “I’ll see you, Burley.”
“I expect you will.”
Now Burley walks up the rise, heading home.
His mind freed, he has Nathan’s departure to think about. He walks back into Nathan’s absence. And with the sorrow that has come to belong to his life, into Tom’s.
He has gone a good way up the slanted street when the plane comes back. He stops and watches it go over the town, low over the treetops.
When he comes to the top of the rise he sees Uncle Stanley Gibbs standing out on the edge of his front yard above the road cut. The old man is in his shirt sleeves, hatless, his hair blowing, waving h
is cane.
Uncle Stanley’s life takes its shape, has taken its shape for years, around his Sundays. On Sunday mornings he goes across town to the church and rings the bell, long and loud, while the clapperstrokes penetrate luxuriously into his deafness. His little splintery body dangles ecstatically on the end of the pull rope, the bell lifting him. And then he goes out to sit on the step, while the congregation assembles and silence issues from the church door, waiting for the meeting to be over, to go in and straighten up.
“That boy of Grover’s come over here in that airplane of hisn” he shouts, waving his cane. “Come right up out of that woods back of Grover’s place.”
“I saw him, Uncle Stanley.”
“Says which ?”
“I saw him!”
“You did!” The old man bends forward, looking down at Burley, startled and proud. “Like a God-durned bird.”
THE CARPENTER SHOP
Ernest’s shop is orderly and warm, filled with the odors of shellac and lacquer and wood resins, the sound of a strong fire licking in the stove, light from the single large window in the rear wall. The room is neat to perfection. There is only the one day’s disarray of tools, the one day’s litter of wood fragments and shavings and sawdust.
Hanging on hooks and pegs and resting on the floor against the wall opposite the window are the ladders and rope tackle and jacks necessary for the building of barns and houses. At the end of the room farthest from the stove, neatly stacked, sorted according to kind and quality and size, are the stores of fine woods he uses in his cabinetmaking. His hand tools, their handles worn to a polish, hang above the workbench from a row of pegs driven into the long sill of the window. On the wall to the left of the window there is a pencil holder into which are wedged a number of thick-leaded pencils of various lengths and colors, a ball of twine stained with the dust of blue chalk, a calendar with a picture of an idyllic farm in the small valley of a creek where flowers and fruit trees are in bloom. While Ernest is at work he does not use his crutches, but leaves them propped in the corner behind the stove. The interior of the shop has gradually conformed to an arrangement that requires the least amount of walking. By a kind of natural growth, everything here has come within his reach.