The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

  But now she is afraid.

  How long?

  The grass may grow a mile in the imagined boundaries of their house.

  IMAGES LIKE SEEDS

  Company gone, Mat stayed on in the living room, smoking and reading the paper. He heard Margaret and Hannah first talking in the kitchen and then stirring around, preparing for bed. Now the house is quiet. He folds the newspaper, moves over to his desk, and turns on the lamp. He takes a sheet of white letter paper out of one of the drawers, and searches among the pigeonholes until he finds a packet of photographs.

  The last letter from Virgil asked for pictures of Port William and the house and the farm. He was forgetting what they looked like.

  On the Sunday after Virgil’s letter came, Mat and Hannah spent the afternoon taking the pictures. They made an excursion of it, driving and walking here and there in the town and on the farm, deciding what Virgil would want to see, pleased to be doing what he had asked.

  Mat takes the photographs out of the envelope and lays them separately on the desk, making an orderly arrangement of them.

  The first was taken from the walk in front of the house, looking down the street into the town. To the right of the picture Old Jack is on his way up the street to the hotel.

  “Stand still, Mr. Beechum,” Hannah called. “We want to take a picture for Virgil.”

  “Good God,” Old Jack said. “He don’t want to look at me.” But he stood still and let them take the picture.

  Looking backward from the same place on the walk, there is a picture of the house, the maple branches and their shadows brittle and clear against the white front.

  By the time Hannah had taken this second picture and wound the camera, Old Jack had crossed the street. He walked up to Hannah and laid his hand on her shoulder and patted her.

  “You get in it yourself, honey, and let Mat work the machine. What he wants to see is you.” Old Jack waited to make sure she had understood. And then he smiled. “You’re a pretty thing. If I was way off over yonder I’d want to see you.”

  And so Mat took the camera and Hannah stood on the porch steps and smiled for Virgil and Old Jack, and they took the picture again with her in it.

  There are the photographs, arranged now on the desk, making a departure from the town and a return to it. Out of his remembering and knowing Virgil would be able to give them colors, movements, sounds, odors, histories. In his mind these small images would grow like planted seeds, become heavy in their dimensional depths, sizes, brightnesses.

  Missing. From among these things.

  Mat gathers the photographs and puts them back in their envelope. The sheet of paper lies on the blotter, filled with bright light. He picks up his pen. He writes the date. He writes “Dear Virgil.” But then he lays the pen down and leans back.

  My dear boy, today we have had grievous news.

  For several minutes this sentence shapes and reshapes itself in his mind—­the compulsion and limit of what he is able to think. The words form, particularizing his fear and grief as on a point, and then dissolve into the whiteness of the page.

  My boy. We have had grievous news.

  He puts the photographs and writing things away. He gets his hat and coat from the rack in the hall, and turns out the lights.

  He leaves the house and starts down into town. A light is on in Old Jack’s room at the hotel, the only one he can see still burning. While Mat is looking, the old man walks out into the center of the room, undressed except for his cap and underwear. He stops and stands still a minute, facing the window, leaning on his cane, scratching the back of his head. And then he moves out of the frame of the window and turns off the light.

  Now all that part of the street is dark. No stars are out. It is clouding up again.

  WAITING

  Margaret sits by her window in the dark.

  She has unpinned her hair, and is brushing it with slow long strokes. Her hair falls dark over the shoulders of her gown.

  Mat has gone out. The house is quiet and dark.

  She brushes her hair, gathers it, and, drawing it over her shoulder, braids it in a heavy braid.

  With the day’s last possible task finished, she sits quietly, overhearing, as if deep in her body, the sounds of outcry and of weeping. She expected this. She knows it has gone on through all the afternoon and evening, and only now she has become still enough to hear.

  The house fills and brims with its quiet.

  The brush lies in her lap. She rocks slowly in the chair. The rockers make a quiet creaking and tapping on the floor.

  Her eyes have become used to the dark. Her gown, the white pillows on the bed, the white closed fronts of the buildings down along the street draw a little light now and are pale.

  In the quiet of the house she waits, as though, divided from Virgil by half the world, she might hear him breathe.

  Her waiting seems not so strange to her. She waited, after his birth, to hear him cry. She has waited, even in her sleep, to hear him wake. Here, in this house, she has waited for him to come back from a thousand departures.

  He was born out of her body into this absence.

  She will hear every footstep, the opening of every door.

  Chapter 4

  THE BARBER’S CALLING

  Jayber Crow mostly grew up and went through high school in a church orphanage called The Good Shepherd.

  It was there, as the school barber’s flunky and understudy, that he learned barbering, although at that time he had no thought of making his living by it; it was simply a duty, assigned him by the superintendent, to permit him to earn a part of his keep. He was, to the frustration and annoyance of his teachers at The Good Shepherd, both bright and utterly careless as a student. After he learned to read he would customarily read his textbooks, or read all that interested him in them, within two or three weeks after they were given to him, and after that he refused to open them again. He read everything he could lay his hands on; by the time he left The Good Shepherd he had read and reread the meager supply of readable books to be had there. He managed, by the random force of his curiosity, to learn a good deal, and most of the time there was enough coincidence between what he learned and what he was expected to learn to allow him to make passing grades.

  He was vastly more inclined to learn than to be taught; that made him the natural enemy of his teachers, and he suffered for it. He came away from The Good Shepherd, he said, bearing more marks of scholarly discipline on his tail, by a considerable margin, than his teachers had ever been able to imprint on his mind.

  In his last year of high school he decided to become a minister of the church that had raised him. Whether this was because of some feeling of obligation, or some vague wish to do good, or what, he no longer is sure. After the later failure of his motive, he was unable to be certain what it had been.

  He was given a scholarship to a small college run by the church, and spent nearly three years there, waiting tables in the women’s dining hall, and continuing to be a recklessly bright and unsatisfactory student. But the college had a better library than the orphanage, and he made good use of that. In his third year, by a sort of boiling over of his intelligence, he began to question the theological assumptions of his professors, and then his own. In the spring of his third year he resigned his scholarship, and said he was sorry.

  He thought then that he might make a teacher of himself. He worked in a barbershop to pay his way through a year and a half of classes at the state university. After the religious confinements of the orphanage and the college and his pastoral ambition, his freedom in the university town excited him, and he began a careful exploitation of it. He divided his free time between the library of the university and the bars and brothels of the town—­not anymore by his old recklessness, but by a strict husbanding of his time and money. By carefulness, he discovered, he could do pretty much as he pleased, and among other things he pleased to do more studying than was required of him. He became, for the first time, systema
tic and competent as a student. His grades improved. During that time he was quiet and deliberate; his extravagances were as methodical as his cautions; most of the time he was alone. For a while it seemed to him that he was satisfied with himself. He was managing to save a little money.

  But he failed again, as if the failure of his first ambition infected his second. It was the same failure of certainty and of purpose. He was utterly free. It was, he believed more and more, the freedom of being on his way from nowhere to nowhere. It was often a depressing and lonely freedom. His leaving the church college had cancelled all but his earliest beginnings. His year and a half at the university had failed to offer an imaginable future. Sometimes he half believed that, having been born by nobody’s intention, and brought up as a mistake by public duty, he had come finally into his fated inheritance, the failure of all purpose. He had made no friends. He owed nothing to anybody. He became more and more depressed under the burden of his freedom.

  He left, less because he wanted to leave than because he no longer wanted to stay. He packed his clothes and books into a box, paid his rent, and put the rest of his savings into the lining of his jacket and his shoe. The simplicity of it startled him. In ten minutes he had cancelled out a year and a half. When he ate breakfast he was on his way out of town.

  Three mornings later, having walked the better part of the way, wandering the backroads to circumvent the waters of the great flood of 1937, he arrived in Port William, near which he had been born and had lived his earliest years. The town’s most recent barber had left. Using his savings as a down payment, Jayber bought the shop. He slept that first night in the barber chair, half freezing, his head drawn like a terrapin’s into the collar of his voluminous raincoat. In two days he was in business. The question if this was the fortune he had come in search of passed out of his mind; barbering suited him well enough, and would support him—­if enough hair would grow in Port William, and when he looked over the prospects he figured enough might. His given name was Jonah; he signed himself J. Crow; the town christened him Jaybird, and then Jayber.

  His barbershop, which is both his place of business and his home, is a tiny frame building in the swale of the branch. The shop has two stories, a single small room in each. The downstairs room is the shop, walled with white-painted bare boards, the floor polished by the tramping underfoot of the shorn hair of generations; it smells of hair, hair tonic, shaving lotion, mug soap, and tobacco smoke. In the center of the floor there is a rusty stove, which serves in winter as a source of heat and a spittoon, and in summer as a spittoon and a foot-prop. The barber chair is placed near the door in front of a long mirror; beneath the mirror a board shelf bears an assortment of bottles of tonic and lotion, a whetstone, a large ornamented shaving mug and brush, an array of scissors and razors and combs, a cigar box containing the cash proceeds of the day. On a table at the end of the shelf a metal water container with a faucet perches on a two-burner coal-oil stove. In the open spaces along the walls are maybe a dozen ill-matching chairs. Jayber rarely has so many customers as he has chairs, but the shop is also a loafing and talking place, a sort of living room, for the townsmen, and for Jayber himself. In any assemblage at any time there will be more of what Jayber calls “members” than there will be customers. Around the walls are a number of calendars of various years, none turned past its respective January. And hanging here and there from nails driven in at random, there are Indian relics, hornets’ nests, extra big stalks of tobacco or ears of corn that the farmers have brought in. Anything found or plowed up in the town or the neighborhood that might be classed as odd or interesting, and that conceivably could serve as a subject of conversation, is apt sooner or later to wind up hanging from a nail in Jayber’s shop—­and will be duly examined and talked about and forgot and left hanging. Over the years the shop has become a kind of museum in which the town has put down what it thought about.

  The upstairs room, reached by a stairway up the side of the building, is as private as the lower one is public. Jayber has managed to cram all the essentials of his life into it: bed, books, table, chair, dresser, kitchen cabinet, cookstove. Few in Port William have ever been there, and those only rarely—­not that Jayber makes any particular attempt at privacy, but there is seldom an occasion or reason for anyone to come there. The shop is his living room and guest room, to which most of the men of the town consider they have a standing invitation. To eat or sleep or read he goes upstairs and is alone. To work, or for company, he goes down and opens the shop. He keeps no regular hours. His shop may be closed for three days at a stretch, or open any hour of the night.

  He has continued to be a student of sorts, as far as short funds and few books and erratic habits have permitted. He is likely to know something, if not a good deal, about anything—­and likely to have to be asked before he will tell what he knows. He has come to a few friendships, all of them made and kept in the public atmosphere and easy talking of the shop. At one time or another, in one way or another, he has befriended nearly everybody he knows. There is an offhand goodness in him that has made him welcome among the men of the town. They know him for good company and a good talker. They take for granted that talking is as much his business as hair-cutting—­at any rate, none of them ever feels obliged to get his hair cut to justify his presence in the shop. When Jayber finishes with a customer and asks “Who’s next?” he is as likely as not to find that nobody is, and then he will climb into the chair himself, and, if no new customer comes in, talk half a day. He practices—­sometimes willingly, sometimes by the sufferance of impositions on his good nature—­a kind of poor man’s philanthropy. He lends considerably more money than he ever has the heart to collect, and is apt at Christmas to play Santa Claus, secretly, to the children of the ones who owe him most. His shop is occasionally used as a roost by husbands and sons too drunk to go home. Now and then he puts in a weekend drinking and wenching down in Hargrave, and he makes no apologies. He is seldom invited into the domestic life of Port William; he knows it by its manhood and boyhood passing in and out the door of his shop.

  TALK

  After he ate supper Jayber had a smoke, and then unloaded his table and washed his dishes and put them away. He took his time. Working or loafing, his life is mostly public. Privacy is his luxury—­his chance to be quiet, to pay a little attention to what may be going on inside his head. He did not come back downstairs until he remembered that the fire would be getting low.

  When he opened the shop nobody was waiting for him. He sat down in the barber chair and leaned it back and crossed his ankles over the foot rest. And then remembered the fire again, and got up and fixed it, and sat back down. He came into the shop while most of the town was still at supper, and now he hears things beginning to stir again: doors slam here and there, a car engine starts and goes out of hearing over the rise—­footsteps, two single sets and then a pair, come down the street, past the door—­two or three doors up the street a boy’s voice calls “Here, Mike!” The boy waits and whistles and calls again. It has been dark nearly an hour.

  Jayber sits up and takes another smoke, wishing somebody would come in. Three times a day, morning and noon and after supper, the town starts up out of a silence and begins again. These are the times he finds it most difficult to be alone. There is an impulse in him, these times, to close the shop and go out and talk a while with anybody he may meet, take up with anybody who may be coming by, and go with him wherever he may be going. His absences from the town always begin with this impulse.

  But now Uncle Stanley Gibbs comes through the door. This is the third time since morning that Uncle Stanley has been in. As a general rule the old man does not come to the shop except to get a haircut, but he got one just three or four days ago, and so Jayber supposes he must have something in particular on his mind. On his two previous trips the shop was crowded, and he seemed satisfied and even a little relieved just to sit down and pretend to be listening while the others talked. Both times he got uncomfortable aft
er a few minutes and, muttering industriously to himself, throwing out the pretense that he was having an awfully busy day, hustled up the street ­toward the church.

  He has pushed the door open, but is still standing out on the sidewalk. In his old age he has grown into the habit of doing only one thing at a time. He would not talk and scratch or look and walk at the same time to save his soul. Now that he has opened the door, he glimpses in, peeping up at Jayber and then around at all the empty chairs and then back at Jayber. His collapsed bristly old face is set in its normal expression of outrage that the world does not make enough noise. When he walks from his house over to the church—­footing the white line down the middle of the road—­he is always seeing shoot out in front of him automobiles and trucks and buses he never heard coming. He knows, he says himself, that he could burn up in his house any night while his neighbors all stand at the door yelling “Fire.” And hard to tell how many times he has been insulted right to his face and not known it. Hour after hour the world pours itself into his deafness like a high waterfall that turns to mist before it can strike and make a sound. His face, by habit, wears his furiousness—­not in response to anything in particular, but just in case something or somebody may be taking advantage of him.

  Uncle Stanley stayed young a long time. He was wild as a bear, he claims, and stout as a mule and bad around the women. He has remembered himself a good deal worse than he ever was, but this “memory” of his wildness is a comfort to him.

  In his prime he had a sort of local fame as a curser. The economy of his vocabulary, and the dexterity and versatility of his use of it, were remarkable. He could talk for thirty minutes without saying a word fit for the hearing of a woman or a child. They called him Stanley Ay-God By-God Gibbs.