Jayber stretches and yawns, a long-drawn O with a grunt at the end.
Burley asks, “What have you heard from Virgil, Mat?”
It was coming. It was bound to come. He might be speaking out of a well, his voice sounds so strange to him: “He’s missing. We had the notice today.”
He feels as though he has run to the edge of something and jumped.
Burley and Jayber say nothing for a moment. But their silence turns toward him, and is an admission of the difficulty and insufficiency of what they will say.
And then they say that they are sorry. Their concern touches him and, as though still falling, he feels himself caught in what they are saying, and hears the sound of his own voice speaking among their voices, becoming familiar again.
He mentions what room he believes there still is for hope. He hopes.
The others agree. So long as a man doesn’t surely know, he has to hope. And that is more difficult than to know the worst surely.
Burley knows that. It has been hard for him to free Tom’s death from the hopeless hope that he may still be alive. So far away as he died, it is hard to quit hoping that it may be only a long confusion and a mistake.
Jayber sits quietly in his chair, keeping the shop open for them, their talk his gift. Finally, as the subject changes, he takes part again.
The light has been out two hours in Milton Burgess’s store. Mat and Burley hate to leave the lighted warm room and start home by themselves.
Finally they have to.
Chapter 5
KEEPING WATCH
From the first week of January, when his lambs begin coming, until the end of bad weather, Mat keeps watch on the barns, seeing to the lambing of ewes and the calving of cows. Whatever is born will be born into his wakefulness and his care. He makes his first round in the dark of the mornings, his last at midnight. He is out of the house at night nearly as much as in the daytime. The smell of the barns stays in his clothes. In the dead of winter, in the time of the long sleeping of most things, he becomes more wakeful than ever.
It is a weary time. The days will string together for weeks in a row, never divided by enough sleep. There are freezing nights when his feet break through a crust of ice into the mud on his first round after supper, and on his last round the tracked mud and manure at the barn door are frozen hard. There are thawing nights of heavy rain when he walks ankle-deep in mud, and nights of snow when the tracks he made going to the barn will be filled by the time he starts back. And there are nights sometimes when there will be a difficult birth, and he has to wake Joe Banion to help him, and the two of them work on into the second half of the night, their hands chilled and numbed by the birth-wet, their feet stinging in their shoes.
In the winter the country sleeps, withdrawn from summer. And Mat, in his growing weariness, will be aware of that rest. Sometimes his head will fall forward and for a few minutes he will sleep an oblivious sleep, at the table after a meal, or sitting in his chair in the living room.
From nightfall until midnight his weariness seems to grow less, and he sits with the family in the living room and talks until the others go to bed. And then he has the quiet to himself, and he sits by the fire, reading or figuring or planning, passing the time between his rounds. This is the easiest and pleasantest time of his day, and the most precious to him. Going his night rounds, walking among the barns and the animals in the light of the lantern, the weather and the moon working their changes, he hungers for the births and lives of his animals, as though the life of his place must be held up by him, like something newborn, until the warm long days will come again and the pastures begin to grow.
In spite of the difficulty and weariness, he goes about his work with greater interest and excitement than at any other time of the year. This is the crisis of increase—what he was born to, and what he chose. When he has made sure of the life of whatever is newborn—when he has done, at any rate, all that can be done—he is at peace with himself. His labor has been his necessity and his desire.
THE SHEEP BARN
Mat goes up the hill, walking in the room of light the lantern makes. The ground appears to dip and waver under the swinging light, and every track is filled with shadow. Beyond the light of the lantern he can see nothing. He goes now as by the inward pattern and usage of his life.
He comes to the fan of tracked mud in front of the barn and, raising the lantern, picks his way to the doors, and slides them open a little to let himself in. The sheep raise their heads and get up, but they are used to his coming and only step slowly out of his way as he moves among them. Shadows leap up around his light. As he moves the barn seems to sway and rise within itself. The ewes’ breath smokes above their heads.
In one of the back corners of the barn he finds an old ewe stretched on the bedding, her breath coming in grunts. She lifts her head to look at him, but makes no effort to get up. A newborn dead lamb is lying near her, not completely free of the birth sack. Mat knows that this second labor prevented her attending properly to the lamb she had already got born. He should have been here earlier. In spite of the circumstances of the day, he thinks with guilt of his failure. His mind has fallen short of its subject.
But now the consequence requires his mind of him. Taking a piece of twine from his pocket, he ties the lantern to a tier rail above his head, and then brings a small hinged gate and pens the ewe into the corner where she is lying. He takes the dead lamb out of the pen and puts it by the doors so he will remember to carry it out. He beds the pen with fresh straw, making himself a clean work place. Already it begins to simplify. It is an act already complete in his mind that he goes about. There is no hesitation and no hurry in his movements. Where nature and instinct fail, he begins with his knowing. He desires the life of what is living. He requires the life of the body suffering to give birth and the life of the body suffering to be born. Nothing else is on his mind now.
Moving gently and slowly, he straightens the lamb’s head and forelegs, and delivers it, wet as a fish, into the air. He holds it up a moment—a limp, dangling thing—to make sure its nose is clear, and then touches it to the ground. It begins to struggle and to breathe. It comes tense and alive in his hand, wobbling its head, reaching down with its legs. It struggles against its weight, and breathes in the cold dung-smelling air.
Mat feels a kind of magician’s triumph. His trick is the trick of the life of a thing, almost as liable to fail as to succeed. His labor is a labor of joy whose joyfulness depends on this precarious result.
He takes hold of the ewe and lifts her to her feet, and she remains upright, head hanging and dazed, loins caved. He carries the lamb to her flank and works the tit into its mouth. As soon as it takes hold and begins to suck he scratches its wet rump with his finger, in imitation of the way the ewe would normally lick and nudge. It becomes more eager, shaking its tail and butting weakly at the udder.
Satisfaction comes into Mat, pressing up into his throat like laughter. Once the trick is set working, the longer it works the better it works. Its own strength and purpose come into it now, and he becomes less necessary to it.
When he puts the lamb down the ewe turns to it and begins licking it, snuffling and bleating quietly and anxiously as she tends to it. Mat takes the lantern and a bucket and brings water from the well, and brings an armload of hay.
He hangs the lantern overhead again, and sits down to watch. He is far from sleep now. He does not think of going back to the house. He holds himself and his thoughts near to these things that his work and care have made familiar again. He sits there on a bucket, his elbows resting on his knees, his hands clasped together, conscious only of the nearness of this place: the ewe and lamb in the lighted pen, the flock sleeping and stirring in the dark behind him, the cold night air on his face and hands.
PART TWO
Chapter 6
A DARK MORNING
He wakes in the dark, unsure how long he has been asleep. He wakes without movement except for the openi
ng of his eyes. For the moment he thinks of nothing. And then from the kitchen on the other side of the house he hears a footstep light and hard on the linoleum. He realizes with relief that he has slept all the way through the night. He reaches across the bed and feels the warmth where Margaret lay asleep minutes ago. The footstep in the kitchen is followed by the sound of the coffee pot scraping on the top of the stove, and by voices—Margaret’s and Nettie Banion’s. For a little while longer he lets himself lie quiet. As if by some movement of his mind during the night, the uneasiness of the day before has left him. It is as if without his will his mind has turned and opened toward the new day. There is, deep in him, an acceptance of time as persistent as time. He wakes on the rising of the morning. The future bears down, and as in hard times before he feels in himself the determination to let it come.
He turns the covers back and gets up.
A fuzzy paleness drifts into the room from the lighted doorway at the other end of the hall. He opens the shutters to close heavy darkness and the sound of rain coming down hard and steady onto the yard and the walk along the side of the house. It has been raining for some time; the sound is that of water striking water. He shivers at the sound and at his apprehension of the wetness of the day. Under such a rain, he knows, the surface of the whole countryside will be a sheet of water moving down onto the loaded streams. He thinks with a kind of panic of how briskly, in a more seasonable year, he would have things moving by now, with the spring coming and the crops to get ready for. This season he will be beginning late, in loss. It rains into Virgil’s absence. The sense of loss has carried his mind out of the house into the wind and rain over the soaked fields.
A DIFFERENCE MADE
By noon on Tuesday Virgil has disappeared from the knowledge of the whole town. The news has gone its rounds among the gathering places, and has quietly set the young man’s life into the past tense of the town’s consciousness. The town has begun to speak and think of him by the act of memory alone. To speak of him in the present tense becomes the private observance of his family—the enactment of their hope.
Wherever Mat goes among the gatherings of his neighbors he feels himself surrounded by an embarrassment, which both he and they are powerless to relieve. Though he is troubled by this at first, it becomes understandable to him. Virgil’s absence, which was once only an absence from the place, has become a vacancy in their minds. They are suddenly barred from the usual forms of politeness; they can no longer ask him about Virgil or offer him their greetings to be passed on. And so, except for the casual give and take of crop talk and weather talk, they have nothing to offer Mat but silence. He accepts this, and as time goes on he will accept it more and more gratefully.
He is most sharply aware of this estrangement in his meetings with Frank Lathrop. In their long bearing of the absence of their sons, and their waiting, Mat has finally gone beyond what either of them had dared admit was possible. He has become the proof of what they most feared. The anticipation of loss that once bound them has been replaced by a reality of loss that divides them. In himself, Frank Lathrop is divided between a kind of shame at this inequality of fortune and a gratitude for it—neither of which he can acknowledge to himself, let alone to Mat.
Now it is only with Burley Coulter that Mat feels at ease. Telling his news that night in the barbershop, he felt it was to speak to Burley that he had come. Common knowledge went between them as a bond. During the following days, in casual meetings on the street and at the card game, they seldom speak of those absences that are most in their thoughts, but they accompany each other into their talk with trust.
A COMFORTER
Early Wednesday afternoon Brother Preston leaves the parsonage and walks across town to the Feltner house. He walks quickly and attentively, sidestepping the puddles. The town is shut against the weather, and quiet except for the sounds everywhere of water dripping and running. He meets no one along the road. There is no sign of life at the Feltners’ either.
Stepping up onto the porch, he closes his umbrella and props it beside the door. Leaning against the wall, he removes his rubbers and places them side by side next to the umbrella. He draws a small black leather Testament out of his coat pocket, faces the door, and knocks. His knock is itself an act of ministerial discretion; the sound is perfectly modulated, both quiet and loud enough. As he waits he continues to face the door, standing erect, lifting himself slightly forward now and then onto the balls of his feet, patting the little Testament with a sort of correct casualness against the palm of his hand.
Footsteps approach from the back of the house, and Margaret Feltner opens the door. Her apron is caught up in one hand, and he knows she has been at work in the kitchen. In a movement of understanding, his imagination sees her wiping her hands on the apron as she hurries along the hall toward the door. He takes off his hat.
“I’m sorry to break in on your work.”
“That’s all right. We were just finishing up the dishes.”
She smiles, greets him, moves aside from the entrance in welcome. The openness of her welcome is a little disconcerting; she is putting him at his ease—which is not why he has come. He senses that she has anticipated him, foreseen his coming and his purpose, but greets him now on her terms, not his.
She takes his coat and hat, hangs them up on the hall tree, and leads him into the sitting room.
He goes to the chair she offers him.
“Make yourself at home a minute. I’ll go take this apron off.”
“Mrs. Feltner,” he says, and she stops. “I hoped I’d find all of you at home is why I’ve come so soon after dinner. Is Mr. Feltner here?”
“He’s out at the barn, I think. We’ll call him. There’s not much he can be doing.”
Again he feels headed off. Her offer seems again an act of her own generosity, in no way a concession to his reason for coming.
He sits down as she leaves. Her footsteps go back along the hall. Again in his imagination he sees her: her hands reaching behind her as she goes, untying the apron. He sits erect in the chair, holding the Testament in his lap. The attitude of his body seems to isolate him from the room, to hold out to it a formality alien to it. Some part of his presence is withheld from it; he might be sitting in the tall-backed chair behind his pulpit.
Margaret’s footsteps enter the bustling noises of the kitchen, which he now realizes to have been continuous since he came in.
“Net,” he hears her say, “would you call Mat? Tell him we’ve got company.”
Out of the sound of her voice—not speaking to him now, remote from him—and out of the look and atmosphere of the room where he sits, there comes to him the sense of the completeness of this household, the belonging together of Mat and Margaret Feltner, the generosity of these people, in which there is maybe no need for him. He feels himself alone here. He is alone in his mission which, whole in itself, surrounds him with its demands, and isolates him. Uneasiness coming over him, a swift tremor, he thinks of the burden of his duty. And then, as though under the pressure of his own hand, he knows his old submission to the mastering of this duty, and knows he will do it.
He stands as the footsteps approach the room. Hannah is with Margaret now. Greetings are exchanged again, and they sit down, he in his chair, Margaret and Hannah together on the sofa, facing him. They talk with a determined pleasantness about trifles—all of them conscious that they are delaying, waiting for Mat to come, that they digress from their feelings and from the purpose of the visit.
Nettie is on the back porch, calling Mat. She has difficulty making him hear, and calls several times before she comes back into the kitchen, slamming the door.
His mind only half-occupied by the conversation, the preacher watches Hannah. She is wearing a clean white smock, the sleeves turned back from her wrists. Her heavy hair is drawn neatly back from her face. She is a beautiful girl; he has thought so often before. And he thinks so now, as always a little startled to find that he does so e
mphatically think so. He watches her face, alert for some sign of what she must be feeling, but he discovers nothing. Her face is composed and quiet. He both wishes and fears to know her thoughts.
And he watches Margaret. He believes that he sees in her face the marks of her grief for her son—but no sign that she expects to be comforted, or asks to be. To the preacher she also seems to be a beautiful woman. But hers has long ago ceased to be the given beauty of a girl; it is beauty that she has kept, or earned, through all that has troubled her and aged her. In all she says there is an implication of Mat’s presence in her life, an assenting to it. To Brother Preston, it is as if something in her leans in waiting, not for him to begin the business of his visit, but for Mat.
They hear him come into the kitchen. He stops at the sink to wash his hands, and then comes on through the house.
“Don’t get up,” he says, entering the room and stepping over to the preacher’s chair.
Brother Preston, leaning forward, takes the hand that is held out to him. The hand is hard, weather-roughened, communicating the chill of the outside air. The brief tightening grip of it is an announcement of welcome, which doesn’t, today, put the preacher at ease.
“I’m sorry to take you away from your work.”
“You needn’t be. There’s not much we can do you’d call work.”
And so they begin again, speaking now of the weather, the delay of work, the rising river. The preacher feels himself drawn again, helplessly, into the stream of pastime conversation, which moves by no force of its own but by a determination in all of them against silence. He speaks and listens with an increasingly uncomfortable sense of his own hesitation, feeling at every turn and shift of the talk that he is failing again the duty that brought him.