Jayber Crow (18 page)

And then I saw Cecelia Overhold coming up the path. She was wearing a sort of baggy hat tilted stylishly over her right ear, a nicely tailored broadcloth coat with a fur collar, and stockings and high heels. And she was walking like the Divine Wrath itself. She was a beautiful woman still, in those days, really something to look at. But I did not regard her with extreme pleasure that morning. I just shut my eyes and lay still. Why I didn't get up and run, I can't tell you, any more than I can tell you why Roy and the others had not run. We were all involved, I think, in a form of self-induced mental retardation.

Lying there with my eyes shut, filled with alarm and the recognition of catastrophe, I fully expected her to come right up and kick me. I was tensed for the blow. But she paid no attention to me at all, either because she didn't see me or because she thought me unworthy of attention; she was capable of that. I heard her gathering up the scattered cards and throwing them onto what was left of the fire. She picked up a piece of a limb and knocked loose the hanging lantern and sent it flying. She battered all the tin plates. And then I heard her breaking the jugs and bottles that were lying around. She even broke the water jug. The fury of battle was on her.

When I heard her walking over toward the sugar tree I opened my eyes. I have never beheld such a spectacle in all the time since. Roy Overhold was at the very top of the tree; Wisely Jones was under him, and under him was Rufus Brightleaf, and under him was Big Ellis. They all gazed downward like treed coons, and then they gazed upward as if hoping to find that the tree continued into the sky like Jack's bean stalk. The tree looked like a totem pole that had come to life and sprouted branches and leaves. And down at the foot was that beautiful outraged woman, looking up, with her fists on her hips.

She said, “Come down from there, you Sunday cardplaying sons of bitches!”

The only one up there with any conceivable reason to come down was Roy, and since he was at the top, he could not come down unless the others would come down first. Big Ellis would have had the honor of being first to accept her invitation, and he declined. Nobody came down. Nobody said a word.

And then Cecelia looked over at me and saw that I was watching. Our eyes met for a second and a chill passed over me.

“What are
you
looking at, you bald-headed
thing?”

Well, in fact I was getting bald, but I had been telling myself that it wasn't very noticeable. I hate to admit my vanity, but what she said hurt my feelings probably worse than anything else she could have done.

What else she could have done, and did do, was pick up a smallish rock all jaggedy and crusty with fossils and throw it at me. It hit me square in the mouth.

After that, I played dead (which wasn't hard). Even after she went away and I heard her start her car and turn it around, I lay still with my eyes shut, tasting blood and feeling my broken tooth with the end of my tongue.

It was a while too before the others came down out of the tree. It was as though Cecelia had run us not out of the place but out of the day, and it took some time and thought for us to get back in.

And when we finally gathered ourselves together again among the ruins, we were changed. It had been a beautiful night and now it was a splendid day, but embarrassment and sorrow had come over us.

Everybody knew that Cecelia and Roy Overhold were each other's all,
and that for both of them their all was varyingly either too much or not enough. Both of them were good people, as people go, and they had a nice farm, but they were living out the terms of a failure that was long and slow. I don't claim to understand it. I only know, from what I had seen already and what I saw later, that they would go along together quietly enough for a while, and then one night (it would always be at night) they would come face to face again with their old failure, each with needs that the other could not fill, and nothing they could do for each other that would not make things worse. Maybe it was childlessness that caused it. Maybe it was just one of those inescapable errors that people sometimes make. When Roy would turn up at my shop after dark or at some nighttime gathering of the men, I would know that he had come in from failure and despair that he could not escape but hoped at least to get off his mind for a while.

So we stood there, not knowing either how to stay or how to go, and felt the weight of that failure. We felt sorry for Roy, who was a quiet, smiling, unhappy man, and sorry for Cecelia, who was a beautiful, unhappy woman, and sorry we could think of nothing to say that would help.

And then Roy seemed to realize that if anybody was going to say something it would have to be him. He said, “Well, boys, if we've got anyplace to get, I reckon we had better get.”

And so we too straggled off in our various directions.

That worter dranking party turned out to be one of the most famous social events in the history of Port William. It started some things that kept happening, and continued some things that were already happening and that went on happening afterward. And in true Port William style, it had achieved its full renown by bedtime Sunday night.

The preeminent topic, of course, was the dramatic entrance upon the scene of Cecelia Overhold, and what she had done and what she had said. You could no more have kept that quiet than you could have prevented thunder from following lightning.

But also Bill Thacker, walking home over the Katy's Branch bridge, blundered into the railing and mistook it for his yard gate. Finding that he could not unfasten it, he climbed over and fell fifteen feet into a field that Webster Page had plowed for corn. Fortunately, the backwater had
just withdrawn from the bottom at that place, and instead of breaking his neck Bill only made a deep impression in about a foot and a half of mud. The mud was so soft and comfortable that he took a good nap before he got up. This story would have been hard to learn except that Bill Thacker himself thought so highly of it that he walked to town the next Saturday afternoon to tell it on himself.

And Julep Smallwood, to put a good face on things, had started home at the crack of dawn. But he made the trip in slow, difficult stages, being often obliged (as he said) to lie down. At Sunday school time he was standing by no means far enough from the church, as stupefied as Lot's wife.

And that was the moment that I happened to make my own entrance into town. I did not know the time; I did not see the talkers standing in the churchyard before it was too late to stop or go back. I went on by, pretending not to see, and keeping to the far side of the road. It was not a situation in which a bachelor barber newly come to town would prefer to be seen with a bloody lip and his clothes all covered with wood ashes and dead leaves.

Ernest Finley used to say, at about the time I returned, “In Port William we don't distinguish the masses from the classes.” And in a way that was true. People did freely mingle in the gathering places of the town. Even Joe Banion, the last black man ever to live in Port William, was a participant and subject in the town's ever-continuing conversation about itself. People loved and befriended one another and were loved and befriended, talked with and about one another, quarrelled with and resented and sometimes fought one another, all pretty much without thought of “special privilege.” The only one in my time who might have been accused of putting on airs was Cecelia Overhold, and in her younger days even Cecelia didn't do it all the time.

And yet certain lines were drawn that weren't much spoken of or much noticed. You would be aware of them only if they were overstepped or if you came into the town as an outsider. I could see, for instance, that Joe Banion was treated pretty much as an equal in talk and in work and in other ways, but also that he never sat down with white people indoors. The white people, who called him “Nigger Joe” to identify him among the several other Joes who lived around, never did so to his face.

I pretty soon found out too that several lines were drawn around a bachelor barber who was known to take part in social events such as the
Little Worter Dranking Party at the Grandstand. The barbershop, for one thing, was a precinct strictly masculine except on Saturday mornings, when mothers with small sons would bring them in for haircuts. At other times, the small boys would be brought in by their fathers and you would have been just as likely to find women in the poolroom. This was not my rule; it was just what the arrangement was and, I suppose, had always been. Anyhow, as the barber of the town, I was pretty effectively divided from its womanly life. I mingled a little, of course, when I went into the stores, and also when I would go out in the mornings and evenings with my buckets to get water at the town pump across the road.

As the barber I was placed also within economic limits that were generally recognized. The shop, as I had been told at the start, and as I had to agree, would not support a man with family responsibilities; it might support a bachelor, if he was careful. The barber lived on what would nowadays be called a “renewable resource” and so would never be out of work, if he could keep going on what his customers could reasonably be charged, but the resource itself was limited.

At times it could be severely limited. I nearly went under, for instance, in the first full month I was in Port William. Almost nobody came to the shop—for a haircut, that is; I had plenty of talkers—and I couldn't imagine what was the matter until I learned that a lot of the people thought it unlucky or unhealthy to get a haircut in February. My income varied also according to the weather, the stages of farmwork, and the state of the local economy. What I had, Grover Gibbs said, was a full-time part-time job.

Such jobs were not highly esteemed. One day I made the mistake, while cutting Mr. Milo Settle's hair, of referring to my “line of work.”

“Boy,” said Mr. Settle, “you ain't got what I call a
job
. You got what I call a
position
.”

When I set up in Port William I was going on twenty-three years old. I was what I would prefer to call not-pretty, which is to say balding, long of face and frame, without resemblance to any movie actor or electable politician. Also I was a man of limited means and prospects, and a bachelor. By “bachelor” I mean, as was generally meant, a man old enough to be married who was not married and who had no visible chance to get married. A bachelor was, by nature, under suspicion. The women did
not turn their backs as I passed along the street; they were, in fact, polite and friendly enough, as a rule. And I did learn (a little too late) to pursue my bachelor's aims and satisfactions with some discretion. But nobody ever told me pointedly or even casually that any eligible maiden was a good cook. I was not held up as an example to the young.

And so, in a society that was in some ways classless, I was in a class by myself. I was soon identified as a man who now and again wouldn't mind to take a drink, or join a nighttime party of fox or coon hunters, or attend a water-drinking party at the Grandstand or a roadhouse dance.

The biggest disadvantage, maybe, was that I remained a sort of bystander a lot longer than I remained a stranger. They were calling me “Jayber” a long time before I was
involved
. Most people treated me well from the start, and some a lot better than well. But it only takes one or two, like Cecelia Overhold, to keep you reminded of how you fit in. So far as she ever let me see, Cecelia never looked straight at me again in her life. I got so that when I met her in the street I would tip my hat to her, if I was wearing one; if not, I would make a little bow. She always went by without looking at me, her head tilted to indicate not that she did not see me but that she had
already
seen me, and once was enough.

 

As for advantages, they were there right from the start, and there were several of them.

One was, I felt at home. There is more to this than I can explain. I just
felt
at home. After I got to Port William, I didn't feel any longer that I needed to look around to see if there was someplace I would like better. I quit wondering what I was going to make of myself. A lot of my doubts and questions were settled. You could say, I guess, that I was glad at last to be classified. I was not a preacher or a teacher or a student or a traveler. I was Port William's bachelor barber, and a number of satisfactions were available to me as the perquisites of that office.

Burley Coulter was correct, for instance, about the goodness of having your dwelling place and your place of business right together. When I came down the stairs and into the shop I was “at work.” When I went back upstairs I was “at home.” This was handy in a lot of ways. The stove that heated the shop heated my bedroom-living-room-bathroom-kitchen (my “efficiency apartment”) upstairs. Often, in the winter, while
I was at work (which included loafing and talking) in the shop, I would have a pot of beans or soup or stew simmering on the stove.

People respected the difference. The shop was a public place, but the upstairs room was private. I've had people in the shop or down there banging on the door all hours of the day and night, for Port William never went altogether to sleep, but I expect I could count on my fingers the number of times anybody ever came to the door upstairs. And most of those times it was Burley Coulter, who, up there, would be mannerly and reserved, very formal—as opposed to his behavior in the shop where, like nearly everybody, he felt at home.

My occupancy of the ramshackle little building seemed to give him immense satisfaction, as if he had foreseen it all in a dream and was amazed that it had come to pass. He didn't harp on the subject, but if it came up he enjoyed talking about it. And he made occasions to review my situation and accomplishments.