Jayber Crow (21 page)

That I was involved became clear to me one spring afternoon in about 1941. Six or eight of the boys were playing basketball on the cinder-covered lot in front of the blacksmith shop. They had put up a hoop there, and the packed cinders made it a good place to play. A little crowd had gathered to watch the game—Mattie and Althie among them. They must have been on an errand of some kind for Althie's mother, for each of
them was carrying a bushel basket; Mattie was holding hers by both handles in front of her. She was wearing a simple short-sleeved cotton dress, a white dress with little flowers on it. Her hair was tied back a little away from her ears with a ribbon. She was perfect.

The two teams were made up of any boys who wanted to play, boys of all sizes and abilities, no two of them as good as Troy Chatham, who was putting on a show. He could do just about anything with a basketball, and he was doing all of it, outthinking and outmoving the other players, trying difficult shots and making them, leaping and running. He was just beautiful and graceful to see. But also he was using his skill to impress the watchers and to make fools of the other players.

I was beginning to be uncomfortable with the thought that he would take my presence there as a tribute to him, and I was starting to leave. About then somebody fed him a pass as he came running in for a shot. He took the pass, faked at the goal, and then, leaping, dropped a perfect over-the-head shot into Mattie's basket. It was the most beautiful thing he had done, and yet it was proprietary and aggressive, a kind of violence.

“Oh,
Troy Chatham!” Mattie said, and dumped the ball out onto the ground.

You could see nevertheless that she was pleased.

And I thought, “Why, you impudent son of a bitch!”

You would need to draw a very big map of the world in order to make Port William visible upon it. In the actual scale of a state highway map, Port William would be smaller than the dot that locates it. In the eyes of the powers that be, we Port Williamites live and move and have our being within a black period about the size of the one that ends a sentence. It would be a considerable overstatement to say that before making their decisions the leaders of the world do not consult the citizens of Port William. Thousands of leaders of our state and nation, entire administrations, corporate board meetings, university sessions, synods and councils of the church have come and gone without hearing or pronouncing the name of Port William. And how many such invisible, nameless, powerless little places are there in this world? All the world, as a matter of fact, is a mosaic of little places invisible to the powers that be. And in the eyes of the powers that be all these invisible places do not add up to a visible place. They add up to words and numbers.

A town such as Port William in this age of the world is like a man on an icy slope, working hard to stay in place and yet slowly sliding downhill. It has to contend not just with the local mortality, depravity, ignorance, natural deficiencies, and weather but also with what I suppose we might as well call The News. The obliviousness of Port William in high
places unfortunately is not reciprocated. The names of the mighty are known in Port William; the news of their influence is variously brought. In modern times much of the doing of the mighty has been the undoing of Port William and its kind. Sometimes Port William is persuaded to approve and support its own undoing. But it knows always that a decision unfeelingly made in the capitols can be here a blow felt, a wound received.

The News intensified—it concentrated the air like a whirlwind—as World War II was cooking up. The war did not make Port William more visible, except to itself; to itself, it became extraordinarily visible. We looked around us, seeing everything as eligible to be lost.

The Monday after Pearl Harbor, my usually cheerful next-door neighbor, Miss Gladdie Finn, was crying as she hung out her wash in the backyard.

“Oh, Mr. Crow,” she said when I came out for a bucket of coal, “have you heard about the terrible war that has started?”

I said, “Yes, ma'am, I've heard.”

“I tell you,” she said, “I don't think much of these wars.” She was crying the way a woman cries who is no longer surprised to be crying.

And I knew why. Her son had been killed in the First World War, and now the coming of this new one had put her back into the midst of her loss.

I said, as consolingly as I could, “Well, Miss Gladdie, maybe it won't last long. Maybe it'll be all right.”

But she said, “Oh, honey, boys will be killed.”

That brought it home to me. I thought the rest of the day of my childish fear of that first great war, and remembered the pictures of the dead lying all askew in the muddy trenches.

Miss Gladdie had been a widow for a long time. She had never remarried. She remained true to the two men she often referred to lovingly by name, Forrest Senior and Forrest Junior. She lived alone on little checks that came in the mail, and from her henhouse and garden, always busy trying to keep body and soul and her infirm old house together. She was a woman of sorrows and might have been excused for seeming so. And yet I rarely saw her when she didn't have a smile and a cheerful word. Now and then when I saw she needed help—a lift with something heavy, say—I would go over and help her. She would let me help her and thank
me kindly, if I came, but she was very particular about not asking. “Honey, I hate to bother you,” she would say.

And I liked her. She was the last one to practice what had been an old Port William custom of trading household things. When she got tired of some of her stuff, she would gather it into her apron and hike off among the neighbors to trade for stuff that they were tired of.

She was the heroine of a famous story. One time before the war, before her losses, she and Maxie Settle and Dora Cotman were sitting on her back porch hulling peas when Thig Cotman came up in one of his fits. He cursed and ranted, damning them and everybody he knew and himself into the bargain, and demanded to know what Miss Dora had done with his razor, for he wanted to cut his throat with it. And poor Miss Dora, who had hidden the razor for fear that he would cut his throat with it, just sat with her head down until Miss Gladdie said, “Thig, Forrest Senior's got a razor. He would never let you shave with it, but if you wanted to cut your throat with it I'm sure that would be all right.”

You could see, still, that she was the woman who had said that. She was a woman who loved her hen flock and her garden and her flowers. Every day, from early spring to late fall, she made a little wander around her house and yard to see what was coming up or getting ready to bloom or blooming. She was always bringing home some plant or seed or root and “sticking it in the ground” to see if it would grow. And within all else she was, she was keeper and protector of the grief by which she cherished what she had lost.

I thought a good deal about Forrest Junior and wondered where he was buried and if anybody even knew where. I imagined that soldiers who are killed in war just disappear from the places where they are killed. Their deaths may be remembered by the comrades who saw them die, if the comrades live to remember. Their deaths will not be remembered where they happened. They will not be remembered in the halls of the government. Where do dead soldiers die who are killed in battle? They die at home—in Port William and thousands of other little darkened places, in thousands upon thousands of houses like Miss Gladdie's where The News comes, and everything on the tables and shelves is all of a sudden a relic and a reminder forever.

And yet, as I knew already and would learn again and again, when
these blows fall into life, life contains them somehow and keeps on going. After her grief at the onset of the new war, Miss Gladdie righted herself and proceeded. When I told her I had registered for the draft and was going to be examined, she said, “Well, honey, everybody has to die sometime.”

I was twenty-eight in 1942, and it looked like to me that I ought to have got my mind settled on some of the major questions. But the war did to my thoughts what a harrow does to crusted ground. I was too old to be lured by visions of adventure and heroism as some of the younger fellows were; I was just normally afraid, for myself and the world. That cloudy fear of what might happen was bad enough. What was worse was trying to reckon with war itself, what caused it, and what justified it. When I was younger, from what I had felt and read and seen in pictures, I had imagined war as a great, blind force like a hard wind at night that trampled and bloodied the ground, leaving behind only loose stones and splinters and bodies torn to pieces. This new war, like the previous one, would be a test of the power of machines against people and places; whatever its causes and justifications, it would make the world worse. This was true of that new war, and it has been true of every new war since. The dark human monstrous thing comes and tramples the little towns and never even knows their names. It would make Port William afraid and shed its blood and grieve its families and damage its hope.

I knew too that this new war was not even new but was only the old one come again. And what caused it? It was caused, I thought, by people failing to love one another, failing to love their enemies. I was glad enough that I had not become a preacher, and so would not have to go through a war pretending that Jesus had not told us to love our enemies.

The thought of loving your enemies is opposite to war. You don't have to
do
it; you don't
have
to love one another. All you have to do is keep the thought in mind and Port William becomes visible, and you see its faces and know what it has to lose. Maybe you don't have to love your enemies. Maybe you just have to act like you do. And maybe you have to start early.

Anyhow, what I couldn't bring together or reconcile in my mind was the thought of Port William and the thought of the war. Port William, I
thought, had not caused the war. Port William makes quarrels, and now and again a fight; it does not make war. It takes power, leadership, great talent, perhaps genius, and much money to make a war. In war, as maybe even in politics, Port William has to suffer what it didn't make. I have pondered for years and I still can't connect Port William and war except by death and suffering. No more can I think of Port William and the United States in the same thought. A nation is an idea, and Port William is not. Maybe there is no live connection between a little place and a big idea. I think there is not.

Did I think that the great organizations of the world could love their enemies? I did not. I didn't think great organizations could love anything. Did I think anybody would live longer by loving his enemies? Did I think those who were going to die could stay alive by loving their enemies? I did not.

Was this a good war? I knew that it could not be good. Was it avoidable? I don't know.

I might have become a conscientious objector if I had had more confidence in myself. I certainly did think that “love your enemies” was an improvement over all the other possibilities, but getting to be a conscientious objector required “sincerity of belief in religious teaching.” Was “love your enemies” a religious teaching just because Jesus said it? Or did it have to be taught by a church? I was not a Quaker. So far as I knew, I had never even seen a Quaker. And suppose you got to be a conscientious objector: What did you do next? Next, I supposed, you left Port William, whose young men who were not conscientious objectors would be getting hurt and killed. I had a conscientious objection to making an exception of myself. As had happened before, my mind was failing me; I couldn't think my way all the way through. As I saw it, I had two choices: to fight in a war and maybe kill people I wasn't even mad at and who were no more to blame than I was, or take an exemption that I really didn't believe was right either and couldn't believe I was worthy of. I couldn't imagine what lay beyond either choice.

What decided me, I think, was that I could no longer imagine a life for myself beyond Port William. I thought, “I will have to share the fate of this place. Whatever happens to Port William must happen to me.” That
changed me, and it cleared my head. It didn't make me feel good to be sharing the fate of Port William, for I knew there would be pain and trouble in that, but it made me feel good to have my head clear. Afterward, I slept all night for the first time in weeks.

If I could have found in my mind a plain and simple way to be right, that would have been something. I would have been changed in another way, and my life ever afterward would have been different. But having reached the crisis—the crossroad, so to speak—I failed. I didn't have at all the feeling of being right.

And then it turned out that I had spent all my sleeplessness and agony on a choice that I didn't have to make. One day they loaded a bunch of us into a bus and took us off to be examined. We had to take our clothes off and line up and submit to being looked at and poked and felt of like a pen of slaughter lambs. I hadn't been quite so lost and nameless since my first night at The Good Shepherd.

I said to myself, “Well, here you are, naked and ashamed, at the stockyards at last. After all your efforts to evade another talking-to across the top of a desk, you are coming now to somebody who is going to point at you with the end of his fountain pen and tell you to go and die for your country. And probably you are going to do it.”

We would come up to these doctors and stand in front of them, feeling like we had been shorn or skinned, not looking at anybody, and they would tell us whether we were sheep or goats.

I was a goat. This old gray-haired doctor put his stethoscope to my chest and listened and listened, and then cocked his head and listened some more.