Jayber Crow (22 page)

“Son,” he said, “I don't want to scare you, but you've got a heart murmur, a little valve problem. I'm going to have to disqualify you.”

I said,
“What?”
I had gone all of a sudden from feeling humiliated to feeling insulted.

“4-F,” he said. “You've got a little fault that's part of your standard equipment.”

I said, “What the hell are you talking about? I'm as healthy as a hog!” He picked up a book and opened it and fingered a page for a moment and then read a sentence that said a man in my condition under the influence of “severe bodily exertion” might become “a pension problem.”

The doctor clapped the book shut, said, “I'm sorry, son,” and that was it.

I went back to Port William, a free man again, and glad of it, and ashamed to be glad. I felt disgraced by my failure to be able to do what I did not want to do.

One day when Mr. Milo Settle came in for a haircut, he said, “Well, boy, what are we going to do for a barber when you go off to the war? You went to be examined, didn't you?”

“Yes,” I said. “And I've been classified.”

“What?”

“4-F.”

“Why, there ain't a thing wrong with you. You're fit as a fiddle.”

“I have a little heart problem. I might not be able to stand severe bodily exertion.”

“Boy,” said Mr. Settle, “you ain't got a thing to worry about.”

 

After the war started and all the eligible young men and boys had gone away, a new silence came into Port William. The town did not become silent, I don't mean that; Port William always finds a plenty to talk about. The silence I mean was just a general avoidance of what lay heaviest on people's minds: fear. We feared that The News would become all of a sudden our news. We feared the news of wounds, deaths, losses; we feared our own grief, which we felt to be waiting. The town continued its conversation about itself, and now also it talked about the war. We all knew which part of the world everybody's son had gone off to, and pretty soon there were some daughters too who had gone away to be nurses, or to serve as Wacs or Waves. There were many new things to be known and talked about, but nobody spoke of fear. And when grief began to come in and replace fear, the grieved, out of consideration for the fearful, did not speak of grief. The nearest anybody came to speaking aloud of these things would be when one of the boys would be shipped overseas to where the fighting was, and his father would have to announce, “Well, he has gone across the waters.” Nothing could reduce the strangeness and dreadfulness of that phrase, “gone across the waters.”

When Jasper Lathrop had to go into the army, he closed the store, leaving all the town's business in the line of groceries and general
merchandise to Milton Burgess. Jasper's father, Frank, and Mat Feltner, who owned the building that Jasper had set up in, sold out the stock and left the shelves and counters empty. In the winters following, until the end of the war, Frank and Mat and Burley and I and various others carried on a rummy game in the little room at the back of Jasper's store, using the meat block as a card table. It surely was one of the oddest card games that ever was, for it wasn't your standard five-hundred rummy. This game did not end. It just stopped when the war stopped.

We had a long piece of butcher paper tacked to the wall with the names of all the players written across the top. When we quit playing for the day, we wrote every player's score under his name. The number of players on any day would vary from two to maybe six or seven. And so far as I know, nobody ever added up the scores; they just accumulated in uneven columns down that long page. Just as the game was a way of waiting for an end that was too long in coming, and as the empty store was a waiting place, so the score sheet was a way of not knowing, as if we would deal and play and take what came, leaving the conclusion to God.

Some coped with their times of fear and worry by becoming awfully quiet. Some would become noisy. Burley Coulter was one who would be noisy. The elder Coulters had died by then and Burley was living alone. After the war started, there would be times when he more or less made my shop his living room. His nephew, Tom, was with a battalion of engineers, first in North Africa and then in Italy. Tom would sometimes have to work under fire, being shot at while he concentrated his mind on something else. I knew that Burley was worrying about Tom when (just two or three times) I saw him fall away from a conversation into thought, and heard him grunt at what he was thinking. Mostly, when he was most worried, he would be working hard to stir up something to laugh about.

He would get up in the midst of the crowded shop, interrupting the conversation, and start outside to relieve himself. “All who can't swim, mount the highest bench,” he would cry out, “for the great he-elephant will now make water!”

Or in the latter part of a late-winter Saturday afternoon, his mind turning (as he would not say, but as we knew) to the prospect of a visit
to his might-as-well-be wife, Kate Helen Branch, he would stand up and stretch. “Well, boys, I reckon I better get on home and shine, shave, clean up, and sandpaper my tool.”

What quieted him was grief. Tom was killed as the invasion fought its way up through the mountains of Italy—somewhere up in the cold and the rocks. For a long time after that, Burley went through the motions, doing about as he had done before, but he made no noise. Tom and Nathan, the sons of Burley's brother Jarrat, had lost their mother when they were little and had come across the hollow to live with their grandparents and Burley. Jarrat, after his wife died, had become a distant, solitary, work-brittle man, and Burley had taken a large share in the raising of the boys. They were his boys as much as their father's, and the raising of them had changed him.

After we got the bad news about Tom Coulter, there was nothing, of course, that anybody could do. Maybe because I wished I could do something and could do nothing, I began to have this feeling that I was watching over Burley. I would be keeping an eye on him, aware of him in a way that I had not been before. The times when he fell away into thought came more often then, and he would have an expression on his face like that of a man who is looking at something he can't quite see. And many a night I sat on with him in the shop, talking of other things, to help him put off going home until he was sure he could sleep. By the time Tom was dead, Nathan had crossed the waters and was in the fighting.

I was learning what I had meant when I decided that I would share the fate of Port William. I had not gone off to war, but the wounds and deaths of Port William boys were happening in Port William. They were happening to me. I was involved; I was being changed. The war years were long because we were always waiting for what we feared and for what we hoped. We felt, I think, that we were failing one another, for we needed to have something we could do for one another and mostly there was nothing. And yet, even in failing one another, even in our silence we kept with one another. People had their ways and kept to them. The crops were planted and harvested; the animals mated and gave birth in the appointed seasons, were fed and watched over; the endless conversation of weather and work went on; memories were kept, stories told, and everything funny treasured up and spread around. The old studied
their memories and mused and spoke. We younger ones began to see that we knew things that never had not been known.

New grief, when it came, you could feel filling the air. It took up all the room there was. The place itself, the whole place, became a reminder of the absence of the hurt or the dead or the missing one. I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.

 

“What can't be helped must be endured,” Mat Feltner said. And he was a man who knew.

When Mat's boy, Virgil, was reported missing in action, and remained missing until “missing” slowly came to mean “dead,” things changed between Mat and Burley. Before, they had been friendly acquaintances, as you might say; now they recognized each other and were friends. They were men of two different sorts but they had stepped onto the common ground from which young men they loved were gone.

Mat had the worst of it, maybe. In loyalty to his boy he had to try to believe that “missing” meant
alive somewhere.
And yet lengthening time insisted, like a clock ticking, that it meant
dead
.

Maybe it helped him to have Burley to sit with and talk. Like Burley, he went through the old motions of his life, taking care of what needed caring for, keeping mostly quiet about what was on his mind. But his hard waiting changed him; you could see it in his face.

One night, not long before the war ended, I was sitting in the shop after bedtime. It was a hot night and I had thought I would read a while downstairs to give the upstairs room a chance to cool. There was a pretty good breeze. Nobody had come in, and I sat in the barber chair, which really was the most comfortable chair I had.

I was reading a good book (
The Woodlanders,
by Thomas Hardy, which was in a box of books I had bought for a quarter at an auction), and I stayed on even after I knew it had cooled off upstairs. People went to bed and the town got quiet. For a long time all I could hear were the candle flies fluttering against the screens.

And then I heard footsteps on the walk. It was Mat Feltner. He hesitated, seeing the light, and looked in.

I called to him, “Come in! Come in! Have a seat!”

I knew what he was doing. He was walking away from his thoughts, but his thoughts were staying with him. He was tired but he couldn't sleep.

He seemed glad enough to come in. He sat down, and I closed my book. We talked just aimlessly for a while. We went over all the local goings-on, which neither of us needed to hear about and were not much interested in, but both of us seemed to feel that we needed to be talking.

And then we spoke of the weather, which had been awfully hot. After that, unable to think of anything more to say, we fell into a silence that was troubled and unwelcome.

Trying to end it, I said finally, “Well, we've had a time,” speaking of the weather.

And Mat said, “Yes, we've
had
a time,” speaking of the war.

We spoke in very general terms, then, of the war and other trials of life in this world.

Mat said, “Everything that will shake has got to be shook.”

“That's Scripture,” I said, and he nodded.

Thinking to try to comfort him, I said, “Well, along with all else, there's goodness and beauty too. I guess that's the mercy of the world.”

Mat said, “The mercy of the world is you don't know what's going to happen.”

And then after a pause, speaking on in the same dry, level voice as before, he told me why he had been up walking about so late. He had had a dream. In the dream he had seen Virgil as he had been when he was about five years old: a pretty little boy who hadn't yet thought of anything he would rather do than follow Mat around at work. He looked as real, as much himself, as if the dream were not a dream. But in the dream Mat knew everything that was to come.

He told me this in a voice as steady and even as if it were only another day's news, and then he said, “All I could do was hug him and cry.”

And then I could no longer sit in that tall chair. I had to come down. I came down and went over and sat beside Mat.

If he had cried, I would have. We both could have, but we didn't. We sat together for a long time and said not a word.

After a while, though the grief did not go away from us, it grew quiet.
What had seemed a storm wailing through the entire darkness seemed to come in at last and lie down.

Mat got up then and went to the door. “Well. Thanks,” he said, not looking at me even then, and went away.

Ernest Finley may have been right in saying that in Port William we were more or less a classless society. On the other hand, we may have been a two-class society: Cecelia Overhold, and everybody else. Or maybe we were a three-class society: Cecelia Overhold, and everybody else, and me. I couldn't imagine Cecelia in those early days as well maybe as I can now, but as I have said, she was a good part of the reason for my social ineligibility. She was my enemy.

But she was Port William's enemy too. Cecelia never liked Port William. She was from Hargrave, and she had some of the social smuggery of the Hargrave upper crust. She married Roy Overhold because he was handsome and she was in love with him, I suppose, and then found that Port William was beneath her—and therefore that Roy, who belonged to Port William, was beneath her. What, after all, would a proud and socially ambitious young woman from Hargrave do with a husband who could be fully entertained by talking or playing cards beside some public stove in Port William for half a winter day? She did not like Port William pronunciation, diction, and grammar. She did not like its public loafing and spitting. She did not like its preoccupation with crops, livestock, food, hunting, fishing, and weather. She did not like its taste in church windows. And so on. She remembered all the personal affronts and
insults that she had suffered, going back, I think, to about 1928, when she and Roy got married.

Her particular cross (or curse) was her sister Dorothy in Los Angeles, whom she had a few times gone out to visit. California, in Cecelia's mind, was the one Utopia of the world. “Oh,” she would say, “it's a real place, a wonderful place. You can see the stars of the picture shows alive. You can step right out your back door and pick an orange from a tree. Everything out there is up-to-date. Dorothy has such lovely friends.” This “California” was the stick she used to measure Port William, and to beat it with. And her mythological sister measured us Port Williamites with a foot or so to spare. Cecelia, as with every look and gesture she let us know, was entirely at ease only in the company of her equals—a company that included, besides herself, only her sister. And of course Cecelia held some secret doubts about herself; you can't dislike nearly everybody and be quite certain that you have exempted yourself.