Jayber Crow (23 page)

Cecelia was a regular churchgoer. I would say that she was safely within the definition of “a pillar of the church.” That, you might have thought, would have helped a little to ease the difficulty between her and Roy, but I don't think it did.

How much the church
meant
to Cecelia I really don't know. (I know it provided her with most of her best occasions for high-hatting me.) So far as I could tell, she was not a forgiving, forbearing Christian, and yet I have wondered if at times the church, to her, didn't stand for some kindness or gentleness that she yearned toward in her heart. But in her practice it seemed to stand merely for gentility and righteousness that, so to speak, justified her in her difference from Roy, who was not a pillar of the church. When he went, he went in a kind of self-embarrassment, utterly failing to see the connection between it and himself, which caused him to sit as far from the pulpit as possible and as near the door.

The church, I would guess, meant little enough to many of the men of Port William, who (if they went) were not comfortable in it and whose chief preoccupation with respect to it was to keep the preacher from finding out how they really talked and thought and lived. Like, I think, most of the people of Port William, Roy lived too hard up against mystery to be without religion. But like many of the men, he was without
church religion. Which is to say that, especially in his own eyes, he was without an acceptable religion. And so in her dealings with him Cecelia thrust the church out like a lion tamer's chair. And Roy, who had never claimed to be a lion, would thereupon be discovered to be not on the attack, or even on the defense, but merely not present. Which surely must have been a further disappointment to her, which maybe seemed to her to verify or justify her general disappointment in him. He, anyhow, was out, and she was in, and neither of them ever could quite forget it.

Roy, I guess, was about as ordinary as a man could be. He was ordinary even in his religious discomfort. In all his life he never did anything that surprised Port William. Except for the sometime extremity of his misery, I don't think he ever surprised himself.

By the time I knew him, Roy was showing some wear, and he was a baldy like me. But once he had been handsome, maybe even pretty. He'd had black curly hair and blue eyes as startlingly clear, almost, as the glass eyes of a doll. One time, with a pride that also embarrassed him, he showed me a picture of himself as a young man. In appearance, at least, he must have seemed a fit match for the beautiful young Cecelia, ever stylish, ever slender. Maybe in the time of their courtship he had looked malleable to Cecelia—good raw material, a man she could make something out of.

As it turned out, Roy was not malleable. What he was already was what he was going to be; what he was already was all she got. She couldn't make anything out of him that he hadn't already become by the time she got started on him. She couldn't even reduce him to anything less than he was.

She was disappointed in him. And this wasn't just
her
disappointment, for I think he was disappointed in himself for being a disappointment to her. It was a disappointment like a nail in your shoe. It wasn't completely disabling, but it couldn't be ignored either. It didn't go away. It wore worse.

But I don't think Roy maintained himself as he was by resistance. I don't think he fought with her or made much of an argument in his own favor. When she raised the pressure, he just escaped. He just quietly
shifted off into one of the maybe innumerable precincts of Port William or the surrounding outdoors where she disdained to go. (Her invasion of the Grandstand on that fine morning in the spring of 1937 was not usual. It was provoked by I don't know what extremity of grief and rage.) As a rule, when the pressure was on, Roy eased away. He was not by nature a man who was very much in evidence.

If a soft answer turneth away wrath, maybe
no
answer stirreth wrath up. It was something like that. Roy had the aspect of a man who had eased away from trouble he had not got rid of. He was a quiet, smiling man, a humorous man who never laughed aloud—a good man, I always thought, whose only severe critic was his wife.

Cecelia would have liked a husband she would have been proud to display, a man who looked good in a suit, who was affable, talkative, and charming, desirable (but not too desirable) to other women. She would have been an excellent wife, maybe, to a certain kind of doctor, maybe even a preacher. Roy finally failed to measure up to any of her standards. Dressed up, he never looked like he was wearing his own clothes. In social situations, if he could not find one of his own kind to talk with about grass and livestock and the other things his kind talked about, he was little better than deaf and dumb. And he was not desirable to other women—not, at least, to any woman Cecelia could imagine.

The time she took him on a trip to visit her sister in California was (for reasons that Port William saw as clearly as if the whole town had gone along) the only time she ever took him. The whole week he wore his Sunday suit, in which he looked like a badly stuffed animal. He smiled at everything and said almost nothing. He walked about, looking for nobody knew what, like some forest or swamp creature newly acquired by a zoo. Or so the talkers in my shop imagined.

When he got home I asked him, “Well, how was it?”

He only smiled and gave one little shake to his head.

When he died, Roy's dead body, in his last ill-fitting Sunday suit, seemed to preserve the integrity of his long discomfort. He looked (unless you deliberately reminded yourself otherwise) as if he would lie there, the center of far more attention than he had ever sought, in mere embarrassment forever.

If Cecelia was my enemy, that was because (as I now believe) she saw
me as her enemy. As the town's barber, as the host of that mostly masculine enclosure, the barbershop, and as the town's permanent bachelor, a piece of raw material permanently raw, forever to be unimproved by a woman of her discriminating powers, I must have seemed to her to be the very gatekeeper of that unregulated other world that Roy eased away into whenever he eased away.

In the last spring of the war, Uncle Stanley Gibbs more or less ran aground as Port William's grave digger and church janitor. He could still dig a grave, he said, but was having more and more trouble getting out of it after he dug it. But also he got fired, first as grave digger and then as janitor, for his inability to control his mouth. He had modified the worst of his vocabulary when he assumed the dignity of associating with preachers and undertakers, but vocabulary really was the smallest end of the problem. Uncle Stanley had no more sense of privacy than a fruit jar. He would tell you at length about his manner of coping with the piles, or his plans for bachelorhood in case Miss Pauline died before he did. His plans for bachelorhood rested on the premise that as soon as Miss Pauline breathed her last, he would cease to be rickety and toothless and deaf and would become a tomcat around the women, as he had been once upon a time.

“Well,” Uncle Stanley would be saying for the further enlightenment of whomsoever might be listening, “the madam goes around committing virtue left and right. She looks like the last of pea time now, and you would never know it, but me and her fell together after the fashion of hemale and shemale, same as everybody.”

And so on.

Anyhow, as his successor Uncle Stanley chose me, because he thought I had both time to spare and the necessary intelligence—for, as he said, “not just anybody can dig a grave.”

I accepted because I was going on thirty-one by then and beginning to see that I needed a little something extra to put away for my old age, in case I lived to be old. Digging graves and cleaning the church were not going to put me in a penthouse in Miami, but I thought they might get me into a nice camp house down along the river, where I could fish when I felt like it.

To salve my conscience for taking the old man's jobs, on which he had depended for self-importance as much as money, I hired him to stay on as my supervisor, and thereby learned some things that I needed to know and quite a few that I did not. Uncle Stanley loved to sit on the edge of a grave, dangling his feet in, and instruct me to do what I was already doing, his conversation varying between unspeakable and incredible. But he didn't last long. In the first winter after the war, survived by Miss Pauline and thus forsaking forever his dream of a widower's bachelorhood, he finally got into a grave he could not get out of. And I was the one who covered him up.

Barbering is a social business; it involves conversation just about by necessity. For me, after Uncle Stanley died, grave digging was a solitary business. Just once in a while I would get caught with a grave to dig on one of my busy days at the shop and would have to hire a hand or two, but mostly, up in the graveyard, I worked alone. It was hard work, and often it was sad work, for as a rule I would be digging and filling the grave of somebody I knew; often it would be the grave of somebody I liked or loved.

It was a strange thing to cut out the blocks of sod and then dig my way to the dark layer where the dead lie. I feel a little uneasy in calling them “the dead,” for I am as mystified as anybody by the transformation known as death, and the Resurrection is more real to me than most things I have not yet seen. I understand that people's dead bodies are not exactly
them
, and yet as I dug down to where they were, I would be mindful of them, and respectful, and would feel a curious affection for them all. They all had belonged here once, and they were so much more numerous than the living. I thought and thought about them. It was
endlessly moving to me to walk among the stones, reading the names of people I had known in my childhood, the names of people I was kin to but had never known, and (pretty soon) the names of people I knew and cared about and had buried myself. Some of the older stones you could no longer read because of weathering and the growth of moss. It was a place of finality and order. The people there had lived their little passage of time in this world, had become what they became, and now could be changed only by forgiveness and mercy. The misled, the disappointed, the sinners of all the sins, the hopeful, the faithful, the loving, the doubtful, the desperate, the grieved and the comforted, the young and the old, the bad and the good—all, sufferers unto death, had lain down there together. Some were there who had served the community better by dying than by living. Why I should have felt tender toward them all was not clear to me, but I did.

There were a lot of graves of little children—most of them from the last century or before—who had died of smallpox, cholera, typhoid fever, diphtheria, or one of the other plagues. You didn't have to know the stories; just the dates and the size of the stones told the heartbreak. But all those who were there, if they had lived past childhood, had twice in this world, first and last, been as helpless as a little child. And you couldn't forget that all the people in Port William, if they lived long, would come there burdened and leave empty-handed many times, and would finally come and stay empty-handed. Seeing them come and go, and come and stay, I began to be moved by a compassion that seemed to come to me from outside. I never said to myself that it was happening. It just came to me, or I came to it. As I buried the dead and walked among them, I wanted to make my heart as big as Heaven to include them all and love them and not be distracted. I couldn't do it, of course, but I wanted to.

That place of the democracy of the dead was sometimes a very social place for the living. People would come to visit the graves, sometimes from far away, or they would come looking for the names and dates of ancestors, and they would meet and talk. Sometimes old friends would meet after a long separation and would have to make themselves known to one another again. I was always learning something.

One of the best days of the year, for me, was Decoration Day, when people would come from near and far with flowers to decorate the
graves. Besides beingbeautiful and fragrant with all the roses and peonies and boughs of mock orange, it was a kind of grace and benediction, and a kind of homecoming. I liked to make a show of being busy in the graveyard so I could watch and listen.

I was doing that one Decoration Day when I saw Hibernia Hopple get out of her car with an armload of the white and pink peonies that she would divide between her mother's family, who were buried at Port William, and her father's at Goforth. This was about 1960. Before she could shut the car door and turn around, Burley Coulter had seen her and come over.

By way of greeting, he said, “Hibernia, I want you to tell me something.”

She turned, saw who it was, and said, “What?”

He said, grinning at her, “Ain't you about lost all your ambition?”

She blushed as pink as a peony. There had been something between them. “Burley Coulter,” she said with complete affection, “you need to be shot.”

I don't know if you would call grave digging “severe bodily exertion.” It surely was the hardest work I have ever done, but it didn't kill me before I gave it up a few years ago. I expect I am by nature a lazy person, and so I never went at it with what you would call violence. But you can't dig a grave without working hard. I mean you have to apply yourself. And after I would get about halfway down, well into the yellow clay that would be either hard or sticky, a voice would begin to speak in my mind; it would say, “Deep enough! Deep enough!” And then I would dig on down as deep as I was supposed to go.

I will say this: It made me strong. After I started digging graves, I got healthier and stronger than I had ever been in my life. And it taught me
how
to be a lazy person. I just didn't let reluctance stand in my way.