Jayber Crow (31 page)

You knew merely by looking at her that Cecelia had a case to make. She thought the human condition was a calculated insult to her personally, the fault of certain people in particular. If she wasn't the president of the United States, or Mrs. Rockefeller, or at least happy, it was somebody else's fault, not hers. Her stinger was always out.

This was generally known, of course. I don't think she would have had to say anything to publish her thoughts and feelings. People generally suppose that they don't understand one another very well, and that is true; they don't. But some things they communicate easily and fully. Anger and contempt and hatred leap from one heart to another like fire in dry grass. The revelations of love are never complete or clear, not in this world. Love is slow and accumulating, and no matter how large or high it grows, it falls short. Love comprehends the world, though we don't comprehend it. But hate comes off in slices, clear and whole—self-explanatory, you might say. You can hate people completely and kill them in an instant. Cecelia knew how to deliver the killing look and the killing refusal to look. She could give the tiniest little snub that would
cause your soul to fester with self-doubt and self-justification and anger. And these were things she could pass along to you because all of them were festering in
her.

She knew that I had taken courses at the university and was a reader of books; that I had become by choice a mere barber, grave digger, and church janitor in Port William. Maybe that was what she could not forgive me for. Her favorite way of revenge was to ignore me, and she did this not just by not noticing me but by appearing to be as yet uninformed of my existence. But when I was near at hand, as I often was at church functions and such, she liked also to stand with her back to me and say to another person, for my benefit, bad things about Port William and my friends. She would damage everything in order to triumph over one thing. And I will have to hand it to her: She was a master of contempt. At her whim, I would have to tongue the gap in my teeth to verify my existence, or spend two hours muttering about in my mind, constructing an argument in self-defense.

And so maybe I know something of how it was with Roy. Roy and Cecelia never had the child who might have been a bond and a comfort between them. And was it fate, justice, or mercy that the failure of that child to appear may likewise have become a bond, though not a comfort, between them?

 

Cecelia thought that whatever she already had was no good, by virtue of the fact that she already had it. The things she desired all were things she didn't have. The failure of the entire population of Port William to live up to Cecelia's expectations brought heavy pressure to bear upon any newcomer or outsider who happened in. She was always latching on to new preachers or schoolteachers—anybody from away who supposably might prove to be as superior to Port William as she was. And they invariably disappointed her, either by liking the commonality of Port William or by regarding her as one of its members. Which, as a matter of fact, was correct. She was one of us. If she suspected as much, that must have been the unkindest cut of all.

The only unbridgeable chasm between Port William and Hargrave or Port William and California was in Cecelia's mind—and this, really, was a chasm between herself and everybody else. Maybe there were times
when she knew it. When I think of that, I am sorry for her. She could fill a room with hate just by walking in. That was her impact, the way she made you feel at first. And then, if you were willing, you finally could see through that to the mere human she was. A mere human whose hate came from misery.

Looking back now, after so long a time, the hardest knowledge I have is of the people I have known who have been most lonely: Troy Chatham and Cecelia Overhold, the one made lonely by ambition, the other by anger, and both by pride always clambering upward over its rubble.

The problem, you see, is that Cecelia had some reason on her side; she had an argument. I don't think she could be proved right; on the other hand, you can't prove her wrong. Theoretically, there is always a better place for a person to live, better work to do, a better spouse to wed, better friends to have. But then this person must meet herself coming back: Theoretically, there always is a better inhabitant of this place, a better member of this community, a better worker, spouse, and friend than she is. This surely describes one of the circles of Hell, and who hasn't traveled around it a time or two?

I have got to the age now where I can see how short a time we have to be here. And when I think about it, it can seem strange beyond telling that this particular bunch of us should be here on this little patch of ground in this little patch of time, and I can think of the other times and places I might have lived, the other kinds of man I might have been. But there is something else. There are moments when the heart is generous, and then it knows that for better or worse our lives are woven together here, one with one another and with the place and all the living things.

 

It seemed strange and accidental to me when Athey and Della moved to town. I had never thought of Athey before without associating him with his place, the Keith place, and I am sure he had never thought of himself so. He and it made each other what they were. And then I had to see him parted from it, and learn to think of him apart from it. It was a little as though he had died and been resurrected in Port William. I ought to have been used to this. I had seen it happen before. It had happened, in fact, to me before. Maybe it happens to every one of us every day, and we
are so used to it that it seems strange only once in a while, when we have to think about it.

The parting clearly had to come. Troy was magnifying himself with power, and Athey, in the working-out of the time and in the natural course of life, was dwindling away. The farm was big enough to contain and shelter and even use many lives, but two such minds could not live in it together. Athey was coming to know that. And then in September of 1952, he misstepped at the top of the ladder as he was going up to mend the corncrib roof. He took a bad fall that broke his leg and (as he said) made an old man of him. Afterward he was lame.

For several days after his fall, lying in his bed, he was thoughtful and spoke little. And then one day when Della came into the room he reached for her hand and she gave it.

“Della,” he said, “we have got to leave this place. It's time and past time.”

He spoke quietly the two sentences that had come at the end of all his thoughts. He and Della looked at each other. He squeezed her hand and let it go. She knew him and she knew herself. And that was all.

He had nothing he could do with his life's work now except leave it to a man who thought nothing of it. And yet he remained true to himself and he went on, pretty much without looking back. When he was on his feet again and could see to things, he and Della bought a little homestead of twenty acres such as you used to see fairly commonly on the edges and ends of the country towns. There was pasture for the old team of mules and a Jersey cow, room to fatten a couple of meat hogs and to keep a flock of chickens, a good garden spot, the necessary buildings. It was not a place on which they could live as they had lived, for that was past and they knew it, but it was big enough to permit them still to be as they were, to do for themselves and to recognize themselves.

At about the equinox of the next spring, the old pair of mules, Pete and Mike, stood freshly bedded in strange stalls, and Athey slept the first night of his life away from home. But of course what he did was establish the work of his hands again on that little twenty-acre place. He called it “piddling,” but his work was perfect. He and that team of mules had got old together, and they understood one another. The mules
seemed to understand even that Athey was lame. He could hang his cane on the fence and take hold of the handles of his breaking plow, and the mules would lean into the collars and just nudge the share into the sod. Athey grunted his instructions to them under his breath, and they listened. He stopped them often—as he would put it, in his quiet way of joking about himself—“so they could rest.” Everything they did on that little place was beautiful. And soon it came about that we ceased to think of things as “changed” or “new,” and Athey and Della seemed again to belong where they were.

Mattie and Troy had moved into the main house on the good farm in the river bottom, and Troy duly swelled himself. In the early summer of 1953, Mattie gave birth to their third child, Athey Keith Chatham.

That was about when the elder Athey began to happen by my shop on a fairly regular schedule. He would get up in the dark before daylight as he always had, do his barn chores, eat his breakfast, and then work in his garden or his little patch of tobacco or wherever else his work was needed. When the day heated up past midmorning, he would amble through town to my shop, for he would pretty well have spent his strength by then and he didn't like to sit in the house while Della went about her work. I was glad to have him. Old Jack Beechum, who had been for several years one of my regulars and a fine friend, had died at the end of the previous summer, and I missed him. Athey came, you might say, to a place that had been prepared.

Old and lame, carrying himself, he said, “like a hatful of eggs,” he would step in through the door and stop and look the place over thoroughly. When he had examined in detail everything and everybody there, with his lips pursed and a look of distant amusement in his eyes as if he knew a great deal more than he was going to say, he would say, “Morning!”

“Well,” I would say, “anything exciting going on?”

And he would say, “Well, I reckon not. I ain't excited.”

He would then hang up his hat and cane, seat himself, remove his eyeglasses from the bib pocket of his overalls, and go through my newspaper. He didn't read it all, but he read it in parts, sometimes moving his lips as he concentrated, all the way from first to last, making a fairly thorough job of it. He was an alert man and did not want to miss anything,
though he grunted in disapproval of much that he read, especially prices. The money that Athey had earned in his life had come hard, and he resented the advertisers' implicit assumption that they might fool him into giving it up.

When he had finished with the paper, refolded it, laid it down, removed his glasses, and put them back into their case, he might exchange a few words with whoever else was there, depending on who it was. But he was not a talkative man. He had a good dry wit and abundant intelligence. Usually, when he had said his few words, enough had been said.

One morning when only Athey and I were in the shop, Brother Wingfare came in. He was on his way to Louisville for his classes at the seminary and was in something of a hurry. He said to Athey, in a way that was a shade too indulgent and a shade too cheerful, as if he expected to hear that all was right with the world, “How're you, Mr. Keith?”

“Well, sir,” Athey said, “where I used to be limber I'm stiff and where I used to be stiff I'm limber. Do you know what I'm talking about?”

“Yessir,” said Brother Wingfare.

“Nosir,”
said Athey.

“Nosir,” said Brother Wingfare.

 

My shop was a democracy if ever anyplace was. Whoever came I served and let stay as long as they wanted to. Whatever they said or did while they were there I had either to deal with or put up with. As a gathering place for the manhood of Port William, often open at night, it could have been a lot rougher than it was. The problem of governing the place was right there in front of me when I started in. I knew that if it got rough I couldn't call the police; we didn't have any police in Port William. And so from the beginning I held to pretty correct behavior in my shop. I knew better than to drink on the job or anywhere near it. If anybody offered me a drink in the shop, I knew how to refuse with the proper implications. I minded my mouth the best I could and didn't gossip or use any sort of bad language. Certain things that people would say I would not acknowledge that I had heard. Later, my association with the graveyard and the church gave me a little dignity that I used to advantage. Even so, there would be times when I would have to take a stand. It
could get socially delicate, you might say. I did very well as long as I knew what my policy was and had used some foresight and more or less prepared myself. The problem came when events got ahead of policy.

I remember a Saturday afternoon in the winter. It was cold. The shop was crowded, some having come as customers, some just to socialize and keep warm. It was not the sort of circumstances I preferred to do my work in. There was too much talk, and it was not quite possible to be sure who came next. To make matters worse, a man I did not enjoy was occupying the space right in front of the barber chair, swinging his arms and giving mouth to a series of extreme and perfectly knot-headed opinions. He had some liquor in him and would have been pleased to be disagreed with. His name was Hiram Hench. His first name (by the working of the local tongue, but also with justice) was pronounced “Harm.”

Athey, who had somehow missed reading the paper that morning, was at the back of the shop in the last of the row of chairs, reading it now with such concentration that he might have been out somewhere by himself. I was keeping mindful of him, needing him to be there as he was.

I don't know what led up to it, but I heard Hiram say (maybe just to anybody who theoretically might have been listening, and generously imputing agreement to the theoretical anybody), “Some niggers looks just like apes. Did you ever think about that?”

He had hardly got that out of his mouth before I knew I had a policy against it. But I was not prepared. I didn't know what to say. It was not a situation in which you would enjoy carrying on a serious argument with an idiot. And, to be honest, I didn't want to see Hiram's big fist as close to me as the end of my nose. I wondered if he would hit me when I had a razor in my hand (which, as it happened, I did).