Jayber Crow (35 page)

From start to finish—four or five hours—the boys would be hollering,
“Chum! Chum! Over here, Chum! Where the hell you at, Chum?” And Chum would be desperately ignoring them all until in his good time he got to them, poking his way through the crowd, holding up his tray.

The band was playing a fast number and the floor was full of jitter-buggers when Andy Catlett came in with Nell Gale, who had been recently the sweetheart of his brother, Henry. Henry, seeing them from the bandstand, brought his hand down, stopped the song they were playing right where it was, and started playing “Your Cheatin' Heart.” Andy began to dance with the girl, holding her close and whirling round and round. Henry made his saxophone sob and moan as if his heart would break—and then, while the piano player took a solo, reared back and laughed at his brother, so maybe his heart was not too broken, after all. As the song finished Andy made another spin beside our table and dipped low, leaning the girl backward onto his arm, and we could hear her suck in her breath through her teeth. She was quite a girl.

Pretty soon (as usual) somebody turned off the overhead lights, which made it a lot cozier and somehow quieter, and a lot harder on poor old Chum. The music seemed to penetrate better in the dimness. The band was playing “Stardust,” and Clydie and I got up to dance.

We danced to the slow songs and sat and watched during the fast ones. We spiked our setups and toasted each other and a number of other things that came to mind. We sat close together. Clydie took my hand and held it in her lap. A wonderful feeling came over us. Outside was the cold, dark, starless night. Inside was warmth and music and mellowness and gaiety. Inside Clydie and me was the good, even, friendly, growing warmth of desire, and our hands held one another in Clydie's lap. It was lovely to dance and watch the young people dancing. Most of the dancers (including, of course, me) began to have the illusion that they were dancing better than they actually were. Still, the young people were fine to watch, and sometimes funny too.

Andy Catlett, ecstatic but less than graceful, picked Nell Gale up in his arms and, whirling round and round, crossed the dance floor and fell down in front of the fireless hearth.

And Alfred Pindle, after he got a few drinks in him, danced just by trotting back and forth in a rhythm having nothing whatever to do with any song that any band had ever played. He trotted along rather quietly,
with his eyes filmed over as if he heard an entirely different music far off. Before long, his girl began to have the limply resigned and submitted look of a small animal carried by a cat.

But most of them danced well enough, and there were two couples who danced beautifully. I mean they would have danced beautifully if you had seen them cold sober dancing in broad daylight in the middle of the road.

The band played “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” They played it slow, slow. It was as if the musicians and the dancers and the whole room were in a trance. Clydie and I swayed to the slow beat, and it seemed that the feeling inside us made us light so that we were floating on the music. We were dancing close, barely moving. Clydie really knew how to put herself against you. She was a snuggler when she wanted to be.

I said right into her ear, “Clydie, my sweet, you feel heavy on the branch and ready to pluck.”

She said, “You got it, boy.”

When I looked up again, I looked directly into the face of Troy Chatham, who was dancing with a woman whose face I did not see, but her long blond hair could not have been Mattie's.

Troy gave me a wink and a grin, raising his hand to me with the thumb and forefinger joined in a circle.

I stopped dancing. What I felt must have showed in my face, for Clydie pushed away from me and said, “What's the matter with you, Jayber? Are you sick?”

I said, “I am. I'm as sick as a dog.”

And I headed for the men's room.

Andy Catlett was there, drying his hands, ready to go out.

He said, “Hey, Jayber!”

I said, “Hey, Andy!”

He said, “Don't go goosing no snowflakes,” and went out. As the door opened and shut again, the music sounded distantly in a kind of yawn.

 

I wasn't, as Clydie thought, sick at my stomach. I was sick at heart, and I don't mean that just as a manner of speaking; I was seriously afflicted. Do you know what picture came flying into my mind when I looked up and saw Troy Chatham looking at me over the head of whichever Other
Woman that was? Not of Mattie at home with the children, wondering where Troy had gone off to and who with. Not that picture (which came to me clearly enough, later), but the memory of Mattie as she had been on that day when I knew I loved her. I had thought many times of her as I had seen her then, with the children so completely admitted into her affection and her presence—as, I thought, a man might be if he wholly loved her, if she wholly trusted him, a man who would come to her as trustful and heart-whole as a little child. I had thought of a flower opening among dark foliage, and of a certain butterfly whose wings, closed, looked like brown leaves but, opened, were brilliant and lovely and like nothing but themselves.

But I was thinking too, as Troy winked at me and raised his sign: “We're not alike!” And that was what sickened me, because I wasn't sure.

I wasn't sure of anything. I hadn't been particularly aware of being drunk out on the dance floor, but now I was drunk, blinking and unsteady in the harsh light and the stench of that grudging little room. I held on to the washbasin and tried to think. What I was sure of was that I wanted to get out of there and be gone, but I didn't want to go back through the dance hall and the dancers. I didn't want to see Clydie. I was going to be a while understanding what had happened in my mind, but I understood that, whatever it was, it had made me unfit for Clydie. I didn't want to go back to Clydie, after all our loveliness, as a mere drunk to be helped out to the car.

And then I saw the little window rather high up over the toilet. I unhooked the sash and shoved it open. It looked impossibly narrow, but I was maybe no more rational than a penned sheep that lunges at a crack in the wall. I stepped up onto the rim of the toilet and then onto the flush tank, and thrust my right arm and then my head and both shoulders through the hole, and made as much of a jump as I could manage. And then I panicked. I had no foothold, my left arm was pinned between my ribs and the window. I began to suppose that some delighted boys were about to come in and see me stuck there with my legs waving about and would pull me back inside again. That thought sobered me some and gave me strength.

The men's room was actually a little lean-to stuck onto the back of
the building. I clawed around on the wall until I caught hold of what must have been a vent pipe or a downspout, and then I got my left foot against one of the stanchions of the toilet stall. I gave a mighty push and a pull, feeling the buttons pop one at a time off my jacket and the left sleeve tear loose at the shoulder, and then I tumbled out into the world headfirst, landing amidst a bunch of old tires, several garbage cans, thrown-away car parts, and other junk and trash.

As nearly as I could tell by feel, I was bleeding somewhat from a cut above my right ear and another on the bridge of my nose, and I was shy some skin along my ribs and belly. The rest of me was all right and able to get around, but I knew I had to use some caution now, for I didn't want to be “helped” by anybody. I didn't want to be kept safe from further damage to myself by being locked up in the county jail, either.

I eased around to the Zephyr, where by good luck I had left my hat and coat. I put them on so as to leave no dirt or blood on the upholstery, found a scrap of paper, and wrote a note to Clydie. The note said:

It shook me to see what I had written and the way I had signed it: “Love.” I said earlier that I didn't love her so much as I liked her. I will have to take that back. Love has a scale, and Clydie and I were on it somewhere. It hurt me to be leaving her.

But I had to go. It seemed that my way in this world had all of a sudden opened up again (like a door? a wound?) and was leading me on. I was thinking, “Oh, I have got to change or die. Oh, I have got to give up my life or die.”

Maybe I was wanting to get to a place where I could not be mistaken, at least in my own mind, for Troy Chatham. I thought, “I am not like
him.” But that thought didn't detain me long. I was thinking also of Mattie. I was going to have to choose. I was going to have to know what I was going to do.

I was plenty aware of the way I looked. My wrecked suit was mostly hidden by my overcoat, which I buttoned tight all the way up, but a man dressed as I was, drunk, with blood on his face, would surely be of interest to the police and maybe to other people. I pulled my hat low, turned down the brim, turned up my coat collar, and started walking home. I had to go back to Hargrave, through Hargrave, across the bridge at the river mouth, through Ellville, and then up the river road to Port William-twelve miles or better. I didn't know what time it was. It was late.

There wasn't much traffic. I walked on the left-hand side of the road, well off the pavement. When cars approached I stepped behind a tree, if one was handy, or kept walking with my head down. I tried to walk straight and fast to give the impression of sobriety and purpose. It was too cold, anyhow, to loiter.

When I got into Hargrave I turned off the main drag and went through on a darker street. After I got across the bridge, where I had no hiding place, I took care that nobody saw me the rest of the way home. On the Port William road, there was too good a chance that I would be recognized. At that time of night there were not many cars—three, maybe four. When I heard one coming I would get behind a tree or lie down in the weeds. I didn't want a ride. I didn't want help. I didn't want to explain anything or answer any questions.

Once I got beyond the town lights, the night was as dark as the inside of a cow. I couldn't see anything I looked directly at. By not looking at anything, by keeping my eyes focused on the dark in front of me, I could distinguish between the black surface of the road and the whiteness of the snow that, as it got colder, had begun to cling to the grass and weeds along the ditch. I kept to the darker side of the difference, and step by step, with a little surprise every time, felt the road there, solid underfoot. It was cold enough that I had to keep knocking along as fast as I could. I would have been glad to have more between my feet and the road than the soles of my Sunday shoes and a thin pair of socks. That it was snowing I could tell when a stray flake melted on my face, but it was snowing only as it had been earlier—a few big flakes drifting slowly down.

After I got used to the going, and the unseeable road and the cold and the dark and the wandering flakes of snow had become the established world of my journey, the thoughts of my mind began to separate themselves like the unbraiding strands of a cut rope.

I thought of Mattie at home up the river ahead of me, perhaps lying awake. I knew the subject of her thoughts, but I did not know her thoughts. I knew that she knew what her problems were, and that she would deal with them, that she was dealing with them, but I did not know how she was dealing with them. I did not know what she was saying to herself as she dealt with them. I knew (it never occurred to me to doubt) that, whatever her problems, whatever her thoughts, she was intact and clear within herself. This was what moved me and drew me toward her, though I could not come near her or be in her presence.

I knew also that Troy was incoherent and obscure within himself. He was a wishful thinker. A dreamer. His mere dream had led him into the reality of endless work and struggle, endless borrowing and paying of interest, endless suffering of the weather and weariness and the wear and tear of machines, and yet he was a dreamer still. He was an escapee. He would plunge from the confines of one dream into the confines of another. In the midst of his altogether laborious and wearing and frustrating life, in the middle of a winter's night, he would turn up at a roadhouse dance with the lips of a strange woman on his mind and a grin on his face. Where the hell did he think he was? What did he think he was?

What Troy Chatham was was my business—not because I chose to make it my business, but because it was. It was my business because I did not want to be what he was, and that was no sure thing. It was a fearful thing to be like him. But what I saw, walking up that dark road, was that it would also be a fearful thing to be unlike him. I saw that I had to try to become a man unimaginable to Troy Chatham, a man he could not imagine raising his hand to with the thumb and forefinger circled—but to do that I would have to become a man yet unimaginable to myself.

What I needed to know, what I needed to become a man who knew, was that Mattie Chatham did not, by the terms of life in this world, have to have an unfaithful husband—that, by the same terms in the same world, she might have had a faithful one.

On the dark road that night, I might have been anywhere at any time;
I did not know where I was even in the little world I knew; I couldn't have told you the time of night within three hours. And in all that darkness and unknowing, I was trying to say to myself that I knew what I was, that I could not have been just anybody.

In my mind, then, I began to question myself and answer myself. I wanted clarity, I wanted sight, but it seems to me that I did not try to think the thoughts I thought. I did not foresee the thoughts I was going to think.