Jayber Crow (36 page)

“You want to believe that Mattie Chatham did not necessarily have to have an unfaithful husband.”

“Yes. That is right.”

“But can you prove that?”

“Maybe not.”

“She could prove that she could have a faithful husband only by having one.”

“I suppose so.”

“So her need, then, you're saying, is to have a faithful husband?”

“Yes, that must be what I'm saying.”

“Well, where is she going to get one?”

“Well, I don't know. It seems a stupid question. She already has got a husband.”

“But is he not unfaithful?”

“Yes, he is unfaithful.”

“And she needs a faithful one.”

“Yes, she does.”

“But if she never has one, you will never know if the terms of this world might have allowed her to have one.”

“I suppose that is right.”

“But where could—
how
could—she get one?”

“Well, if she ever is going to have one, I'm sure, of course, it will have to be me.”

“Wait, now. Hold on. Do you know what you just said?”

“Yes.”

“Do you mean that you love Mattie Chatham enough to say what you just said?”

“Yes. Oh, yes! I do.”

“You love her enough to be a faithful husband to her? Think what you're saying, now. You're proposing to be the faithful husband of a woman who is already married to an unfaithful husband?”

“Yes. That's why. If she has an unfaithful husband, then she needs a faithful one.”

“A woman already married who must never know that you are her husband? Think. And who will never be your wife?”

“Yes.”

“Have you foreseen how this may end? Can you?”

“No.”

“Are you ready for this? Think, now.”

“Yes. I am ready.”

“Do you, then, in love's mystery and fear, give yourself to this woman to be her faithful husband from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death?”

“I do. Yes! That is my vow.”

I tremble to say so, but when I had given that assent, it seemed that there were watchers watching in the dark who all of a sudden could see me.

Maybe I had begun my journey drunk and ended it crazy. Probably I am not the one to say. But though I felt the whole world shaken underfoot, though I foresaw nothing and feared everything, I felt strangely steadied in my mind, strangely elated and quiet.

The sky had lightened a little by the time I reached the top of the Port William hill. It was Sunday morning again. I left the road and more or less felt my way home over the fences and through the fields, at considerable further expense to my clothes and shoes. I climbed into my frozen garden, went up the stairs, and let myself into my room. There was still some warmth from the coal fire I had left burning down in the shop. I sat in my chair and let the cold, slow daylight come around me.

It is a fearful thing to be married and yet live alone, and sleep alone (as I felt in my worst nights) like the dead in the ground. And yet ever after that night of the Christmas dance, I lived under the power of my vow, and I kept it.

Sometimes I knew in all my mind and heart why I had done what I had done, and I welcomed the sacrifice. But there were times too when I lived in a desert and felt no joy and saw no hope and could not remember my old feelings. Then I lived by faith alone, faith without hope.

What good did I get from it? I got to have love in my heart.

Was I fooling myself? I know myself to be a man skilled in self-deception, and so maybe (for the sake of argument, for the sake of whatever truth may be in argument) I ought to suppose that I was fooling myself. If, in addition to my being her husband, Mattie had been my wife and we had lived together, would we not have bickered and battled at times, as other married couples do? Would she not at times have been as incomprehensible and exasperating to me as most men's wives appear to be at times? Would I not have been to her, at times, as thwarting and outrageous as most women's husbands evidently are? Why should I assume that I would have loved her all her life?

All I can answer is that I did love her all her life—from the time before
I ever saw her, it seems, and until she died. I do love her all her life, and still, and always. That is my answer, but in fact love does not answer any argument. It answers all arguments, merely by turning away, leaving them to find what rest they can.

I was married to Mattie Chatham but she was not married to me, which pretty fairly balanced her marriage to Troy, who became always less married to her, though legally (and varyingly in appearance) he remained her husband.

Young lovers see a vision of the world redeemed by love. That is the truest thing they ever see, for without it life is death. I believed that Mattie had seen that vision in the time of her falling in love with Troy Chatham, and that she kept it still and honored it. And so I honored it. But the answering vision, which ought to have been his, was mine. And my marriage to Mattie was validated in a way by Troy's continuing invalidation of his marriage to her.

Only once did that questioning voice of my dark walk return. It said, “Is it legal to be married to somebody who is not married to you?”

I said, “I guess it's legal to be married to any number of people as long as they don't know it.”

“But there's not any comfort in that.”

“No,” I said. “No comfort.” But I had to laugh.

I had not, you see, arrived at any place of rest. Maybe I had not solved a single problem or come any nearer to the peace which passeth all understanding. But I was changed. I had entered, as I now clearly saw, upon the way of love (it was the way I followed home from Hargrave that snowy night; maybe it was the way I followed back to Port William during the flood), and it changed everything. It was not a way that I found for myself, but only a way that I found myself following. Maybe I had always followed it, blunderingly and uncertainly. But now, though it was still a dark way, I was certainly following it. At first I thought that this great change had come to me during my walk after the dance at Riverwood. Later I knew that it had come the day, up there in the churchyard, when I fell in love with Mattie and my heart cracked open like an egg.

Now that I knew what it was that had led me from the start, I had to reckon with it. I had to look over what I had learned so far of life in this world and see what light my heart's love now shed upon it. What did
love have to say to its own repeated failure to transform the world that it might yet redeem? What did it say to our failures to love one another and our enemies? What did it say to hate? What did it say to time? Why doesn't love succeed?

Hate succeeds. This world gives plentiful scope and means to hatred, which always finds its justifications and fulfills itself perfectly in time by destruction of the things of time. That is why war is complete and spares nothing, balks at nothing, justifies itself by all that is sacred, and seeks victory by everything that is profane. Hell itself, the war that is always among us, is the creature of time, unending time, unrelieved by any light or hope.

But love, sooner or later, forces us out of time. It does not accept that limit. Of all that we feel and do, all the virtues and all the sins, love alone crowds us at last over the edge of the world. For love is always more than a little strange here. It is not explainable or even justifiable. It is itself the justifier. We do not make it. If it did not happen to us, we could not imagine it. It includes the world and time as a pregnant woman includes her child whose wrongs she will suffer and forgive. It is in the world but is not altogether of it. It is of eternity. It takes us there when it most holds us here.

Maybe love fails here, I thought, because it cannot be fulfilled here. And then I saw something that a normal life with a normal marriage might never have allowed me to see. I saw that Mattie was not merely desirable, but desirable beyond the power of time to show. Even if she had been my wife, even if I had been in the usual way her husband, she would have remained beyond me. I could not have desired her enough. She was a living soul and could be loved forever. Like every living creature, she carried in her the presence of eternity. That was why, as she grew older, I saw in her always the child she had been, and why, looking at her when she was a child, I felt the influence of the woman she would be. That is why, in marrying one another, we mortals say “till death.” We must take love to the limit of time, because time cannot limit it. A life cannot limit it. Maybe to have it in your heart all your life in this world, even while it fails here, is to succeed. Maybe that is enough.

And so there were times when I knew (I knew beyond any proof) that the faith that carried me through the waterless wastes was not wasted.

I began to pray again. I took it up again exactly where I had left off twenty years before, in doubt and hesitation, bewildered and unknowing what to say. “Thy will be done,” I said, and seemed to feel my own bones tremble in the grave.

Not a single one of my doubts and troubles about the Scripture had ever left me. They had, in fact, got worse. The more my affections and sympathies had got involved in Port William, the more uneasy I became with certain passages, not just in the letters of St. Paul, that clarifying and exasperating man, but even in the Gospels. When I would read, “Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left. Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left,” my heart would be with the ones who were left. And when I read of the division of the sheep from the goats, I couldn't consent to give up on the goats—though, like most people, I had my list of goats, who seemed hopeless enough to me, and I didn't know what to do about them.

What would I do with a son who killed his father merely to inherit his money, and only a little quicker than he would have inherited it anyhow? What would I do with that woman—she lived up in the big bottom at the mouth of Willow Run long ago—who beat a black girl to death for stealing a spoon and then found the spoon? What would I do with somebody who reduced the world in order to live in it, somebody who reduced life by living it? What would I do with a man who wished for the death of his rival? I didn't know. I could see that Hell existed and was daily among us. And yet I didn't want to give up even on the ones in Hell. For the best of reasons, as you might say.

“You don't want to go to Hell, honey,” said Miss Gladdie Finn.

“I don't,” I said. “But I don't reckon it has enough room for everybody who's eligible.”

“Well, I don't know,” she said. “A soul is mighty small.”

But now I could see something else too—something, I suppose, that old Dr. Ardmire knew I did not see, and knew I would not easily see. My mistake was not in asking the questions that so plagued my mind back there at Pigeonville, for how could I have helped it? I can't help it yet; the questions are with me yet. My mistake was ignoring the verses that say God loves the world.

But now (by a kind of generosity, it seemed) the world had so beaten
me about the head, and so favored me with good and beautiful things, that I was able to see. “God loves Port William as it is,” I thought. “Why else should He want it to be better than it is?”

All my life I had heard preachers quotingJohn 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” They would preach on the second part of the verse, to show the easiness of being saved (“Only believe”). Where I hung now was the first part. If God loved the world even before the event at Bethlehem, that meant He loved it as it was, with all its faults. That would be Hell itself, in part. He would be like a father with a wayward child, whom He can't help and can't forget. But it would be even worse than that, for He would also know the wayward child and the course of its waywardness and its suffering. That His love contains all the world does not show that the world does not matter, or that He and we do not suffer it unto death; it shows that the world is Hell only in part. But His love can contain it only by compassion and mercy, which, if not Hell entirely, would be at least a crucifixion.

From my college courses and my reading I knew the various names that came at the end of a line of questions or were placed as periods to bafflement: the First Cause, the First Mover, the Life Force, the Universal Mind, the First Principle, the Unmoved Mover, even Providence. I too had used those names in arguing with others, and with myself, trying to explain the world to myself. And now I saw that those names explained nothing. They were of no more use than Evolution or Natural Selection or Nature or The Big Bang of these later days. All such names do is catch us within the length and breadth of our own thoughts and our own bewilderment. Though I knew the temptation of simple reason, to know nothing that can't be proved, still I supposed that those were not the right names.

I imagined that the right name might be Father, and I imagined all that that name would imply: the love, the compassion, the taking offense, the disappointment, the anger, the bearing of wounds, the weeping of tears, the forgiveness, the suffering unto death. If love could force my own thoughts over the edge of the world and out of time, then could I not see how even divine omnipotence might by the force of its love be swayed down into the world? Could I not see how it might, because
it could know its creatures only by compassion, put on mortal flesh, become a man, and walk among us, assume our nature and our fate, suffer our faults and our death?