Jayber Crow (37 page)

Yes. And I could imagine a Father who is yet like a mother hen spreading her wings before the storm or in the dusk before the dark night for the little ones of Port William to come in under, some of whom do, and some do not. I could imagine Port William riding its humble wave through time under the sky, its little flames of wakefulness lighting and going out, its lives passing through birth, pleasure, suffering, and death. I could imagine God looking down upon it, its lives living by His spirit, breathing by His breath, knowing by His light, but each life living also (inescapably) by its own will—His own body given to be broken.

Once I had imagined those things, there was no longer with me any question of what is called “belief.” It was not a “conversion” in the usual sense, as though I had been altogether out and now was altogether in. It was more as though I had been in a house and a storm had blown off the roof; I was more in the light than I had thought. And also, at night, of course, more in the dark. I had changed, and the sign of it was only that my own death now seemed to me by far the least important thing in my life.

What answer can human intelligence make to God's love for the world? What answer, for that matter, can it make to our own love for the world? If a person loved the world—really loved it and forgave its wrongs and so might have his own wrongs forgiven—what would be next?

And so how was a human to pray? I didn't know, and yet I prayed. I prayed the terrible prayer: “Thy will be done.” Having so prayed, I prayed for strength. That seemed reasonable and right enough. As did praying for forgiveness and the grace to forgive. I prayed unreasonably, foolishly, hopelessly, that everybody in Port William might be blessed and happy—the ones I loved and the ones I did not. I prayed my gratitude.

The results, perhaps, were no more than expectable. I found, as I had always found, that I had strength, but never quite as much as I needed—or, anyhow, wanted. I felt that I might be partly forgiven, as I was partly forgiving; Port William continued to be partly blessed and happy, as before, and partly not; I was as grateful as I said I was. And so perhaps my prayers were partly answered; some perhaps were answered entirely.
Perhaps all the good that ever has come here has come because people prayed it into the world. How would a person know? How could divine intervention happen, if it happens, without looking like a coincidence or luck? Does the world continue by chance (since it can hardly do so by justice) or by the forgiveness and mercy that some people have continued to pray for?

But why ask? It was not just a matter of cause and effect. Prayers were not tools or money. Sometimes in my mind I would be sitting again in Dr. Ardmire's office, as if I had returned to 1935 out of my later life to give him my report. I finally knew, I told him, why Christ's prayer in the garden could not be granted. He had been seeded and birthed into human flesh. He was one of us. Once He had become mortal, He could not become immortal except by dying. That He prayed that prayer at all showed how human He was. That He knew it could not be granted showed His divinity; that He prayed it anyhow showed His mortality, His mortal love of life that His death made immortal. And I could see Dr. Ardmire looking straight at me with that distant, amused light in his eyes, and I could hear him say, “Well. And now what?”

I had learned a good deal since 1935, I supposed. But did that mean that I could explain much of anything? It did not. Did it mean that my way in the world was now lighted to the very end? It did not.

I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever.

Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart. It is like a bird that has blundered down the flue and is caught indoors and flutters at the windowpanes. It is like standing a long time on a cold day, knocking at a shut door.

But sometimes a prayer comes that you have not thought to pray, yet suddenly there it is and you pray it. Sometimes you just trustfully and easily pass into the other world of sleep. Sometimes the bird finds that what looks like an opening is an opening, and it flies away. Sometimes the shut door opens and you go through it into the same world you were in before, in which you belong as you did not before.

If God loves the world, might that not be proved in my own love for it? I prayed to know in my heart His love for the world, and this was my
most prideful, foolish, and dangerous prayer. It was my step into the abyss. As soon as I prayed it, I knew that I would die. I knew the old wrong and the death that lay in the world. Just as a good man would not coerce the love of his wife, God does not coerce the love of His human creatures, not for Himself or for the world or for one another. To allow that love to exist fully and freely, He must allow it not to exist at all. His love is suffering. It is our freedom and His sorrow. To love the world as much even as I could love it would be suffering also, for I would fail. And yet all the good I know is in this, that a man might so love this world that it would break his heart.

 

After that night of the Christmas dance, I never owned a car again. I can see now that this in itself was an important stage of my journey. It was a step backward, maybe. I was no longer progressing. From then on, I didn't often leave the Port William neighborhood. If I went anywhere I either walked or bummed a ride.

The world all at once became bigger, as big almost as I remembered it from my childhood. Hargrave had drawn farther away. If I went there now I had to think ahead and allow time. For me there was no more jumping into a car and running somewhere. Louisville and Lexington, places I had driven to now and again in the Zephyr (for reasons soon hard to remember), I never went to again.

My social life changed. Before, I had yearned for company, especially the company of women, and had gone seeking it. Now I no longer went seeking, but taught myself (not always easily) to make do with the company that came.

I felt older. I felt that I had seen ages of the world come and go. Now, finally, I really had lost all desire for change, every last twinge of the notion that I ought to get somewhere or make something of myself. I was what I was. “I will stand like a tree,” I thought, “and be in myself as I am.” And the things of Port William seemed to stand around me, in themselves as they were.

I went regularly about my duties, my meals, my lying down and rising. My days and tasks seemed not to be accumulating toward anything. I was making nothing of myself. I was not going anywhere. In the silences of the shop on summer days, I could hear the clock ticking (a sound I
love), and the ticks did not seem to add up to minutes or hours, but merely passed. Customers and loafers entered the shop, made their curious mixtures of character and preoccupation, spoke the resulting conversations, and went away. The talk flared, burned brightly, or died down, according to the availability of fuel.

“Woger,” said Grover Gibbs one fine day to Roger Roberts, speaking generously in the spirit of an older man advising a younger one, “looks like you and Sassy ought to have some children. Everybody ought to have at least a few.”

“Ain't no use in plantin' 'em one night and wootin' 'em up the next,” said Roger, causing Grover to slump forward suddenly as if knocked in the head.

“Looord, what is this weather coming to?” said Julep Smallwood, looking out at the rain turning to snow on a bitter north wind.

And Burley Coulter said, “Aw, Julep, it'll all average out to something tolerably comfortable.”

“He drinked a fifth of whiskey a day, and smoked hard to tell how many cigarettes,” said Grover Gibbs, shaking his head, “and it finally killed him.”

“How old was he?” asked Mr. Milo Settle, biting.

“Ninety-two.”

One Saturday night, Walter Cotman sat tilted against the wall in a wire-back chair and told in his matter-of-fact way, without ever a smile, about going to Corbin Crane's sale and buying back one by one the tools that he had loaned to Corbin and that Corbin still had when he died. Walter said, “I hated to ask his widow for 'em.”

“I always keep springwater in the radiator on my car,” Grover Gibbs proclaimed to John T. McCallum.

“Now, why,” said John T., already outraged, “would a man ever do any such of a thing as that?”

“Well, did you ever hear of a spring that froze?”

“
And,”
said Grover, “I had an old sow that got out of the pen through a hollow log. It was a crooked log, so I stuck both ends under the fence. She run herself to death just going round and round.”

John T., looking off through the window into the far distance for relief, said, “Psht!”

Reading in the paper of the death of a beautiful actress, Athey Keith said, “She has passed from the beautician to the mortician.”

“What's the matter, old hoss?” said Burley Coulter to Big Ellis, who one evening stepped a little painfully through the door.

“Well, Burley,” Big Ellis said, being honest, “my knees is giving me trouble.”

“First your knees,” Burley said, “and then your ass.”

They found a certain wondrous glee in the joke of getting old, and they varied it endlessly.

“Age,” said River Bill Thacker toward the end of a conversation to the general effect that time, contrary to expectation, made old men out of young ones. “Age has done more for my morals than Methodism ever did.”

“Well,” Burley Coulter said, thinking maybe of his mother's years of dying away by bits, “some people live a long time.”

Catching his tone, Bill said, “What's the matter with living a long time? It ain't going to kill you.”

“No,” Burley said. “Not for a long time.”

 

Burley Coulter and Big Ellis were telling the story of how they baked the cake. Both of them were in the story and I had heard them tell it maybe a dozen times, but they were telling it again. It was always a good story.

The crops were laid by. Annie May, Big Ellis's wife, had gone to spend a week with her brother. Burley, for some reason, had wandered over to Big Ellis's early in the afternoon, maybe just to pass the time. Big Ellis somehow had on hand a fifth of very good whiskey, of which he generously offered Burley a drink, which Burley then praised and recommended to Big Ellis, who drank and generously offered it again.

Events, and the story too, began to slide a little at that point. Before long, it seemed, Grover Gibbs and Rufus Brightleaf showed up for some reason, and Grover for some reason had three pints of very good whiskey in a minnow bucket in the back end of his truck. And then it seemed that some others showed up. They had a happy, sociable, amusing time all afternoon.

About midway of the latter half of the afternoon they got hungry. Burley suggested that they ought to fry some fish. So they got Big Ellis's
seine and went and seined his pond. They caught an excellent mess of fish and two turtles. Some of them started dressing the catch, and Burley and Big Ellis, both of them pretty good cooks, started breading the fish and frying them and making corn pones and a big pot of coffee.

They had a fine feast. But then Rufus Brightleaf said they ought to have some dessert—he was a cake man himself. So Burley and Big Ellis said well, then, they would make a cake.

That put them into new territory. Neither of them had ever made a cake before, so they had to go by Annie May's recipe. It was going to be an angel food cake.

They went strictly by the directions. They separated the egg yolks from the whites, beat the whites, mixed up all the other ingredients, and put the batter into a cake pan. It did not fill the pan—nothing like.

“It ain't enough,” Burley said.

“It ain't nothing like enough,” said Grover Gibbs, also a pretty good cook, who had come over to criticize. “I could eat that big a cake by myself.”

So they got the dishpan and repeated the recipe until the pan was full, making sure they would have plenty for everybody, and using up in the process most of the eggs Annie May had saved up to sell at the store.

When they opened the oven at the end of the prescribed time, they had an angel food cake of exactly the same dimensions as the oven, containing within it the racks of the oven and the dishpan.

That night, by the time they got the oven cleaned and the kitchen set to rights in anticipation of Annie May's homecoming the next morning, Burley and Big Ellis were more sober than they wished to be.

But it was a good cake. Even the dogs and the hogs thought so.

 

The nation lapsed into peace there for a while, between the Korean War and the one in Vietnam. Or, rather, instead of fighting a war, it was merely getting ready to fight one, and for a while Port William eased along without patriotic deaths. The farmers' economy, which was pretty good at the end of the Second World War, stayed pretty good for a while, though it began a long slant downward in the early fifties. For just a while, it was possible for Port William to think and act as if it had a future as itself, although there were signs, if you were looking for signs, that as
itself it was fading away. The blacksmith shop had been closed since Mr. Will Johnson died in 1951. The elder Mixters had died; one of Bill's boys was working in an explosives factory in Indiana, the other in construction in Louisville. The old music had about entirely gone. Television had come. Instead of sitting out and talking from porch to porch on the summer evenings, the people sat inside in rooms filled with the flickering blue light of the greater world.

And yet for a while Port William kept on as pretty much itself. (Maybe something of itself will always be there. Who is to say?) There remained among the men those who, at least in the daytime and some even at night, would rather sit and talk in my shop or the poolroom or the garage or one of the stores than sit at home and watch TV The rowdy boys still held a sort of loose party way into Saturday night in bearable weather, talking in the sitting places in front of the stores, driving back and forth in their cars, playing the radio loud, smoking, talking, laughing, scuffling, drinking some. Now and then they would build a fire and sit around it. They were noisy enough, but as a general thing in those days they caused no serious trouble. (It had been a longish while since anybody from Port William had been shot in Port William, and it would be a longish while again. Of course, though all things don't come to all men, all things sooner or later come to somebody, and Port William had had and would have its allotment of shooting.) About the time the boys all dwindled off to sleep, Athey Keith and the other old farming men grew tired of their beds and began to stir out to their chores, if they had any, or they came to the sitting-and-talking places to wait for daylight.