Jayber Crow (39 page)

It got to be late April. We'd had some lovely weather. The woodlands were strewn with wildflowers and overhead were making shade. Everybody was busy about the fields and plant beds and gardens. The season had made its claim. And then there came a day of brittle-feeling showers driven over the town by a cold wind that, after the warm days, seemed to come through your clothes in slices.

I went to the back door as I always did and knocked twice, and nobody answered. I opened the door and leaned in. The kitchen was empty. As a kitchen was apt to be at that time of day, it was cool and formal, full of the reduced, mingled smells of seasonings and cold food. A cloth, as always, was spread over the things on the table, the chairs all shoved in at their places. There was a great pressure of silence in all the house.

I called quietly, “Anybody home?”

And even more quietly Della called back, “In here, Jayber.”

I laid down my barbering tools and tiptoed, suddenly full of knowledge, to Athey's room. It was the sitting room, where they had moved in a bed for him when he could no longer climb the stairs. I stopped in the door.

Della was standing on the far side of Athey's bed, holding his hand. He had felt poorly after dinner and had wanted to lie down for a nap, something he had resisted doing. She let him sleep a long time and then could not wake him. His eyes were open, but he was staring at nothing. She could not allow herself to leave him even to call Mattie on the phone. She looked at me and shaped silently the words, “He's going.” The words tugged at her mouth, but she was not crying. Seeing me hesitate, she smiled and said, “I'm glad you've come.”

I went over to the bed then and picked up Athey's other hand. He was breathing, but already he was not there. I could feel a small tremor in the
hand I held. There was almost no pulse. We stood a while with him, holding his hands. And then he ceased to breathe.

The eyes have a light. They give a light. I saw it go out in Athey's.

When the light had gone, Della, looking down, gently laid her fingers on his eyelids and closed them. She placed his hands together. She touched his forehead.

When finally she looked up at me, the light of our own eyes seemed to startle and glitter in the air between us.

And then, as her tears started to fall, she smiled and said, “Well.”

After my many days of a sort of family membership, it was strange to step back into my mere duty. I dug Athey's grave. I waited, standing aside, as the bearers brought the coffin up among the stones. And then, when the last of the living had gone away, I mended back the ground.

After Athey's death, I never went to his and Della's house again. There was, after that, no want of friendship between Mattie and Della and me. A certain confidence, a certain understanding, had been established and would remain. But our reason to be together had been withdrawn. And so the world changes.

It wasn't until Decoration Day that I talked with Della again. I walked to the graveyard early, the first thing, as I always do on that day, to make sure the place looked good, and also because I liked being there on that day.

Della was already there when I got there. The daylight was just coming. I imagined that she had been lying awake, missing Athey, and had been moved by the thought that it was Decoration Day and was glad to have that day's visit to make, something to do.

She had brought a great vase of white peonies, every blossom with a beautiful stain of red on the center petals, and had stood it in front of the stone that bore the legend:

There was young grass on the grave by then. She was bending over it, her left forearm propped on her left knee, doing what might have been
gardening or housekeeping—weeding, tossing away dead leaves and small stones. I made a walk around the place, over the hilltop and out of sight, not wanting to disturb her.

When I came around again to where I could see her, she had begun to walk away, slowly, reading the stones as she went. She saw me and raised her hand, and I went over.

I said, “Hello, Della.”

She ignored my greeting, seeming, in speaking to me, just to go on with her thoughts. “Well, Jayber, it's odd the things we do. I know he's not here. Or, anyhow, I don't feel that he is. He seems more gone from here than anywhere. And yet I come here, and I think of him. I can't do anything for him where I think he is. I do what I can. Those are pretty peonies, don't you think?”

“They're beautiful,” I said.

Her eyes had a glaze of tears that did not fall. I was touched entirely by the look of her and the sound of her voice. I said, “Della, are you all right?”

She said, “There are leftovers, Jayber. There are things I did or said that I wish I hadn't, and things I didn't do or say that I wish I had. When he finally got free of his sickness and awful clumsiness there at the last, I was glad, and yet I was sorry I was glad, and yet I miss him. But am I all right? Yes, I am all right. You know, Jayber, Athey never knew his mother.”

She went her way, then, and left me standing there still as a stone, all filled to running over with the force of what she had put into my mind.

It was the thought of Heaven. I thought an unimaginable thought of something I could almost imagine, of a sound I could not imagine but could almost hear: the outcry when a soul shakes off death at last and comes into Heaven. I don't speak of this because I “know” it. What I know is that shout of limitless joy, love unbound at last, our only native tongue.

 

The Chathams' youngest boy, Athey Keith, or A. K. as they called him, was only seven at the time of his grandfather's death, and I think he was not much affected by it. A. K. was a study—and I speak now from later knowledge. He seemed to be by nature what you might call a good boy. He was a good student. When he got old enough, he was (in a resigned
or routine sort of way) useful to his father. But he was also, seemingly by nature, not attracted at all to farming, or to much of anything else that Port William had to offer. He was quiet, as unhumorous as his father, and independent, standoffish. His mind, from the time he was just a little fellow, was elsewhere and he did not pretend otherwise. It was as if he had hardly come to consciousness before he was consciously waiting for a chance to be gone to some other place. And when the chance came he took it; after that he returned as seldom as possible. I never understood him or, to be honest, had much feeling for him. I suppose his mother understood him, if anybody did. I know Troy didn't. But I don't think Troy ever understood anybody, including himself. Of the Chathams' three children, I think A. K. was the most like Troy—though I don't think he particularly liked Troy, which may explain him somewhat.

Of all of us who knew Athey, the one who was most affected by his death, the one who was affected forever by it, was the older boy. Athey's death itself was a world's end for Jimmy. It was the loss of a companion and friend, which is what Jimmy thought it was. It was also, as the rest of us could soon see, the loss of a steadying influence. A worse loss may have been the little farm that the two of them had worked together. The place wasn't actually sold until after Della's death, but it was lost to Jimmy when Athey died. By the time it was sold, Jimmy himself was lost.

Della held on to the place, saw to it that the old mules grazed there until they died, as Athey had wanted them to do, and let Jimmy raise the tobacco crop. But no shoats were purchased that spring to be grown out and fattened for slaughter in the fall, the milk cow had been sold, the chickens given away, the garden leveled and sowed in grass. The old household integrity of the place, the put-together picture puzzle of it that Jimmy had loved, had to be given up. It was too much for Della alone.

“But
I'll
do it,” he said, shedding a boy's tears for the last time in his life. “
I'll
take care of it.”

It was, of course, not possible. He was only another child trying to call back what was forever gone. The little place, as it had been, was not possible. What had held it together and justified it had been Athey, and Athey was gone. Jimmy was a big boy, too old now to be fiddling around. His daddy needed him.

From that time on, Jimmy Chatham was a young man with a calling he could not answer.

Troy did need him. He needed somebody. He needed more help, as usual, than he could afford. It was opportune that his own son had grown strong enough to be of use.

The problem was that Jimmy had grown strong enough also to rebel. He didn't take to working for his father, he didn't like his father's ways or sympathize with his predicament, and he altogether lacked A. K.'s ability to resign himself even temporarily to what he disliked.

Troy was stretched tight in every way, financially, physically, and mentally—as he had been and was going to be. He was farming too much rented land, doing it badly, spending too much time on the road. His work was always a little (or more than a little) behind, always under the shadow of hopelessness and defeat. He was always exasperated or desperate. And always, in town, he was bluffing and blustering, acting the part of a man of large concerns, with many irons in the fire, needing to be in a hurry. And he
was
in a hurry. He had worked himself into circumstances of debt and obligation that hurried him even beyond his wish to look like a man in a hurry.

To Jimmy, this meant that they were always toiling in a mess, always facing too much work that they would have to do in too much haste, and with aging, overworked equipment. It meant that Troy always expected too much and was never satisfied.

Troy's dependence on Jimmy, which increased as the boy grew older, gave Jimmy commensurate power to make trouble, which of course he used. The two of them were at war from the start. Jimmy had as yet no way of escape, and he could not or would not willingly obey. Troy could not help hinting and even saying that Jimmy had been misled by his grandfather's influence. Nor could he overlook any fault or error in his son's work. “Did you think you were still up there driving that old team of mules?” “Did you think you could do that while you were asleep?”

Jimmy was quick with sass when he wanted to be. He tried all the effects of deliberate incomprehension and slowness. He could go for days without saying a word to anybody.

Sometimes, in his new sullenness, he helped his mother in her garden, or she would send him to care for the chickens. But it was not the
same. This work seemed only to impress on him a hopelessness that he felt without knowing. His mother's work and his father's were not parts of the same thing.

They no longer kept a milk cow or slaughtered hogs for their own use. Such things Troy liked to be seen dismissing with a wave of his hand. “I'm not fooling with any damned milk cow.” Such enterprises did not conform to his idea of “the business of farming.” He believed that he could not afford to fiddle around. He did not do little jobs. The business of farming had to do with “volume.” He would say, “There's no money in that,” as if it were his bravery to know that many things had to be overlooked or driven through or reached across to get money, of which nevertheless he needed more than he got.

Troy's one aim was to be at work with the greatest available power in the biggest possible field. During the sixties, with Athey gone and Della out of the way, and Mattie resigned or unable to resist, he began tearing out fences, plowing through waterways, bulldozing groves of trees. He didn't want anything in his way. He wanted to be seated on power, driving on and on. His belief (his religion, you might as well say) was that if he went on covering ever more ground with ever greater power, discounting the costs in worry, weariness, and soil erosion, he could finally be a success, a real businessman, with an office he actually sat and worked in. He would have status. People would look at him with envy.

He was a dreamer. He could not imagine himself as he was or where he was. And so he dreamed of himself as he would never be. For a dream he borrowed money, rented land, bought machines, drove them in big fields to the limit of endurance and beyond. It was a dream he could not have escaped even if he had waked up, for he belonged to it by his pledge and signature. His name was on too many dotted lines. The too little he earned by too much work already belonged to other people before he even earned it.

To Jimmy, such work was solitary confinement. It was slavery. He knew it instinctively, without thinking about it. He knew it because he had known his grandfather and was in spirit his grandfather's son. His own father he did not know, really, and never would. And so he could not see a way out. He was, after all, only a boy of twelve and then thirteen and fourteen and fifteen.

He still had his grin, but now it was turned away from the family. Now it was turned to the world. It was a grin of readiness. He was waiting to see what the world might offer. He wanted and expected it to offer something if not better at least different. He wanted to hear its dare. You could still see the mischief in his grin, but you could see trouble too. All he needed was a car.

Athey Keith died in the spring of 1961. As I look back on it now, his death seems to have been the start of a new run of hard times for Port William, and of course for other places like it. Still and always, Port William was contending with The News. The local news was just talk, the result of Port William's never-ceasing observation of its own doings and its listening to itself. The other news, The News of the World, seemed to have to do principally with The War and The Economy.

I know it is somewhat objectionable to capitalize such things and speak of them as if they were freestanding creatures. But The War and The Economy were seeming more and more to be independent operators. The War, I thought, was just the single Hell that is always astir in the world, always going on in modest ways even when it has not broken out in full force. And the nations were always preparing funds of weapons and machines and people to be used up whenever The War did break out in full force, which meant that sooner or later it would.