Jayber Crow (40 page)

Also it seemed that The War and The Economy were more and more closely related. They were the Siamese twins of our age, dressed alike, joined head to head, ready at any moment to merge into a single unified Siamese, when the crossed eyes of government should uncross. The War was good for The Economy. There was a certain airy, wordy kind of
patriotism that added profit to its virtue. There was money in it, as Troy Chatham would say, who himself was being used by The Economy like lead in a pencil or in a gun. After he was used up, he would not be given a second chance. There is no rebirth in The Economy.

When I say that Port William suffered a new run of hard times in the 1960s, I don't mean that it had to “weather a storm” and come out safe again in the sunshine. I mean that it began to suffer its own death, which it has not yet completed, from which it may or may not revive. And here, talking against the wind, so to speak, I must enter, along with my lamentation, my objection. You may say that I am just another outdated old man complaining about progress and the changes of time. But, you see, I have well considered that possibility myself, and am prepared to submit to correction by anybody who cares about a community, who can show me how the world is improved by that community's dying.

At about the time of Athey's death, Milton Burgess also died, leaving everything to his sister in Dayton. Which is to say that Burgess General Merchandise, Milton's headquarters and profession and hobby and staff of life for nearly sixty years, was (you might as well say) without an inheritor. The sister had a son, but he lived in Denver and of course was not inclined to stop midway in his life's journey and come to Port William to keep store.

The store was put up for sale, and to everybody's surprise nobody wanted it. The old building had swayed a little in the winds that had blown since 1874 and was not quite as handsome or as steady on its feet as it had been in its youth, but it still had some life ahead of it. And it was still pretty fully stocked, ready to go on being a store. It could not have made anybody rich, but there was a living in it.

It was not a living that anybody wanted. Nobody wanted it because having it would have involved irregular hours, irregular pay, full-time responsibility, some worry, and living in Port William. It had about come to the point where nobody wanted to live in Port William who wasn't already in the habit of living there, or who could afford to live anyplace else. The world had become pretty generally Ceceliafied. We had received no young doctor to take the place of Dr. Markman, whose little office had begun to sink back onto its haunches. Nobody wanted to make a little money if making it required them to worry as well as work.
Nobody wanted to have to be responsible after “quitting time.” They had the idea of an eight-hour day and a weekly check. So finally Burgess General Merchandise went for whatever it would bring at the courthouse door. Braymer Hardy bought it for not much, sold out the merchandise at a profit (though he said not), and turned the building over to his wife to use as an “Antique and Junque” store. She used it mainly as a place to keep things, opening for business only when she felt like it, and pricing her stuff to keep. One night some drunken prophet scrawled COME HOME in a big scripture of green paint on one of the windows. When Josie Hardy died, Braymer held an auction of the contents and gave the building to Billy Gibbs and his boys as the price of tearing it down.

The demise of Burgess General Merchandise gave Jasper Lathrop the monopoly (if you would call it that). Commerce in Port William did not cease—it hasn't ceased yet—but in some ways the slant was getting steeper. Jasper Lathrop, like most country merchants then, bought chickens and eggs and cream from the farmwives. This was a more important prop to the local economy than you might think. It was one of the main-stays of the household economy of the farms, helping the families to preserve their subsistence by making a ready market for the surplus. But also it was a valuable tie between Jasper and his customers. It brought in trade.

But that ended. The household poultry flocks began to dwindle away. So did the little household dairying enterprises of two to maybe half a dozen cows. The farmwives, who once had come to town with produce, bought their groceries, and gone home with money, now went to the store (maybe in some more distant town) with only money and went home with only groceries.

The Economy no longer wanted the people of Port William to produce, for instance, eggs. It wanted them to eat eggs without producing them. Or, more properly speaking, it wanted them to buy eggs. It didn't care whether the eggs were eaten or not, so long as they were bought. It didn't care how fresh they were or how good they were, so long as they were bought. Perhaps, so long as they were paid for, The Economy was not much interested even in delivering the eggs.

For The Economy was studying the purpose of The War, which is to
purchase and not have. The customers of The War (all of us, that is) purchase life at a great cost and yet lose it.

And The War was just as busily studying the purpose of The Economy, which is to cause people to purchase what they do not need or do not want, and to receive patiently what they did not expect.

Having paid for life, we receive death. By now, in this nineteen hundred and eighty-sixth Year of Our Lord, we all have purchased how many shares in death? How many bombs, shells, mines, guns, grenades, poisons, anonymous murders, nameless sufferings, official secrets? But not the controlling share. Death cannot be marketed in controlling shares.

Also going, soon to be almost entirely gone, were the sheep flocks. Sheep had been always a part of farming in this region of the world. Port William, over the years, had sent thousands and thousands of spring lambs to Louisville. The lambs would be born in January and February and sent to market straight off the ewes in May and June. The wool, it was said, kept and fed the ewes, and the lambs were clear money. And then that dwindled away in only a few years. “Dogs,” the farmers would say after they had sold their flocks. “The damned dogs were cleaning me out.” But I don't think that altogether explains it. When a lot of people have sheep, after all, stray dogs tend to disappear.

Age, I think, may have had more to do with it. The farmers were getting older. The young people were leaving or, if they stayed, were not interested. Sheep require a lot of work and trouble. People were less willing to be up at night in the winter with lambing ewes. But also once a fabric is torn, it is apt to keep tearing. It was coming apart. The old integrity had been broken.

And the farmers, some of them at least, were worrying. They knew that farming was in decline, losing diversity, losing self-sufficiency, losing production capacity. A sort of communal self-confidence, which must always have existed, had begun to die away.

You could hear it in the talk. Elton Penn, say, would come in on a Saturday night for a haircut, and then another good farmer, Nathan Coulter maybe or Luther Swain, would come in, and then others. Prices and costs would be quoted, news exchanged, comments made, questions asked. It would be a conversation that I could pretty well have written down word for word before it took place. They would talk quietly, humorously, anxiously
about what was happening to them. They were feeling their way through facts they could not help but know toward a hopeful prediction they could never make. “If things keep on this way,” they were asking, “what is going to become of us?”

Well, they already suspected what I now know. They were going to die, most of them, without being replaced. Some of them would die alone, in houses from which everybody else had gone, to the graveyard or “away” Poor old Luther Swain was dead alone for two days, lying on his face in his barn lot. (To his grandchildren, wherever they were, if they could have known him, he would have been no less strange than Abraham.) But they weren't worrying just about themselves. They were worrying about the fate of their life, what they had lived by and for, their work, their place. They ventured even to worry about the fate of eaters (who were not worried about the fate of farmers). I've heard it a thousand times: “I don't know what people are finally going to do for something to eat.”

And one night Elton grinned, I remember, and said, “I've wished sometimes that the sons of bitches would starve. And now I'm getting afraid they actually will.”

The others laughed, knowing what he meant. They are dead now, most of them. Most of them kept on farming until they died. They kept on because they had no choice, or because that was what they had always done and was the way they knew themselves, or because they liked it. Or for all of those reasons. And as long as they farmed they worried about farming and what was to become of it. This worry was maybe the main theme of conversation in my shop for a long time. The older men and some of the younger ones returned to it as if dutifully. But it wasn't a duty. It was just a continuation of the pondering and the wondering and the fear and the great sorrow that had been in each of their minds as they went about their often lonely work.

I don't think that such thoughts had ever been in the minds of farming people before. Before, no matter how hard they worked or how little they earned, farmers had always had at least the assurance that they were doing the necessary work of the world, and that before them others (most likely their own parents and grandparents) had done the same work, which still others (most likely their own children and grandchildren)
would do when they were gone. In this enduring lineage had been a kind of dignity, the dignity at least of knowing that the work you are doing must be done and that it does not begin and end with yourself. Now the conversation in my shop was burdened with the knowledge that their work might come to an end. A good many of them already knew to a certainty that they did not know who would be next to farm their farms, or if their farms would be farmed at all. All of them knew that neither farming nor the place would continue long as they were. The dignity of continuity had been taken away. Both past and future were disappearing from them, the past because nobody would remember it, the future because nobody could imagine it. What they knew was passing from the world. Before long it would not be known. They were the last of their kind.

Troy Chatham, if he was there, would hold himself outside this conversation. But he could not be too much aloof from it, because he needed to stay close enough to look down on it. He despised their fear and the old-fashioned, nearly lost hope that was the cause and meaning of their fear. To Troy, in his zeal for newfangledness, they and their thoughts were as out-of-date as last year's snow. They were leftovers, obsolete. The world, ever advancing toward better things, was just waiting for them to get out of the way. He never said as much outright, but he made his point by his standing aloof, by his looking down, by his refusal of their hope and their worry. He made his point by not bothering to make it.

He did say, and said often enough, that he had the answer: modernize, mechanize, specialize, grow. They were all involved (unavoidably, as they saw it) in the industrialization of farming, but they didn't believe Troy. A few of them—Elton Penn, for one—returned his contempt. How could you thrive if you were buying everything you needed and your costs were increasing faster than your earnings? If you were losing money or breaking even on growing corn, how could you correct that by growing more corn?

Troy would answer by talking about man-hours, efficiency, economy of scale, and volume. He was attending meetings, listening to experts, and he had their language.

Or one of them would say, “Well, I reckon maybe that's all right, if you don't mind borrowing the money”

Troy had a ready answer to that too. “Debt is just an ordinary business expense,” he would say.

And then, knowing they knew he was, by their standard, too much in debt, he would say, “I never expect to be out of debt again in my life. If you've got anything paid for, borrow against it. Use it. Never let a quarter's worth of equity stand idle.”

Was he talking to persuade himself?

They knew too that he didn't have any equity to speak of, beyond his equipment. But he was going to have some, or Mattie was. So far he had only borrowed increasingly for operating expenses, using as collateral his paid-for equipment and the next year's crops on an ever-larger rented acreage. When Della died and Mattie inherited the Keith place, he would all of a sudden have at least within reach enough idle equity to suit maybe even him.

 

Troy Chatham was not the only one listening to the experts. In 1964, acting on the certified best advice, the official forces of education closed the Port William School. It was a good, sound building, with swings and seesaws and other playthings on the grounds around it, and they just locked the doors and sent the children in buses down to Hargrave. It was the school board's version of efficiency, economy of scale, and volume. If you can milk forty cows just as efficiently as twenty, why can't you teach forty children just as efficiently as twenty? Or for that matter, a hundred or two hundred?

Having no children of my own, I may have no right to an opinion, but I know that closing the school just knocked the breath out of the community. It did worse than that. It gave the community a never-healing wound.

It was a great personal loss to me, for I had loved seeing the children gathered and let loose, as if the schoolhouse breathed them in and out. I liked hearing the children's voices suddenly set free at the end of the school day. Some of the teachers, of course, had been bad and some good. But how good or bad they were Port William knew, and knew without delay. Whether the parents interfered for good or ill, the school was right there in sight and they at least could interfere. The school was in the town and it was in the town's talk.

When the school closed, the town turned more of its attention away from itself. If people are driving down to Hargrave on school business or for school events, they might as well shop in Hargrave, or get their hair cut there. Port William lost business. I did. I don't want to sound mercenary, but of course a community, to be a community, has to do a certain amount of its business within itself. Did somebody think it could be different?