Jayber Crow (48 page)

And how many hours have I spent in watching the reflections on the water? When the air is still, then so is the surface of the river. Then it holds a perfectly silent image of the world that seems not to exist in this world. Where, I have asked myself, is this reflection? It is not on the top of the water, for if there is a little current the river can slide frictionlessly and freely beneath the reflection and the reflection does not move. Nor can you think of it as resting on the bottom of the air. The reflection itself seems a plane of no substance, neither water nor air. It rests, I think, upon quietness. Things may rise from the water or fall from the air, and, without touching the reflection, break it. It disappears. Without going anywhere, it disappears.

Here on the river I have known peace and beauty such as I never knew in any other place. There is always work here that I need to be doing and I have many worries, for life on the edge seems always threatening to go over the edge. But I am always surprised, when I look back on times here that I know to have been laborious or worrisome or sad, to discover that they were never out of the presence of peace and beauty, for here I have been always in the world itself.

 

You may think, then, that I had arrived, by so simple a movement as that between Port William and the river, at the perfect solution to my problems. But that would be a mistake. It was a good solution, good sometimes beyond praise, but it was far from perfect. Because (to start with) I was far from perfect. However interesting and lovely my days were,
I could get from one day to the next only by passing through a night. I have, it is true, known lovely nights here: nights of sound sleep and good dreams, and nights made wakeful by happy thoughts. But I have not always been a good sleeper, and my thoughts at night have sometimes been far from happy.

Maybe there is a kind of justice that says you must pay for good days with bad nights. And maybe my debt is paid now, for lately I sleep well. But my bad nights continued for a long time after I came to the river. They got worse, in fact. To be alone here in the daytime often doubles the pleasure. But to be alone at night is sometimes only to be defenseless against the oncoming knowledge of incompleteness and imperfection, mine and the world's. Why is hate so easy and love so difficult?

In the daytime, going about my work, I would often make up little rhymes and repeat them to myself. If, say, I was weeding my beans, I would get a rhyme going in my head, and it would say,

And I would repeat it in my mind, dissatisfied with the part about being fat, which I had never been at any time, and trying to find a better word than
lean
to rhyme with
dream
. Or I would be splitting firewood, a good straight-grained block of ash, say, and I would be sort of exclaiming to myself,

Or, after a bad storm, I would say,

But of my bad nights I made only one rhyme and it repeated itself to me time and again:

It is not a terrible thing to love the world, knowing that the world is always passing and irrecoverable, to be known only in loss. To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain. It is a terrible thing to love the world, knowing that you are a human and therefore joined by kind to all that hates the world and hurries its passing—the violence and greed and falsehood that overcome the world that is meant to be overcome by love.

On such nights I fell from mere sleep into bad dreams. I would be in a place without memories, wholly cut away from history and the known world. It was a city without trees or birds, with no named streets. The days over it were darkened and the nights lighted. I would be hurrying through it in panic and despair toward a destination I did not know. And around me in the nameless streets in the dimness of day or night, anonymous people were killing one another with stones and fire.

I kept dreaming these dreams after I had waked up. I could not stop dreaming them. I would lie with my eyes wide open, awake and dreaming, the dark room as bedeviled as if the Old Scratch himself stood breathing beside my bed.

The trouble with many of my dreams was that they were perfectly rational, or they came from perfectly rational fears. They came from The Economy and The War—that is to say from The News. It really didn't make any difference whether I was asleep or awake. All I needed was to
be alone and quiet and in the dark, so that my mind could concentrate itself on fearful things, and it could not be unconcentrated sometimes until daylight.

Lying in my bed in the dark, asleep or awake, I would know for a certainty that at the headwaters of the river heavy machines were cutting their way along the mountainsides. I could see the trees falling, the roots tearing out of the ground, the ground being shoved aside. I could hear the bedrock shudder and crumble.

I would know that cars and trucks were speeding in narrow lanes day and night along the roads of the world. I would marvel that all of them did not crash into one another, and would flinch in my soul at the certainty that some of them
would
crash. Out of the general blur of haste, one place suddenly would assert itself: a patch of pavement, roadside weeds, crumpled metal, oil and blood, throbbing lights, and then calls going out into the dark distance, people waking up already afraid in a world utterly changed.

And I would know that across the world always, always were wars and rumors of wars. Boys like Forrest Finn and Tom Coulter and Virgil Feltner and Jimmy Chatham were going out to be killed. Boys who had never seen one another, let alone harmed one another, were being taught to kill one another. And the wars grew always worse, as for their own reasons they had to, and the world grew always smaller and more frail.

For a long time then I seemed to live by a slender thread of faith, spun out from within me. From this single thread I spun strands that joined me to the good things of the world. And then I spun more threads that joined all the strands together, making a life. When it was complete, or nearly so, it was shapely and beautiful in the light of day. It endured through the nights, but sometimes it only barely did. It would be tattered and set awry by things that fell or blew or fled or flew. Many of the strands would be broken. Those I would have to spin and weave again in the morning.

 

But of course the story of my life is not finished yet. I will not live to tell the end of it.

My life, though, has been something (as only now at last I am able to see), but it is something that it has made of itself, not something that I
have made of it. All I seem to have done is avoid wherever I could (so far) the man across the desk—for (so far) the world has afforded a little room for a few of us, lucky or blessed, to go around him. And now I wonder if I can die quickly enough and secretly enough to make the final evasion.

“No, Jayber,” Lyda said, “you are not going to end up in any damned nursing home.”

She is always sending Reuben down to me with a hot meal. “She says she cooked a good deal too much,” he'll say, or, “She says you need to taste of this. It's good.”

That evening she had sent him to bring me up to supper, as now she often does. We were talking afterward, sitting at the table. I meant to make a joke, realizing only after it was too late to stop that it could be no joke. It was fear, and I should have bitten my tongue. I said, “That was mighty good, my dear Lyda. Something to remember when I'm peeing on myself and watching TV down at the Fair Haven.”

The others laughed, to grant me my joke and ease my embarrassment. But Lyda didn't laugh. “No, sir!” she said. “Not if the Lord spares
me!”

Bless her.

But she has not yet thought of everything that I have thought of.

 

If my bad night dreams needed daytime confirmation, I have not needed to leave the river to find it. It might seem to you that living in the woods on a riverbank would remove you from the modern world. But not if the river is navigable, as ours is. On pretty weekends in the summer, this riverbank is the very verge of the modern world. It is a seat in the front row, you might say. On those weekends, the river is disquieted from morning to night by people resting from their work.

This resting involves traveling at great speed, first on the road and then on the river. The people are in an emergency to relax. They long for the peace and quiet of the great outdoors. Their eyes are hungry for the scenes of nature. They go very fast in their boats. They stir the river like a spoon in a cup of coffee. They play their radios loud enough to hear above the noise of their motors. They look neither left nor right. They don't slow down for—or maybe even see—an old man in a rowboat raising his lines.

The fishermen have the fastest boats of all. Their boats scarcely touch the water. They have much equipment, thousands of dollars worth. They can't fish in one place for fear that there are more fish in another place. For rest they have a perfect restlessness.

I watch and I wonder and I think. I think of the old slavery, and of the way The Economy has now improved upon it. The new slavery has improved upon the old by giving the new slaves the illusion that they are free. The Economy does not take people's freedom by force, which would be against its principles, for it is very humane. It buys their freedom, pays for it, and then persuades its money back again with shoddy goods and the promise of freedom. “Buy a car,” it says, “and be free. Buy a boat and be free. Buy a beer and be free.” Is this not the raw material of bad dreams? Or is it maybe the very nightmare itself?

 

But wait. Also there were times when good dreams came to me. They still come.

Not so long ago I had dreamed, I thought, all night such dreams as I have told. I was exhausted. I thought, “Won't morning ever come?”

And then, asleep or awake, I looked out and saw the stars, and a deep, peaceful sleep came upon me.

The phone rang, which was strange because I have never owned a telephone in my life. I let it ring a long time because, as I told myself, “My phone couldn't be ringing because I don't have a phone.”

When I answered it, it was Athey Keith. He said, “Jayber, if you haven't already done something too silly, come on up to Art Rowanberry's and sit with us for a while.”

“All right,” I said, and hung up.

I thought, “What's Athey doing calling me up? Athey's dead. And Art Rowanberry. He's been dead two years.”

But I got up and put on my clothes. It was still night and the air, when I opened the door and stepped out, was damp and fresh.

I walked along the river road to the Sand Ripple road and up into the smaller valley. It was day by then, perfectly cloudless and bright. I crossed the creek on the little swinging footbridge.

As I went along the lane below the house, I looked up and saw Athey
Keith and Art Rowanberry sitting on the porch. Elton Penn was there. Burley Coulter was there. They were smiling, lifting their hands to me, glad to be together, glad to see me.

“Howdy, Howdy!” Art called. “Come up!”

Elton was sitting beside him in the swing. I had sat there with the four of them many a Sunday afternoon, resting and talking. I went up and sat below them on the top step. To be there seemed strange, but it was all right.

“Well, ain't it a fine day overhead,” Art said, as he always used to do. And Elton picked up Art's hand and kissed it. There were tears of joy in his eyes.

I sat with them a long time, listening to them talk of the things they had always talked about before. But I didn't know the time. The sun seemed to be standing still. I knew that Uncle Othy's old silver watch was in my pocket, but I knew also that it was not running.

Finally I realized where I was.

Della Keith lived to be eighty-four years old. She died in 1971, and the whole Keith estate then passed to Mattie Chatham, who was the only heir. The family name of Keith survived in Port William then only in the given name of Mattie and Troy Chatham's one surviving child, Athey Keith Chatham, known as A. K. And A. K. by then was only technically countable as a citizen of Port William. In the fall of 1971, A. K. enrolled in the college of commerce at the university in Lexington. Within a few years he would realize his father's ambition. He would become a real businessman, sitting at a desk, with other people working for him. By then he would be a long way from home.

When Mattie Chatham inherited the Keith place (and also, of course, the little place in town), she became her husband's landlady. That may partly explain Troy's progress through the years afterward. Mattie was all of a sudden, and merely by inheritance, the owner of a five-hundred-acre farm. Troy, who had been going all-out for twenty-six years, had nothing to show for it but a continuous debt that he claimed to be reconciled to, his status (mostly with himself) as a big operator, and the goad and burden of unquenched ambition. So he must have felt himself,
from then on, to be engaged in a contest with fortune, or whatever you might call that power that distributes the goods of the world, giving more to some, who rarely feel that they deserve less, and less to others, who usually feel that they deserve more.

But Troy's life was not determined entirely by fortune. He had in his pride, as a matter of fact, chosen against his father-in-law and his ways. In doing so he had left out of account the possibility that Athey might choose against him, which Athey (and Della) did when they left everything to Mattie alone. In making this choice, Athey and Della (and also Wheeler Catlett, their lawyer) obviously thought that they were protecting Mattie against Troy's haste and his bad judgment. What they failed to consider (or did consider, and couldn't help) was something that I believe all of them knew: that Mattie could not be protected from Troy's haste and bad judgment. By dividing Mattie's fortune from Troy's, they made Troy, in effect, her enemy. He would have to make her party to his bad judgment.