Jayber Crow (43 page)

I dug the grave. I waited while the pallbearers—Jimmy's friends, unbelievably young—bore the flag-covered coffin to the grave and the mourners gathered. When they had assembled, instead of standing well out of the way as I usually did, I took off my hat and stepped in under the edge of the tent.

The preacher spoke his words and prayed his prayer. The salute was fired. The bugler sounded taps: “Day is done, gone the sun—” The flag was folded and handed to Mattie, who received it like a child wrapped in swaddling clothes and shed not a tear. She sat erect. She tossed her head backward slightly once, as if to shake rain from her hair, and that was all. Troy, who had been stoic at the time of Liddie's death, wept with one hand over his face.

Afterward, it seemed for a while that Troy had been almost unmade by his grief, but then, having nobody else to be, he became himself again and continued on. I think he was ashamed that he had been seen in his weakness. He seemed to assert himself again in order to deny that he was weak. He was still young enough to believe in his strength. And, really, he had no choice; his life had been determined by then. Until he died he would have to stay in it and live by its established terms the best he could.

Of course I had no more right to stop and grieve than anybody else. For a while, though, I felt that I too was being unmade by grief. Grief and bewilderment. Jimmy Chatham had been so much alive in my imagination that I could not easily imagine him dead. I could not imagine him dead without grieving, or without imagining his mother's grief, which made me grieve.

Before he died, I wondered, had he imagined that he could die?

Both sides, in making war, agree to these deaths, this dying of young soldiers in their pride. And afterward it becomes possible to pity the suffering of both sides, and to think of the lost, unfinished lives of boys who had grown up under hands laid with affection on their heads.

It seemed, after he was killed and buried, that my own left hand kept the memory of the shape and feel of Jimmy Chatham's head when he was little and I would have to clamp my hand above his ears to keep him from looking around while I cut his hair.

Somewhere underneath of all the politics, the ambition, the harsh talk, the power, the violence, the will to destroy and waste and maim and burn, was this tenderness. Tenderness born into madness, preservable only by suffering, and finally not preservable at all. What can love do? Love waits, if it must, maybe forever.

In any moment when I was quiet, tenderness and madness would come upon me and contend to no purpose, to the making of no sense. I could hardly bear to read the newspaper, which filled me with disloyalty and unbelief. We were, as we said again, making war in order to make peace. We were destroying little towns in order to save them. We were killing children in order that children might sleep peacefully in their beds without fear. We were raping and plundering a foreign land (and our own) for the sake of “love of country.” We were carrying into the heavens this cruelty and emptiness of heart. I felt involved in an old sickness of the world. I was sick with that sickness and could see no end. We had waded halfway across a bloody mire and could not get out except by wading halfway again, either forward or back.

For a while again I couldn't pray. I didn't dare to. In the most secret place of my soul I wanted to beg the Lord to reveal Himself in power. I wanted to tell Him that it was time for His coming. If there was anything at all to what He had promised, why didn't He come in glory with
angels and lay His hands on the hurt children and awaken the dead soldiers and restore the burned villages and the blasted and poisoned land? Why didn't He cow our arrogance? Lying awake in the night (for again sleep was coming hard) I could imagine the almighty finger writing in stars for all the world to see: GO HOME.

But thinking such things was as dangerous as praying them. I knew who had thought such thoughts before: “Let Christ the King of Israel descend now from the cross, that we may see and believe.” Where in my own arrogance was I going to hide?

Where did I get my knack for being a fool? If I could advise God, why didn't I just advise Him (like our great preachers and politicians) to be on our side and give us victory and make sure that Jimmy Chatham had not died in vain? I had to turn around and wade out of the mire myself.

Christ did not descend from the cross except into the grave. And why not otherwise? Wouldn't it have put fine comical expressions on the faces of the scribes and the chief priests and the soldiers if at that moment He had come down in power and glory? Why didn't He do it? Why hasn't He done it at any one of a thousand good times between then and now?

I knew the answer. I knew it a long time before I could admit it, for all the suffering of the world is in it. He didn't, He hasn't, because from the moment He did, He would be the absolute tyrant of the world and we would be His slaves. Even those who hated Him and hated one another and hated their own souls would have to believe in Him then. From that moment the possibility that we might be bound to Him and He to us and us to one another by love forever would be ended.

And so, I thought, He must forebear to reveal His power and glory by presenting Himself as Himself, and must be present only in the ordinary miracle of the existence of His creatures. Those who wish to see Him must see Him in the poor, the hungry, the hurt, the wordless creatures, the groaning and travailing beautiful world.

I would sometimes be horrified in every moment I was alone. I could see no escape. We are too tightly tangled together to be able to separate ourselves from one another either by good or by evil. We all are involved in all and any good, and in all and any evil. For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless. It is why God grieves and Christ's wounds still are bleeding.

But the mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief, either. After death and grief that (it seems) ought to have stopped the world, the world goes on. More things happen. And some of the things that happen are good. My life was changing now. It had to change. I am not going to say that it changed for the better. There was good in it as it was. But also there was good in it as it was going to be.

 

Burley said, “Well, have you seen your buddy lately?” I knew he meant the inspector.

It was late March or early April by then. Burley was waiting out another wet spell.

“No,” I said. “I hope not to become any better acquainted with the inspector.”

“How're you going to keep from it? You're inspectable, ain't you?”

“Well,” I said, a little fearful of what I knew I was about to say, for I had not yet said it even to myself, “I suppose I'm going to have to shut her down.”

“What!” Burley said. “You can't do that! Hell fire! What'll we do without a barbershop?”

“Well, barbershops' days are numbered, anyhow. The boys and young men don't want their hair barbered anymore. They're wanting it ‘styled.' And I reckon I don't want to learn how to style. I'm not up with the times, and I reckon I'll just stay behind.”

“You're just going to live here, then?”

“No, I reckon I'm going to leave.”

“Leave! Where? I mean where to?”

“I don't know. To the river, maybe. I always thought that if I lived on the river, I'd fish. More, I mean, than I have so far.” I was listening to myself with some interest, for I certainly had not thought it through.

“Fish?” Burley said. He was often enough a fisherman himself, but he knew that to some respectable people fishing was a vice, an addiction of sorts that led to worse things. And so he said
“Fish?”
as though to warn me of what others might think.

“I thought,” I said, and I had to clear my throat, for I was going to speak of an old dream that I had not thought of in a long time. The
dream came from about the time I became Uncle Stanley's successor as grave digger and janitor. Or maybe it came all the way from my days at The Good Shepherd. “I thought I'd buy me a little patch down by the river, with trees and maybe a garden spot. I'd build me a little house out of secondhand lumber. I'd end my public life and commence a private one. I'd build a little boat.”

There it was. That was what I wanted to do. I could see my boat, my green boat, floating light as a leaf by the shady bank at the end of a path coming down from the house.

Burley was grinning. He saw. He knew. But he said, “You don't have to build no house. I got a house I'm not using. Lord, I don't expect I've stayed two nights in it since Mam died.”

He was talking about his little camp house, where we'd come ashore out of the flood that morning in 1937. I hadn't seen it many times since then, but I knew the look of it. I saw what he saw.

“Elnd you'd be willing to part with it?”

“No need for me to
part
with it. I'll just give you the use of it.”

To feel at home in a place, you have to have some prospect of staying there. The inspector's visit and my talk afterward with Wheeler had forced me to think of leaving and to suffer the thought. My mind didn't really give up on my shop until Burley Coulter offered me his camp house on the river and I imagined my boat floating on the water. I knew for sure then that I was going, because I knew where I was going to go.

It is strange the way your mind withdraws from a place it knows you are going to leave. I didn't plant my garden in town that spring. I leveled it and sowed it in grass. I didn't replenish the coal pile when it ran low. Looking ahead to the possibility of renting the building, I used my spare time in painting the outside, roof and walls, and re-puttying the windows. And so I began my farewell.

I was no sooner convinced that I was going to leave than I became eager to be gone. Staying and thinking of going, for one thing, made me sad. I had lived and worked there, after all, for thirty-two years. I had come when I was twenty-two, hardly more than a boy. And now I was fifty-four, pretty old to be making a new start in life. But also I was looking forward to this new start. That little house down there among the trees by the river had become a new vision of my mind. I longed to go. I began putting things I wasn't using into cardboard boxes.

I know better by now than to try to predict what is to come. But of all the stages of my life—Goforth, Squires Landing, The Good Shepherd, Pigeonville, Lexington, Port William—this one here on the riverbank bids fair to be the last. Unless of course I fall and break something or become an emergency of some other kind, and give up the ghost finally in front of an institutional TV set down at Hargrave. Who knows?

Some of the changes in my life were imposed, and some were chosen—if by “chosen” I may mean that I chose what I seemed already to have been chosen by, desire having obscured the alternatives. And each change has been a birth, each having taken me to a new life from which I could not go back. And I have asked myself, “Would I have known such births if, from Pigeonville or Lexington, I had taken one of the paths by which people get somewhere and make something of themselves?” But of course I have no answer.

 

The night before I left, I boxed up the last of the things I would take with me, leaving out only what I would need to pass the night and to fix breakfast. The few electrical gadgets I had I put in a clutch beside my little refrigerator to give to whatever ones might rent the place, for I would have no electricity on the river. I put everything in order. And then I went to bed.

And then, unable to sleep, I got up again and stripped the bed, folded the bedclothes, put them in a box, stuffed the pillow in on top, shut the box and tied it with a piece of twine. I tried sitting in my chair by the window then. But I was too stirred up to keep still for long. Thirty-two years had seemed a long time to me when I first thought of leaving. Now that I was ready to go, it seemed that almost no time at all had passed since I had come there and slept the first night cold, having no fuel to make a fire. It seemed all to have been a passing, and I was again what I had been during so many of my younger years, a stranger and a traveler.

I went out. It was late. There was enough moonlight to brighten the trees and the roofs and walls of the houses and throw their bottomless black shadows beyond them. The town, filled with sleep, was just wonderfully quiet. Nobody was out. The young had finally gone to bed. The old had not yet begun to wake up.

Loafing and wakefulness are two of the principal arts of Port William.
Maybe, too, they pass in Port William for public duties. In the business places and the street, people loaf and talk to the point of discomfort and the neglect of other things. They stand in the cold and think of yet more to say until their noses are red and their toes half-frozen. Some carry the conversation on into the night, long after the stores have closed. Some rise early and begin again before daylight.

In its conversation, its consciousness of itself, its sleep and waking, Port William has always been pretty much an unofficial place. It has, really, nothing of its own but itself. It has no newspaper, no resident government, no municipal property. Once it owned and maintained the part of the road that passed through it, two dug wells with pumps, and a stout-walled, windowless jail in which one malefactor had spent one night. These were all of its public domain. For the supervision of these things and the keeping of the peace, there was a town board, a mayor, and a constable. With the revenue from licensing saloons and fining (with their permission) the local troublemakers, they maintained the town properties. Their one great civic feat was causing the first telephone company to whitewash its poles. But all that was a long time ago. Port William would remember bits of it occasionally, but mostly it forgot. Mostly the town's history had become its ways, its habits, its feelings, its familiarity with itself.