Jayber Crow (49 page)

In describing the course of Troy's life after Della Keith's death, I am supposing a little, but not much. More than likely I would not be speaking from knowledge if the barbering trade had not followed me to the river. But talk, as I have said, draws to a barber as water draws to low ground. My customers would park on the side of the road and walk down the path to the house, bringing always their small donations to leave in return for my small service (also donated), and always also they brought a small burden of talk, which they would want to be lightened of before they climbed the path back up to the road again. The times were changing, nobody could doubt that. And in the minds of the older Port Williamites, Troy Chatham seemed to signify what the times were changing to. They pondered over their knowledge of him because they (or most of them) were skeptical and uneasy about change of any kind, and they were uncertain what to think about Troy. They were not sure they got the point that he was so sure he had got. He had simply outdistanced them all, not only in the scale and speed of what he called his “operation,” but also in his fearlessness of debt. It is a fact that nearly all the farmers of Port William who were born as late as the 1930s were brought up to distrust debt at the very least, and some of them greatly feared it. To owe what you had not yet earned, to have to work to earn
what you had already spent, was a personal diminishment, an insult to nature and common sense. Most of them knew this from experience.

But Troy did not fear debt. He preferred to see himself as a man ahead of his time. He had got so he liked to speak of his creditors as his “business partners.” And this was true enough, for he always owed them so much that they could not easily afford to let him fail. The bank continued his loans, and even increased them, to keep him afloat. By owing them he came, in a manner of speaking, to own his creditors. In his applications for credit, he was holding them for ransom. In this way, by having a net worth of probably less than nothing, he had become a man of power.

I know what I know of this partly because Troy was one of my faithful customers who followed me from town to the river. He lacked almost completely the inclination, which was otherwise pretty general in Port William, to keep private business private. In Port William, people usually prefer to talk about other people's business. Troy preferred to talk about his own. He had at least the virtue of not being a gossip. He talked to anybody who was on hand about his financial affairs, apparently without the least suspicion that his hearers were not respectful or even envious of the magnitude of his debts. He would talk in this way to (for instance) Nathan Coulter, who never said more than a little about himself or anybody else, and who probably could have paid for all of Troy's assets and some of his liabilities too without borrowing a cent.

If nobody else was available to talk to about his “operation” and his finances, he talked to me, without suspecting in the least that I did not concur in his high opinion of himself. Except for quoting Scripture to him occasionally to heap coals of fire on his head, I acted toward him with tolerance and politeness, and he assumed that I liked him. Maybe he thought that since he liked himself everybody liked him. But, really, I don't think he liked himself. If he did, why would he have worked and suffered so to be something he wasn't—to make “something” of himself ? Maybe he disliked himself but thought he was smart enough to convince everybody that he was likable. Maybe he thought he liked himself because he thought he was that smart. Because I never openly disagreed with his financial pronouncements, he assumed that I agreed and was impressed. Why would anybody living as I did not secretly want to be like him?

In fact, of all the trials I have experienced, he was the hardest. He was the trial that convicted me over and over again. I did not like him. I
could
not like him. Maybe I didn't need to like him, but I needed at least not to dislike him, and I did thoroughly dislike him. I also enjoyed disliking him. In his presence I was in the perfect absence, the night shadow, of the charity that I sought for and longed for. I had got far enough that I could see how, in this hard and sorrowful and sometimes terrible world, charity could light and ease the way, if a person could be capable of it. I could see how it could show an opening that a man like me might, after all, squeeze through. And in the presence of Troy Chatham, which was getting to be about the only place where I really needed that charity and really suffered for the want of it, I didn't have it.

 

When Mattie inherited her parents' estate, she used the moneys from the estate and the sale of the property in town to clear the Keith place of the inheritance taxes and all outstanding debts. And then here is what Troy could have done. He could have made it safe in Mattie's keeping. He could have seen that, safe in her keeping, it would have made both of them safe for the rest of their lives. If he had to keep on in his debt-driven plunge toward whatever grandeur he thought would satisfy him, then he could have left her and her inheritance clear of it. But that is not what he did. He followed the way of “business,” not of farming or family or marriage. When the apple fell from the tree at last, he was there waiting, with his own hands cupped to receive it.

What he did was persuade her to mortgage the whole thing, first to build a grade-A dairy (milking parlor, loafing shed, silo, Holstein cows, and equipment), and then to “leverage” the purchase of more land. By the time the estate was settled, we were in the bigtime, big-farmer, land-buying jamboree of the 1970s. Men of power were saying again, “Get big or get out.” The talk was all of leverage. Land prices were going up, which meant that farmers of ambition could borrow more and more on the land they owned in order to own more and more land.

It was at about that time, I believe, that Troy began to call himself an “agribusinessman.” He would quote a great official of the government who had said, “Adapt or die,” meaning that a farmer should adapt to the breakneck economic program of the corporations, not to his farm. Troy
was sure that he was an adapter and would not die. He loved that word
leverage
. And I remember that one day, when he was talking of this, Nathan Coulter said, “A lever has got two ends. Where is the fulcrum going to go?”

So far as I remember, that was Nathan's only comment on the economics of Troy Chatham. As it turned out, he was right. It turned out that Troy, who proposed to be the lifter, was lifted.

Troy miscalculated the movement of the fulcrum, but that wasn't what was really wrong. If he couldn't control the movement of the fulcrum, why should he have allowed everything to depend on the position of it in the first place? What was wrong was not the movement of somebody else's fulcrum, but Troy's own point of reference. He never knew where he was.

At first, his point of reference was himself, his own wants and his ambition. There is nothing surprising or unforgivable about that, maybe, in a young man. But Troy never outgrew it. I don't think he ever caught on, despite what it cost him, that one of his reference points might have been and ought to have been Mattie. His vanity and pride and self-assurance (pretended or not) obscured her to him from the start. You can imagine that early in their marriage some awareness of her wishes and her sense of things might have distracted him a little from himself and given him a power of thinking that apart from her he didn't have and could never have. But that didn't happen. Maybe Troy's contempt for Athey caused him to ignore what really was the best opportunity of his life, which was to love, honor, and cherish Athey's daughter. Or maybe Troy was, in the ways that counted most, just an incurable chucklehead.

He enlarged his pride by investing it (as well as a lot of money, usually borrowed money) in equipment. And so then the equipment, the power to do things mechanically, became his point of reference. His question was what his equipment could do, not what the farm could stand. The farm, in a way, became his mirror. The farm never at any time was his reference point, and this was his bewilderment and his (and its) ruin. This was why he was reduced by everything he did to enlarge himself; it was why his life was all spending and no gain.

Finally, of course, his debt became his point of reference. What he
did, finally, he
had
to do to get the money to pay his creditors. He, his equipment, the farm, and all were just dragged along by debt. He had to keep going because his creditors were on his heels. He had worked like a slave, and he was one.

All the way along—from his first adventures into the postwar mechanization, to the installation of the dairy, to the installation of the confinement hog-raising barn that replaced the dairy, to the final wrack and ruin—he was under the influence of expert advice, first in the form of magazine articles and leaflets and pamphlets, and then in the persons of the writers of the articles and leaflets and pamphlets, who instructed him, gave him their language and point of view, took photographs of the results, spoke of him in public talks as an innovator and a man of the new age of agribusiness, and who had simply nothing to say when their recommendations only drew him deeper and deeper into debt.

 

Over the years, I pretty much made a point of staying away from the Keith place. I remembered it from way back. Just from what I could see from the road, I knew that it was going down, and I really didn't want to see the rest of it. Besides, I wanted both to spare myself Troy's company and to avoid any appearance of desiring Mattie's.

But one winter day not long before Christmas (this was a year or two before Mattie fell ill), I did go down there. There was a good big slue on the Keith place well back near the river. The wild ducks were gathering there and I proposed to myself to drop down close to the slue in my boat to see if I couldn't maybe shoot me the makings of a good supper.

I rowed down the river into a stout wind that I hoped would last long enough to help me row home against the current. I tied up at a place where the bank was not too steep, clawed my way to the top, and crept across the bottom to the slue. After a long sneak through the standing corn and the tall weeds and the trees, making never a sudden move, never a sound, I came into sight of the slue and found it (as you often do in that kind of hunting) perfectly empty. I found a sitting place on a log in a weed patch and sat there a long time, but nothing came.

Finally I had to move. The cold had got into my clothes, and my hips and knees were so stiff I could hardly stand up. Now that my hunt was
over, I began to look around. I told myself that I might kick up a rabbit and have a good supper out of my efforts, after all. But I wasn't really hunting anymore. It had struck me, walking in, that the still unharvested corn crop that I was walking through was poor for the year, and so overgrown with Johnsongrass that you could hardly see the rows. As I looked now, paying more attention, I could see that the soil was pale and hard, lifeless, and in places deeply gullied. I thought of Athey. “The land slopes even in the bottoms, and water runs.”

Troy had bulldozed every tree from along the drains and water-courses where Athey had allowed them to stand and get old. He had bulldozed every tree from every foot of ground where you could drive a tractor. The fences were gone from the whole place. Troy was a hog farmer now. Hogs were the only livestock on the farm, and they were all inside pens in the large hog barn that I could smell a long time before I could see it. Except for the larger ones where machines were stored, the other farm buildings looked abandoned—paintless and useless, going down. The buildings in use looked only a little less abandoned. It was no longer a place you could see anybody's pride or pleasure in. In front of the farm buildings, toward the road, the house and yard and garden looked neatly kept—an entirely different kind of presence and feeling there. Behind the barn lots was what I had heard Troy, in his devil-may-care way, call his “parts department.” This was a patch of two or three acres completely covered with old or broken or worn-out machines. And here a kind of reforestation was taking place: Weeds and vines and sapling trees of various kinds were growing up all around and even through the machines.

I got to where I could see that and stopped. I didn't go any farther. Every scrap of land that a tractor could stand on had been plowed and cropped in corn or soybeans or tobacco. And yet, in spite of this complete and relentless putting to use, the whole place, from the house and garden all the way back to the river, looked deserted. It did not look like a place where anybody had ever wanted to be. It and the farming on it looked like an afterthought. It looked like what Troy had thought about last, after thinking about himself, his status, his machinery, and his debts.

All of a sudden I felt ashamed, as if I had walked without thinking into some total and embarrassing privacy. I had been, until then, sort of
fascinatedly eager to see, and then I realized that I did not at all want to be seen seeing. I crept back to my boat even more stealthily than I had crept up on the absent ducks.

 

Mattie Chatham was the true child of her parents and their ways. As Mat Feltner used to say, “You can't beat out of the flesh what's bred in the bone.” She
belonged
to the good farm that Troy was turning into paper. And she was a true child of the revelation of the 1930s. She seemed always in some way mindful of the Depression, when the Keiths had held life together by living from the place. She knew what the place had meant to Athey and Della, and what they had meant to it. Through all the time and the troubles of her marriage to Troy, she held as well as she could to the old ways. She never let the economies of her household sink down. She was a woman of great energy, whose movements always had a certain force and momentum and resolution, as well as grace. She kept house, kept a flock of chickens, gardened, canned and preserved food, made clothes, practiced every sort of ingenuity and frugality.