Jayber Crow (41 page)

The old Port William Hotel, with its long front porch that had once accommodated the rocking chairs and summer-evening conversations of drummers and other travelers on the river, had become first a sort of happenso old folks' home, and then a sort of happenso apartment house. And then one night in 1964 it departed from history altogether by burning very quickly to the ground.

 

Mat Feltner died in 1965. It was late August, the busiest time of the year. His funeral took place just in a little pause in the workday.

When the gathering at the graveside had dispersed and driven off, I was surprised to see that Burley Coulter still hung around. He hung around while the undertaker, Petey Tacker, and his assistant gathered and loaded their equipment. Though the time for my work had come, I stood with Burley making talk.

Digging a grave is one thing. I was always glad for company when I was digging a grave, which can be lonesome and a little depressing. It is a descent that maybe nobody can make altogether willingly.

Filling a grave is another thing altogether. There is something just about unbearably intimate about filling a grave, especially if it matters to you whose grave it is. I would rather do it by myself. I would rather, if I had my rathers, not be seen doing it. It is the very giving of the body to the earth, the sealing over of its absence until the world's end.

But Petey and the assistant went their way and there Burley still was, talking with me on the subjects I managed to bring up and showing no signs of leaving.

So I said, “Well—,” and went over to the big stone where I had put my digging tools out of sight.

Ordinarily in Port William usage, when you say “Well—” with a certain intonation, the other person says, “Well, I reckon I better get on
home,” and then you can get on with your work or close your shop or whatever you need to do.

But when I got back with my spade, Burley had taken off the jacket of the suit he had been keeping to wear to funerals for maybe thirty years. He had rolled his shirt cuffs back three turns, loosened his tie, and tucked it into his shirt. He smiled at me, saying nothing, and took the spade.

I saw the point then, and went to the little toolshed and got another spade and came back and helped him.

We didn't say anything more. We worked until the last little clods had been scraped out of the grass and tossed onto the grave. We tapered and smoothed the mound to Burley's satisfaction.

And then he handed his spade to me, swung his jacket over his sweated shoulder, and walked away.

 

By that time the interstate highway was boring its way into our valley and across it and out again on the other side. Everything it came to looked smaller than it had looked before. Whatever it came to that was in its way, it destroyed. It was a great stroke of pure geometry cut through the country maybe five miles down the river from Port William—close enough that, now, when the town is quiet, it can hear the sound of more traffic in a few minutes than ever went through it in a month.

The interstate cut through farms. It divided neighbor from neighbor. It made distant what had been close, and close what had been distant. It interrupted the flow of water through the veins of the rock. All the roads that had gone through our part of the country before had been guided at least somewhat by the place—by features of the land, older roads, property boundaries. This one, this great casting away of the earth, respected no presence, no limits. It remembered nothing. Anything that was in its way had to move or be moved, house or hill, barn or field, stream or woods. Big bulldozers cut the land away down to the rock. Power drills bit into the rock. Explosions cracked and shook the rock and the pieces were hauled away. Places where lives had been lived disappeared from the face of the world forever.

The older men of Port William would drive down to look at the machines as they worked and to marvel at the expense and the power and the upheaval. One day a worker whose chainsaw had quit cranked it
several times and then in disgust flung it in front of an oncoming bulldozer, which covered it up. Port William had never before thought of such a possibility.

More even than television, the interstate brought the modern world into Port William. More even than The Economy and The War, it carried the people of Port William into the modern world. It was a thing of unimaginable influence. People in Port William would find it handy to drive to work or to shop in Louisville. And Louisville would find it handy to grow farther out into the countryside. City lots would be carved out of farms, raising of course the price of farmland, so that urban people could enjoy the spaciousness of rural life while looking evening and morning at the rear ends of one another's automobiles.

Port William shrank yet further. The interstate dwarfed it in scale and made light of its needs. Fuel, money, and people gathered to the interstate as water gathers to the river. The time would come when Mr. Milo Settle would be on the phone to the Standard Oil Company. “This is Milo Settle here at Port William,” he would say, as if he were calling no farther than Hargrave. “Milo,” he would say. “M-i-l-o.” The problem was that the company would no longer deliver as much gas as he needed for his customers. They were squeezing him out in favor of the service stations on the interstate. “I've been selling your products for fifty years,” he would say, justice and indignation shaking his voice, to some powerless secretary or receptionist in some place that he knew no more about than she knew about Port William. He might as well have been talking to the chairman of the board. “Fifty years!” he would say, unable to believe that so many years could mean nothing.

That great road—moving, it seemed, purely according to its own will—was the mark of an old flaw come newly ordered into the world. Who could doubt that if everything stood in its way, nothing would be left?

It was late at night, a Saturday in the winter. I heard a light, hesitant tapping on the glass pane of the door, which I thought at first was a dream, and then I heard it again. And then I heard her call quietly, “Jayber?” I knew who it was.

I said, “Yes. Wait a minute.”

I felt in the dark for my pants and shirt and put them on, and then turned on the lamp by the bed.

When I opened the door, feeling the cold flow in on my bare feet, she said, “I'm awfully sorry to bother you, Jayber.”

I said, “It's all right. Won't you come in?”

She said, “I will just step inside, if you don't mind.”

She stepped in like a girl, light over the threshold. She had the lightness of a girl, a woman's gravity in her eyes.

It was cold out, but that was not why she stepped inside. She didn't want to be seen where she was. She had left Troy's old pickup well up the street, he being gone in their car. But she was smiling as if everything was all right, which I knew it could not be.

You might say that this was the ridiculousness that a married ineligible bachelor barber's upstairs room was specifically prepared for.

I dragged my one chair out from the table and turned it toward her. “Would you like to sit down?”

She was fully aware of the social awkwardness and wanted to hurry past it. “No. Thank you, Jayber. Jayber, I need your help.”

“Well, you can have it.”

“Or
maybe
I do. Maybe you can't help.”

“Well, let's see if I can.”

She said, “They've arrested Jimmy down at Hargrave.”

I could guess why, so I didn't ask.

“Drunk,” she said. “He was driving that old car down the sidewalk in front of the courthouse, but this time they're just calling it drunk. I don't want Troy to find out, if I can help it.”

There was trouble enough in her eyes and voice, but no appeal for sympathy. She had a problem and had set about solving it.

“Is it bail money you need?”

“Yes. I don't have the cash and I don't want to write a check.” She named the amount. She said, “Jayber, if you can, would you mind? I knew I could ask you.”

“You were right,” I said. “You can ask me.”

I had the money. I was using the bank by then, but I had kept my old habit of stashing away a little account on my own. I had maybe three or four hundred dollars stuck between the pages of an old copy of Paradise Lost. I was embarrassed to reveal this to Mattie, but it was also the only time in my life when I was sort of grateful and proud to have been so sly.

I handed her the amount she needed.

She said, looking straight at me, “Jayber, thank you. I'll get this back to you before long.”

I wanted to say, “Take it. Keep it. It's yours.” But of course I couldn't. It would have been like sending her a valentine.

I said, “You're entirely welcome.”

She had taken off her gloves to put the money into her purse, and now she was putting them on again.

I said, “Do you want me to go get him?”

She kindly did not ask me how I was going to do that in the middle of the night without a car. She said, her hand on the knob of the door, “No, thank you. I had better be the one to do that.”

And then, looking back at me, she said, “Of course I've warned him. And his daddy has.”

“I know,” I said.

I knew too, and knew that she knew, that Troy's warning had been coal oil on a fire.

For a little while after she was gone her fragrance stayed in the room.

 

Jimmy Chatham was a problem that couldn't be solved at home. Maybe it couldn't be solved anywhere anytime soon. You could describe the problem easily enough by just adding and subtracting. All there was to it was visible, I mean. Jimmy was not dishonest or shy or sly. He didn't have many secrets, if any. For one reason, everything he did had some reference to his all-out battle with his father. He could make no secret of what he did because what he did was intended in the first place to be an announcement.

Unlike Troy, he was attractive in a way that people didn't envy or resent. Everybody liked him. He was always right into whatever fun was available, and he was not very particular about what he called fun. He was, I can tell you, plenty smart, though not a good student. He might have been a fine athlete, but was as willfully disappointing in that as in other things. He would be ineligible because of bad grades, or he broke the training rules, or he made some kind of mischief. Aside from the work he did grudgingly for his father to earn the little freedom that he made much of, he was what you would have to call a wild boy. He made a few brief token submissions, enough to get by, but in general nobody could do anything with him. He was beyond appeal.

The problem with Jimmy was, he had liked the place he was born in until Athey died; after that, he hadn't liked it. Since then his aim had been to defy that place when he was in it and to get out of it as far as he could whenever he could. As soon as he was sixteen he bought an old car that he was then, as he saw it, enslaved to his father to pay for, and that kept him in the unhappiness of breakdown and repair and new parts and envy of better cars. He was stuck in the momentary life of having fun, enduring work to earn money to have fun, and getting into trouble. When the car was running he would be in Hargrave on Saturday nights and sometimes on other nights.

In Hargrave he turned that big grin of his to the world. The grin said, “Come on, world, show me what you got.” And the world understood
him perfectly. The world came up with beer, girls, gasoline, dances, boys in need of a fight, and pretty soon marijuana. Jimmy's message home was trouble and a kind of fame. He pretty well won the wildness contest of his generation.

He was having (when he had it) no end of fun, and of course was not making himself happy. A part of the cost of making his father unhappy was the unhappiness of his mother. That by itself was enough to make Jimmy unhappy, for he was not a hard-hearted boy and he loved his mother. He was wild, but he was also bewildered. He was caught (as his father was caught) and he didn't know how to get loose.

People were sort of awestruck by him in a way, and yet worried about him too. He was coming to no good, and nobody wanted that. They hoped that something would settle him down. Maybe even he hoped something would.

Nobody knew when or how he decided to enlist in the army. Nobody knew whether or not he had been sober when he did it. We just heard one day that he had done it, and that he was soon to be gone. He had done it the minute he was old enough. At least he had solved his problem with his father. In Port William people mostly were relieved. They could quit worrying about him if they didn't know what he was doing.

It was not maybe the best time to join the army. The War had broken out again, this time in Vietnam. Everybody hoped Jimmy Chatham would not have to be in a war. He had, it seemed, a fair chance not to be. The army, after all, was scattered over half the world. People thought the army would give Jimmy a look at the world, teach him some things, and help him to settle down. Even I, sad to say, thought it might. I hoped it would.

When I looked at him in his wildness and sadness and bewilderment, ready to leave us, I would think what love had led to. Ever since, remembering him, I have thought of that.

 

Once Jimmy was gone (as you might have predicted, as maybe Jimmy predicted), Troy realized how much he had depended on him. He missed him, thought better of him, and excused his faults. In town he reported on his travels and bragged on his accomplishments.

Troy also became a fierce partisan of the army and the government's war policy. The war protesters had started making a stir, and the talk in
my shop ran pretty much against them. Troy hated them. As his way was, he loved hearing himself say bad things about them.