Jayber Crow (50 page)

Troy depended on her. Surely he knew he did. For a long time, he took her work and his dependence for granted. And then he got embarrassed. He began to feel that she (and, therefore, he) was degraded by the part she played. He was, after all, following the line of what was supposed to be a “success story”—how a smart and talented country boy started out with nothing and finally gained a big acreage of land and made something of himself. And here he was, gaining nothing, and his wife was working to raise the food they ate, which he ought to be able to buy for her. And she would be milking the cows or, later, feeding the hogs, when he had nobody else to do it, when he ought to be able to hire somebody to do it in her place.

She became in a way the sign of his torment, of the failure that he felt but couldn't bear to see, and he began doing something he had never done before. He had always, in his humorless humor, made jokes about women and wives. But now he began to make jokes that were disparaging directly of her. “I'm going home,” he would say. “If the woman don't have dinner ready I'm going to raise hell, and if she does I ain't going to eat it.” So far as I know, he
was
joking, or trying to. But it was the wrong kind of joke.

Anger is not a sin for no reason. I think I can say truly that I am a man slow to anger. I don't like anger in myself any more than I like it in other people. But when anger comes to me, it comes full force; I remember Elton Penn saying, “Hell flew into me in a minute!” My skin seems to get all of a sudden tighter, my vision gets bad, as if I'm looking through a little hole, and I feel light and joyful and careless. When Troy would let out one of those remarks, I would have to stop and take hold of the chair-back with both hands. A barber, you know, is often holding a deadly weapon.

Sometimes if I was alone after he had left, I would seem to wake up from a dream in which I was imagining how I could nick his throat with the razor and make it look like an accident.

Why didn't I do it? I wish I was sure why. Pacifist that I was and am, I am not sure. There were times when, without benefit of any conscious thought whatsoever, I wanted to wreck him in one neat stroke of perfect violence. Was I so good, so deeply convinced of the wrong of killing, that I refrained from doing it without benefit of thought? Was I a coward? Was I afraid of the man across the desk and the clash of the jailhouse door? Or was I too finicky to want him bleeding on my floor? Waking up from a dream of violence is much the same as waking up from a dream of love. You must go on living your life.

I did not love Troy Chatham. I was no longer capable of the effort of will it took to understand why Mattie did. Which would sooner or later remind me that I could not understand why God did. That was my sanity.

Did Mattie, in fact, love Troy? I think she did. I have lived some time beyond my hatred of Troy Chatham by now, and I think she loved him. I think she loved him to the end, and pitied his struggle even as she suffered it. I think so because she was not downbeaten. However she may have submitted herself and her place to what Troy was, and to what he meant to other things that she loved, what she was remained intact. If she had not loved Troy that could not have been so. But she loved him, however at odds with him she may have been, for however long. She remembered and kept treasured up her old feeling for him. She treasured up the knowledge that, though she was not happy, happiness existed. And so as Troy's character wore lower and more awry, her own grew straighter and brighter.

Why did she stay with him and stay loyal to him so many years until death, through so much sorrow and trouble and damage? There were two reasons, I think: She was married to him, which she took as seriously as, after all, I would have had her take it; and she understood, not just his ambition and his foolishness, his selfishness and lack of judgment, but also his fragility. She sacrificed everything to hold him together—maybe wrongly, but I lack the intelligence (or maybe the will) to see how she might have done otherwise, once she was married to him. After all, it wasn't just Troy himself that she was dealing with but the way of the world in her time. It would be hard to argue that one woman ought to have found a way to stand up against a whole drove of experts and their salesmen, who spoke for the way of the world and were certain that there was no other possible way.

And so she was defeated, a good woman who had too early made one bad mistake. And yet she persevered with dignity and good humor, and with a kind of loveliness that was her own. How do I know? I know because from time to time during those years we would be together.

The Nest Egg was the fifty or so acres of big timber that Athey Keith kept and protected “in case of need,” until finally just having and holding it came to mean a great deal more to him than any possibility of need. It lay on the upriver side of Coulter Branch, cut off from the rest of the Keith place and made inconvenient to get to by the branch and its rough hollow, and therefore never even fenced and pastured in the memory of man. Whether or not it was an absolutely “virgin” woods is another question. There were some double-trunked white oaks, big ones, and so there must have been some cutting in there, a long time ago, but only in a few spots. Other places, I thought, had never been touched. Trees were standing in the Nest Egg that had been there when D. Boone and the others came hunting through, and when the first old Keiths and Coulters and Rowanberrys came in and settled: oaks and walnuts and tulip poplars that you couldn't reach halfway around with both arms and that went way up without a limb. It took, as Burley Coulter said, a mighty good rifle (and a mighty good eye) to shoot a squirrel out of the top of one of them. Where the wind had blown one over and its roots had come up, there would be a hollow in the ground bigger than a grave.

One of the happinesses and finally the greatest joy of my life on the
river was my nearness to the Nest Egg. It was only half a mile or so away. I would go downriver along the road and then turn in to the Coulter Branch hollow by a lane so little used as to be almost invisible. It really was just a footpath kept worn by occasional hunters or trespassers (like me) and the wild creatures. The path went along between a low wooded slope and a little patch of bottom that had been cropped occasionally in Athey's time but was now covered with thicket. There was a dense patch of the bamboo that we call “cane,” about six or eight feet high, which once stood in huge brakes and fed the buffalo before the time of the white people. For some distance in the cane the path was almost a burrow. And then you stepped out of that confinement into a swale wooded with big water maples and ashes and walnuts and sycamores, a sort of entrance hall, spacious and airy. Backwater from the floods often stood there, and the floor was covered with pieces of drift, which in turn were covered in the growing season with a solid stand of nettles. In spring when their foliage was new, these nettles seemed a rich and perfect carpet, though they stood taller than your knees and stung like fire if they touched your skin.

From this place of entrance, being always careful of the nettles, you could make your way up a low, steep slope into the drier woods, untroubled by flooding, where the dark trunks went up so tall, and among them you would see here and there the silver of beeches or, along the hollows, the sudden whiteness of sycamores. This was a many-storied place, starting under the ground with the dark forest of roots and the creatures of the dark. And then there were the dead leaves and the brilliant mosses and the mushrooms in their season. And next were the wildflowers and the ferns in their appointed places and times, and then the spice bushes and buckthorns and devil's clubs and the patches of cane. And next were the low trees: ironwood, hornbeam, dogwood, and (in openings made by fallen big trees) redbud. Above those, the big trees and the vines went up to the crown of foliage at the top. And at all these aboveground stories there was a moving and singing foliage of birds. Everywhere there were dens and holes and hollows and secret nests. When you were there you could be sure that you were being seen, and that you more than likely would not see what was seeing you.

Everything there seemed to belong where it was. That was why I went there. And I went to feel the change that that place always made in me. Always, as soon as I came in under the big trees, I began to go slowly and quietly. This was not because I was hunting (I hunted in other places), but because in a place where everything belongs where it is, you do not want to disturb anything. I went slowly and quietly. I watched where I put my feet. I went for solace and comfort, for a certain quietness of mind that came to me in no other place. Even the nettles and the mosquitoes comforted me, for they belonged where they were.

There were, in the hot, muggy summer days, sure enough a great plenty of mosquitoes. Big ones. And hungry. They could smell your blood beneath your skin at a distance of a hundred yards, and they came whining to the feast, so ecstatic with appetite that they didn't even look up to see if you were watching. You could swat them several at a lick and they didn't seem to mind. They were outlandish big. Burley Coulter used to say that they could stand flatfooted and deflower a turkey. If you went there in good mosquito weather, you were inclined to keep walking; you never thought of sitting down. In general it was best, after the weather heated up, to go to the Nest Egg only on the cooler, drier, breezier days.

 

On a warm day, a bright day in late April, a Sunday afternoon, I passed right on through the swale where the nettles were and went up that first low, steep slope. From there the woods went back on a sort of platform or terrace that was broken by slue hollows where backwater was still puddled from the late rises. In those places the mosquitoes about added up to a mean dog; you could fairly hear their guts growling. I kept to the high ground and went on to where the slope of the valleyside began to rise. At that point Coulter Branch ceases to be a sluggish, mud-banked stream and becomes a steep, rocky one, coming down in a series of little falls and pools like a stairway. Well up the slope I turned away from the stream and walked out along the face of the bluff to a sort of point near the upper boundary of the Keith land. The woods opened up in that place and, as I expected, there was a fine breeze. I sat down and leaned my back against a big red oak. As I often did, I had brought a book to read.

But I didn't read much, or long. Because of the breeze, the place was
full of the motions of shadows and lights. The day was still warming up, and I was not far past a pretty good dinner. A woodpecker was halfheartedly pecking on a hollow limb as if he were neither feeding nor sending a message but just idly whittling or talking to himself. My book slipped out of my hands and woke me up. I stretched out on my back on the dry leaves, then, and went to sleep in earnest.

One of the best things you can do in this world is take a nap in the woods. I slept soundly and without moving for half an hour. As often happens at such times, my mind woke up before my body did. My eyes opened right out of sleep, and I was looking up at the gently stirring treetops and the bright sky, with no other thought on my mind, and my body still deeply resting. It was delicious and I did not want to move.

The woodpecker stopped his drowsy pecking and flew. I raised my head and looked around. Mattie Chatham was coming along the slope about the same way I had come. She was just idly wandering along, looking at everything as she went. She had picked a little bouquet of violets, both the blossoms and the pretty leaves, and was carrying it as she might have done when she was a girl, pleased to have their beauty with her. She seemed surrounded by almost a singing of her sense of rest.

You can maybe imagine my astonishment at waking to the sight of her there, and also my discomfort, for she had not yet seen me. It was a moment of great social awkwardness. I felt it a shame to intrude on her. I knew in an instant that, like me, she had come there for solace and comfort. I could feel, as later I would know, that she was a familiar of the place. Coming there, she stepped over a threshold where her troubles, if they did not quite go away, at least stopped and waited. And so I could hardly assume that this was an offhand encounter, as if we had met in the post office in Port William. I thought of just lying still and letting her go by, or even pretending to be asleep. But I didn't want her to think, if she came nearer and saw me, that I had been slyly watching her. When she turned her head away, I sat up. When she looked back in my direction, I raised my hand and gave a small, noncommittal wave.

She said, “Oh!” in surprise, and not exactly with pleasure. And then, as if we were in the post office in Port William, she gave me her good general-purpose smile and said, “Hello, Jayber. How're you?”

“I'm fine,” I said. “It's a good day.”

“It's beautiful,” she said.

She came on, not to where I was but nearby, and sat down.

She said, “I thought I would find a breeze here.”

She hadn't looked at me when she spoke. Fearing she had spoken just to be polite, I didn't reply. I didn't know whether she had sat down in friendship, or because she was feeling socially awkward herself, or because she was tired.

And then she did look at me and smiled again, seeming to endow our encounter with a sort of permission. She gestured with her bouquet toward the treetops, through which the sky sent down upon us a network of gently shifting lights. “Lovely,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

We sat there, thus apart and together, for a long time.

After a while she stood up, brushed the leaf chaff from her clothes, and said, “Well, I guess we ought to be going.”

She said “we.” What did she know? We never spoke of such things. This was in 1970, the year after I moved to the river. She was forty-six years old that year. I had loved her, had belonged to her, then, for a long time. When I think of her now, I am sometimes persuaded that she already knew that. Is this because any man believes, or fears, that a beloved woman not only knows more about him than he knows himself but also knows it sooner than he can hope to know it? Or did she really know?