Jayber Crow (28 page)

Troy had begun to see Athey and the others as “in the way.” He would tell of working with them, for instance, on the same mowing land, and having to slow down until they could pull out at the turns to let him and his tractor go ahead. “By God,” he would say, “I just wanted to drive right over the top of 'em!”

I confess that I heard this with a sense of guilt, for by the time Troy began to say such things I had bought the Zephyr and had succumbed to something of the same impatience. My wonderful machine sometimes altered my mind so that I, lately a pedestrian myself, fiercely resented all such impediments on the road. Even at my sedate top speed of forty miles an hour, I hated anything that required me to slow down. My mind raged and fumed and I cursed aloud at farmers driving their stock across the road, at indecisive possums, at children on bicycles. Ease of going was translated without pause into a principled unwillingness to stop. Hadn't I been there and didn't I know it? And so, self-accused, having begun by resenting the insult to Athey, I ended by yielding Troy a little laugh and a nod of understanding, which shamed me and did not make me like him any better.

In 1949, Mattie gave birth to their second child, named as if, and perhaps intentionally, for nobody: James William, called Jimmy.

It was impossible to know of the trouble down at the Keith place without supposing that Mattie was caught somewhere in the middle, and isolated. Her mother could only have been torn and troubled by the conflict, but Della was free in the privacy of her own heart to take sides and stand by Athey. Athey, mostly in silence, was entirely on his own side.

But Mattie, I thought, was divided. Though she was in love with her young husband, she was her father's daughter still. Somewhere, sometime, the full force of their difference would have to be suffered—and Mattie would be the one who suffered it. That she was her parents' child meant, as Troy's ambition and his arrogance grew clear, that she would finally have to love him without approving of him. In fact, their marriage settled early upon the pattern it would always have: she was trying to wind up at home the thread that he unraveled elsewhere. He had been seized by a daydream of “farming big,” having what he wanted. What he wanted, as time would reveal, was to be a sort of farming businessman, an executive who would “manage” the “operation” from an office with a phone while other people (and machines) did the actual work. He got so far finally as to build and furnish a “farm office,” which he never really had time to sit down in. While he connived and contrived and borrowed, and drove day into night, trying (as he learned to put it) to “increase the
profit margin by increasing volume,” she gardened and canned and tended to her hen flock and milked the cows and did whatever else Troy “didn't have time to do,” and of course she took care of the children.

She was taking up the slack. We all knew it. One Saturday afternoon somebody waiting for a haircut said something about Troy Chatham's tractor equipment, for he already had more than anybody around. And Burley Coulter, who had my razor hone on his thigh, sharpening his knife, said without looking up, “The best equipment he's got is his wife.” Somebody laughed, and somebody said, “Yep,” and everybody nodded.

But the remarkable thing was that Mattie Chatham never looked like a woman who was put upon and divided in her loyalties and having a hard time; she didn't look as though she would have welcomed sympathy, or as though she needed it. She was not her parents' child for nothing. She was going about her life, taking her pleasures as she found them, suffering what was hers to suffer, doing what she had to do. She had about her no air of self-pity or complaint. And this could only have been because, in her own heart, she was not pitying herself or complaining. It was as though her very difficulties had confirmed her in her sense of herself and her capabilities.

I knew Mattie Chatham a long time, and I never knew her to falsify or misrepresent herself. Whatever she gave you—a look, a question, an answer—was honest. She didn't tell you everything she knew or thought. She never made reference even by silence to anything she suffered. But in herself she was present. She was present in her dealings with other people. She was right there. She was, to my eye, a good mother who liked and enjoyed her children, leaving them free within limits that both she and they understood. But she was also coming into responsibility for the community.

You don't have to know Port William long before you see that whatever coherence it has is largely owing to certain women. Maybe, since I no longer live in Port William, I shouldn't generalize about it, but this is the way it seemed to me then. Art Rowanberry was surely right (mostly right) in saying that “people in Port William don't have their own business.” One result is that people know who needs help. In Port William the women, like the men, talk. It is wonderful how secrets, always told secretly, can get around; I have been told the same secret three times in
one day, each time with a warning to tell nobody. But some women seem more likely to act on what they know than most men. The men are not uncharitable; they are quick to get together to harvest a crop for a neighbor who gets sick. But it is the women more than the men who see to it that cooked food goes where it is needed, that no house goes without fuel in the winter, that no child goes without toys at Christmas, that the preacher knows where he should go with a word of comfort. This is a charity that includes the church rather than the other way around. Margaret Feltner was one of the women who saw to such things; so was Della Keith; so, as she came into her time, was Mattie Chatham.

Of course, my semipublic participation in the nightlife of Hargrave was known in Port William. I had no more of “my own business” than anybody else. And of course, my reputation as an ineligible bachelor barber, grave digger, and church janitor (known to partake of the manly nightlife of Port William and to favor the society of bold women in the nightspots of Hargrave) made me perhaps always a little more hopelessly marginal to the womanhood of Port William.

And yet I was something more than an observer. I was more or less tolerated because of my usefulness, and also, I believe, because of the remote chance that even so black a sheep might yet be washed whiter than snow. I continued to attend the services and other gatherings at the church, just in case I was needed to open or shut the windows or bring in extra chairs, and to make sure all the lights were turned off afterward. And so I was having a good bit to do, in a servantly way, with the women, who often had reason to tell me what needed to be done or what needed getting ready for. Mattie Chatham, as time went on and the older women became less able, had a way of being involved and seeing to things. Her way was quiet and unobtrusive—and effective; she got things done. She was never bossy (as, for instance, Mrs. Pauline Gibbs always was) but was just simply and quietly kind. She certainly made nothing special of me. But when she asked me to do something, she asked clearly knowing that she was putting me to trouble. She would say, “Jayber, would you mind?” And she always thanked me. She was considerate. That was one of the reasons I remained aware of her. Looking back, when the time came to look back, I could see that I was extraordinarily aware of her even then.

She had come into her beauty. This was not the beauty of her youth and freshness, of which she had had a plenty. The beauty that I am speaking of now was that of a woman who has come into knowledge and into strength and who, knowing her hardships, trusts her strength and goes about her work even with a kind of happiness, serene somehow, and secure. It was the beauty she would always have. Her eyes had not changed. They still seemed to exert a power, as if whatever she looked at (including, I thought, me) was brightened.

And then one Friday not long after the summer solstice of 1950 (at the start of another war), the most deciding event of my life took place, and I was not the same ever again. Vacation Bible School was going on at the church. I went up in the early afternoon as usual to clean up and prepare the building for the Sunday services. I finished my work in the sanctuary, and then because classes and “activities” were going on I went outside to putter around until the building would be empty.

It was a pretty afternoon, not too warm. Mattie had brought the littlest children out into the yard to play games, her own Liddie among them. I picked up some trash along the road in front of the church, then began pulling some weeds out of the shrubbery, aware all the time of Mattie and the children, and pausing now and again to watch.

To be plain about it, I didn't think much of Vacation Bible School. As a product of The Good Shepherd, I didn't think much of confinement. If I had ever gone to Vacation Bible School, I thought, I would not have liked it; I would have been too much aware of the invitation of the free and open summer day. It was nevertheless a great pleasure to me to watch Mattie and the children. She was guiding their play and playing with them, not being very insistent about anything, and they all were having a good time.

I knew well the work and worry she had pending at home, and yet in that moment she was as free with the children as if she had been a child herself—as free as a child, but with a generosity and watchfulness that were anything but childish. She was just perfectly there with them in her pleasure.

I was all of a sudden overcome with love for her. It was the strongest moment I had known, violent in its suddenness and completeness, and yet also the quietest. I had been utterly changed, and had not stirred. It
was as though she had, in the length of a breath, assumed in my mind a new dimension. I no longer merely saw her as one among the objects of the world but felt in every nerve the heft and touch of her. I felt her take form within my own form. I felt her come into being within me, as in the morning of the world.

This love did not come to me like an arrow piercing my heart. Instead, it was as though Port William and all the world suddenly quietly fell away from me, leaving me standing in the air, alone, with the ache of acrophobia in the soles of my feet and my heart hollowed out with longing, in need of what I did not have.

For a time—how long I don't know—I was lost to myself, standing there still as a tree, and I have always wondered if she saw and knew. And then somehow, as uncertain of my contact with the ground as Julep Smallwood drunk, I made my way out of town into the woods, and sat down and put my head in my hands.

 

Such a thing is maybe one of the liabilities of ineligible bachelorhood. Maybe it is one of the liabilities of manhood. For a long time I did not know what to make of it, and I suffered from my ignorance. What business had an ineligible bachelor to be in love with a married woman? Had it been only an infatuation, a desire striking and wounding and passing on by, it would have been a waste of pain. And how was I to know that a waste of pain was not what it was? I felt much and knew nothing. I had been touched by power but not by knowledge. There was nothing to do but submit to the trial of it. After a long time, it proved by its own suffering that love itself was what it was, and I am thankful.

My dreams changed. Before, I had rarely dreamed of any woman I had been attracted to in my waking life. I would dream of women I had glimpsed in passing, or of women I had never seen before, who might, for all I knew, have been nymphs or goddesses. Now I dreamed of Mattie Chatham, of her herself.

I told nobody. Nobody knew of it but me. That alone was a revelation. I had always made it a rule of thumb that there were no real secrets in Port William, but now I knew that this was not so. It was the secrets between people that got out. The secrets that people knew alone were the ones that were kept, the knowledge too painful or too dear to speak of. If
so urging a thing as I now knew was known only to me, then what must other people know that they had never told? I felt a strange new respect for the heads I barbered. I knew that the dead carried with them out of this world things they could not give away.

From that moment up in the churchyard, Mattie Chatham became a demand and a trouble on my mind. I began to contrive (usually without success) to be near her. I wanted, as I would say to myself, to be in her presence, as if her presence were a fragrance, or a light that was within her and shone around her. And within this influence or power that I called her presence was Mattie herself, her palpable self, ripe and beautiful, unimagining, it seemed, within my fully awakened imagining of her, within my awareness unaware. There were times when my desire stood before me like a spoiled child, insisting that it should be given what it did not have—what it did not know it could not have.

Looking back, I still feel a kind of shame about that passage of my life. I ceased to be solitary (as, in a manner of speaking, I have always been) and became furtive, leading a secret life in my thoughts, which were always as urgent and unrefusable as a knock on the door late at night, and which always led straight to impossibilities that seemed nonetheless possible. I might as well have been back at the orphanage, surrounded by strangers and dreaming of home.

Thinking of Mattie, I began to imagine the intimacy of marriage, which I thought might be a name for admission into presence. In marriage, a man and a woman might come gladly into each other's presence. This was something, I think, that would not have occurred to me in thinking of Clydie, who always consciously reserved something of herself. Clydie was always holding a high card that she wouldn't play—or maybe couldn't play, given her circumstances. But what moved me so toward Mattie was the sense that she withheld nothing; she was not a woman of defenses or devices. Though she might be divided in her affection and loyalty, within herself she was whole and clear. She would be wholly present within her presence.