Jayber Crow (52 page)

 

But faith is not necessarily, or not soon, a resting place. Faith puts you out on a wide river in a little boat, in the fog, in the dark. Even a man of faith knows that (as Burley Coulter used to say) we've all got to go through enough to kill us. As a man of faith, I've thought a considerable amount about a friend of mine (imagined, but also real) I call the Man in the Well.

The now wooded, or rewooded, slopes and hollows hereabouts are strewn with abandoned homesteads, the remains of another kind of world. Most of them by now have no buildings left. Everything about them that would rot has rotted. What you find now in those places when you come upon them are the things that were built of stone: foundations, cellars, chimneys, wells. Sometimes the wells are deep, dug to the bedrock and beyond, and walled with rock laid up without mortar. Virtually every rock in a structure like that, if it is built right, is a keystone; it can't move in or out. Those walls, laid underground where there is no freezing and thawing, will last, I guess, almost forever.

Sometimes the well is the only structure remaining, and there will be no visible sign of it. It will be covered with old boards in some stage of decay, green with moss or covered with leaves. It is a perfect trap, and now and then you find that rabbits and groundhogs have blundered in and drowned. A man too could blunder into one.

Imagine a hunter, somebody from a city some distance away, who has a job he doesn't like, and who has come alone out into the country to hunt on a Saturday. It is a beautiful, perfect fall day, and the Man feels free. He has left all his constraints and worries and fears behind. Nobody knows where he is. Anybody who wanted to complain or accuse or collect a debt could not find him. The morning that started frosty has grown warm. The sky seems to give its luster to everything in the world. The Man feels strong and fine. His gun lies ready in the crook of his arm, though he really doesn't care whether he finds game or not. He has a sandwich and a candy bar in his coat pocket. And then, not looking where he is going, which is easy enough on such a day, he steps onto the rotten boards that cover one of those old wells, and down he goes.

He disappears suddenly out of the lighted world. He falls so quickly that he doesn't have time even to ask what is happening. He hits water, goes under, comes up, swims, or clings to the wall, inserting his fingers between the rocks. And now, I think, you cannot help imagining the way it would be with him. He looks up and sees how far down he has come. The sky that was so large and reassuring only seconds ago is now just a small blue picture of itself, far away. His first thought is that he is alone, that nobody knows where he is; these two great pleasures that were his freedom have now become his prison, perhaps his tomb. He calls out (for might not somebody chance to be nearby, just as he chanced to fall into the well?) and he hears himself enclosed within the sound of his own calling voice.

How does this story end? Does he save himself? Is he athletic enough, maybe, to get his boots off and climb out, clawing with fingers and toes into the grudging holds between the rocks of the wall? Does he climb up and fall back? Does somebody, in fact, for a wonder, chance to pass nearby and hear him? Does he despair, give up, and drown? Does he, despairing, pray finally the first true prayer of his life?

Listen. There is a light that includes our darkness, a day that shines down even on the clouds. A man of faith believes that the Man in the Well is not lost. He does not believe this easily or without pain, but he believes it. His belief is a kind of knowledge beyond any way of knowing. He believes that the child in the womb is not lost, nor is the man whose work has come to nothing, nor is the old woman forsaken in a nursing home in California. He believes that those who make their bed in Hell are not lost, or those who dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, or the lame man at Bethesda Pool, or Lazarus in the grave, or those who pray,
“Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani.
”

Have mercy.

 

The rest of what I have to tell begins in the amazing state of ignorance. It was a fairly ordinary late summer day, a Monday. I ran my lines the first thing, as usual, and had my breakfast and my shave. I did up my housework, gathered the things that needed washing (which is how I remember that it was Monday), and washed them. Provided I am not short of water, I like washing. I do it on a scrubbing board in a galvanized tub set on two chairs, and I have two other tubs for rinsing. It is
pleasant to work a while in the smell of soap, and then to have the smell of the clean wet things drying on the line. Nobody came for a haircut that day, and so I was never interrupted. When I had the washing hung out, I fixed a bite to eat, and ate, and took a nap, and then I went down to hit a few licks in the garden.

I did have a trouble or two on my mind. I knew that Mattie was in the hospital down at Hargrave. Some said she was dying. Some said, well, you never know, for a person can be mighty sick and still linger for a long time. Nobody was saying any more, not even for politeness' sake, that she might get well. You will imagine that I felt powerfully drawn to go to see her, to offer in her presence, as people do, the useless wish that I could do something to help. But I had not gone. I was not going to go. If I didn't go, I knew I would be sorry. But not a soul, including me, had ever acknowledged that I had any concern in the matter. If I went and was seen there, I would embarrass her. I would embarrass myself too. I did think of that.

Troubled or not, grieved or not, you have got to live. And the facts of the case are even harder than that, for however troubled and grieved you may be, you will often find, looking back, that you were not living without enjoyment. That day had a trouble in it that would overwhelm its pleasure, though I did not yet know it.

I was putting off knowing it. All that day there had been a crashing in the wind, the sound of a chainsaw and that of a much heavier engine. But the sounds seemed somehow undemanding. The wind that day was stirring in the nearer trees, and as I went about my work I raised a certain amount of commotion around myself. I made excuses for the crashings and the engine sounds. In this valley, after all, some form of pandemonium is no rare thing. A highway crew will be at work somewhere; the heavy gravel trucks will be running; a towboat or a convoy of pleasure boats will be passing on the river; a crew will be clearing right-of-way under a power line; the forces of the air will be practicing what I suppose to be bombing runs low over the ridgetops; The Economy and The War are everywhere, making their noises.

“Something of Great Importance is going on,” I thought to myself, brushing it aside. “Surely The News is happening someplace nearby.”

And so it wasn't until I had commenced work in the garden that I all of
a sudden stopped, knowing that I knew what it was, and an awful coldness of knowledge went over me from head to foot. I put my hoe away and started for the Nest Egg. It was a painful walk, for I was still hoping to be proved wrong, but every step I took confirmed that I was right.

The thickety little strip of bottomland along the lower end of Coulter Branch had been cleared off with a bulldozer, and that was where they were yarding up the logs. Tremendous logs were lying there, side by side. They made me think of beached whales, great living creatures heaved out of their element at last. But all the logs were not big. Troy Chatham had sold every marketable stick, every tree big enough to make two two-by-fours.

Troy himself was standing among the big logs, looking about. Beyond, off in the woods, the chainsaw ran hard and then more easily and then idled, sputtering, as a tree fell, breaking its way through other trees to the ground. And then you could hear only the engine of the bulldozer that they were dragging the logs with. Presently the dozer burst out through the fringe of cane. It dragged a big log into place beside the other logs and hurried out of sight again, making nothing of whatever saplings were in the way.

Troy saw me then and waved me over. I went obediently, feeling a sort of embarrassment, as if the occasion called for an etiquette that I had not learned. He was grinning his big in-the-know grin. He began talking before I got within hearing.

I said,
“What?”

He said, “You've got to see it to believe it, don't you?”

I could say nothing. For me, seeing it made it harder to believe. I couldn't quite imagine the world in which it would be believable. Something fundamental seemed to be ending. Athey's Nest Egg now looked small. Now, even in my memory of it, it looked small.

Troy said, “Lord Almighty, the power they've got! And these boys know how to use it! You wouldn't think it, would you?”

“No,” I said.

“And look at these logs,” he said. “Who'd have thought such trees could have grown here?”

The day was hot and he was sweating. We both were.

He was grinning, wanting to talk. Beyond his need for money, he was
needing to be proud. I had begun to feel the world whirling; I wanted to lie down for fear of being flung off.

I knew the story. I knew what had happened. All that “leverage” he had bragged about: The fulcrum had shifted. The price of land had dropped. He no longer had the equity to support his debts. He was about to lose everything that he had believed he owned by courtesy of relentless work and endless debt. In his desperation to salvage something, even just a little dab of pride, he had had to look on Mattie's illness as providential. He had come to that. As soon as she had gone into the hospital (for the last time, I knew now; she was gone from this place forever), he had sold the timber. So I knew too that she had been its protector.

I heard in my mind the voices of how many outraged old men of Port William: “The damned fool! They ought to penitencher the son of a bitch!”

At the clap of that condemnation in my thoughts, what had happened to him seemed to happen to me, and for the first time I saw him apart from my contempt for him. I saw him clear-eyed.

I saw us both as if from a great distance off in time: two small, craving, suffering creatures, soon to be gone. Troy was a beaten man and knew it, and was trying not to know it. You could see it in his eyes. Now at last he was about to inherit a farm that he had worn out, that he had so encumbered with debt that he could not keep it, that I knew would now be dragged into the suck of speculation and development to be subdivided under some such name as Paradise Estates. This was Troy's last play in what he had sometimes liked to call “the game of farming.” What did he have left? Another cutting of timber, maybe, if he could wait another hundred or two hundred years.

So there he was, a man who had been given everything and did not know it, who had lost it all and now knew it, and who was boasting and grinning only to pretend for a few hours longer that he did not know it. He was an exhausted man on the way back, not to the nothing that he had when he started out, but to the nothing that everything had been created from—and so, I pray, to mercy.

And there I was, a man losing what I was never given, a man yet rich with love, a man whose knees were weakening against gravity, who needed to go somewhere and lie down. I stood facing that man I had
hated for forty years, and I did not hate him. If he had acknowledged then what he finally would not be able to avoid acknowledging, I would have hugged him. If I could have done it, I would have liked to pick him up like a child and carry him to some place of safety and calm.

 

The time would come (and this was my deliverance, my Nunc Dimittis) when I would be, in the small ways that were possible, his friend. It was a friend, finally, that he would need. I would listen to him and talk to him, ignoring his self-pity and his lapses into grandeur and meanness, giving him a good welcome and a pat on the shoulder, because I wanted to. For finally he was redeemed, in my eyes, by Mattie's long-abiding love for him, as I myself had been by my love for her.

But that day I couldn't stay with him any longer. I needed to leave him and his desperate merchandise and that woods of once-upon-a-time. I needed to go and find a place to lie down. That urge was in me like a natural force. Like a woman or an animal in labor, I longed to lie down, for I was heavy, not with new life but with much dying, many deaths. I had in me the shaking of the fall of all things. I wanted to get as low as I could, as I thought I would want to do had I been in the top of a windblown tree or in a little boat in a storm.

I didn't go home. Anything of the familiar world would have been more than I could bear. I went in amongst the trees between the river and the road. There was a driftlog in an elderberry patch well up the slope. I made my way into that covert and lay down beside the log on the dry leaves. Nobody would find me there, and I needed not to be found.

I fell into a dreadful sleep that maybe was my death itself. I became one with the earth and was anything but at peace. I heard the motors speeding along the pavements and the rivers, the tractors in the fields, the airplanes in the sky, and always, always that chainsaw in the woods. I heard the big trees tearing and breaking their way to the ground, and the thumps of little creatures run over on the road.

It could have been three hours or three weeks that I suffered that dream, but I knew when I woke that it was more than three hours and less than three weeks, for it was early morning and the time of year was the same. I was bewildered, having been changed by my bitter sleep more than I yet could know.

In the darkness a large black-and-yellow spider had woven a perfect web right above me, guying it to the log, several elderberry stems, and my shirt. I eased out from under it as carefully as I could, but not without damaging it. In my bewilderment I spent several perfectly crazy minutes trying to fix it. But of course a man can't make a spider's web, any more than he can make a world. Finally I said, “Pardon me, old friend, I have got to go.”