Seven : Through the Valley
Andy Catlett knows more than he understands, and more than he will understand for a good many years to come. He has too much on his mind and in his nature, too many choices, in too complex a time, to permit him to be close to any clarifying insight.
He has grown up in Hargrave, the county seat, a little town looking up and down the Ohio at Cincinnati and Louisville, dreaming of distance and money and bright lights, uneasy about its failure to attract the notice of Progress, sniffing with some contempt and some embarrassment—for fear, perhaps, of being familiarly recognized—in the presence of the farmers on whose custom it has depended since its beginnings; and yet half content, for the time being, to be self-contained and small, perched like a pretty memory on the outside sweep of the river’s bend, in love with summer evenings when the merchants and the office men and the distillery workers come home to shady yards and the smells of supper, in love with foggy mornings when the towboats whistle and groan in the river’s blind shroud, summoning the wakers to the mysterious and the far. And Andy knows that life. In the confines of church and school he learned the truths to which the town pretended or aspired. In the countenances and characters of his teachers, in long back yard rambles home from school, in Saturday afternoon adventures in alleys and outskirts and along the river, he learned how the truths fared in daily life.
But Andy’s family had its roots in the farmland around Port William— Wheeler, his father, is in a sense not so much a lawyer as a farmer who practices law—and the boy has grown up also under the eyes and hands of Mat and Margaret Feltner, his mother’s parents, of his father’s parents, Marcellus and Dorie Catlett, of Elton and Mary Penn and the Coulters, and of Old Jack Beechum, his great-great-uncle. And so, though he knows the town, he knows as well truths older than the town’s truths; he knows a faith and a hardship and a delight older than the town’s ambition to be a bigger town. Since the beginning of his consciousness he has felt over and around him the regard of that fellowship of kinsmen and friends, watching him, warning him, correcting him, teasing him, instructing him, not so much because of any ambition they have for him as because of where he comes from and because in him they see, come back again, traits and features of dead men and women they loved.
Andy remembers his father’s parents, Marce and Dorie Catlett, now dead, who left to Wheeler, their only surviving son, the good farm on the Birds Branch Road which had borne their name for three generations. He remembers the threadbare life of that couple—the unadorned, sparely furnished rooms of the house; fences and buildings patched and repatched; old Marce’s worn and carefully kept and mended tools. He remembers how, after Dorie’s death, the house yielded parcels of letters, canceled checks, paid and canceled promissory notes and mortgages, all neatly tied with strips of rag, and drawers full of neatly bound bundles of cloth scraps, remnants of thread and string wound around folds of paper, boxes of buttons clipped from worn-out clothes. As long as Andy knew them, though they had no dependent then and were safe from the ruin that they had struggled against, it was still characteristic that Marce should wear a straw hat neatly patched with pieces of various old shirts; that Dorie’s dishpan should have its leaks stopped with tiny bits of rag; that her oven door should be propped shut with a tobacco stick and a rock. And before he was old enough to be told, Andy had already glimpsed the aim of that pinching thrift and hard saving: that the farm should survive them undiminished and unencumbered, that what they had served should go on. He remembers the vacancy of the house after his grandmother Catlett’s death. The place was sharecropped then by the Coulters—Marce Catlett was a first cousin to Dave Coulter, Burley and Jarrat’s father—and by Elton Penn, Old Jack’s tenant and, by then, as much his son as any man would ever be. And Wheeler would be there, looking after things, before he went to the office in the morning, or before he went home in the evening, or both.
And so it was only to be expected that from the time they were old enough to stay away from home Andy and his younger brother, Henry, would have an aspiration toward Port William. They would go there whenever they could—to visit with grandparents, to eat big meals that dependably included dishes they especially liked, to tag along with the men when they went to the fields, to drive the teams to the field and hold the reins while the men loaded the wagons, to pick berries along the edges of the woods in the dewy mornings, to gather walnuts and hickory nuts on bright Saturdays in October, to ride horseback to the ponds to swim, to fish in the river or the old quarry, to listen to the stories that Mat or Burley or Old Jack would tell, not always when asked, but when the mood was on them. While they were still only children, Andy and Henry became initiates of a way of life that was threatened and nearly done with in that part of the country, and of which they would be among the last survivors.
When the two boys became old enough to work it was only to be expected that they would go to work in the fields that their kinsmen for generations before them had gone to work in, and that the men who had been their friends and at times their playmates would then become their exemplars and taskmasters. For Andy this was a time of trial that put him in touch with the depths of his pride and endurance. It set the first standard in his mind that he recognized as worthy of his effort. From that company of men, that brotherhood of friends and kinsmen, his teachers, he glimpsed a vision of human possibility that would not leave him.
They were hard enough on him. They did not spare him. He was a skinny, clumsy boy, and embarrassed about it, and they did not spare him even that.
Burley would squeeze his leg above the knee, delicately, as if in wonder. “Andy,” he would say, “does your leg swell up like that ever’summer?”
“Sixteen years old,” Elton Penn said. “Boy, it’s time you learned to set up by yourself.”
And they would tell him: “Come on, Andy! Come on! Come on!”
They would stand and watch him fumbling, coming up with his end of it. “Hundred dollars waitin’ on a dime.”
But at the end of a long day, when he had lasted and done well, he felt their satisfaction with him, their relief and pleasure.
“Tired, old boy?” they would ask him.
“No,” he would say.
And then maybe one of them would lay an open hand on his head, or give him a clap on the shoulder or a hug.
And now he is getting ready to leave that place and life that have made him what he is. He is going to bring that old life, familiar to him as though he has known it for generations, to the test of what he does not know: a strange city, books and voices that will be a new world to him. Through the summer he gave little thought to this coming change. As always, there were the long workdays in the fields, an occasional day or two of fishing and camping by himself along the river, and nights at Hargrave with Kirby when they went to a dance or a party or a show or sat talking and loving on the hilltop above the town and the meeting of the two rivers. He let the time go by.
It was only a week ago, when Henry left Port William and went back to Hargrave to begin his own last year of high school, that Andy felt himself borne irrevocably toward the future that is so dark and questionable to him. He stayed on with Mat and Margaret, working in the tobacco harvest, but now there lay in him a strange sorrow that seemed not to go away even when he was thoughtless of it or asleep. And when he put his mind to it he knew what it was: it was fear that in order to be what he might become he would have to cease to be what he had been, he would have to turn away from that place to which his flesh and his thoughts and his devotion belonged. For it was the assumption of much of his schooling, it was in the attitude of most of his teachers and schoolmates, it was in the bearing of history toward such places as Port William and even Hargrave, that achievement, success, all worthy hope lay elsewhere, in cities, in places of economic growth and power; it was assumed that a man must put away his origin as a childish thing.
One morning, unable to sleep, he got up before daylight and slipped out of the house. He went through the barn lot and down the hill under the stars and through the gathering strands and shelves of mist, and past the house where the Berlews were asleep, and into the woods of the hollow—a way familiar to him since as a boy he first followed Joe Banion hunting. Once in the woods he could see very little, only strange, faint, and shifting clouds of light here and there, but he was on a path that he knew and now he walked slowly. The darkness was close around him; he felt the touch of it. A strand of spiderweb broke wet on his face. He went on down into the depth of the woods, a place where two forks of the little stream joined. The stream was dry; only the tireless, endless songs of the crickets flowed and glimmered in the air. Around him the trees stood still; not a breeze or a breath was stirring. Ahead of him he could hear a bird begin to sing, a voice solitary and strong greeting the first light. He waited, standing still as the trees, until the growing morning began to reach in through the leaves and he could see a little, and then he crossed the bed of the stream and climbed up through the woods on the other side, angling down the hollow as he went. He came shortly to a broad, gently sloping bench that lay between the wooded slope he had just climbed and an even steeper one above. Here the trees had been cut down, leaving a clearing of perhaps two acres. Now through the rim of low bushes that edged the clearing he could see a brightening expanse of sky.
He had come into one of the deepest depths of his memory. One morning when he was only three or four years old, when this clearing stood planted in tobacco, ripe for harvest, he had come here with Mat, and Joe Banion, now dead, and Virgil, longer dead than Joe. They came down on a wagon drawn by a team of mules, one black and one, in her old age, nearly as white as snow. He remembers the early morning sunlight slanting in, the dew shining, the hummingbirds at the tobacco blooms, the solemn quiet of the woods. The clarity of that morning hour and the freshness of his eyes mythified the place, so that now it seems to him that he came there first, not fifteen years ago, but generations ago beyond memory—that when Mat and Joe and Virgil brought him there is was not new to him, but more familiar than his own flesh, and the place and the hour held him like his mother’s lap.
He stepped out through the wet foliage into the edge of the clearing and stood still. In the snag of a deadened tree near the center the bird continued to sing. Though Andy would not realize it until later, he was no longer thinking. The place filled his consciousness; amply and easily it woke within his mind, and his mind rested in it. For some time as he stood there, so quieted that he was hardly aware of his own presence, the only sounds were the bird’s song and the constant dreaming song of the crickets. And then off in the woods, where he would not go again for a long time, he heard a squirrel’s teeth grate into the rind of a hickory nut; and he could see again ahead of him the intent gray figure of Joe Banion. Joe’s black hand moved from under the brim of the dew-beaded felt hat where it had been resting meditatively against his face; his hand rose and opened in the air, alert as a deer’s ear. Quietly, that hand still in the air, Joe looked back to warn him with a stern shake of his head—Don’t make a sound!—and stepped off slowly along the edge of the woods, his silent feet brushing a dark track through the dewy grass. The black man and the small white boy gone out of sight, Andy stood some moments longer, recovering the presence of the place, and then he turned and went silently back into the woods.
Now his last day in the field has come and gone. He was cutting with Nathan and Elton when Mat and the other Coulters and Lightning came back with the wagons to load again. They stopped at the far end of the field.
“Andy,” Mat called. “Time for you to be going, I expect.” He knew that Andy had some getting ready to do and some good-bys to say and a date for that night, and he did not want him to be rushed.
The three cutters had just finished their rows and were standing at the end of the field, resting, not talking much now, for they were tired.
“All right,” Andy called back.
“Well, old boy, are you going?” Elton said.
“I guess so.”
“Well, Andy,” Nathan said, “be good and be careful.”
“Yeah,” Elton said, “mainly be careful. And we’ll be seeing you back in these parts before too long, I expect.”
Andy put his tools down beside the water jug at the row end. “Yeah.” He was looking off into the river valley, and then he looked at his friends and held his hand out. They shook, and said good-by.
The others were already loading the first of the wagons, Mat building the load, Mary Penn on the tractor, the rest on the ground. When he passed them they did not stop, but raised their hands to him.
“So long, son,” Mat said.
He left the field and from some distance looked back, and there they were, going on, intent upon their work as before, and the ripe tobacco and the evening light surrounded them with a glow that would stay in his mind, he thought, forever.
At the house Little Margaret and Mattie were out playing in the yard, and he knew that Hannah had come back to tell him good-by. He washed his hands and went into the kitchen to find her sitting with Margaret at the table. In the chair beside her Margaret had a pile of neatly folded laundry and a large paper sack. She was obviously waiting for him, with a lot she had been keeping on her mind to tell him.
“Now,” she said, beginning without a greeting as she was apt to do when her mind was much occupied, “here are your extra clothes. They’re clean, and I’ve just darned your socks. And that sack’s got your shaving things in it and some other odds and ends. And there’s a check in there from your grandaddy, for your wages, and I think maybe a little more.”
“Okay,” Andy said, picking up the bundles. “Thanks.” He was beginning to be upset, wanting to hurry and be gone.
“Now wait,” Margaret said. “I’m not finished.” And she resumed the list she had been keeping in her mind. “Inside that sack is a tin with some cookies in it for you to take with you to school. Don’t shake ‘em around and make crumbs out of ’em, and don’t eat ’em before you get there. And when you do get there I want you to apply yourself and study hard, because I think you’ve been given a good mind and it would be a shame to waste it. Your grandaddy thinks so too.”
Margaret paused, searching out and ordering the rest of what she had to say. Andy stood holding his bundles, grinning, for he knew he would have to wait until she had said it all. This way his gentle grandmother had of being duty-bound and stern amused him. And yet as never before he was touched by her. She was thinking more than she was saying or was going to say. Her eyes were on him, gentle and grave behind her glasses, and as if she deliberately held him he could not look away.
“Listen,” she said. “There are some of us here who love you mighty well and respect you and think you’re fine. There may be times when you’ll need to think of that. And before you leave Port William I think you ought to go over to the hotel and say good-by to your uncle Jack.”
“I will,” Andy said. “I was going to.”
“And that’s mainly all I wanted to tell you. Now come here and kiss your old granny good-by.”
Andy went obediently and leaned down and kissed her. “Good-by,” he said. “I’d better go.”
“You’d better,” Hannah said. “It’s getting late.” She stood and put her arms around him. “You’ll have to clean up before you kiss Kirby, but I’m going to kiss you the way you are.” And she kissed his cheek. “Be good, hon,” she said, and turned him and pushed him toward the door.
And now it seems to him it is all behind him: the day, the summer, his life as it has been up to now and as he knows it. Margaret and Hannah have made him feel it, this sudden great division. Margaret’s words have made an occasion of his departure; that, he will realize later, was her gift to him. She has reached deeply into him, into that luminous landscape of his mind where the past lives, where all of them—some who are now dead—are together, and where they will all still be together long after many of those now living will be dead. She has shaken him out of what might have been the simplicity of his leaving and has made it as complex as it really is, as she would have it be. And so as he leaves the house Andy steps out into a changed and strangely radiant world, for he is walking now not merely in the place but in his knowledge of it, surrounded by the ghosts and presences of the ones who have cared for him and watched over him there all his life, and he is accompanied by earlier versions of himself that he has lived beyond. The ache of an exultant sorrow is in his throat.
He puts his bundles in on the seat of Mat’s truck, which he will drive home and which Henry will bring back after school on Friday, when he comes to rejoin the tobacco cutting. Little Margaret and Mattie have followed him out across the yard.
“Good-by, kids,” Andy says.
“I want to go,” Mattie says.
“You can’t go, dummy!” his sister tells him.
“I want to go, Andy.”
“Next time,” Andy says.
“Good-by, Andy ” Little Margaret says. “Come back smart.”
As Andy leaves the truck and starts out toward the street he can see Old Jack sitting alone in one of the chairs on the hotel porch. The old man sits so still that he appears inanimate. Even from that distance it is clear that he is not conscious of where he is; he is not present there. Yet, as he crosses the road, Andy is aware as always that he approaches a past much older than his own, that he cannot remember. But it is a past that, listening to Old Jack’s and his grandparents’ talk, he can enter with his imagination, and in that way he has taken possession of it. Since boyhood he has been Old Jack’s listener, the student of his memory. And there has come to be a part of his mind that is spacious and old, hung with the elaborately interconnecting web of Port William lineages, containing landscapes changed beyond recognition years before his birth, peopled by men and women and children whose names have turned mossy on their graves.
He steps up onto the edge of the porch and with contrived cheer greets the old man’s vacant body. “How are you, Uncle Jack?”
And still for many seconds Old Jack’s mind stays wherever it has gone. The intelligence of his eyes remains distant and he does not move. And then he turns his head and his eyes light and look up. “Why, son,” he says, “I’m all right now. I thank you.” And he waves his hand in a gracious gesture of dismissal, for he thinks that Andy is the young fellow, now two hours gone, who helped him back to the porch after he fell there in front of Burgess’s store. But this voice sounds more familiar and dear to him than that one.
“Who is it?” he says.
“It’s Andy Catlett,” Andy says. And then, he adds: “Wheeler’s boy.”
“Good God Amighty!” Old Jack says. “Honey, I didn’t know you.” And he shakes his head in chagrin, and says again: “I didn’t know you.”
For a moment he feels sinking through him a sort of shame in having failed to recognize the boy, for whom his love was prepared far back in his love for Ben Feltner. It occurs to him that he probably will not live much longer, and he thinks: “All right. All right.”
“I’m glad you came, son,” he says. “Come here where I can get ahold of you.”
Andy steps up within reach, and the old man stretches out his right hand and feels the boy’s arm from the shoulder down to the wrist, and then he runs his hand down his leg from hip to calf, grasping and pressing, as he once would have handled a horse’s leg. He says as he always says: “Son, you’re mighty nar’ in the hams.” He shakes his head. He has been hoping the boy would muscle up some.
For Andy these examinations are both funny and embarrassing, and yet peculiarly moving, for he recognizes a sort of loving-kindness in them. He submits to them at a considerable sacrifice of dignity—something, it seems to him, he can hardly spare.
Old Jack lifts his hand from the back of Andy’s knee and takes hold of his elbow and pushes him away a step. He leans back now to regard him. There is something about Andy’s brow and eyes that reminds Old Jack of Mat and, before Mat, of Ben. Aside from that, he looks mainly like Wheeler. He has the strong nose that Wheeler got from his father. Old Jack snorts with pleasure, a stockman’s pleasure, at seeing a good trait passed on. He touches the boy with the point of his cane.
“You’re your daddy made over,” he says. “You’re Wheeler Catlett made over. But you’ll never make a lawyer like your daddy. You ain’t got the head for it.”
And he continues for a while to gaze upon the boy. He is not sure what this boy may make of himself. The other boy, that Henry, will make the lawyer. This one, this Andy, with the eagerness to know of the old times, his interest in the men who have worked the fields, is a puzzle.
“What’re you aiming to make out of yourself?” He prods the boy gently again with the end of the cane.
“I don’t know.”
“God Amighty,” Old Jack says.
“A farmer, I guess,” Andy says doubtfully. A farmer is what he would like to be. But now he seems to be headed away from that.
“Well,” Old Jack says, also doubtfully. “You can be that.”
“Books,” he thinks. The boy loves books. Reading books is something Old Jack has done little enough of in his day, the Lord knows. He read in his readers while he went to school and has forgotten all that, except for the mouse that gnawed the rope and turned the lion loose. And long back, Nancy used to make him read some in the Bible. But that was a tedious and difficult labor—to take a little book in his hands and say over all those black words; it seemed to him you could go on doing that forever, and he found it a worrisome prospect. Marvelous, to him, the sort of mind that could look at words and see through them to what they were about. He could seldom do it. The Twenty-third Psalm, he could see through that one. He has read the newspaper some, but he either cannot see through those words at all, or he sees not people but little things hopping around like fleas.
But suddenly he remembers his manners. Here he is sitting in the most comfortable chair, and the boy is still standing. He leans and hooks his cane onto a rung of an old kitchen chair that sits nearby, and draws it over.
“Here,” he says. “Set here.”
“No,” Andy says, embarrassed again. “Here. I’ll take this other one.”
But Old Jack has already begun getting up. He hauls himself up by one of the porch posts and then lets himself down again, with as much difficulty, into the kitchen chair. He clangs his cane across the seat of the metal armchair he has just abandoned. “Set down!”
Andy obeys with relief. Now maybe they will talk. That is a comfort that Andy has hoped for: to sit there on the porch, the town before them, the legendry of its past near them, himself, for the moment, only a welcome and beloved presence of the present. How many times have they sat there, Old Jack remembering and meditating on his memories; Andy listening, his mind slowly illuminating a country of the past that, by Old Jack’s gift, he was born to, though he does not remember it. But that is not going to happen today. It will not happen again.
Old Jack taps his cane on Andy’s knee. “You’ve just come from the tobacco patch.”
“Yes sir.”
“What were they doing?”
“Nathan and Elton were cutting. Grandaddy and the others were loading.”
Old Jack is sitting on the seat of the chair without leaning against the back—straight up, like a rider. He taps the boy’s knee lightly with the cane; he leans forward a little. “Now tell me, son. Who was cutting in the lead ?”
“Elton.”
“Ah!” Old Jack says. He leans back now. He would have had it so.
In the rhythms of that difficult work Elton moves like a dancer, seemingly without effort, lightly. Old Jack can see him. In his mind he can see him very well indeed: swaying, bending and rising in the ripe row in the rich evening light—that unsparing man, so careful in his ways—his blade striking lightly as he bends, the golden plants turning to rest upon the stick, the row lengthening rapidly behind him, shortening ahead of him. With increasing distance the figure loses personality; it becomes a lyrical embodiment of youth and strength and grace, of the passion to achieve what the light allows. It could be Elton or Nathan, or Mat in his day, or Old Jack himself in his, or any of that crop of young men, strong and swift, eager in their spending, who have risen and flourished and fallen in this place, generation after generation.
And now Old Jack’s eyes are those of a man intently watching, though he looks at nothing within the range of sight. For some time Andy gazes at his face, wondering at him.
But the silence draws out to unusual length, and Andy’s mind, burdened with such a press of subjects, wanders away from Old Jack. He begins to think of the coming night, for that too has been much in his thoughts. It will be his last night with Kirby for he does not know how long, maybe until Christmas. Kirby, who has been the lure and trial of his thoughts for more than a year, also will be going away to college, but she will be going to a fashionable Eastern school, in keeping with her social aspirations. The thought of this division of their ways saddens Andy and bewilders him and fills him with the confusion of unacknowledged resentment. And yet he has an eagerness for this parting; he hopes that it will clarify the bond between them in a way that will ease his mind. He wants this love to be easing to his mind, and it never has been. He wants Kirby’s love to be an unconditional gift—as he believes his love for her to be—and Kirby is most formidably equipped with conditions. She might not love him forever, she will declare. How do they know? They are both young, she reminds him, as if she has managed by some imperturbable womanly insight to be as doubtful and prudent as the old. And not his most passionate declaration can entirely divert her from her concern for proprieties and clothes and points of etiquette. The fact, which neither of them can yet admit, is that they belong to different worlds: Andy to the fields and woods of Port William; Kirby to the close and ambitious circle of the first families of Hargrave and to the world beyond. Not only does Andy suffer this difference without understanding; he adores Kirby all the more because of it. It is as though all the contradictions of his time and place and nature would be resolved in him if Kirby would only love him as he is. But she will not do it. She loves him as raw material.
That Andy is sufficiently raw even he knows. At parties, depending on who is there, he is apt to be either impossibly shy or offensively loud. He is suspicious or contemptuous of strangers, disrespectful of shrines and verities, stubborn, surly, intemperate, and generally extreme. All this conflict and confusion is a salt water of exile across which he sees what he takes to be his heart’s destined homeland flowing with milk and honey: Kirby, so lithe and smooth and lovely, so gently gazing upon him when he has managed to please her, so blessedly quenching, bright and clear above all confusion. No wonder he is confused.
For a while, as he sits in silence with Old Jack, thoughts and griefs, fantasies and hopes as customary as ritual occupy his mind. But the changing light distracts him. He looks at his watch and stands. He will have to get on his way.
Old Jack slowly turns and looks up at him, the tall, gangly boy standing there with the gum and dirt and sweat of the tobacco patch on him. It is Wheeler’s oldest boy, Andy. “Son, I’m glad to see you. How’re your folks?”
“All right, and I’m glad to see you too,” Andy says. “I’ve got to go now.”
Old Jack takes hold of his forearm. He holds him there, looking up at him. There is something troubling that he knows about this boy. He cannot remember what it is.
And suddenly Andy understands the bewilderment in the old man’s face. He senses the deep forgetfulness that is coming over him, the present more and more a series of unjoined moments from which he takes shelter in the firm sequence of the past. He has forgotten what happened earlier today, the conversation at dinner, even Andy’s arrival a few minutes ago.
“I’m going away to school,” Andy says. “I’m going to leave in the morning.”
“Up there to the college,” Old Jack says.
Andy nods.
Old Jack holds to Andy’s arm, looking intently up into his face. What lies ahead of this boy? Where will this departure lead him? What will he have to face? What strength is in him for the work he will have to do? He sees that he has come to an end in this boy. When Andy Catlett turns and leaves he will step away into a future that Old Jack does not know and that he cannot imagine.
His eyes blur. Though the boy is standing there, he cannot see him now. And he has turned him loose. His hand is opened and raised in benediction and farewell. “Learn your books,” he says. He means more than that, but that is what he says again: “Learn your books.”
There are three quick steps across the boards of the porch, and the boy is gone.
For a moment Old Jack feels unsupported, as though he might fall one way or another out of the chair. That passes. He recognizes himself again. He is as he is and as he has been, remaining after departure and after taking away. He knows that as one of the inescapable themes of his life: the departure from him, from the beginning, of men and women he has loved, of days and years, of lightness and swiftness and strength. The other theme is faithfulness to what has remained. What has remained is the good darkness out of which all things come, even the light, and to which they all go back again. Too little respect is paid to that now, he thinks, but he has respected it. He has thought of it without ceasing. It has been the center of his mind. By that he has endured and come through. He has not looked back from it or dreamed of an easier way. Having put his foot into the furrow, he has not looked back, though he has known that it must deepen into a grave.
Coming through took him a long time: from the stillbirth of his and Ruth’s son in the February of 1893 until a day in the early spring of 1908 when he finally got out of debt for the second time. Fifteen years, and the shadow of death was heavy on him all that time. That was his labor for longer than Jacob labored for the daughters of Laban, and the last five of those years were the darkest and the worst.
In the years following Rose McInnis’s death he labored in darkness. In his memory of them they have neither color nor brightness. It seems to him that in all that time he did not see the sky. He worked from dark until dark; to carry on the necessary trading and to deal with his creditors he rode to town at night when he could not work. He drove and deprived himself, he spared himself nothing. Whenever possible he spared Ruth and Clara. For himself, he did not ask the cost. He suffered whatever was necessary to earn the dollars that his creditors and his own honesty required of him. He no longer had a vision to lighten and justify his toil. He hoped for little; for days and weeks together he did not hope at all. He was dull and enduring and strong as a beast of burden, and he took a certain grim satisfaction in that. He went on because he would not stop, because it was not thinkable that he would quit or ease himself or look away from his task. And always near him was the thought of the dead woman who had loved him as he was, and of the living one who could not.
The shadow of that time returns to him again and fills his mind. He bears it again. Though he has not moved, though he still sits on the porch as Andy left him, he has gone back into his old darkness, his eyes veiled with the sorrow of a man who must bear his own weight through the world as a burden. And yet it is not now as it was then, for ahead of him in his thought he is aware of the presence of Mat Feltner. Now his memory urges him forward. He would like to see Mat again as he was when he was a young man.
When he finally got clear of his debt to the bank—he had already paid what he owed to Ben Feltner—it was one of those days of false spring in late February, a day of clearing after rain, the shadows of clouds sliding over the country as fast, nearly, as a horse could run. He worked through the morning, and as soon as dinner was over rode to town with the check for his tobacco crop that he had sold the day before. He went into the bank and endorsed and deposited the check, and wrote out another in payment in full of the interest and the remainder of the principal, and received the canceled mortgage in his hand.
“Well,” the cashier said, as if to begin some goodhearted tribute, for he knew of Jack’s hardship. But Jack was already walking to the door; the old urging and haste were still upon him, and there was work he had to do. He folded the mortgage, creasing it twice, and put it in his shirt pocket and got on his horse.
It was a good black horse that Jack had named Socks because all four of his pasterns were white. Used to his rider’s haste, the horse went into a canter without a touch or a word as soon as he felt him mounted, and carried him swiftly out of the town. It was an easy, tireless canter that black horse had, and Jack rode with the unconscious grace that for years still to come would turn heads in the street
Sitting on the hotel porch, erect in the straight chair, he feels again the motion of that canter—pleased, now as then, by the horse’s fidelity to his gaits. And yet he is virtually thoughtless, the gray wheeltrack flowing backward beneath the unvarying beat of the shod hooves. It has been a long time since he has looked forward with his old free delight in the use of his mind; his thought has been freighted with necessities and urgencies, bound by the limits of present time and season and weather. And yet, now, he is aware of change, as a man preoccupied might be aware of the weather changing above his head. His life has changed; another hinge has turned. And after they have turned into the Birds Branch Road toward home he slows the horse to a walk, the better to think of it.
He touches the folded mortgage in his pocket; his fingertips press upon the crisp edges of that paper that had pledged him to the loss of everything and bound so many years of his labor to the fear of ruin; with his thumb he feels the flatness and smoothness of the paper, affirming the reality of that death pledge, now broken. After so long a time he is free. And the farm is free. He names in defiance and triumph the names of those who thought him beaten. But his words to himself are without strength, as though repeated from memory, and his deliverance remains unreal. Still, he rides along with a strange alertness, looking eagerly around him, as though his eyesight has been freed from a long confinement.
At the top of the rise beyond the ford on Birds Branch he comes in sight of the upland fields of his own place: the house and outbuildings and barns, the winter-deadened sod of the pastures, the veil of green wheat over last year’s croplands, the gray stone of the fences bending along the contour of the slopes, the trunks and the webbed and spiked branches of the unleafed woods. And now it seems to him that his soul breaks open, like a dull coal, shattering brilliance around him. He has been gone but little more than two hours, and yet he returns as from a long voyage or a war. Now he does consciously feel the open sky above him, the eye of heaven clear upon him. In that long, unwearying gaze he feels the clarity of his outline. Over his farm in the distance the broad cloud shadows pass, darkening and leaving bright again the rinsed air.
Clear and whole before him now he sees the object of his faith as he has not seen it for fifteen years. And he feels opening in himself the stillness of a mown field, such a peace as he has never known. For the last five years he has lived at the limit of his strength, not looking up from the ground, perishing at night into lonely sleep as though his bed was a grave from which he rose again in the dark, sore in his bones, to take up again the labor of repaying the past. And now, the shudder of realization in his flesh, he sees that he has come through. He has been faithful to his land, through all its yearly changes from maiden to mother, the bride and wife and widow of men like himself since the world began.
He lost his life—fifteen years that he had thought would be, and ought to have been, the best and the most abundant; those are gone from the earth, lost in disappointment and grief and darkness and work without hope, and now he is only where he was when he began. But that is enough, and more. He is returning home—not only to the place but to the possibility and promise that he once saw in it, and now, as not before, to the understanding that that is enough. After such grievous spending, enough, more than enough, remains. There is more. He lost his life, and now he has found it again.
Words come to him: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death ... Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil”—the words of the old psalm that Nancy had made him repeat when he was a boy until he would remember it all his life. He had always been able to see through those words to what they were about. He could see the green pastures and the still waters and the shepherd bringing the sheep down out of the hills in the evening to drink. It comes to him that he never understood them before, but that he does now. The man who first spoke the psalm had been driven to the limit, he had seen his ruin, he had felt in the weight of his own flesh the substantiality of his death and the measure of his despair. He knew that his origin was in nothing that he or any man had done, and that he could do nothing sufficient to his needs. And he looked finally beyond those limits and saw the world still there, potent and abounding, as it would be whether he lived or died, worthy of his life and work and faith. He saw that he would be distinguished not by what he was or anything that he might become but by what he served. Beyond him was the peace and rest and joy that he desired. Beyond the limits of a man’s strength or intelligence or desire or hope or faith, there is more. The cup runs over. While a man lies asleep in exhaustion and despair, helpless as a child, the soft rain falls, the trees leaf, the seed sprouts in the planted field. And when he knows that he lives by a bounty not his own, though his ruin lies behind him and again ahead of him, he will be at peace, for he has seen what is worthy.
Jack stopped the horse when he first reached the height of ground, and he stood him there as though to be observed by a critical eye—not consciously, he was not thinking about the horse, but that was the habit of his hand. And now he starts him on again, slowly so as to continue his thoughts and to savor the completion of his return. It seems to him that his life has come to its true beginning. He is forty-eight years old.
That his life was renewed, that he had been driven down to the bedrock of his own place in the world and his own truth and had stood again, that a profound peace and trust had come to him out of his suffering and his solitude, and that this peace would abide with him to the end of his days—all this he knew in the quiet of his heart and kept to himself. Who, in those days, could he have told? Not Ruth, for hers was a different faith, and no hardship or joy of hers would be apt to bring her nearer home; anyhow, he and Ruth did not speak of matters of importance. Not Clara; Clara was still only a little child—in a sense she would remain a child, for she would never be tasked with a burden that would teach her what he knew. To Ben perhaps, but Ben was old, and what Jack had to tell bore too strict a qualification of pain to be told to a man so near the grave and so much beloved. But it seemed to him that Ben already knew it, for when he told him that he was out of debt and on his feet again, Ben smiled and said: “Then it’s all right, Jack my boy. Didn’t I tell you so?”
It was only to Mat, after Mat had reached his manhood, after he had received the inheritance of Ben’s land and proved worthy of it, that Jack began to speak out of the exultant knowledge that had come to him. Then, fearing that Mat would look away from what he had undertaken or attempt in too much pride to go beyond it, Jack would gesture with his hand to the ridges and hollows that bore indelibly for them both the memory and the mark of Ben, and he would say: “That’s all you’ve got, Mat. It’s your only choice. It’s all you can have; whatever you try to gain somewhere else, you’ll lose here.” And then, taking hold of Mat’s shoulder, letting him see in his eyes with what fear and joy he meant it, he would say: “And it’s enough. It’s more than enough.” And he would quote that psalm: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.” He would ask as if half in jest: “Do you understand that, Mat? Do you know what it means ?” And he would put his eye on the younger man in order to keep him from saying glibly or too soon that he understood. And so he saw to it that when the time came when Mat had need of them he too would have those words in mind.
The renewal of his life made no change in the look of him or in his ways. By then he was determined and hardened; outwardly he had become what he was to be. From then on only time would change him. His hands and face and body were marked by his years of work and exposure; their shape and attitude were fixed as though his flesh had been annealed to the toughness of wood or live bone. And there was about him an air of stubbornness and withstanding; it was in the way he stood and moved, in the set of his face, in the directness of his stare.
Anyone who looked at him in those days sensed that he was a man who would do unflinchingly whatever he thought necessary, whatever affection or loyalty or obligation demanded. He had become a man whose presence changed other men; when he came among them his influence was discernible in the way they looked or stood or spoke.
But however little change there was in his aspect and his ways, the inward change was deep and permanent, and where this change was made visible was in his place. Coming home that February afternoon after he had paid his debt, he saw that under the oppression of his darkness and his long struggle the farm had grown stark. The yard trees standing nearest the house had died or grown too infirm to be trusted to stand, and had been cut down and not replaced, leaving the house without shade. The orchard that his father had planted had nearly died out. The buildings all needed paint. The new barn that he had built ten years before to replace the burned one never had been painted; now the boards had turned gray and were streaked with rust from the nailheads. Most troubling of all were the two or three of his fields that under the constraint of his debt he had neglected or overtaxed. Wherever he looked he saw the need for remedies and repairs, and he felt the satisfaction he would take in those attentions.
He remembered what he had understood after his fight with Will Wells: that he could not ask another man to work without hope; that therefore he would not acquire more land, but instead turn his effort with redoubled care in upon the land that was rightfully his, not because it belonged to him so much as because, by the expenditure of history and work, he belonged to it, and because he could properly attend to it by himself. The onset of that understanding had been the immediate cause of much of his hardship. Now it set him free. Its results slowly became visible around him and under his feet. His thoughts no longer ranged the distances of possibility but were contained inside the boundaries of his farm. He became again the true husband of his land. He still worked and went ahead as before, but now his work was healing; it restored the health of his place and his own satisfaction. He had come a long way from what he might have been. Now as he drove to the field in the morning and returned again at night, as he looked after his stock in the pastures, and made his rounds of the pens and barns, doing his chores, there was a joy deep in him, shining, reflecting the sky, like water in a well.
He began the restoration of his fields. As he had time and money he repaired and painted or whitewashed the buildings. He planted young shade trees in the yard and fruit trees in the orchard, and carried water to them in the dry spells of summer. He planted berry beds and an arbor of grapes, hedges and edgings and shrubs. Under his hands the place became abundant and beautiful as it had never been in the time of his memory.
He saw in Ruth’s face certain softenings of pleasure at what he had done. He knew that he was making her life more agreeable, and he was glad. But such acknowledgment as she made she might have made to a stranger. He expected no more. It was too late, and he accepted that. But he felt keenly the want of words between them. If they could have spoken with some candor of themselves, with some mutual pleasure of their place in the world, looking ahead with concern or with hope, that would have made them both different lives and different deaths. But she could not offer, and he could not ask. That was his failure: he had not united farm and household and marriage bed, and he could not. For him that was not to be, though the vision of what he had lost survived in his knowledge of his failure, and taught him the magnitude of his tragedy, and made him whole. It was too late for a woman’s love. And that was all that was lacking.
He is aware, in the cold, of the dark barn, the smells of hay and dung and the bodies of animals; the sounds of chewing, of hay drawn from mangers, of corn rattling in troughs. The mangers are full of hay, the stalls and pens fresh bedded. The north wind sings in the gable. His fingers and toes ache with the cold; he is hungry and tired. The work done, he can think of sleep. For a moment the apprehension of sleep comes powerfully over him, seeming to sway him in his tracks, the thought of the released weight of his body and its repose.
He goes out and draws the doors to behind him and turns to the winter twilight, the cold wind bending close over the farm out of the starless distance. The ground is whitening with snow, and he can feel the flakes melting on his cheek. For some moments yet he stands still upon the turning world, in the whirl of the snow, in the falling night. Closing the doors against the cold dark, he has closed and cherished in his mind the thriving that the barn holds, the vision of that harbored life emerging in green spring. This is his devotion. He tilts his face up into the long fall of the snow.
Again he thinks of Mat, ahead of him, but near.
In the summer of 1912 Ben Feltner died—he was killed, shot down in the road by a man whose friend he had been. Old Jack feels again the weight of that sudden grief.
Now, with Ben gone, Jack had his mind, and his eye too, on Mat. He had loved Mat through all his growing up and had had the satisfaction of seeing him become a young man worthy, perhaps, of his father. He kept that perhaps in mind, for he knew that the test had not come, and he waited for the test.
The test came, he knew, with Ben’s death, and it would not soon end. Knowing the lonely responsibility that Ben’s absence would make for Mat, he began spending more time on the Feltner place than he had before. When he could spare a half day or a day, he would get on his horse or take a team and go to Mat’s, and just step into whatever work was going on. He gave Mat his help; more important, he gave him his presence. As thirty years before Ben had been on hand for him, so now he was on hand for Mat. He gave him the steadiness, and he gave him the little uneasiness and the pressure, that a young man can only get from an older man’s knowing eye. It was one of the good fortunes of his life that when Mat needed him he was in the clear, for then the time of his solitude was ended.
Now he can see Mat again as he was when he was twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old—a little flighty yet, a little too impatient, a little too easily upset or discouraged, but a good man, and the time was coming when the two of them would speak and work together as equals. He can see Mat’s face as it was then: big ears that stuck out, nose a little hooked like the Beechums’ noses, his father’s clear, understanding eyes, hat tilted jauntily onto the back of his head; a grin—maybe a little uneasy, maybe a little defiant—turns up the corners of his mouth as he watches Jack’s eyes for some sign of what he thinks.
And again Old Jack raises and opens his hand.