All the Days and Nights

by William Maxwell

  In due time the surveyors appeared, with their tripods, sighting instruments, chains, stakes, and red flags, and the path of doom was made clear. The government, moved by humane considerations, did, however, build a new village. The cottages of Upper Cleeve, as it was called, were all exactly alike and as ugly as sin. There was no way on earth that you could join three of them together and produce a house that William Morris would have felt at home in. The castle was saved by its rocky situation, but its owners did not choose to look out on an eight-lane expressway and breathe exhaust fumes and be kept awake all night long by trucks and trailers. So the rooks fell heir to it.

  6. The carpenter

  ONCE upon a time there was a man of no particular age, a carpenter, whom all kinds of people entrusted with their secrets. Perhaps the smell of glue and sawdust and fresh-cut boards had something to do with it, but in any case he was not a troublemaker, and a secret is nearly always something that, if it became known, would make trouble for somebody. So they came to his shop, closed the door softly behind them, sat down on a pile of lumber, and pretended that they had come because they enjoyed watching him work. Actually, they did enjoy it. Some of them. His big square hands knew what they were doing, and all his movements were relaxed and skillful. The shavings curled up out of his plane as if the idea was to make long, beautiful shavings. He used his carpenter’s rule and stubby pencil as if he were applying a moral principle. When he sawed, it seemed to have the even rhythm of his heartbeat. Though the caller might forget for five minutes what brought him here, in the end he stopped being interested in carpentry and said, “I know I can trust you, because you never repeat anything …” and there it was, one more secret added to the collection, a piece of information that, if it had got out, would have broken up a friendship or caused a son to be disinherited or ruined a half-happy marriage or cost some man his job or made trouble for somebody.

  The carpenter had discovered that the best way to deal with this information that must not be repeated was to forget it as quickly as possible, though sometimes the secret was so strange he could not forget it immediately, and that evening his wife would ask, “Who was in the shop today?” For people with no children have only each other to spy on, and he was an open book to her.

  Sometimes the person who had confided in him seemed afterward to have no recollection of having done this, and more than once the carpenter found himself wondering if he had imagined or misremembered something that he knew perfectly well he had not imagined and would remember to his dying day. In the middle of the night, if he had a wakeful period, instead of thrashing around in the bed and disturbing his wife’s sleep, he lay quietly with his eyes open in the dark and was a spectator to plays in which honorable men were obliged to tell lies, the kind and good were a prey to lechery, the old acted not merely without wisdom but without common sense, debts were repaid not in kind but in hatred, and the young rode roughshod over everybody. When he had had enough of human nature, he put all these puppets back in their box and fell into a dreamless sleep.

  For many years his life was like this, but it is a mistake to assume that people never change. They don’t and they do change. Without his being able to say just when it happened and whether the change was sudden or gradual, the carpenter knew that he was no longer trustworthy — that is to say, he no longer cared whether people made trouble for one another or not. His wife saw that he looked tired, that he did not always bother to stand up straight, that he was beginning to show his age. And she tried to make his life easier for him, but he was a man firmly fixed in his habits, and there was not much she could do for him except feed him well and keep small irritations from him.

  Out of habit, the carpenter continued not to repeat the things people told him, but while the secret was being handed over to him he marvelled that the other person had no suspicion he was making a mistake. And since the carpenter had not asked, after all, to be the repository of everybody’s secret burden, it made him mildly resentful.

  One day he tried an experiment. He betrayed a secret that was not very serious — partly to prove to himself that he could do such a thing and partly in the hope that word would get around that he was not to be trusted with secrets. It made a certain amount of trouble, as he knew it would, but it also had the effect of clearing the air for all concerned, and the blame never got back to him because no one could imagine his behaving in so uncharacteristic a fashion. So, after this experiment, he tried another. The butcher came in, closed the door softly, looked around for a pile of lumber to sit on, and then said, “There’s something I’ve got to tell somebody.”

  “Don’t tell me,” the carpenter said quickly, “unless you want every Tom, Dick, and Harry to know.”

  The butcher paused, looked down at his terrible hands, cleared his throat, glanced around the shop, and then suddenly leaned forward and out it came.

  “In short, he wanted every Tom, Dick, and Harry to know,” the carpenter said to his wife afterward, when he was telling her about the butcher’s visit.

  “People need to make trouble the way they need to breathe,” she said calmly.

  “I don’t need to make trouble,” the carpenter said indignantly.

  “I know,” she said. “But you mustn’t expect everyone to be like you.”

  The next time somebody closed the door softly and sat down and opened his mouth to speak, the carpenter beat him to it. “I know it isn’t fair to tell you this,” he said, “but I had to tell somebody …” This time he made quite a lot of trouble, but not so much that his wife couldn’t deal with it, and he saw that the fear of making trouble can be worse than trouble itself.

  After that, he didn’t try any more experiments. What happened just happened. The candlemaker was sitting on a pile of lumber watching him saw a chestnut plank, and the carpenter said, “Yesterday the one-eyed fiddler was in here.”

  “Was he?” the candlemaker said; he wasn’t really interested in the fiddler at the moment. There was something on his mind that he had to tell somebody, and he was waiting for the carpenter to stop sawing so he wouldn’t have to raise his voice and run the risk of being overheard in the street.

  “You know the blacksmith’s little boy?” the carpenter said. “The second one? The one he keeps in the shop with him?”

  “The apple of his eye,” said the candlemaker. “Had him sorting nails when he was no bigger than a flea. Now he tends the bellows.”

  “That’s right,” said the carpenter. “Well, you know what the fiddler told me?”

  “When it comes to setting everybody’s feet a-dancing, there’s no one like the one-eyed fiddler,” the candlemaker said. “But I don’t know what he’d of done without the blacksmith. Always taking him in when he didn’t have a roof over his head or a penny in his pocket. Drunk or sober.”

  “You know what the fiddler told me? He said the blacksmith’s little boy isn’t his child.”

  “Whose is he?”

  “Who does he look like?”

  “Why, come to think of it, he looks like the one-eyed fiddler.”

  “Spitting image,” the carpenter said. And not until that moment did he realize what was happening. It was the change in the candlemaker’s face that made him aware of it. First the light of an impending confidence, which had been so clear in his eyes, was dimmed. The candlemaker looked down at his hands, which were as white and soft as a woman’s Then he cleared his throat and said, “Strange nobody noticed it.”

  “You won’t tell anybody what I told you?” the carpenter found himself saying.

  “No, of course not,” the candlemaker said. “I always enjoy watching you work. Is that a new plane you’ve got: there?”

  For the rest of the visit he was more friendly than usual, as if some lingering doubt had been disposed of and he could now be wholly at ease with the carpenter. After he had gone, the carpenter started to use his new plane and it jammed. He cleaned the slot and adjusted the screw and blew on it, but it still jammed, so he put it aside,
thinking the blade needed to be honed, and picked up a crosscut saw. Halfway through the plank he stopped. The saw was not following the pencil line. He gave up and sat down on a pile of lumber. The fiddler had better clear out now and never show his face in the village again, because if the blacksmith ever found out, he’d kill him. And what about the blacksmith’s wife? She had no business doing what she did, but neither did the blacksmith have any business marrying someone young enough to be his daughter. She was a slight woman with a cough, and she wouldn’t last a year if she had to follow the fiddler in and out of taverns and sleep under hedgerows. And what about the little boy who so proudly tended the bellows? Each question the carpenter asked himself was worse than the one before. His head felt heavy with shame. He sighed and then sighed again, deep heavy sighs forced out of him by the weight on his heart. How could he tell his wife what he had done? And what would make her want to go on living with him when she knew? And how could he live with himself? At last he got up and untied the strings of his apron and locked the door of his shop behind him and went off down the street, looking everywhere for the one-eyed fiddler.

  7. The man who had no friends and didn’t want any

  THERE was a man who had no enemies — only friends. He had a gift for friendship. When he met someone for the first time, he would look into the man or the woman or the child’s eyes, and he never afterward mistook them for someone else. He was as kind as the day is long, and no one imposed on his kindness. He had a beautiful wife, who loved him. He had a comfortable, quiet apartment in town and a beautiful little house by the sea. He had enough money. All summer he taught children to sail boats on the salt water and on winter afternoons he sat in his club and helped old men with one foot in the grave to remember names, so they could get on with their recollecting. If necessary, he even helped them to remember the point of the recollection, which he had usually heard before. In the club he was never alone for a minute. If he sat down by the magazine table, the other members gathered around him like fruit flies — the young, uneasy new members as well as his bald-headed contemporaries. The places he had lived in stretched halfway around the world, and he was a natural-born storyteller. His conversation went to the head, like wine. At the same time, it went straight to the heart. He was a lovely man, and there aren’t any more like him.

  But there was also in the same club a man who had no friends — and, of course, not a single enemy either. He was always alone. He had never married. Though he had too much money, no one had ever successfully put the finger on him. He did not drink, and if someone who had been drinking maybe a little too much nodded to him on the way upstairs to the dining room, he did not respond, lest it turn out that he had been mistaken for somebody else. He tried sitting at the common table, in the hope that it would broaden his mind, but it was not the way he had been given to understand it would be, so he moved to a table by the window, a table for two, and for company he had an empty plate that did not contradict itself, a clean napkin that lived wholly in the present, a glittering glass tumbler that had its facts and figures straight, an unprejudiced knife, an unsentimental fork, and two logical spoons. Actually, his belonging to this particular club at all was due to a mistake on the part of the secretary of the committee on admissions, who had been instructed to notify another man of the same name that he had been elected to membership.

  The man who had no friends did not want any, but he was observant, and from his table by the window he saw something no one else saw: The man who had no enemies, only friends, did not look well. It could be nothing more than one of those sudden jerks by which people grow older, but there was a late-afternoon light in his eye, and also his color was not good. Joking, he made use of the elevator when the others moved toward the stairs. And more and more he seemed like a man who is listening to two conversations at once. Sometimes for a week or ten days he would not appear at the club at all, and then he would be there again, moving through the stately, high-ceilinged rooms like a ship under full sail — but a ship whose rigging is frayed and whose oak timbers have grown lighter and lighter with time, and whose seaworthiness is now entirely a matter of the excellence of the builder’s design.

  The first stroke was slight. The doctor kept him in bed for a while, but he was able to spend the summer in his house by the sea, as usual. During the period of his convalescence, his wife informed the doorman at the club that he would be happy to see his friends. Naturally, they came — came often, came in droves, and found the invalid sitting up in bed, in good spirits, though not quite his old self yet. They were concerned lest they stay too long, and at the same time found it difficult to leave until they had blurted out, while it was siili possible, how much he meant to them. These statements he was somehow able to dispose of with humor, so that they didn’t hang heavy in the air afterward.

  The man who had no friends also inquired about him, and the doorman, after some hesitation, gave him the message too, thinking that since this was the first time in fourteen years that he had ever asked about anybody, he must be a friend. But he didn’t pay a call on the sick man. He had asked only out of curiosity. When he returned to town in September, he saw on the club bulletin board an announcement of a memorial service for the man who had a gift for friendship. He had died about a month before, in his sleep, in the house by the sea. The man who had no friends had reached the age where it is not unusual to spend a considerable part of one’s time going to funerals, but no one had died whose obsequies required his presence, and again he was curious. He marked the date in the little memorandum book he always carried with him, and when the day came he got in a taxi and went to the service.

  THE small stone chapel filled up quickly, for of course they all came, all the friends of the man who had no enemies. They came bringing their entire stock of memories of him, which in one or two instances went back to their early youth. And in many cases there was something about their dress, some small mark of color — the degree of red or bright blue that is permitted in the ties of elderly men, the Légion d’honneur in a lapel — because it had seemed to them that the occasion ought not to be wholly solemn, since the man himself had been so impatient of solemnity. The exception was the man who had no friends. He wore a dark-grey business suit and a black-and-white striped tie, and sat alone in the back of the chapel. To his surprise, the funeral service was completely impersonal. Far from eulogizing the dead man or explaining his character to people who already knew all there was to know about it, the officiating clergyman did not even mention his name. There was a longish prayer, and then quotations from the Scriptures — mostly from the Psalms. The chapel had a bad echo, but the idea of the finality of death came through the garbled phrases, even so. The idea of farewell. The idea of a funeral on the water, and mourners peering, through torchlight, at a barque that is fast disappearing from sight. The man who had no friends sat observing, with his inward eye, his own funeral, in an empty undertaking parlor. The church was cold. He felt a draft on his ankles.

  The young minister raised his voice to that pitch that is customary when the prayers of clergymen are meant to carry not only to the congregation but also to the ear of Heaven. There was a last brief exhortation to the Deity, and then the service was over. But during the emptying of the chapel something odd happened. The people there had not expected to derive such comfort from the presence of one another, and when their eyes met, their faces lit up, and they kept reaching out their hands to each other, over the pews. The man who had no friends saw what was happening and hurriedly put on his overcoat, but before he could slip out of the church, he felt his arm being taken in a friendly manner, and a man he knew only by sight said, “Ah yes, he belonged to you too, didn’t he? Yes, of course.” And no sooner had he extricated himself from this person than someone else said, “You’re not going off by yourself? Come with us. Come on, come on, stop making a fuss!” And though he could hardly believe it, he found himself sitting on the jump seat of a taxi, with four other men, who took out their hand
kerchiefs and unashamedly wiped the tears away, blew their noses, and then sat back and began to tell funny stories about the dead man. When he got out of the cab, he tried to pay for his share, but they wouldn’t hear of it, so he thanked them stiffly, and they called good-bye to him as if they were all his friends, which was too absurd — except that it didn’t end there. The next day at the club they went right on acting as if they had a right to consider themselves his friends, and nothing he said or didn’t say made any difference. They had got it into their heads he was a friend of the man who died, and so one of them. Shortly after the beginning of the new year, what should he find but a letter, on club stationery, informing him that he had been elected to the Board of Governors. He sat right down and wrote a letter explaining why he could not serve, but he saw at once that the letter was too revealing, so he tore it up. For the next three years he went faithfully, but with no pleasure, to the monthly dinners, and cast his vote with the others during the business meeting that followed the dinner. At the very last meeting of his term, just when he thought he was escaping, the secretary read off the names of the members who were to serve on the House Committee, and his name was among them. It seemed neither the time nor the place to protest, and afterward, when he did protest, he was told that it was customary for the members of the Board of Governors to serve on one committee or another after their term was finished. If he refused, the matter would be placed before the Board of Governors at their next meeting. He didn’t want to call that much attention to himself, so he gave in. He served on the House Committee for two years, and at these meetings found that he was in sympathy with the prevailing atmosphere, which was of sharp candor and common sense. Inevitably he became better acquainted with his fellow committee members, and when they spoke to him on the stairs he couldn’t very well not respond. For a while he continued to sit at his table by the window, but someone almost always came and joined him, so in the end he decided he might as well move over to the common table with the others. Later he served on the Rules Committee, the Archives Committee, the Art Committee, the Library Committee, the Music Committee, and the Committee on Admissions. Finally, when there were no more committees for him to serve on, someone dropped a remark in his presence and he saw the pit yawning before him. He took a solemn vow that he would never permit his name to be put up for president of the club, but it was put up; they did it without asking his permission, for it was an honor that had never been refused and they couldn’t imagine anyone’s wanting to refuse it.