You almost couldn’t make him mad. But if you didn’t watch yourself he could make you mad, just by being so much himself he couldn’t imagine that anybody could be different. He didn’t go in much for second opinions. He stayed single until his mother and daddy both were dead, and then he married Annie May pretty soon, which maybe was predictable. He liked company. He didn’t like to be by himself.
Being married to Big, after the long head start he’d had, was not dependably an uplifting experience. Though Annie May was a good deal younger than he was, she was made pretty much on his pattern, ample and cheerful. But she could be fittified. I’ve seen her mad enough at Big, it looked like, to kill him, and maybe he’d be off on another subject entirely and not even notice, which didn’t help her patience. One time when she got mad and threw an apple at him—it would have hurt, she had a good arm—he just caught it and ate it. I didn’t see that. It was told.
But she never stayed mad long. One time when I went over there she was just furious at him, mainly because he wouldn’t bother to argue with her over whatever she was upset about in the first place. She was crying and hollering, “I’m a-leaving you, Big! You’ve played hell this time! I’m a-leaving here just as soon as I get this kitchen cleaned up!” That was like her. You wouldn’t have minded eating dinner off of her kitchen floor. And of course by the time she got the kitchen cleaned up she had forgiven him. I think she loved him because he was the way he was. They never had any children, and he was her boy.
Maybe because they didn’t have children Big and Annie May let their little farm sag around them as they got older, the way a lot of such couples do. Big’s daddy had the place in fair shape when he died, but he died early in the Depression, and so Big couldn’t have made a fast start even if he had wanted to. He and Annie May lived well enough, but that was mainly Annie May’s doing. She made a wonderful big garden every year, and kept a flock of chickens and some turkeys. They always had three or four milk cows, milked mainly by Annie May, and they sold the extra cream and fed the extra milk to their meat hogs. So they always had plenty to eat. Annie May was as fine a cook as ever I ate after. When they had company or a bunch of us were there working, she would put on a mighty feed. Both of them loved to eat, and they loved to see other people eat.
But Big never tried for much or did much for his place. He wasn’t, to tell the truth, much of a farmer. When he went to help his neighbors he’d work as hard as anybody, but put him by himself on his own place, and getting by was good enough. He was a great one then for “a lick and a promise” or “good enough for who it’s for.”
I don’t know that he ever owned a new piece of equipment, except for a little red tractor that he bought after the war just to be shed of the bother of a team of mules. When he got the tractor he stubbed off the tongues of his old horse-drawn equipment and went puttering about even more slipshod than before. My brother, Jarrat, and I swapped work with him all our lives, you might as well say, but when we went to his place we always took our own equipment. Jarrat’s main idea was to get work done, and he didn’t have enough patience to enjoy Big the way I did. “If he gets in my way with one of them cobbled-up rigs of his, damned if I won’t run over him.” That was Jarrat’s limit on Big, and Big did keep out of his way.
His final sickness was pretty much like the rest of his life. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry to get well, or to die either. He didn’t make much of it. The doctor had said a while back that he had a bad heart and gave him some pills. Big more or less believed the doctor, but he also let himself believe he would sooner or later get well. I don’t think he felt like doing much of anything.
Annie May said, “Big, for goodness sake, let’s take you to a heart doctor or something. You can’t just lie there. We can’t just do nothing.”
“I ain’t going anywhere,” he said. “I’m just feeling a little dauncy is all.”
She knew better than to push him. Easy-going as he was, when he took a stand you couldn’t shake him. He could just lie there. They could just do nothing.
If he had been suffering, if something had hurt him or he had been uncomfortable, maybe he would have done something. Maybe he would be living yet. But the only thing the matter was he was getting weaker. His strength was just slowly leaking out of him. He didn’t have much appetite, and he was losing flesh. But he was comfortable enough. He wasn’t complaining.
So nothing was what they did. That was the way Big had solved most of his problems. He would work hard to help his neighbors, because he liked them and liked to be with them and wanted them to get their problems solved. He would wear people out talking to them and fishing for their opinions on anything whatsoever. He would go to no limit of trouble to have a good time, and he’d had a lot of good times. But when it came to doing some actual work for himself, he often simplified it by not doing anything.
That was why, when Big took sick, the old Ellis place, as some of us still call it, was pretty well run down. There wasn’t a chicken or a hog or a cow. Another neighbor, a young fellow, was growing the crop and making a little hay on the shares, but that was all. Social Security, I reckon, was taking up the slack.
I got used to making some time every day to go to see how Big was doing and to sit with him a while. What was harder to get used to was the place. The fences all gone down. The barns and other outbuildings all paintless, and the roofs leaking. The lots grown up in weeds and bushes so you couldn’t open the doors that were shut, or shut the doors that had been left open. And every building was fairly stuffed with old farm tools, most of them going back to Big’s daddy’s time or before, for Big always figured they might come in handy.
What they did, it turned out, was come to be antiques. When the farm was sold to a Louisville businessman after Big died, and the tools and a lot of the household plunder were auctioned off, about everything was bought at a good price by antique collectors. After she was too old to use it, or even want it, Annie May had more money than she ever imagined.
Walking across the fields, the way I usually went when I went to see Big, I would have to appraise every time what had become of the place, a good little farm dwindled down almost to nothing. Nobody going out to milk anymore. Nobody going out to feed the chickens or the hogs. You really couldn’t see that anybody still lived there until you got to the yard. The yard was still Annie May’s territory—her last stand, you might say—and it was kept neat. The house itself, the cellar and smokehouse out back, they still showed care. And well off to the side, out of the way, the rusty dinner bell that hadn’t been rung in years was still perched on its leaning pole. A man on a tractor couldn’t hear it. The bell was going to turn out to be an antique too. At the sale two ladies bid for it until you’d have thought it was made out of gold.
The day that was going to be the day Big died I went over there first thing in the morning, as soon as we finished up at the barn and ate breakfast. It was a fine morning, cold and bright, the sky blue and endless right down to the horizon, and everything below shining with frost. We had finished with the hog-killing the day before, and I was bringing some fresh spareribs and tenderloin, thinking they might tempt Big to eat. Until then Big and Annie May both were talking like he was going to get well.
But that morning things had changed. I could feel it as soon as I stepped in through the kitchen door. Annie May was busy setting the kitchen to rights. She didn’t try to keep me from seeing that she was crying. Two of her friends, neighbor women, had come to be with her and help her, as the women do when there’s trouble. What had happened was they had figured out—Big first, I think, and then Annie May—that Big wasn’t going to get well. The whole feeling of the house had changed. My old granny would have said the Angel of Death had passed over and marked the house. Call it superstition if you want to, but that was what it felt like.
“I brought some meat,” I said. “Lyda thought maybe Big would like something fresh.”
“Well, God love her heart!” Annie May said, taking the packages
from me, as if she was mourning over them.
And then she said, “Go on in, Burley. He’s awake.”
I went in. Big was lying in the clean bed in the clean room, looking no different really, but that feeling of being in a marked house was there too. The counterpane was white as snow, and white as it was his hands lying on it looked pale. They looked useless. When I came in, he raised a hand to me and gave me a grin as usual. But now he seemed to be grinning to apologize for the feeling that was in the room. He would always get uneasy when things got serious, let alone solemn. He disliked by nature the feeling that was there, but he didn’t refuse it either.
He said, “Well, Burley, it come over me that I ain’t going to come out of this.”
I went over to the bed and gave his hand a shake. I took my jacket off and sat down by him. His hand and his voice were weak, but they weren’t noticeably weaker than the day before.
He said, “I’m about to be long gone from here.”
“Oh, sho’ly not,” I said.
“It’s so,” he said.
I said, “If it’s so, old bud, it’ll make a mighty difference around here. We’ll look for you and we’ll miss you.”
He had been stronger than me all his life, and now he was weak. And I was sitting there by his bed, still strong. What could you do? What could you do that would be anyways near enough? I could feel the greatness of life and death; and the great world endless as the sky swelling out beyond this little one. And I began again to hear from that requirement that seems to come from the larger world. The requirement was telling me, “Do something for him. Do more than you’ve ever done. Do more than you can do.”
As if he had read my mind, he said, “I appreciate you coming, Burley. You’ve stuck by me. I imagine I’ll remember it as long as I live.” And then he giggled, for in fact it was a fine joke.
“Well, I wish I could do more. Ain’t there anything at all you want?”
“Not a thing. Not a thing in this world.”
We talked then, or mostly I did, for a while, about things that were going on round about. And finally I had to leave. They were busy at home, and they’d be looking for me. Big had said he wasn’t long for this world, but he looked about the same as yesterday. For all I knew, he might live a long time yet. When somebody tells you he’s going to die, you can’t say, “Well, go ahead. I’ll just sit here till you do.” I was going to be surprised when I got word that afternoon that old Big had sure enough left us.
“Well,” I said, “I got to be getting on home.” And I stood up.
He raised his hand to stop me. “Wait, Burley. There is something I want you to do.”
“Sure,” I said. “Name it.”
“Go yonder to the press”—he used the old word—“and open the door.”
I went to the closet and opened the door. It was where they kept their good clothes, Annie May’s Sunday dresses, not many, and Big’s suit, all put away there together.
“Ain’t my pistol there, just inside?”
The pistol was in its shoulder holster, hanging on a nail in the door jamb. It was a .22 revolver, heavy-built and uncommonly accurate for a pistol. It was the only really good thing Big had ever owned, and he had taken care of it like a king’s crown. He bought it new when times were good back there in the forties, and the bluing was still perfect except for a spot or two where the holster had worn it. I had always thought highly of it, and he knew I had.
“It’s right here,” I said.
“I want you to take it. I’d like to know where it’ll be after I’m gone.”
It flew into me then just how far toward the edge of things we’d come, two old men who’d been neighbors and friends since they were boys, and if I’d thought of anything to say I couldn’t have said it. For a while I couldn’t even turn around.
“Put it on,” Big said. “Button your jacket over it. I don’t want Annie May to see it when you leave.”
I did as he told me. I said, “Thanks, Big.”
“Sure,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “I’ll be seeing you.”
He said, “Yeah. See you later.”
So I had come to do something for Big, if I could, and instead Big had done something for me, and I was more in debt to the requirement than ever.
I went out through the kitchen, speaking a few pleasantries with the women, and let myself out. I sat down on the porch step to put my overshoes back on, and started home. And all the time the requirement was staying with me. “Can’t you, for God’s sake, think of something to do?” When I got to about the middle of the barn lot, I just stopped. I stood there and looked all around.
Oh, it was a splendid morning, still frozen, not much changed at all. The ground was still shining white under the blue sky. I thought of a rhyme that Elton Penn was always saying in such weather: “Clear as a bell, cold as hell, and smells like old cheese.” Maybe that was what put me in mind to do what I did.
When I looked back towards the house, the only thing between me and the sky was that old dinner bell leaning on its post like it was about to fall.
Big’s pistol, when I pulled it out, felt heavy and familiar, comfortable. It was still warm from the house. There were five cartridges in the cylinder, leaving an empty chamber to rest the hammer on. I cocked it and used my left hand to steady my right. What I wanted was a grazing hit that would send the bullet flying out free into the air.
Even as the bullet glanced and whined away, the old bell summed up all the dongs it had ever rung. It filled the day and the whole sky and brought the worlds together, the little and the great. I knew that, lying in his bed in the house, Big heard it and was pleased. Standing in the lot, I heard it and I was pleased. It wasn’t enough, but it was something. It was a grand sound. It was a good shot.
An Empy Jacket (1974)
Marcie Catlett was usually wakened in the morning by his father’s voice calling up the stairs, according to his mood, “Marcie! Betty! Time to get up!” or, singing badly, “Dear ones, Harford Fork again awaits the sunrise!” or, beating on a pan, “Wake up and pee! The world’s on fire!”
But this morning the telephone rang into Marcie’s sleep in the dark before the house had stirred. Or maybe it was a pressure of calamity that woke him before the phone rang, as if the whole dark countryside were already disturbed by the knowledge that Elton Penn was dead.
And so Marcie lay under the covers, alert and still, through the long time until the fourth ring and then his father’s voice answering. Marcie would never forget the sounds that followed.
“Hello?” And after a pause: “Aw!” And then after a long pause, and interrupted by further pauses: “What time? . . . Oh. . . . Oh. . . . Where are you now? . . . Well, I’m sorry, Henry. . . . I know you are. . . . All right. We’ll be there.”
Marcie heard his father hang up the telephone. He heard him say, his voice breaking on the last word, “Flora, Elton’s dead.”
Those words, his father’s voice saying them, seemed fixed and continuing in the air. They seemed suspended as though they might fall, though they had not fallen.
He heard his mother: “Oh, Andy, I’m so sorry!”
And then the house began to sound like itself again. Marcie heard his father go out the back door to the barn. He heard his mother fixing breakfast. Presently he began to smell breakfast. It might have been any morning, except for the three words, “Flora, Elton’s dead,” that continued still, aloof from him, suspended in the air—and except that he and his sister had not been called, though ordinarily they would have been. Their father maybe was doing their morning chores in addition to his own. And so it was a different day.
Marcie and Elton had been friends. It was a family friendship. Marcie had inherited it, so to speak, from his father who, with his brother, Henry, had inherited it from their father. Marcie’s father and Elton often worked together, and when they did, if he was not in school, Marcie would be with them. That had been a regular part of his life from before he cou
ld remember. Sometimes, now that he was nearly ten and getting bigger, he would be at work with Elton by himself, and Elton would let him help or give him jobs to do on his own. When Marcie had actually helped and been necessary, Elton would reach into his pocket for money to pay him, or he would write him a check.
To tell the truth, Marcie did not like working with his father as much as he liked working with Elton. This embarrassed him a little, and he tried to keep his father from knowing. But he belonged to his father, so his father clearly thought, and that was sometimes too tight a fit. His father had expectations that sometimes Marcie felt closing in on him, so that he could not to save his life work willingly or keep in a good humor. He and Elton, though, were nothing but friends. With Elton, he felt free, even when Elton was being hard on him, which Elton sometimes was and didn’t mind being.
Marcie could be careless. Sometimes, even with Elton, he could not keep his mind on his business. He left a gate open and next thing he knew three sows were in the garden, and Elton was in what Marcie’s father and his uncle Henry called a limited good humor. If Marcie had been older, as he well knew, it would not have been even limited good humor. Elton said, with limited amusement and even kindly but also sternly, “You’re sorry, Marcie, but sorry don’t shut the gate when you were supposed to shut it, and it don’t keep the hogs out of the garden, and it don’t undo the damage.”
So he had to stand and take it, for Elton was neither more nor less than Elton. If you wanted to be with Elton, which Marcie did, you had to be with him as he was. To displease him was a way of finding out how much you wanted to please him.
Marcie had begun to imagine a time when he would be grown up and would work as an equal with Elton and his father and the Rowanberrys and the others, when even Elton would recognize him as a man good at work, capable of putting his hand to a job and doing it right.
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