"Lord no!" Wheeler says.
It is an argument that neither of them ever wins. Jack never admits that he has lost, but he can never bring himself to think that Wheeler has lost, either-not for a minute. What he does believe, what he keeps very firm in his mind, is that between him and Wheeler it does not matter who wins, which is to say that between them the idea of winning is not a very important idea. As a matter of fact, nothing would trouble him more than to beat Wheeler in an argument.
"Well, then, Wheeler," he says to mend their dispute, "I reckon we're going broke then."
Wheeler laughs. `No we're not, Jack. We're going to do fine. Don't you worry."
Old Jack slaps his hand down onto Wheeler's knee. "You're all right, son."
To tell the truth, Old Jack loves Wheeler as much as he would have loved his own son if he had ever had one-maybe more. Loves him stubbornly and strictly by his own rules, but devotedly and generously nevertheless. He has been seen more than once sitting on the back bench of a courtroom, grinning and crying shamelessly as a child while Wheeler makes his closing speech to the jury.
"Listen to that boy," he says. "He's a shotgun. Lordy lord."
The Grass May Grow a Mile
The room was Virgil's. It was hers and Virgil's. Now it is hers.
But not hers. And this house is not hers.
When she and Virgil married they came here to live-a short time, they thought, until their own house would be built. They had made their plans.
And then, soon, Virgil was called into the war. Both her parents were dead. She stayed on, to wait.
"They want you to stay here," Virgil told her. `And I do."
"You're welcome here. You know you are," Margaret and Mat told her.
She knew she was. She could not have refused them if she had wanted to.
Margaret and Mat made her welcome. They did all that was possible to make it easy for her to be there. She stayed, feeling that she belonged because Virgil belonged.
In the still room, Virgil's and hers, not hers, she lies in bed, looking up into the dark. She is not sleepy yet. With the bigness of her pregnancy she is uncomfortable any way she lies. It will be difficult to sleep.
Below her own window she can see the elongated shape of the livingroom window printed in yellow light on the yard. Mat is still down there. At this time on most nights they would all still be there in the living room, still talking. Now, divided in separate rooms, they have made themselves lonely-to think alone, as now they must.
Virgil was gone more than a year and a half, and then, in the last summer, he came home for two weeks. He had to leave again. For her, that short time of his presence was nearly as painful as his absence. It began nothing, ended nothing-a brief touching, an interruption of his ab sence, in which there seemed little to be said, nothing to be planneda troubled bearing of the nearness of his departure. She loved him; she would be with him a few days; she would live beyond them, as she would have to, remembering them. A certain amount of happiness was possible for a little while; she would see to it that he knew nothing but her happiness. After that she would wait again. It was simple enough. She would do what she had to do. Wait. She had learned to do that.
"I'm getting better at it every day," she told Virgil. "I'm a champion waiter."
"You're a champion waitress," Virgil said.
She never wasted a chance to smile. And it seemed to her that there was a finer reality in her bogus happiness than in her sorrow. It was a gift to Virgil-what she could give him; she kept him from knowing what it cost her. And, curiously, this bogus happiness became the source of a real happiness-fugitive and small, but triumphant in a way, and precious to her.
One afternoon, two days before he had to go, they filled a picnic basket and walked out across the ridges in the direction of the river. They stopped on the point of the farthest ridge. At the end of a long gentle slope, the ground tilted upward again and made a small grass-covered knoll over the woods on the bluff. From there they could see the bottoms in the long bend of the river, and for miles on either side of them the valley lay open and broad.
They stood together at the top of the knoll, looking.
"This would be a fine place for a house," Virgil said. "What do you think?"
"Yes. The loveliest place."
"Then right here is where I'm going to build you a house."
"Build us a house."
"I'll build you a house. And then you can give me back half of it. If you want to."
She laughed. She still remembers the sound of her laughter. "Yes. I want to. I'll give you all of it. And you can give me all of it."
`And that's the way it'll be. We'll give this house to each other. We'll pass it back and forth, like a kiss."
`After the war?"
`After the war. And now too."
He picked up a flat rock and laid it down on the center of the knoll.
"There's the front doorstep."
He found more stones, and, pacing out the dimensions, marked the boundaries of an ample house, its rooms and doors.
Watching him as he moved back and forth in the imagined courses of walls, she was happy. She was happier than she remembered being. Beyond his absence, it began. She could see it.
He finished his design, and stood in the middle of it, smiling, looking at her.
"Come in."
She came in.
They gathered wood and built a fire. A little later they spread their picnic and ate. Afterward, while the fire burned, they sat on in the light of it, talking. At dark a soft wind had got up; it made sound now in the woods below them.
When Virgil was a child, he told her, Mat took him and Bess out to where he was having a new barn built; they had wanted to watch the carpenters, and pestered Mat until he let them come along. The framing of the barn had been completed, but the roof and the siding still had to be put on. They stayed through the afternoon, playing with wood scraps and watching the carpenters. And then, shortly before quitting time, it began to rain. Mat came hunting them and, taking their hands, hurried them inside the barn.
"Let's get in out of the wet."
And he brought them in, and stood there, his face extravagantly serious, while the rain poured down on them between the open rafters.
"Daddy, we're getting wet," Bess kept saying. She would look up at him, her eyes begging, pointing down at the wetness of her dress.
Mat looked down at her. His hat brim had filled with water, and when he tilted his head it poured down like a veil in front of his face. "It's lucky we got this barn built in time," he told her. "We'd have drowned if it hadn't been here."
And then they had to give in to his joke and laugh. They stood there in the warm rain, holding hands, laughing, until the shower went by.
Now, as by some return of that free joyfulness, he had made this house that was no house, and had given it to her. It was no house that was their house. Strangely, it had made them glad. After what had been their estrangement-in the seeming futility of talking or hoping, in the nearness of Virgil's departure-their desiring of this house was like a bet made, making the thought of winning possible. In this house that was the hope of house they gambled toward what might be.
Hannah was happy. Her sadness that he would leave again was still in her, and was not changed. But also she was happy, and now her happiness seemed to her to exist apart from her sadness, and to be as great.
As the fire burned out the dark grew. Hannah gave herself into the possession of this house of theirs. There, in the dark, away from the other house where she had spent her waiting, its walls were nearly real. It made a new belonging imaginable. The fire had opened a space of light which was the space of a house-which remained, though the fire had not. Her house was as near her as his hands touching her, the weight of him.
In his absence their child grew in her. She no longer felt herself to be waiting, sorrowful and mute, on the edge of Virgil's absence. Her body seemed to turn around a new center. The thought of Virgil'
s coming back enclosed her and she enclosed his child. Everything leaned inward around the child, the beginning, in her, of both their lives.
But now she is afraid.
How long?
The grass may grow a mile in the imagined boundaries of their house.
Images Like Seeds
Company gone, Mat stayed on in the living room, smoking and reading the paper. He heard Margaret and Hannah first talking in the kitchen and then stirring around, preparing for bed. Now the house is quiet. He folds the newspaper, moves over to his desk, and turns on the lamp. He takes a sheet of white letter paper out of one of the drawers, and searches among the pigeonholes until he finds a packet of photographs.
The last letter from Virgil asked for pictures of Port William and the house and the farm. He was forgetting what they looked like.
On the Sunday after Virgil's letter came, Mat and Hannah spent the afternoon taking the pictures. They made an excursion of it, driving and walking here and there in the town and on the farm, deciding what Virgil would want to see, pleased to be doing what he had asked.
Mat takes the photographs out of the envelope and lays them separately on the desk, making an orderly arrangement of them.
The first was taken from the walk in front of the house, looking down the street into the town. To the right of the picture Old Jack is on his way up the street to the hotel.
"Stand still, Mr. Beechum," Hannah called. "We want to take a picture for Virgil."
"Good God," Old Jack said. "He don't want to look at me." But he stood still and let them take the picture.
Looking backward from the same place on the walk, there is a picture of the house, the maple branches and their shadows brittle and clear against the white front.
By the time Hannah had taken this second picture and wound the camera, old Jack had crossed the street. He walked up to Hannah and laid his hand on her shoulder and patted her.
"You get in it yourself, honey, and let Mat work the machine. What he wants to see is you." Old Jack waited to make sure she had understood. And then he smiled. "You're a pretty thing. If I was way off over yonder I'd want to see you."
And so Mat took the camera and Hannah stood on the porch steps and smiled for Virgil and Old Jack, and they took the picture again with her in it.
There are the photographs, arranged now on the desk, making a departure from the town and a return to it. Out of his remembering and knowing Virgil would be able to give them colors, movements, sounds, odors, histories. In his mind these small images would grow like planted seeds, become heavy in their dimensional depths, sizes, brightnesses.
Missing. From among these things.
Mat gathers the photographs and puts them back in their envelope. The sheet of paper lies on the blotter, filled with bright light. He picks up his pen. He writes the date. He writes "Dear Virgil." But then he lays the pen down and leans back.
My dear boy, today we have had grievous news.
For several minutes this sentence shapes and reshapes itself in his mind-the compulsion and limit of what he is able to think. The words form, particularizing his fear and grief as on a point, and then dissolve into the whiteness of the page.
My boy. We have had grievous news.
He puts the photographs and writing things away. He gets his hat and coat from the rack in the hall, and turns out the lights.
He leaves the house and starts down into town. A light is on in Old Jack's room at the hotel, the only one he can see still burning. While Mat is looking, the old man walks out into the center of the room, undressed except for his cap and underwear. He stops and stands still a minute, facing the window, leaning on his cane, scratching the back of his head. And then he moves out of the frame of the window and turns off the light.
Now all that part of the street is dark. No stars are out. It is clouding up again.
Waiting
Margaret sits by her window in the dark.
She has unpinned her hair, and is brushing it with slow long strokes. Her hair falls dark over the shoulders of her gown.
Mat has gone out. The house is quiet and dark.
She brushes her hair, gathers it, and, drawing it over her shoulder, braids it in a heavy braid.
With the day's last possible task finished, she sits quietly, overhearing, as if deep in her body, the sounds of outcry and of weeping. She expected this. She knows it has gone on through all the afternoon and evening, and only now she has become still enough to hear.
The house fills and brims with its quiet.
The brush lies in her lap. She rocks slowly in the chair. The rockers make a quiet creaking and tapping on the floor.
Her eyes have become used to the dark. Her gown, the white pillows on the bed, the white closed fronts of the buildings down along the street draw a little light now and are pale.
In the quiet of the house she waits, as though, divided from Virgil by half the world, she might hear him breathe.
Her waiting seems not so strange to her. She waited, after his birth, to hear him cry. She has waited, even in her sleep, to hear him wake. Here, in this house, she has waited for him to come back from a thousand departures.
He was born out of her body into this absence.
She will hear every footstep, the opening of every door.
4
The Barber's Calling
Jayber Crow mostly grew up and went through high school in a church orphanage called The Good Shepherd.
It was there, as the school barber's flunky and understudy, that he learned barbering, although at that time he had no thought of making his living by it; it was simply a duty, assigned him by the superintendent, to permit him to earn a part of his keep. He was, to the frustration and annoyance of his teachers at The Good Shepherd, both bright and utterly careless as a student. After he learned to read he would customarily read his textbooks, or read all that interested him in them, within two or three weeks after they were given to him, and after that he refused to open them again. He read everything he could lay his hands on; by the time he left The Good Shepherd he had read and reread the meager supply of readable books to be had there. He managed, by the random force of his curiosity, to learn a good deal, and most of the time there was enough coincidence between what he learned and what he was expected to learn to allow him to make passing grades.
He was vastly more inclined to learn than to be taught; that made him the natural enemy of his teachers, and he suffered for it. He came away from The Good Shepherd, he said, bearing more marks of schol- any discipline on his tail, by a considerable margin, than his teachers had ever been able to imprint on his mind.
In his last year of high school he decided to become a minister of the church that had raised him. Whether this was because of some feeling of obligation, or some vague wish to do good, or what, he no longer is sure. After the later failure of his motive, he was unable to be certain what it had been.
He was given a scholarship to a small college run by the church, and spent nearly three years there, waiting tables in the women's dining hall, and continuing to be a recklessly bright and unsatisfactory student. But the college had a better library than the orphanage, and he made good use of that. In his third year, by a sort of boiling over of his intelligence, he began to question the theological assumptions of his professors, and then his own. In the spring of his third year he resigned his scholarship, and said he was sorry.
He thought then that he might make a teacher of himself. He worked in a barbershop to pay his way through a year and a half of classes at the state university. After the religious confinements of the orphanage and the college and his pastoral ambition, his freedom in the university town excited him, and he began a careful exploitation of it. He divided his free time between the library of the university and the bars and brothels of the town-not anymore by his old recklessness, but by a strict husbanding of his time and money. By carefulness, he discovered, he could do pretty much as he pleased, and among other things he pleased to d
o more studying than was required of him. He became, for the first time, systematic and competent as a student. His grades improved. During that time he was quiet and deliberate; his extravagances were as methodical as his cautions; most of the time he was alone. For a while it seemed to him that he was satisfied with himself. He was managing to save a little money.
But he failed again, as if the failure of his first ambition infected his second. It was the same failure of certainty and of purpose. He was utterly free. It was, he believed more and more, the freedom of being on his way from nowhere to nowhere. It was often a depressing and lonely freedom. His leaving the church college had cancelled all but his earliest beginnings. His year and a half at the university had failed to offer an imaginable future. Sometimes he half believed that, having been born by nobody's intention, and brought up as a mistake by public duty, he had come finally into his fated inheritance, the failure of all purpose. He had made no friends. He owed nothing to anybody. He became more and more depressed under the burden of his freedom.
He left, less because he wanted to leave than because he no longer wanted to stay. He packed his clothes and books into a box, paid his rent, and put the rest of his savings into the lining of his jacket and his shoe. The simplicity of it startled him. In ten minutes he had cancelled out a year and a half. When he ate breakfast he was on his way out of town.
Three mornings later, having walked the better part of the way, wandering the backroads to circumvent the waters of the great flood of 1937, he arrived in Port William, near which he had been born and had lived his earliest years. The town's most recent barber had left. Using his savings as a down payment, Jayber bought the shop. He slept that first night in the barber chair, half freezing, his head drawn like a terrapin's into the collar of his voluminous raincoat. In two days he was in business. The question if this was the fortune he had come in search of passed out of his mind; barbering suited him well enough, and would support him-if enough hair would grow in Port William, and when he looked over the prospects he figured enough might. His given name was Jonah; he signed himself J. Crow; the town christened him jaybird, and then Jayber.
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