His barbershop, which is both his place of business and his home, is a tiny frame building in the swale of the branch. The shop has two stories, a single small room in each. The downstairs room is the shop, walled with white-painted bare boards, the floor polished by the tramping underfoot of the shorn hair of generations; it smells of hair, hair tonic, shaving lotion, mug soap, and tobacco smoke. In the center of the floor there is a rusty stove, which serves in winter as a source of heat and a spittoon, and in summer as a spittoon and a foot-prop. The barber chair is placed near the door in front of a long mirror; beneath the mirror a board shelf bears an assortment of bottles of tonic and lotion, a whetstone, a large ornamented shaving mug and brush, an array of scissors and razors and combs, a cigar box containing the cash proceeds of the day. On a table at the end of the shelf a metal water container with a faucet perches on a two-burner coal-oil stove. In the open spaces along the walls are maybe a dozen ill-matching chairs. Jayber rarely has so many customers as he has chairs, but the shop is also a loafing and talking place, a sort of living room, for the townsmen, and forJayber himself. In any assemblage at any time there will be more of whatJayber calls "members" than there will be customers. Around the walls are a number of calendars of various years, none turned past its respective January. And hanging here and there from nails driven in at random, there are Indian relics, hornets' nests, extra big stalks of tobacco or ears of corn that the farmers have brought in. Anything found or plowed up in the town or the neighborhood that might be classed as odd or interesting, and that conceivably could serve as a subject of conversation, is apt sooner or later to wind up hanging from a nail injayber's shop-and will be duly examined and talked about and forgot and left hanging. Over the years the shop has become a kind of museum in which the town has put down what it thought about.
The upstairs room, reached by a stairway up the side of the building, is as private as the lower one is public. Jayber has managed to cram all the essentials of his life into it: bed, books, table, chair, dresser, kitchen cabinet, cookstove. Few in Port William have ever been there, and those only rarely not that Jayber makes any particular attempt at privacy, but there is seldom an occasion or reason for anyone to come there. The shop is his living room and guest room, to which most of the men of the town consider they have a standing invitation. To eat or sleep or read he goes upstairs and is alone. To work, or for company, he goes down and opens the shop. He keeps no regular hours. His shop may be closed for three days at a stretch, or open any hour of the night.
He has continued to be a student of sorts, as far as short funds and few books and erratic habits have permitted. He is likely to know something, if not a good deal, about anything-and likely to have to be asked before he will tell what he knows. He has come to a few friendships, all of them made and kept in the public atmosphere and easy talking of the shop. At one time or another, in one way or another, he has befriended nearly everybody he knows. There is an offhand goodness in him that has made him welcome among the men of the town. They know him for good company and a good talker. They take for granted that talking is as much his business as hair-cutting-at any rate, none of them ever feels obliged to get his hair cut to justify his presence in the shop. When Jayber finishes with a customer and asks ' Whos next?" he is as likely as not to find that nobody is, and then he will climb into the chair himself, and, if no new customer comes in, talk half a day. He practices-sometimes willingly, sometimes by the sufferance of impositions on his good nature-a kind of poor man's philanthropy. He lends considerably more money than he ever has the heart to collect, and is apt at Christmas to play Santa Claus, secretly, to the children of the ones who owe him most. His shop is occasionally used as a roost by husbands and sons too drunk to go home. Now and then he puts in a weekend drinking and wenching down in Hargrave, and he makes no apologies. He is seldom invited into the domestic life of Port William; he knows it by its manhood and boyhood passing in and out the door of his shop.
Talk
After he ate supper Jayber had a smoke, and then unloaded his table and washed his dishes and put them away. He took his time. Working or loafing, his life is mostly public. Privacy is his luxury-his chance to be quiet, to pay a little attention to what may be going on inside his head. He did not come back downstairs until he remembered that the fire would be getting low.
When he opened the shop nobody was waiting for him. He sat down in the barber chair and leaned it back and crossed his ankles over the foot rest. And then remembered the fire again, and got up and fixed it, and sat back down. He came into the shop while most of the town was still at supper, and now he hears things beginning to stir again: doors slam here and there, a car engine starts and goes out of hearing over the rise-footsteps, two single sets and then a pair, come down the street, past the door-two or three doors up the street a boy's voice calls "Here, Mike!" The boy waits and whistles and calls again. It has been dark nearly an hour.
Jayber sits up and takes another smoke, wishing somebody would come in. Three times a day, morning and noon and after supper, the town starts up out of a silence and begins again. These are the times he finds it most difficult to be alone. There is an impulse in him, these times, to close the shop and go out and talk a while with anybody he may meet, take up with anybody who may be coming by, and go with him wherever he may be going. His absences from the town always begin with this impulse.
But now Uncle Stanley Gibbs comes through the door. This is the third time since morning that Uncle Stanley has been in. As a general rule the old man does not come to the shop except to get a haircut, but he got one just three or four days ago, and so Jayber supposes he must have something in particular on his mind. On his two previous trips the shop was crowded, and he seemed satisfied and even a little relieved just to sit down and pretend to be listening while the others talked. Both times he got uncomfortable after a few minutes and, muttering industriously to himself, throwing out the pretense that he was having an awfully busy day, hustled up the street toward the church.
He has pushed the door open, but is still standing out on the sidewalk. In his old age he has grown into the habit of doing only one thing at a time. He would not talk and scratch or look and walk at the same time to save his soul. Now that he has opened the door, he glimpses in, peeping up at Jayber and then around at all the empty chairs and then back at Jayber. His collapsed bristly old face is set in its normal expression of outrage that the world does not make enough noise. When he walks from his house over to the church-footing the white line down the middle of the road-he is always seeing shoot out in front of him automobiles and trucks and buses he never heard coming. He knows, he says himself, that he could burn up in his house any night while his neighbors all stand at the door yelling "Fire." And hard to tell how many times he has been insulted right to his face and not known it. Hour after hour the world pours itself into his deafness like a high waterfall that turns to mist before it can strike and make a sound. His face, by habit, wears his furiousness-not in response to anything in particular, but just in case something or somebody may be taking advantage of him.
Uncle Stanley stayed young a long time. He was wild as a bear, he claims, and stout as a mule and bad around the women. He has remembered himself a good deal worse than he ever was, but this "memory" of his wildness is a comfort to him.
In his prime he had a sort of local fame as a curser. The economy of his vocabulary, and the dexterity and versatility of his use of it, were remarkable. He could talk for thirty minutes without saying a word fit for the hearing of a woman or a child. They called him Stanley Ay-God By-God Gibbs.
His first vice, his professed badness with the women, was cured by time. He wore it out and discarded it-or was worn out and discarded by it; and lived beyond it, and kept the overhauled memory of it for stock in trade during his retirement.
And his vocabulary was completely renovated in collaboration with Brother Preston soon after he was hired by the church to be janitor and grave digger. Since then
the only thing that has broken him loose from righteousness and sent him climbing back up into the upper ranges of his old eloquence was the news that his grandson Billy, Grover's boy, had become the pilot of a four-engined airplane. And he has continued to need all the words he knows to express his appreciation of that glory.
He pushes the door wider open with the point of his cane, and then grabs the doorjamb with his free hand and climbs into the shop.
'What do you know, Uncle Stanley?"
Uncle Stanley cannot possibly have heard, but according to his theory of social procedure, this is the time for a greeting to be offered and accepted. He bites into the air four or five times as though pumping himself up. And then he yells back, at the top of his voice, and as pathetically and sickly as possible at that volume:
"Fair to middling, Jayber, by golly. But, by dab, ain't it been a awful winter?"
Jayber's first inclination is to kick the chair around and help himself to the comfort of a private grin. But remembering that the mirror is behind him, he wipes his own face straight with the back of his hand, and waits. The old man has said exactly what Jayber and nearly everybody else in Port William could have predicted last week that he would say, for the second article of his theory holds that all greetings surely must take the form of a question about his health. But the townsmen, who know his theory, take pains to avoid the question, knowing he will answer it anyhow. With the exception of Brother Preston and two or three helplessly well-intentioned female members of the church, it has been ten years since anybody asked Uncle Stanley how he feels.
Now that the greeting is done with, he removes his grin and sits down. He looks up at Jayber out of the bristling of his whiskers and eyebrows, and bites off some more air.
"Yessir, by golly, it's been a hard winter. It's been hard on the old bugger, by golly. I was just telling the madam here the other night, by dab, I believe it's weakened me. I believe it's aged me."
Jayber lets himself laugh now, and says loudly, "It's not the cold that's getting you down, Uncle Stanley. You've just been too active at night for an old buck."
That's flattery. Uncle Stanley grins. His mouth draws open like a rubber band; you could loop the corners of it over his ears.
`Aw-aw now, Jayber, that time's done gone." But he shakes his head, and then nods. "I've seen the time, though. I call back forty, fifty years, I could work all day, by juckers, and wench like a tomcat all night." He laughs in sincere admiration. "With the best of them. By grab, I didn't know what a night's sleep was. When I heard the roosters crow I just come home and et breakfast and went to work. But not anymore. It's done gone by."
"I can't believe that, Uncle Stan. Some of them told me they hear you romp and stomp and bellow like a bull all hours of the night."
"Haw. Too late for that, Jayber. If I was still able to bother any women it wouldn't be the madam. When Grover was born that about fixed it between me and her. Said all that foolishness might be a pleasure to me, but wasn't nothing but suffering and trouble to her. Said, by grab, I could just sleep in the back room. By juckers, I've put up with her all these years for her conversation. And can't hear what she says a third of the time. Hard on a man! By dab by grab."
Mrs. Gibbs is a stout member of the Port William church and sings in the front row of the choir. She was the only one of the congregation who voted outright against hiring Uncle Stanley to be janitor. For maybe forty years nobody has seen the two of them together in public. If Uncle Stanley is sitting out on the front porch, Miss Pauline will be sitting on the back porch. She keeps house for him and cooks his meals and sits down at the table with him, but only because it's her "duty as a Christian," not because she wants to. Otherwise they live like strangers who happen to have rooms in the same hotel. She has forced Uncle Stanley to live behind her back, and he probably forced her to force him, and she probably forced him to force her to force him, and so on and so on; it's just as well to accuse time and the world and Port William, which are also, and just as uncertainly, to blame. Since the first few years of it, the marriage of Uncle Stanley and Miss Pauline has been an armistice, likely to break into hostilities any minute. Neither of them makes any bones about it. Whenever the question of increasing Uncle Stanley's wages or of giving him a little "token" at Christmas is put to a vote before the congregation, Miss Pauline votes against it. And Uncle Stanley is apt to publicize, in the normal course of his conversation, at the top of his voice, anything from the trouble Miss Pauline is having with her bowels to the events of their wedding night.
Once the old man gets started there is no telling when or where he will stop. As long as he is doing all the talking he is certain, for a change, what the conversation is about, and he aims to make it worth his trouble. Jayber listens to him, usually, with a growing sense of guilt and alarm. If there was anybody else in the shop it would be mostly funny, but always when he is the only one in the audience Jayber feels himself helplessly implicated in what the old man is saying. He never intends to get him started. He will be carrying on what seems a harmless conversation, with the best intentions in the world, and then all of a sudden Uncle Stanley will have taken off into some outrageous confession-not just spoken, published. And Jayber feels like somebody who intended to light a cigarette and set the town on fire. The old man has no secrets, no concern for privacy, no wish for dignity, no notion of responsibility that might stop him or make him lower his voice. It is not that Jayber fails to be amused and even tickled at what he says, and not that any particular thing he says is not in one way or another more amusing than disturbing; but running along with the amusement is the nearly terrifying certainty that there is no limit to what he might say, or would say if he knew how. Once that awful mouth of his loosens up and starts running, anything is possible. Nothing has any value except conversational. Nothing is worth anything except as it maintains the sound of his own voice bubbling up into the silence of the world. Listening to him, Jayber sometimes thinks that the words don't come out of his mouth, but disappear into it. That mouth is an abyss that the whole world and the planets and stars might be sucked into and vanish forever. He can be heard distinctly, in calm weather, fifty or seventy-five yards in all directions, advertising at a shout the failure of everything to mean anything.
In the face of Uncle Stanley's devouring garrulousness, as confirmed and free a bachelor as he is, Jayber always finds himself taking up the defense of marriage. Not so much the defense of any particular marriage-not, by a long shot, of Uncle Stanley's-but of marriage itself, of what has come to be, for him, a kind of last-ditch holy of holies: the possibility that two people might care for each other and know each other better than enemies, and better than strangers happening to be alive at the same time in the same town; and that, with a man and a woman, this caring and knowing might be made by intention, and in the consciousness of all it is, and of all it might be, and of all that threatens it. At these times it seems to Jayber that, of all the men in Port William, he's the most married-not in marriage, but to this ideal of marriage. He is bound in this way, as he is bound, beyond his friendships and his friends, to an ideal of friendship.
These are the last remainders of Jayber's ideals. He holds to them against the possibility that life will mean nothing and be worth nothing. He is a despairing believer in these things, knowing that everything fails. The ideal rides ahead of the real, renewing beyond it, perishing in itunreachable, surely, but made new over and over again just by hope and by the passage of time; what has not yet failed remains possible. And the ideal, remaining undiminished and perfect, out of reach, makes possible a judgment of failure, and a just grief and sympathy.
In Port William, or beyond it or above it, Jayber imagines a kind of Heavenly City, in which each house would be built in a marriage and around it, and all the houses would be bound together in friendships, and friendliness would move and join among them like an open street. His living in Port William has been a bearing of the descent of the town from that ideal-as though at the end
of each night, out of his mind and his desire, he gives painful birth to the new real morning and the real town-as though he watches the descent of all things from Heaven, like a snowfall, into the aimless gap of Uncle Stanley's mouth. But he is also the adulterer of his marriage, the servant of opposite houses, faithful to both and unfaithful to both-slipping away from his Heavenly City, to which he has sworn his devotion, to become the lover of all the perishing lights and substances of Port William and of the weather over it and of the water under it. After so long, it seems to him that he is the native and occupant of both places, and passes freely between them, and in serving either serves both.
A New Calling
Tonight Jayber has ceased to listen to Uncle Stanley. He sits looking out into the dark street and at the light in Milton Burgess's store, letting his mind run. Out of kindness, he pretends to be listening, nodding his head now and then in a movement he intends to be ambiguous, but which he knows Uncle Stanley will take for encouragement.
The old man runs down finally, and Jayber lets him be quiet a few seconds to make sure. Then, with his voice carefully noncommittal, he says:
"Well."
"Says, which?"
"Well!"
"Yessir!" Uncle Stanley says.
He's quiet for nearly a minute, and Jayber sees that he is getting down to his business, whatever it is. He looks out the window, slowly opening and shutting his mouth, thinking over what he has to say. When he turns back, he prods Jayber's shin with the point of the cane and says, "I've got a proposition for you, Jayber. I've been trying to get a chance to talk to you all day."
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