"Driver!" he says.
Big Ellis, giggling, goes around and gets into the driver's seat. And then for many seconds nothing happens at all.
"What's matter?" Burley says.
"You all coming?" Big Ellis says. "Get in."
"No!" Jayber says. "We got to carry this out with due propriety, and a due sense of what is fitting, and with due solemnity, and with dignity. He must have a procession, a cortege. You drive ahead, Big Ellis, at a slow, a stately, an elegiac, and a dirgeful pace. And we will walk behind."
Big Ellis starts the engine. He guns it fiercely to test its mettle and discipline it thoroughly beforehand. He throws it into gear. The car makes three hunching lunges and dies with a cough in the middle of the road.
"Low, sweetheart," Burley says. "Put her in low"
Big Ellis gets her in the right one this time, and the procession moves off, Big Ellis driving at an elegiac and a dirgeful pace, followed by the red wagon carrying Whacker's feet, followed by Burley and Jayber, each with an arm around the other for consolation and for help in walking, their hats dangling in lamentation from their free hands.
`A famous cortege, if ever I saw one," Jayber says. "Drum!" he says.
And Big Ellis begins to beat with his fist against the car door the ponk- ing concussions of a funeral march.
"Oh, a redounding and a sublime cortege," Jayber says. "Nothing is so redounding and resounding in the history of a town as a good calamity or a classy funeral or an event of that stripe. God knows they happen seldom enough."
Inspired by the thought of mending the history of Port William with a funeral of unimpeachable class, he lines out the chorus of a dirge:
And they sing it a second time together. Jayber chants:
And they all sing:
They have raised around them by now a great barking and howling of dogs. Citizens' voices are shouting out of the darkness. House lights are snapping on. People are coming out onto lighted porches in their night clothes. But nobody follows except four or five dogs who, though they make a loud boast of barking and growling, keep a respectful distance.
Through it all the members of the cortege maintain an invincible solemnity and dignity. They sing their chorus many times over with the strength and loudness of deep conviction. In the pauses Jayber makes hieratic and indecipherable gestures in the air with both hands, intoning: "Et-t-ceterah. Et-t-ceterah. Et-t-ceterah."
As they bear down on the outskirts, he becomes inspired again, and sings some new verses, holding his right hand in benediction in the air each time Burley and Big Ellis come in on the chorus:
They sing the chorus, Big Ellis pounding the car door, the dogs barking, Whacker's feet keeping their perfect repose in the wagon.
Jayber is shaken and a little sobered by the turn his song has taken. A true grave digger's tune," he tells himself. And he tells himself, "Once a preacher, always a preacher." But now that he has sung his way into it, he reckons there is nothing to do but dig in and sing his way out of it.
Burley and Big Ellis bawl the chorus.
There is something incorrigible about his mind. He has always known it. No matter how near home he sets his mind to work, it always beelines for the final questions. His thoughts return to the verge of this life, the place of their defeat, with fascination and with strange delight. Is it noble faith or cowardice that, though he cannot see that all loves do not end in the dark, he cannot believe they do?
They sing the chorus. The end in sight, Jayber begins to be conscious of the darkened country lying quiet beyond their singing and the commotion of the dogs.
That movement of his mind completed, he feels himself returning, fully and gladly present again with the others. As he listens to his companions singing the chorus, the sense of the rarity and extravagance of the occasion comes back to him, the sense of the rarity of their comradeship, and he laughs aloud and sings with them. They are approaching the graveyard now, and the dogs, as if having pursued to the limit of their jurisdiction, have quit following.
Their turning off the road at the graveyard gate seems to Jayber to mark a culmination of large significance, and he calls to Big Ellis to stop.
'A few appropriate words will be appropriate at this time," he says.
"Gentlemen," he says, "that was a procession, I dare say, without equal, and will not be forgotten, I dare say, in the lifetimes of those now living-it being in any case an accomplishment-a glorious achievement in the pride of which we may all rejoice-a triumph-a gilded pinnacle in the history of this noble city, this alabaster village, this fairest flower, this yaller rose of the valley of the green Kentuck. Can you say amen?"
`AMEN!"
"Forward!"
In solemn triumph they advance between the stone pillars of the gate and up the hill, Big Ellis's headlights picking out the white of the headstones under the cedars. They have hushed their singing.
At the top of the rise they follow the road as it turns to the left and goes among the graves along the ridge.
"Right here," Jayber says. "Whoa!"
Big Ellis gets out, and in the red glow of the taillights, as quietly as they can, they begin the job of getting Whacker out of the trunk. Getting him out is for some reason harder than getting him in. At each straining heave they move him only inches. As they tug and haul on his great arms and legs, they are intimidated by the size of him.
"What a tub of guts!" Jayber says. "He must weigh five hundred pounds."
"He don't miss it far," Burley says.
They laugh.
"Shhhhh!"
"We look just like devils in this red light," Big Ellis whispers.
They are all stopped a moment by the thought of that.
Burley whispers: "We'd look like the devil if it was daylight." And straightening from their labor, they laugh. They are wavering helplessly now between hilarity and a strict silence that they feel to be demanded of them by the silence around them-not so much the heard silence pierced by the voices of insects as the imagined perfect silence of the dead. And though in their silences they are beginning to be troubled by what seems to them their disturbance of the dead, that seems to make what is funny even funnier.
They finally get Whacker out and lay him on his back on the wagon, his head dangling over one end and his legs over the other.
"Now ..." Jayber whispers.
But he does not finish, for they become aware that Big Ellis's old car, relieved of its burden, has begun to roll. It has eased off slowly, rocking a little over the bumps, following the road down the gentle slant of the ridge.
"Oh, Lordy!" Big Ellis says. "It's got a hant in it!"
They stand transfixed, chilled to the bone by what, in that place under those circumstances, seems a certainty.
Finally Jayber says, making a blind leap in the direction of rationality: "You didn't put on the brake, Big Ellis."
And Burley says: "Oh mercy! All that crockery!"
And all three of them begin to run after the car, which has a good head start and is rolling faster.
As they run they whisper violently to each other: "Run!" "Hurry!" "Watch out!" "Oh, Lordy!" And running in the dark, their feet pounding the uneven gravel, they stagger and lurch, bumping into each other, ricocheting both ways out of the road. And somehow they gain on the car, which keeps its even pace straight ahead in the wheel-ruts. Then where the road makes a right angle turn to the left, the car keeps going straight, climbs over the low embankment, which checks its speed, and comes to a stop against a large granite tombstone whose markings show with sudden clarity in the beam of the headlights. And then the three pursuers fetch up against the tombstone too. Leaning down between the stone and the car, Burley inspects for damage.
"Not a dent, not a scratch."
And then they all sit down to get their breath. They sit facing the car whose headlights peer steadily at the tombstone, almost touching it, for all the world like a nearsighted person trying to make out the inscription.
As soon as they
have rested, they get up and walk back to where they left Whacker. Following Jayber's whispered orders, Burley and Big Ellis each pick up one of Whacker's legs, and Jayber taking the tongue of the wagon, they start slowly down among the stones toward the newly dug grave of Ernest Finley. All the way there they labor in conscientious quiet, keeping the wagon uneasily balanced as with great effort they lug it over the mounds.
They halt it at the end of the grave and begin the difficult and perilous business of lowering Whacker down. Gravity is too much in their favor now, and they accompany their work with much grunting and whispered cautioning as they roll Whacker over on his belly and start him in feet first and backwards.
"Oh, me!" Big Ellis whispers. "I believe the grave will be the end of us all."
And leaving Whacker bent like a hinge over the lip of the grave, they let go and laugh, rolling on the ground until, intimidated by their noise, they fall silent again.
Now, Jayber getting down into the grave to pull and the other two lift ing at Whacker's shoulders, they work him carefully backward and downward. But it is not until Whacker's balancing-point slides over the edge that they realize that instead of leading they are being led. For Whacker is going on his own now, and they lack the strength to pull him out-or to hold him, either, for very long. Down in the grave Jayber fights off the impulse to turn loose and run, knowing there is no place to go; he takes his stand where he is, shoving at Whacker's great buttocks for dear life, his voice rising up quick and small from under his burden.
"Hold him, boys, hold him! Take hold and rear back!"
Burley and Big Ellis do take hold and rear back, with the strength of desperation, but there is nothing to do, seeing that Whacker is bound to go, except slow him down. But the farther he slips into the grave, the faster he goes. His arms are too large even at the wrists to take much of a grip on, and Burley and Big Ellis finally hold him only by his fingers. Below them in the grave they can hear Jayber grunting, yielding ground inch by inch as the big man comes irresistibly down.
But they do at last get him laid down in the bottom of the grave without letting him fall. The big head comes to rest between Jayber's feet. They pitch in his hat and Jayber places it over his face and folds his hands, and steps up onto the mound of his stomach and is hauled out.
And now the difficulty and danger of their labor only serve to increase their sense of accomplishment. They feel that they have achieved a rare distinction. Up on the hill they can see Big Ellis's car lights growing dim, the battery nearly played out, but that seems not to matter now
"Well, it did fit him," Big Ellis says.
Burley laughs. "It's not exactly what you'd call roomy, is it, Jayber?"
"No," Jayber says, 'Ais not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church door, but 'tis enough, 'twill serve."
"Durn if that ain't fine, Jayber. Say some more."
"Say some more, buddy."
Jayber straightens himself at the head of the grave and raises his hand. And as though seized by meanings he cannot resist, he speaks slowly and with feeling:
Stooping, he lifts in his cupped hands some dirt from the mound at the grave's edge and lets it sift slowly in.
Overtaken and sobered by Jayber's words-Jayber as much as the others-they stand with their heads bowed after he has finished. Apart from anything any of them could have intended or expected, Jayber's words have transcended drunkenness and farce. The meaning of the time has been lifted far above the snores that come with astonishing power out of the grave. Jayber's words have returned them to the occasion they started with-the end of the war, the dying, the deaths-the graves of the millions that, beyond knowing, peace has come to.
A Passing Dirge
Mat wakes up in one of the folding chairs in the dim light of the lamp left burning at the head of the coffin. He wakes to resume the heaviness of Ernest's death, cramped from sitting asleep in the hard chair, the old pain lying deep and keen in his shoulder. He knows he cannot have slept long.
Slowly, so as to make no noise, he straightens himself in the chair, feeling with that movement how tired he is. This is the second night in a row that he has passed with little sleep-and, he might as well say, no rest. Seeing from the slight paling of the windows that dawn has begun, anxious for the night to be over, he reaches up and turns off the lamp, letting the grey of the sky seep into the room. It is not as light as he thought it might be.
His awareness of the room fades. All his attention is caught now by the pain in his shoulder. The pain is like a four-inch sliver of hot light burrowing in under his shoulder blade. Or like a bullet; the pain of a wound would be the same as other pain. It could be borne. A man gets used to pain, he thinks. He learns it. It gets to be familiar to him, a part of what his life is and feels like. And what good does it do him? It teaches him to make light of the pains that are less, and to respect those that are greater. It teaches him what he can stand. And what good does that do him? He needs to know what he can stand because the chances are he will have to stand as much as he is able. That is what is ahead of him-to suffer and to stand it. And so is there virtue in standing it? Maybe. Surely. But there are limits too, and suffering kills. Ernest stood a great deal, and kept quiet, until there came a greatness of it that he could not stand. And that-what it takes to kill a man, what his limit is-is his mystery. The mystery of his death that becomes the mystery of his life. In the flow of his strange half-dream, Mat becomes conscious of his own mortality upon him. And he does not care.
He rouses. The light has grown stronger. The outlines of the room have begun to emerge out of the shadows. Changed to accommodate Ernest's coffin and the ceremonies of his death, the room has an austerity that seems to Mat not only to stand for the sadness of all else, but to be in itself a cause for sadness. He longs for it to be the way it was.
In the paling gloom he can make out the figure of Old Jack slumped in another of the uncompromising chairs, still asleep, his hands resting on his knees, the cane propped against the seat between his legs.
They sat out on the porch until after midnight, listening to the music and the noises of the crowd. After Wheeler had started back to Hargrave, it was decided that the three women would go to bed, leaving Mat and Old Jack to sit through the rest of the night beside the coffin. Old Jack had insisted on staying, over the protests of Bess and Hannah, who thought he ought to rest.
All I do is rest, honey," he said to Hannah.
He and Mat sat in the living room and talked, Mat sitting at the head of the coffin with his back to it, and Old Jack facing him, as they still sit. Mat, as though to lead his own mind as far from that room and that night as possible, turned the conversation toward the past. The old man spoke of the names and landmarks and happenings of a time before Mat's birth, and Mat listened, his mind drawn back before its own beginning, held and quieted by the vision of another time, and by the sense of the continuance of the land, the place, through all that has happened on it and to it-its history of little cherishing and much abuse. For as always it was finally the land that they spoke of, fascinated as they have been all their lives by what has happened to it, their own ties to it, the wife of their race, more lovely and bountiful and kind than they have usually deserved, more demanding than they have often been able to bear.
After the house grew quiet, Old jack's interest in the talk began to flag, and soon he quit talking altogether. He yawned and rubbed his eyes, and then nodded, and his head dropped forward. With a kind of anger he shook himself, and roused. Looking up at the lamp by Ernest's coffin, he scratched his head, and in the midst of scratching dozed off, his hand came slowly down and found a resting place on his thigh. His face, tilted forward, was shadowed, but the lamplight gleamed in his white hair.
Mat remained wakeful a long time. In the silence then he seemed to have reached the end not just of talk but of thought as well. He felt the pressing in of it-the silence of Ernest's death, the ever-waiting silence that surrounds all speech.
He was still sitting
there in that suspension when he heard the approaching clamor of Whacker's funeral procession. At first it seemed only a fitful last resurgence of the festivity, an indecipherable mingling of shouts and laughter, but as it drew nearer he made out the measured heavy beat of a dead march and, above it, the strained wailing of a dirge.
Mat's first impulse was to take the irreverence of it as an affront. And for that reason, though it seemed to him he recognized the voices, he did not get up as the clamor drew near to try to see who was making it. But as the procession drew even with the house, he felt himself irresistibly drawn into the spirit of it. That following the giddy jubilance of its victory celebration the peaceful sleep of the town should be broken, not by any song of victory or thanksgiving, but by voices singing a dirge-that seemed to him to be fitting. For in his mind, at least, and the minds of the others who had sat in silence on the porch, hadn't the night been burdened with the knowledge that the dead have lost and are absent from victory?
But that they went by singing, voices raised in the rhythm of loss and grief with unabashed glee, seemed to Mat to change the night, to start it toward something else-though he was not able to say what.
He shifts in his chair, needing to be up and stirring now that he is awake. There is no longer a comfortable way to sit. But he does not want to disturb the sleepers, and the silence still presses on him as with a weight.
He thinks of the women and the baby, still asleep. And then there comes to him not only the thought of Margaret but the sense of her, lying asleep, alone in their bed in the dim room. He longs to go in and lie down beside her and take her in his arms.
Though he does not go to her now, the longing to do so makes a small cell of happiness in his mind. It has been a long time since his thought has gone so freely toward her.
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