The best way between Port William and Hargrave was still the river. The road found its way as if by guess, bent this way and that by the whims of topography and the convenience of landowners. At intervals, it was interrupted by farm gates.
After a while, hearing several more horses coming behind him, he stepped out of the road and lay down in a small canebrake. When they had passed, he returned to the road and went on. Always he was watchful of the houses he passed, but he stayed in the road. If he was to protect the one choice of which he was still master, he had to hurry.
And now, as he had not been able to do when he left it, he could see his farm. It shone in his mind as if inwardly lighted in the darkness that now surrounded both him and it. He could see it with the morning sun dew-bright on the woods and the sloping pastures, on the little croplands on the ridge and in the bottoms along the creek. He could see its cool shadows stretching out in the evening and the milk cows coming down the path to the barn. It was irrevocably behind him now, as if a great sword had fallen between him and it.
He was slow and small on the long road. The sun was slow overhead. The air was heavy and unmoving. He watched the steady stepping of his feet, the road going backward beneath them. He had to get out of the road only twice again: once for a family in a spring wagon coming up from Hargrave and once for another horse and rider coming down from Port William. Except for those, nothing moved in the still heat but himself. Except for the cicadas, the only sounds he heard were his own steady footfalls on the dry dust.
He seemed to see always not only the changing road beneath his feet but also that other world in which he had lived, now lighted in the dark behind him, and it came to him that on that day two lives had ended for a possibility that never had existed: for Abner Coulter’s mounting up to a better place. And he felt the emptiness open wider in him and again heard himself groan. He wondered, so great was the pain of that emptiness, that he did not weep, but it exceeded weeping as it exceeded words. Beyond the scope of one man’s grief, it cried out in the air around him, as if in that day’s hot light the trees and the fields and the dust of the road all grieved. An inward pressure that had given his body its shape seemed to have been withdrawn, and he walked, holding himself, resisting step by step the urge to bend around the emptiness opening in his middle and let himself fall.
Where the valley began to widen toward the river’s mouth, the road passed a large bottom planted in corn. Thad looked back, expecting that he would see Martha Elizabeth, and he did see her. She was maybe three-quarters of a mile behind him, small in the distance, and the heat rising off the field shimmered and shook between them, but he knew her. He walked faster, and he did not look back again. It seemed to him that she knew everything he knew, and loved him anyhow. She loved him, minute by minute, not only as he had been but as he had become. It was a wonderful and a fearful thing to him that he had caused such a love for himself to come into the world and then had failed it. He could not have bowed low enough before it and remained above ground. He could not bear to think of it. But he knew that she walked behind him—balanced across the distance, in the same hot light, the same darkness, the same crying air—ever at the same speed that he walked.
Finally he came to the cluster of houses at Ellville, at the end of the bridge, and went across into Hargrave. From the bridge to the courthouse, he went ever deeper into the Saturday crowd, but he did not alter his gait or look at anybody. If anybody looked at him, he did not know it. At the cross streets, he could see on the river a towboat pushing a line of barges slowly upstream, black smoke gushing from its stacks. The walks were full of people, and the streets were full of buggies and wagons. He crossed the courthouse yard where people sat on benches or stood talking in little groups under the shade trees. It seemed to him that he walked in a world from which he had departed.
When he went through the front door of the courthouse into the sudden cool darkness of the hallway, he could not see. Lights swam in his eyes in the dark, and he had to prop himself against the wall. The place smelled of old paper and tobacco and of human beings, washed and unwashed. When he could see again, he walked to a door under a sign that said “Sheriff ” and went in. It was a tall room lighted by two tall windows. There was a row of chairs for people to wait in, and several spittoons, placed at the presumed convenience of spitters, that had been as much missed as hit. No one was there but a large man in a broad-brimmed straw hat and a suit somewhat too small, who was standing behind a high desk, writing something. At first he did not look up. When he finally did look up, he stared at Thad for some time, as if not sufficiently convinced of what he saw.
“In a minute,” he said, and looked down again and finished what he was writing. There was a badge pinned lopsidedly to the pocket of his shirt, and he held an unlit cigar like another pen in his left hand. He said as he wrote, “You look like most of you has been wore off.”
“Yes,” Thad said. “I have killed a man.”
The sheriff laid the pen on the blotter and looked up. “Who?”
Thad said, “Ben Feltner, the best friend I ever had.” His eyes suddenly brimmed with tears, but they did not fall. He made no sound and he did not move.
“You’re a Coulter, ain’t you? From up about Port William?”
“Thad,” Thad said.
The sheriff would have preferred that Thad had remained a fugitive. He did not want a self-confessed murderer on his hands—especially not one fresh from a Saturday killing in Port William. He knew Ben Feltner, knew he was liked, and feared there would be a commotion. Port William, as far as he was concerned, was nothing but trouble, almost beyond the law’s reach and certainly beyond its convenience—a source, as far as he was concerned, of never foreseeable bad news. He did not know what would come next, but he thought that something would, and he did not approve of it.
“I wish to hell,” he said, “that everybody up there who is going to kill each other would just by God go ahead and do it.” He looked at Thad for some time in silence, as if giving him an opportunity to disappear.
“Well,” he said, finally, “I reckon you just as well give me that pistol.”
He gestured toward Thad’s sagging hip pocket, and Thad took out the pistol and gave it to him.
“Come on,” the sheriff said.
Thad followed him out a rear door into the small paved yard of the jail, where the sheriff rang for the jailer.
The sheriff had hardly got back into the office and taken up his work again when a new motion in the doorway alerted him. He looked up and saw a big red-faced girl standing just outside the door as if uncertain whether or not it was lawful to enter. She wore a sunbonnet, a faded blue dress that reached to her ankles, and an apron. Though she was obviously timid and unused to public places, she returned his look with perfect candor.
“Come in,” he said.
She crossed the threshold and again stopped.
“What can I do for you, miss?”
“I’m a-looking for Mr. Thad Coulter from up to Port William, please, sir.”
“You his daughter?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, he’s here. I got him locked up. He claims he killed a fellow.”
“He did,” the girl said. “Is it allowed to see him?”
“Not now,” the sheriff said. “You come back in the morning, miss. You can see him then.”
She stood looking at him another moment, as if to make sure that he had said what he meant, and then she said, “Well, I thank you,” and went out.
An hour or so later, when he shut the office and started home to supper, she was sitting on the end of one of the benches under the shade trees, looking down at her hands in her lap.
“You see,” my grandmother said, “there are two deaths in this—Mr. Feltner’s and Thad Coulter’s. We know Mr. Feltner’s because we had to know it. It was ours. That we know Thad’s is because of Martha Elizabeth. The Martha Elizabeth you know.”
I knew her, but it came s
trange to me now to think of her—to be asked to see her—as a girl. She was what I considered an old woman when I first remember her; she was perhaps eight or ten years younger than my grandmother, the red long gone from her hair. She was a woman always near to smiling, sometimes to laughter. Her face, it seemed, had been made to smile. It was a face that assented wholly to the being of whatever and whomever she looked at. She had gone with her father to the world’s edge and had come back with this smile on her face. Miss Martha Elizabeth, we younger ones called her. Everybody loved her.
When the sheriff came back from supper, she was still there on the bench, the Saturday night shoppers and talkers, standers and passers leaving a kind of island around her, as if unwilling to acknowledge the absolute submission they sensed in her. The sheriff knew as soon as he laid eyes on her this time that she was not going to go away. Perhaps he understood that she had no place to go that she could get to before it would be time to come back.
“Come on with me,” he said, and he did not sound like a sheriff now but only a man.
She got up and followed him through the hallway of the courthouse, past the locked doors of the offices, out again, and across the little iron-fenced courtyard in front of the jail. The sheriff unlocked a heavy sheet-iron door, opened it, and closed it behind them, and they were in a large room of stone, steel, and concrete, containing several cages, barred from floor to ceiling, the whole interior lighted by one kerosene lamp hanging in the corridor.
Among the bars gleaming dimly and the shadows of bars thrown back against concrete and stone, she saw her father sitting on the edge of a bunk that was only an iron shelf let down on chains from the wall, with a thin mattress laid on it. He had paid no attention when they entered. He sat still, staring at the wall, one hand pressed against his belly, the other holding to one of the chains that supported the bunk.
The sheriff opened the cell door and stood aside to let her in. “I’ll come back after while,” he said.
The door closed and was locked behind her, and she stood still until Thad felt her presence and looked up. When he recognized her, he covered his face with both hands.
“He put his hands over his face like a man ashamed,” my grandmother said. “But he was like a man, too, who had seen what he couldn’t bear.”
She sat without speaking a moment, looking at me, for she had much to ask of me.
“Maybe Thad saw his guilt full and clear then. But what he saw that he couldn’t bear was something else.”
And again she paused, looking at me. We sat facing each other on either side of the window; my grandfather lay in one of his lengthening sleeps nearby. The old house in that moment seemed filled with a quiet that extended not only out into the whole broad morning but endlessly both ways in time.
“People sometimes talk of God’s love as if it’s a pleasant thing. But it is terrible, in a way. Think of all it includes. It included Thad Coulter, drunk and mean and foolish, before he killed Mr. Feltner, and it included him afterwards.”
She reached out then and touched the back of my right hand with her fingers; my hand still bears that touch, invisible and yet indelible as a tattoo.
“That’s what Thad saw. He saw his guilt. He had killed his friend. He had done what he couldn’t undo; he had destroyed what he couldn’t make. But in the same moment he saw his guilt included in love that stood as near him as Martha Elizabeth and at that moment wore her flesh. It was surely weak and wrong of him to kill himself—to sit in judgment that way over himself. But surely God’s love includes people who can’t bear it.”
The sheriff took Martha Elizabeth home with him that night; his wife fed her and turned back the bed for her in the spare room. The next day she sat with her father in his cell.
“All that day,” my grandmother said, “he would hardly take his hands from his face. Martha Elizabeth fed him what little he would eat and raised the cup to his lips for what little he would drink. And he ate and drank only because she asked him to, almost not at all. I don’t know what they said. Maybe nothing.”
At bedtime again that night Martha Elizabeth went home with the sheriff. When they returned to the courthouse on Monday morning, Thad Coulter was dead by his own hand.
“It’s a hard story to have to know,” my grandmother said. “The mercy of it was Martha Elizabeth.”
She still had more to tell, but she paused again, and again she looked at me and touched my hand.
“If God loves the ones we can’t,” she said, “then finally maybe we can. All these years I’ve thought of him sitting in those shadows, with Martha Elizabeth standing beside him, and his work-sore old hands over his face.”
Once the body of Ben Feltner was laid on his bed, the men who had helped Jack to carry him home went quietly out through the kitchen and the back door, as they had come in, muttering or nodding their commiseration in response to Nancy’s “Thank you.” And Jack stayed. He stayed to be within sight or call of his sister when she needed him, and he stayed to keep his eye on Mat. Their struggle in front of Chatham’s store, Jack knew, had changed them both. Because he did not yet know how or how much or if it was complete, it was not yet a change that he was willing, or that he dared, to turn his back on.
Someone was sent to take word to Rebecca Finley, Margaret’s mother, and to ask her to come for Bess.
When Rebecca came, Margaret brought Bess down the stairs into the quiet that the women now did their best to disguise. But Bess, who did not know what was wrong and who tactfully allowed the pretense that nothing was, knew nevertheless that the habits of the house were now broken, and she had heard the quiet that she would never forget.
“Grandma Finley is here to take you home with her,” Margaret said, giving her voice the lilt of cheerfulness. “You’ve been talking about going to stay with her, haven’t you?”
And Bess said, dutifully supplying the smile she felt her mother wanted, “Yes, mam.”
“We’re going to bake some cookies just as soon as we get home,” Rebecca said. “Do you want to bake a gingerbread boy?”
“Yes, mam,” Bess said.
She removed her hand from her mother’s hand and placed it in her grandmother’s. They went out the door.
The quiet returned. From then on, though there was much that had to be done and the house stayed full of kin and neighbors coming and going or staying to help, and though by midafternoon women were already bringing food, the house preserved a quiet against all sound. No voice was raised. No door was slammed. Everybody moved as if in consideration, not of each other, but of the quiet itself—as if the quiet denoted some fragile peacefulness in Ben’s new sleep that must not be intruded upon.
Jack Beechum was party to that quiet. He made no sound. He said nothing, for his own silence had become wonderful to him and he could not bear to break it. Though Nancy, after the death of their mother, had given Jack much of his upbringing and had been perhaps more his mother than his sister, Ben had never presumed to be a father to him. From the time Jack was eight years old, Ben had been simply his friend—had encouraged, instructed, corrected, helped, and stood by him; had placed a kindly, humorous, forbearing expectation upon him that he could not shed or shirk and had at last lived up to. They had been companions. And yet, through the rest of that day, Jack had his mind more on Mat than on Ben.
Jack watched Mat as he would have watched a newborn colt weak on its legs that he had helped to stand, that might continue to stand or might not. All afternoon Jack did not sit down because Mat did not. Sometimes there were things to do, and they were busy. Space for the coffin had to be made in the living room. Furniture had to be moved. When the time came, the laden coffin had to be moved into place. But, busy or not, Mat was almost constantly moving, as if seeking his place in a world newly made that day, a world still shaking and doubtful underfoot. And Jack both moved with him and stayed apart from him, watching. When they spoke again, they would speak on different terms. In its quiet, the house seemed to be straining to
accommodate Ben’s absence, made undeniable by the presence of his body lying still under his folded hands.
Jack would come later to his own reckoning with that loss, the horror and the pity of it, and the grief, the awe and gratitude and love and sorrow and regret, when Ben, newly dead and renewing sorrow for others dead before, would wholly occupy his mind in the night, and could give no comfort, and would not leave. But now Jack stayed by Mat and helped as he could.
In the latter part of the afternoon came Della Budge, Miss Della, bearing an iced cake on a stand like a lighted lamp. As she left the kitchen and started for the front door, she laid her eyes on Jack, who was standing in the door between the living room and the hall. She was a large woman, far gone in years. It was a labor for her to walk. She advanced each foot ahead of the other with care, panting, her hand on her hip, rocking from side to side. She wore many clothes, for her blood was thin and she was easily chilled, and she carried a fan, for sometimes she got too warm. Her little dustcap struggled to stay on top of her head. A tiny pair of spectacles perched awry on her nose. She had a face like a shriveled apple, and the creases at the corners of her mouth were stained with snuff. Once, she had been Jack’s teacher. For years they had waged a contest in which she had endeavored to teach him the begats from Abraham to Jesus and he had refused to learn them. He was one of her failures, but she maintained a proprietary interest in him nonetheless. She was the only one left alive who called him “Jackie.”
As she came up to him he said, “Hello, Miss Della.”
“Well, Jackie,” she said, lifting and canting her nose to bring her spectacles to bear upon him, “poor Ben has met his time.”
“Yes, mam,” Jack said. “One of them things.”
“When your time comes you must go, by the hand of man or the stroke of God.”
“Yes, mam,” Jack said. He was standing with his hands behind him, leaning back against the doorjamb.
“It’ll come by surprise,” she said. “It’s a time appointed, but we’ll not be notified.”
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 9