Grover Gibbs was sitting by Jayber on a nail keg. He stuck his big fist out at me and said, “Calf’s head. Hit her a good one.”
I had been onto that since I was about five. It would have been like hitting an anvil, and the harder you hit the worse it would hurt.
And so I just slapped his fist with my open hand. He jerked his fist back, rubbing it, and said in falsetto, “Oh! You hurt me, boy.” The laughter that came from everybody then was friendly, and so I was all right.
Maze Tickburn was sitting in a rocking chair behind the stove, holding forth. He seemed to be in a fashion the host of the gathering, and certainly its chief entertainer. Maze was Port William’s stonemason, its digger and waller-up of cisterns and wells, its builder of foundations and cellars. He lived with his wife, India, on a scrap of hillside, two acres maybe, below the road just after it started down the hill toward Dawes Landing and eventually Hargrave. On their perch above the river valley, Maze and India had a small house, a smaller barn, a pen for the hog that ate their scraps, and the cistern, dug and walled and plastered by Maze, that caught the rainwater from their roof. On their stony slope they raised a garden and a little patch of tobacco, but lived mostly on Maze’s daily wage of perhaps two dollars.
When he had steady work, Maze was a sober man. When he didn’t, usually in winter when the ground was too wet or too hard-frozen to dig, idleness and the long nights would wear on his nerves, and then he would drink and spend a good deal of time in town. He especially endeared himself to his fellow loafers at these times because, when drunk, he sang whatever he said. He made the music of his words principally by drawing out certain sounds until their gravity was fully disclosed:
Ohhhh, there’s nothing so to warrrrm
The heart like a droooop of whiskey
On a coooold day.
Or he would brag:
Ohhhh, I am the beeeest stone waaaaller
What they iiiis in Porrrrt William
On account of I aaaam the oooonliest one.
But a feeeew moooore years
And I’m a loooong time gone,
And wheeeen I’m goooone
They woooon’t be noooone.
At such times Maze’s thoughts dwelt upon mortality, and he would sing of Petey Tacker, the Hargrave undertaker:
Ollll’ Petey Tacker, heeee’s the boy
Aaaalways shoooore of a job,
Laaaast feller we’ll eeeever meet.
And wheeeen I meet him
I’ll doooone be done.
I’ll be a loooong time gone.
I don’t know if I’m remembering now from that night in 1943, or just remembering. Maze was a principal character in Port William, one of its stars, you might say, for a good many years after that, and he was remembered for a good many years more, is still remembered by a few who cherish such memories. If all the stories of Maze and their related songs had been remembered, they would make a sort of happenstance opera of Port William. For instance:
One day Mrs. Preston, wife of Brother Preston the young preacher, was driving home from Hargrave. She came around a curve and there was Maze wobbling in his derelict truck from one side of the road to the other. Mrs. Preston very considerately applied the brakes, and so she hit him just hard enough to pop him out and send him flying into a big briar patch. Maze took the shock limberly enough, and so sustained no serious injuries but only a multitude of scratches. When he landed he just sat there with his back against a stump, bleeding profusely from his head, face, neck, shoulders, arms, hands, and perhaps other parts.
Mrs. Preston crept on hands and knees through the tunnel Maze had bored going in, and when she saw him she sang a tremulous little aria of her own:
Ohhhh, Mr. Tickburn!
Are you allll riiiight?
Can I heeeelp you?
And Maze sang back:
Ohhhh, Mizriz Piston,
Caaaall Petey Tacker,
Gaaaather dog fennel,
And siiiing “Blue Eyes.”
I’m a loooong time gone.
I do remember that on that night in Burgess’s store Maze presently sang:
Ooool’ Milton Burgess,
Most honestest maaaan ever lived!
Buy twoooo pound of bloney,
Get oooone pound and a haaaalf
And haaaalf a pound of thuuuumb.
Sellll you a load of coallll
Eighteen huuuunderd to the toooon.
Milton Burgess, I think, was not a humorless man. If he was not highly entertained all his life, he missed a wonderful opportunity. But he understood too that he had his part to play in the ongoing drama. He responded in recitative: “Get him out of here!”
“I’m a loooong time gone,” sang Maze over his shoulder as he helped himself to the door and out into the dark.
And perhaps I knew even then that Maze would make his way along the road to where the path to his house branched off and went steeply down the slope. And there he would stop, afraid to go farther alone, and sing that evening’s closing song:
Ohhhhhh, Indy!
Ohhhhhh, Indy!
Come get ollll’ Maze!
Ollll’ somabitch
Is druuuunk agin!
And India would come up the path to help him home.
When Maze had gone and the conversation had resumed, I began to feel again the way I had felt that morning in the stripping room. I felt it was a good place in which I did not belong. Not yet. I was nine years old, going on ten, with the ambition of growing up to be a man good at work. I had even begun to learn to be such a man, as I can see now, but I was a long time and many difficulties short of my aim. Though I didn’t want to know it, I knew that nobody could mistake me for anything but what I was: a small boy unaccomplished at much of anything except causing trouble.
I said, “What time is it, Jayber?”
He looked at his watch. “Quarter after seven.”
“Well,” I said, “I got to go.”
As I went to the door, Mr. Burgess said, “Goodnight, Mr. Catlett. Call again, please.”
Some of the older boys at school sometimes said to one another, “Kiss my ass.” That expression came to my mind then and I recognized its excellence. But I was too near the door by then to say anything, even assuming I would have dared to say anything. If Granny heard I had told Mr. Burgess to kiss my ass, she would have used all the soap in Port William to wash out my mouth.
Outside it was cold and just about perfectly black. It had clouded up again, not a star in the whole sky. I stood still a minute, just to feel the relief of being out of the store and out of sight. Lighted windows here and there shone through the dark without brightening it.
Granny had turned on the porch light for me. I headed for that, and was soon back again where everybody was glad to see me. They were all sitting in the living room, talking. I hung up my wraps on the hall tree and went in and sat on the sofa between Hannah and Aunt Lizzie. Uncle Ernest had gone up to his room over the kitchen. All the rest were there.
They were talking about Uncle Virgil. They all had written to him at Christmas, had sent him presents, and by then had received his letters in reply. Now they were repeating what he had said. Since he had gone, an insistent dread had dwelt in that house, never spoken of, not at least in my hearing. I did not think of it all the time, but when I did think of it, there it would be. Perhaps it never departed from Hannah and my grandparents. I think of them now, of Hannah then scarcely more than a girl, hardly more conversant with the death she dreaded than I was, and of my grandparents, to whom that death when it came would be one of a series to which they knew their own belonged. It was as though their talk of Uncle Virgil that night, talk that was humorous and bright and hopeful, was yet overlaid by a shadow; and my memory of it, as I look back with knowledge, is overlaid by grief.
But the talk then drifted on from Uncle Virgil to other things, to common memories, old stories told again, and to the ever-returning questions of history and kinship: long discussio
ns, sometimes contentious, beginning “Whatever happened to their daughter?” or “Who did he marry?” or “Who was she before she married?” And again I wish I had listened.
My own mind too drifted away from the subject of Uncle Virgil, but it followed its own course of thought. For me, in addition to its present foreboding, that house contained my mother’s memories of her girlhood and growing up, which I had so sharply imagined as to make them almost my own: stories of walking down to the river to swim; of skating parties at Grover’s Pond; of how Aunt Cass had let her fall onto the stove top, blistering the palms of her hands; of how she rode on her pony out the Coulter lane at dusk and was sent flying home by the moaning of pigeons in a barn; of putting on a circus in which so many Port Williamites performed that hardly enough were left for an audience.
The sense of a longer, older history that came to me in my ancestral houses came mostly from my grandmothers, both of whom had lived in the early years of their marriages with their mothers-in-law, my grandfathers’ mothers. Both of my grandmothers, despite their remarkable differences of character, never complained of that state of things, but they seemed to have done a great deal of listening. Their own memories included the memories of the older women, and they spoke familiarly of lifetimes not their own. And so in both houses I knew, before I knew what to think of it, a history that seemed to me ancient and that included much sorrow: memories of hard births, hard work, epidemics, deaths of children, debt and worry. And always back there in the mists of time, hardly imaginable and yet immediate as an odor, was the Civil War and the violence and personal vengeances, tawdry and deadly, that it had perpetrated in the little towns and farm neighborhoods of our part of the country.
In one of the corners of that room were glass-fronted shelves of books. Some of them still would be considered good books: books by Scott and Dickens and Hawthorne and Mark Twain. They had belonged to Granddaddy’s mother, and in a good many of them her name was written on the flyleaf in a pretty hand: “Nancy Beechum Feltner.” There were some books in those cases that I knew Ma Feltner had read to my mother when she was a girl. I had not read any of those books yet, though I imagined that eventually I would. But one of them especially attracted me. This was an early edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with the illustrations of E. W. Kemble. It was the copy I would read in another year or two, and I have it yet, the pages now so fragile they will hardly bear touching. But in those days, in 1943, I was taking it out only to look at the pictures. I thought of going to get it, and then I thought of The Boy’s King Arthur in which would be the sound of my mother’s voice. I loved the sound of her voice reading, I think, above all the other sounds I knew. I rested in it. Among my most estimable experiences was that of being sick in the wintertime, free from school, alone at home with my mother. Those days brought precious exceptions and variances. I could spend the day downstairs in my parents’ bed. I could have poached eggs and toast and tea. And my mother would read to me: The Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, Little Men, the stories of Robin Hood and Little John and Friar Tuck and Much the Miller’s Son, A Christmas Carol. In this house that had once been hers I felt both separated from her and close to the thought of her.
I got the book out of my suitcase in the hall and went back to my place on the sofa. I turned to the illustration that I liked maybe best of any, a picture of Sir Launcelot gone mad in the woods after Queen Guenever had so mistakenly told him to stay out of her sight. Except for Sir Launcelot’s eyes, which were rather too bugged-out with his madness, it is an inviting picture: a wilderness of old trees and big rocks and a little falling stream. And on the facing page I read, hearing my mother’s voice quietly bespeaking the strangeness and wonderfulness of the words as she pronounced them:
And now leave we a little of Sir Ector and Sir Percival, and speak we of Sir Launcelot, that suffered and endured many sharp showers, which ever ran wild wood, from place to place, and lived by fruit and such as he could get, and drank water, two years; and other clothing had he but little, save his shirt and his breeches.
It didn’t sound like such a bad life. Much as I admired Sir Launcelot, I was disappointed in him for allowing himself to be driven crazy by Queen Guenever. If she had forbidden me to come into her sight, I would not have minded much.
It pleased me thoroughly to know that back in those old days the word for crazy was “wood.” But this was going to get me in trouble in a few weeks, when we fourth graders started learning about synonyms. Our teacher, Miss Heartsease, sent a number of us to the blackboard to write down a word, any word, and a synonym. I wrote “crazy—wood.” This was my first performance as a cutting-edge scholar, and I am sure I was too obviously proud of it. Maybe I expected to be asked to address the class on the subject of Arthurian synonyms. But Miss Heartsease, who no doubt had been denied the benefits of The Boy’s King Arthur, was not impressed. She thought I was merely striking another blow for the emancipation of fourth graders, and she sent me back to my seat in disgrace. This gave so much pleasure to my classmates that they had to be called to order, which gave me even more pleasure than the rarity of my synonym. Thus, though it was not in the curriculum, I was learning at an early age one of the laws of compensation: cutting-edge scholarship, even when unappreciated, is effective as entertainment.
I turned in the book past the place where my mother had stopped reading to me, and a wonderful thing happened. The sound of my mother’s voice reading that strange English continued in my mind, and I realized that I was reading it for myself, but in her voice. I read how Sir Tristram went mad for love of the queen, la Belle Isolda, so that she did not recognize him:
But ever she said unto Dame Bragwaine, “Me seemeth I should have seen him heretofore in many places.”
But as soon as Sir Tristram saw her he knew her well enough, and then he turned away his visage and wept. Then the queen had always a little brachet with her, that Sir Tristram gave her the first time that ever she came into Cornwall . . . And anon as this little brachet felt a savor of Sir Tristram, she leaped upon him, and licked his learis and his ears, and then she whined and quested, and she smelled at his feet and at his hands, and on all parts of his body that she might come to.
So then I knew what a brachet was. But Sir Tristram was the second knight I had read about who had gone mad for love of a woman. This seemed to me to be happening too often, even if the women were queens. I didn’t think I would ever fall in love with an actual queen, but it did trouble me to wonder if ever I would be driven out of my mind by love for a woman. Because I would soon write my age in two numerals, I was afraid something like that might happen to me pretty soon. But by now life has pretty much had its way with me, and I can say with relief that I have never gone mad for love. Not completely.
It was becoming clear to me that this book needed to have an end, and I turned a lot farther over, and read a little about the death of King Arthur, how the King when he was dying sent Sir Bedivere to throw his beautiful sword Excalibur into the water, and how Sir Bedivere disobeyed twice but finally obeyed:
Then Sir Bedivere departed, and went to the sword, and lightly took it up, and went to the water’s side; and there he bound the girdle about the hilts, and then he threw the sword into the water as far as he might; and there came an arm and an hand above the water, and met it and caught it, and so shook it thrice and brandished.
And then the hand vanished away with the sword in the water.
I could just see that, and what I saw was a knight in beautiful armor walking down through the woods to the rockbar at the mouth of Coulter Branch on our own river. He carried reverently in both hands a beautiful sword. He went out to the very edge of the rockbar and threw the sword as far as he could into the river, and just as I was ready for the splash it was going to make, a hand rose up out of the water and caught it!
“I think I see a sleepy boy,” Granny said, and I sat up straight to try not to look sleepy.
“Well, Granny,” Granddaddy said,
looking serious, “we haven’t got a bed for him. I reckon we’ll have to hang him on a nail.”
He said that every time I came to spend the night, and I laughed. I said, “Where’s the nail?”
But Granny, who was not always sure herself when Granddaddy was teasing, said, “Granddaddy’s teasing you.” She got up. “You just come with Granny. Nobody’s going to have to hang on a nail around here. Tell everybody goodnight.”
That meant I got to let Hannah kiss me again. I made the rounds to get and give my goodnight hugs:
“Goodnight, Auntie. Goodnight, Granddaddy. Goodnight, Aunt Lizzie. Goodnight, Hannah.”
And Hannah did give me another excellent kiss on the cheek.
I picked up my grip and my book, and Granny and I went up the stairs. We went to the bedroom in the back of the house that had been Ma Feltner’s room in her last years and then my mother’s when she was growing up. It was a small, comfortable room on the south side. The sun shone in through the window in the winter, making a warm print of light on the rug, and often in the summer a breeze would sway the curtains as it blew in through the shade of the old maples in the yard.
Granny turned back the bed for me and plumped the pillow and turned on the lamp on the nightstand. There was a little radio on the nightstand.
“You can listen to the radio if you want to,” Granny said, “but don’t turn it up loud.”
She knew I would like to listen awhile, for Henry and I didn’t have a radio in our room at home.
She said, “Now, you brought your pajamas?”
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 56