He sits with his feet drawn back to the sides of his chair, his hat pushed back off his forehead. He is a fairly big man, and although his hair is white his body is still solidly composed, without excess or diminishment. The whiteness of his hair emphasizes the prominence of his features, the green of his clear eyes. Except for a slackening in the flesh of his cheeks his face has retained its angularity and firmness. It is a flexible, expressive face, deeply lined around the mouth and eyes, so that now in its apparent calm it seems near to both humor and sorrow. So far only his hand has betrayed him.
It is his turn to play. He draws from the deck and looks down to study his cards, his metal-rimmed reading glasses set a little low on his nose; he discards and leans back, taking up the cigar again.
Nobody else moves.
“Jayber, it’s your play, ain’t it?” Frank Lathrop says finally.
“Let a man think.”
“Hell,” Old Jack Beechum says, “a mule could’ve thought by now.”
Jayber plays. They play out the hand, and Frank Lathrop gathers the cards and shuffles and deals. Mat arranges his cards and tilts his chair back against the desk. He and Frank and Jayber wait quietly, watching Old Jack.
The old man holds the cards clumsily in his huge hands, fumbling them from one semblance of order to another with the forceful deliberate movements of a man laying bricks—a man building a spindling unwieldy tower of bricks that constantly requires the addition of one more brick to balance it upright. The earflaps of his corduroy cap have come untied; they flail out at warped angles from the sides of his head, dangling their strings, like the wings of some disgruntled bird. He reaches out, turning his cards face down against the block, and looks aggressively at the others as though to answer an insult.
“Your turn, old mule,” Jayber Crow says. He grins as he speaks, but speaks with a patience that amounts almost to gentleness.
Old Jack draws a card from the deck, stares at it, deciphers the message, and swats the meat block with it. He rolls his chew of tobacco over his tongue into the opposite jaw and clamps it there and turns away, aloof and silent; the movement abruptly repudiates his involvement in the game, dismisses his opponents and the game itself as finally as if he had gone out of the room.
They know that when his turn comes again they will have to call him back.
MISSING
Mat looks out the window at the crates tumbled together in the lot; the leafless weedtops poke through them, jerking and wavering in the wind. The pile of them, like the vacancy of the store, is a fact of the war; it remains for the same reason that he and Frank together have allowed the store to remain empty; they’ve foreclosed no possibilities. But now the boxes cluttered together in the rain seem to Mat to insist upon his own disquiet. His anxiety has become, after the first violence of its onset, more a physical state than anything else, a remote vibrance of numbness clenching and unclenching in his body as acutely as pain. The feeling is intensified by a vague awareness that, if he examined it, it would declare itself to be an extreme and desperate fear; but he has resisted any acknowledgment. He feels simply that he is bracing himself to confront an actuality not yet apparent—which, in loyalty to his son and his son’s life, he cannot allow himself to anticipate.
When he went to the post office shortly before noon to get the mail, there was no letter from Virgil. There had been none from Virgil for more than three weeks; but they had hoped, he and Margaret and Hannah, that there might be one on Monday. But he carried the mail home folded in the newspaper without looking at it, hastening then, in the presence of the fact, to qualify his hope, admit beforehand that he would be disappointed, to say that although he had hoped, he had expected nothing.
When he stood on the back porch a few minutes later, looking at the envelopes of what mail had come, he realized that he had failed to prepare himself; his precaution had spared him none of the force of his disappointment. It was not until he thumbed through the mail a second time that he noticed the government envelope addressed to Hannah, and felt change pass over his head like a chill. He picked the letter out from among the others, as though to dispose of it. And then he laid it down again, straight, with the others inside the newspaper, and he began an almost soundless whistling under his breath.
It is in his mind forever, that moment. For what seems a long time he stands as though deep in thought, though he is not thinking, the thin dry thread of his whistling crossing the edges of his teeth. His fingers tap nervously on the underside of the troughed newspaper. And then he thinks of Hannah and Margaret, and steps back into the angle between the wall of the house and the enclosure of the back stairway so he cannot be seen from the window. He leans against the stair door, looking out across the yard.
Rainwater has collected shallowly beneath the maple trees, making a large irregular pool stretching from the walk along the edge of the porch to the lilac bush beside the gate to the chicken yard. The rain is falling slowly in large drops so that the circles it makes striking the surface of the pool remain intact. For a moment at the center of each circle the black branches of the trees are mirrored perfectly, and then distorted and fragmented as the circles interlink and subside and renew. Across the fence in the chicken yard seven or eight hens stand together under the eave of the tool shed.
The chicken yard is bounded on one side by the wall of a large feed barn. The barn is painted white, and on its red roof there is a white red-roofed cupola with a spire and wind vane. Opposite the barn, beginning within the L-shape of the chicken yard and extending beyond it, is a large garden plot. To Mat’s right, looking off the porch toward the side of the lawn, a fence overgrown with honeysuckle hides the town from him; he can see only the roofs of the store buildings, the bare treetops among them, the roof and tall octagonal steeple of the church.
For a moment these things occupy his attention without his naming or thinking about them, as though his mind has become simply the cool grey-lighted space containing them, into which the rain falls.
But now he hears the pounding of his brother-in-law’s crutches coming up the walk beside the house. The familiarity of the sound is suddenly welcome to Mat. It fixes him steadily again in the day and place. Ernest is home for dinner. They will go into the house now.
Coming around the corner of the house, Ernest looks up, smiling at Mat. “Dinner ready?”
“I don’t know. I just got here myself.”
Ernest swings up onto the porch with a movement both cumbersome and strangely agile. He is ten years younger than Mat, his dark face finely modeled, strong-boned, the lips set firmly and evenly together in denial or concealment of the difficulty of his lameness. His faded work jacket fits him tightly across the shoulders. A flat yellow carpenter’s pencil sticks out beneath the band of his cap.
He stands beside Mat, leaning on the crutches while he reaches inside his jacket for a cigarette. “Did you hear from Virgil?”
Mat shows him the envelope. The two men look at each other a moment. Ernest shakes his head and starts to the door.
Having put it off as long as he can, Mat turns to follow him.
Margaret and Hannah are sitting at the table, Margaret beating eggs in a bowl she holds in her lap, Hannah sewing, holding the piece of white material a little awkwardly above the bigness of her pregnancy. They look up as the two men come into the kitchen. The room is warm, the air heavy with the smells of cooking. Nettie Banion stands at the stove, a lifting rag in her left hand, which she rests against her hip.
“Here they are,” Margaret says. “Put the biscuits in, Net.”
Ernest goes out into the hall. Mat goes to the table and holds the letter out to Hannah. There comes over him a great need to do this gently. But he can only do it bluntly, with a kind of shame as though there might be a polite way to do it but he does not know what it is.
She reaches out for the letter and takes it. Mat knows she is looking at him, but he does not look at her. And he knows when she looks away from him. She tears op
en the envelope and reads the letter, and lays it slowly and flatly down on the table, indicating that Mat should read it. And Mat reads it, and then, as though the duty falls to him, he reads aloud: “Virgil Feltner . . . missing in action.”
Nettie closes the oven door and turns around. She says “Oh” very quietly, her mouth holding the shape of the sound. “He ain’t dead.”
“No,” Margaret says.
Mat hears Ernest going up the stairs to his room.
Hannah has not moved. She sits staring out the window, her hands lying quietly on the piece of white material folded in her lap. Mat picks up one of her hands and holds it, awkwardly because she doesn’t respond. Her hand remains passive for a moment, and then she squeezes his and gently takes her hand away. She has not looked at him.
“It may not mean a thing,” he says.
“No.”
And Margaret reads the letter and puts it back on the table. She takes up the hem of her apron and wipes her eyes. Mat lays his hand on her shoulder.
“Wash up,” she says. “It’s nearly ready.”
Mat washes, and goes and sits down by the front window in the living room. He opens the paper, but looks at it without reading.
As if obeying an instinct, he has done what he usually does. But his eyes only follow the print of the page without reading; the headlines are a black strict architecture; he cannot, somehow, bring himself to assent to a meaning in the words. He folds the paper and moves over to sit on the sofa. Out the window the rain strikes and splashes on the black road.
The sounds become more brisk and rapid in the kitchen. Mat can hear Hannah setting the table. Ernest is in his room at the back of the house above the kitchen; now and then his crutches thump across the floor. Presently Hannah comes in and sits on the sofa beside Mat. She holds up her sewing for him to see. It is a small white gown, delicately embroidered with white thread.
Mat touches it with his fingers. “It’s going to be a mighty dressed-up baby.”
“Oh, you’re going to be proud of this baby.”
“I am. I know it.”
She folds the dress and turns and looks at Mat, smiling. “Tell me what you did this morning.”
And he tells her, the calm of his voice uncertain at first, contradicted by his effort to keep it calm. He was busy all morning with the cattle, he tells her. The cows are calving.
Virgil would be pleased to hear about the calves. But he does not speak of Virgil.
THE CARD GAME
“Uncle Jack,” Mat says, “it’s your play.”
Old Jack draws an ace from the deck, and with a large avoidance of looking either at his hand or at the card slaps it into the discard pile; and Mat, who holds two aces in his hand, decides he will wait until his next turn to pick it up.
The four of them have been there since the early afternoon. The rain by now has dried out of their coats, which have been spread carefully over the back of a wooden bench under the windows. They have, as usual, a fire going in the stove; as usual, except for Old Jack’s occasional fits of swearing, they have played pretty much without talking.
By now the card game in the empty store has become an institution, a kind of unnamed club that in the years since its beginning has acquired a fairly stable membership and meeting time. The habit of gathering there in the afternoons began in the late winter of 1941–42 with Mat Feltner and Frank Lathrop. The two of them had been neighbors and friends as long as either of them could remember. In the last thirty or forty years their friendship had led them in and out of perhaps a dozen business partnerships of one sort or another—the latest being the joint ownership of the old building in which, only a year before the war, Frank’s son had opened a general store.
But in the early weeks of the war, after their sons had gone into the service, their friendship changed from a casual fact to a necessity. Their talk stayed offhand and easy, but it was conditioned now by the presence of the war, the uncertain nature of their involvement in it, their sense of helplessness before an immeasurable fact. The silences they had always allowed to occur comfortably and simply between them were complicated now by the recognition that there were concerns too grievous for talk. They came to speak to each other with a kind of gentle vigilance, surrounding their conversations with sensitive boundaries, but also with a deepening need to speak.
In those first weeks of the war, after the tobacco had been marketed and they had begun the long and relatively idle wait for spring, they had taken to walking down to the store in the afternoons. It comforted them to build a fire there in the back room and sit and talk.
For a while they went on the pretext of seeing what would have to be done to maintain the building during Jasper’s absence, and what improvements ought to be made when he came back. “When and if he comes back,” Frank said cautiously only once. And after that they left Jasper’s name out of it. In spite of their avoidance of his name they both knew that he continued to be implicated in all they said. Any consideration of the future of the store became intricately a consideration of Jasper’s future, of the future and outcome of the war, of what would be lost. Something would be lost, was in the process of being lost, and they dreaded to ponder what. Their talk had become an obscure dealing with fate. It made them nervous.
But by that time Jayber Crow, the town’s barber, had begun coming to the store to sit and talk with them. Port William, Jayber said, provided a short supply of heads to barber, and an even shorter supply of heads that could make a satisfactory connection between a service rendered and a promise to pay, so he might just as well be talking.
“You might just as well,” Frank told him.
“If you can abide the company,” Mat said.
“I’ll do you the kindness,” Jayber said, “of not judging.”
In the afternoons he fastened to the knob of his shop door a battered paper clock which, because of the looseness of the hands, announced perpetually that he would be back at six-thirty; in consideration of the obtuseness of Port William heads he felt obliged to make no further explanations. “Hair’s my business. Let it grow.”
Jayber’s presence made the gathering permanent. There was an air of permanence in his idleness, his long body stretched in a straight line from the back of his tilted chair to the edge of the seat to where his shoe heels bracketed on the rim of the sandbox under the stove, his fingers laced behind his bald head. He would come and sit as long as they would stay, talking for the love of company and the love of talk. It was Jayber who brought the deck of cards.
So the rummy game is a creature of the war, shaped in the suspension of action, the suspension of all certain knowing, that the war has imposed on them. It came about almost by nature, they feel. They know it by its presence, which holds them there in the afternoons from the end of autumn to the beginning of spring, allowing them a dependable silence, masking and comforting them in the solitude of their fears. They are waiting—for the war to be over, for whatever resumption will take place at the end of it.
A DREAM OF ABSENCE
When dinner was over Nettie set the table again for Joe Banion and herself. Ernest put on his jacket and lit a cigarette and went back to the shop.
Now Mat has come back into the living room. He takes his shoes off and lies down on the sofa. He lies on his side, facing the window, his left arm bent back and propped against the pillow beside his head, his right arm resting across his hip, the hand dangling. He no longer thinks of where he is. He looks out the window, near sleep. The stillness of his hands comforts him. Out the window he can see the yard fence blind with honeysuckle, and above it the roof and white steeple of the church. The branches of the trees in the yard thatch across the steeple, the green shutters of the belfry under it. At the top of the sash a single bead of water swells and drips; the bead grows heavier, touches the point of the steeple, breaks; the drops, blown one at a time against the window, streak down, twisting the steeple, holding its whiteness against the glass.
The rain falls
harder, the wind blowing it in against the window. The water beads and streaks over the whole pane, the sound sheeted and vibrant there, the rain striking and flaring, blurring the light. The steeple crumbles, its white and green held, with the black of the trees, in shivering transparent smears in the square of the window.
The surface of the water stirs when the wind stirs, ripples barring the reflected blue of sky with the green of water. Several blue dragonflies hover and dart over the pond and in the cattails at the pond’s edge, their transparent wings blurring the hard shine of the sun. The mud at the edge of the water is pocked with cow tracks, covered in places with a thin green skim of algae; in places it has begun to dry and only the earth in the cups of the tracks is wet. It is early afternoon. The sun is high. There are no clouds. The sky is hot and brittle, a vast sheet and splintering of blue light turning the eyes down. White and yellow and blue butterflies have lighted on the wet mud; their wings open and close slowly, mottling the light. The pond is at the center of a large field where Queen Anne’s lace and daisies are in bloom. The air is heavy with the noises of insects, the hot pungent spices of weeds. The wings of the butterflies open and close over the dark mud.
Mat sees the whole field circling the shimmering round blink of the pond, dipping down to the wet banks. He is aware of the tense articulation of white translucent petals around the yellow eyes of the daisies, the green smooth grassblades under which the ants traffic in a frail cross-hatching of shadows.
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 73