Finally she said, “I’ll declare, Burley, these false teeth of mine seem to have got out of whack.”
When he had time he helped her in the kitchen, and helped her keep house, sparing her as much of the work and worry as he could. In good weather he would sometimes persuade her to let him do the washing, and set up the tubs and wringer in the back yard to avoid cluttering the kitchen, and do in an hour what would have been a half day’s work for her. When he finished, the clothes he had on would be as wet as the ones he had washed.
“Burley Coulter,” she would say, “you’re worse than any kid.” And then she would laugh.
Seeing that his recklessness and awkwardness amused her, he plunged and rubbed over the scrubbing board more furiously than ever, making the water splash and spout higher than his head. Performing these elaborate exaggerations of his incompetence, he could make her laugh like a girl.
She made, finally, a kind of household pet of him, made a child of him, and he submitted painstakingly. She fixed special treats and desserts for him. In the years between Dave’s death and her own she crocheted a set of doilies for his room.
He remembers the heavy day, after her death, that he spent burning the leftover odds and ends of her life that she had carefully preserved in the closets and the bureau drawers: postcards and letters from people whose names he had forgot and hastened to forget again, photographs of people dead before he was born, whose names he never knew. Though he wanted none of it, though he lightened himself by getting rid of it, there was an awesome finality in the burning of those things, dear to her for reasons that would never be known again in the world.
Since his father’s death and the boys’ departure, and even more since the death of his mother, Burley has devoted himself to Jarrat—not because Jarrat ever has required devotion of him, but because he is touched by Jarrat’s loneliness, and in the absence of so many is lonely himself.
Jarrat lives for work. He has grown nearly silent. If Burley wants to talk, he has to wait for a chance to go elsewhere. But he and Jarrat have continued to work together, and there has been a great deal to be done and always more to do. During the past two years, in addition to farming their own places, they have sharecropped on Mat Feltner’s. Jarrat took this new work, Burley knew, simply because the acreage became available—and because he is, within the limits of his strength, unable to let the opportunity of a crop go by.
Burley has made himself Jarrat’s friend. Though Jarrat will never acknowledge any dependence on him, Burley has made himself dependable. He has been, as he never was earlier in his life, faithful to their work, not for his own sake, but for Jarrat’s. In these years of their loneliness devotion has become Burley’s habit. He has become more gentle as Jarrat has become more hard.
Now, as he comes up to the yard, Jarrat is waiting for him, standing on the stone walk between the back porch and the cellar house. He is past fifty now, and looks older—all leather and bone and lean meat, taller and leaner than Burley, a little bent in the shoulders. His face, beginning to hollow in the cheeks and temples and around the eyes, is covered with a week’s growth of nearly white beard. His mouth is cleanly shaped, firm, and tightly, deliberately, closed. His eyebrows are coarse, heavy, completely black; below them his eyes are set deep and have a peculiar fixity of gaze.
He is wearing an old hunting coat, soiled and stained and frayed. His large hands hang down at his sides, the knobbed heavy bones of his wrists showing beneath the coat cuffs. His hands are scarred and hardened, weathered to the color of an old saddle. Jarrat’s face invites no sympathy; to Burley, all the humanness and vulnerability of him are in his hands, and he is always touched by the sight of them. For three or four years, Burley knows, Jarrat has been unable to sign a check. His hand has become incapable of performing the small movements of his name, can scarcely grasp and hold steady so small an object as a pencil. It is the peculiar adaptation of his strength that he can do small work only clumsily or not at all, but manages the roughest and heaviest labor with grace and seemingly without strain.
He stands midway of the walk, awkwardly waiting. He asks, “Did he catch the bus?”
“Yes.”
“You got him there all right. And saw him off.”
“Yes.”
Jarrat is looking down at his feet. He nods. And then, as though he had been not waiting but passing on some errand, he goes out the gate and starts home.
Burley walks up the steps and onto the porch. He wipes his feet on the piece of old carpet beside the door and goes into the kitchen.
He lays a fire in the cooking range and lights it. Once the blaze has caught, he goes to the living room to build up the fire there, and then goes out along the path to the barn to do his feeding.
When he leaves the barn, the sun, just before setting, shines out of a breach in the clouds, and below him the valley is suddenly filled with a transparent mist of rich light. He stops to look. A window in a house he cannot see, on a ridgetop three or four miles away on the other side of the river, catches the sun. His clothes are still damp from the rain; his feet are wet and cold. He stands there, watching the light, thinking suddenly of spring.
Back in the house, he gets out a pair of dry shoes and a change of clothes. He stands in front of the stove in the living room, taking off his wet clothes and putting the dry ones on. He waits there, holding his hands over the top of the stove, until he is warm.
The house has become dark. He goes through the cold hall to the kitchen and turns on the light and begins preparing his supper. He goes about his work in about the same way as his mother would have gone about it.
Usually his housekeeping seems to him to be too painstaking, even wasteful, for one man living alone. At times he has thought it would be better to move his bed down to the kitchen and live in the one room with the one fire, as Jarrat has always done, and close up the rest of the house. But he has never been able to bring himself to the change. He follows the old habits of the household, keeping at least the three rooms alive. And he keeps Nathan’s room clean and waiting, refusing to accept loneliness as the culmination of anything. He knows better than to hope outright for the return of anybody, but he is careful to leave the possibilities open.
When his meal is done with and the kitchen is set to rights, he goes back to the living room and sits and smokes in his chair beside the stove. The room is furnished sparely and to Burley, despite his own presence in it, it feels deserted. There is a checkered linoleum on the floor, a small carpet in the center of it in front of the stove. Besides Burley’s rocking chair, there are four straight-backed chairs, a sofa, and a table under the front window. On the mantel behind the stove a stopped clock stands between two glass vases. Between the clock and the vases are pictures of Tom and Nathan in their uniforms, and an enlarged photograph of the family taken by Jarrat’s wife in the year before her death. They are standing in a row in the yard in front of the house. It is Sunday, or else they have dressed up especially for the picture—he cannot remember. The two little boys, at either end of the row, are grinning, looking into the camera. Jarrat and Burley, almost unrecognizably younger, stand with the boys beside them and the old people between them; they have their hands behind them, their feet apart, their eyes squinched against the sun; Jarrat, self-consciously, is smiling. The grandmother stands with her hands clasped in front of her, her feet placed together at a prim angle, in what was considered graceful posture in the time of her girlhood. Beside her, peculiarly apart from her, and from all the rest of them, old Dave is leaning forward over his cane. He might be there alone for all the deference he pays to the presence of the others. He is as tall as Jarrat, and as lean, his white hair uncombed. He is wearing a white shirt and tie and a dress coat of an old-fashioned cut which fits him too tightly across the shoulders, but his pants are work pants, without creases. The set of his face is stubborn. He has submitted only grudgingly—only, finally, at the insistence of his pretty daughter-in-law—to the taking of the picture.
He stares straight ahead.
They look into the room: the living faces of the dead, the different younger faces of the living, more perishable than the paper of the photograph. Jarrat’s young wife was the first to die, leaving Jarrat and the two boys to become what they would not have become if she had lived, changing all the possibilities. And old Dave held on to his life as if nothing was less obvious and less certain than death—until a simple sleep, like a child’s, pried his fingers loose. And the old woman died, among the gathering of her memories, as though she died into a death she had already lived in for years.
And Tom is dead. And Nathan is gone again, bound to them now only by the thin strand of departure.
Burley leans forward, opening the door of the stove, and throws in the butt of his cigarette and empties the ashes out of his hand.
He picks up a newspaper and looks at it a moment. But it is yesterday’s paper—he forgot to get the mail when he came in. He puts the paper down and turns on the radio, and then, anticipating with a kind of fear the breaking of the silence, turns it off again.
He gets up and walks to the window and, shielding his eyes from the light in the room, looks out. There are no stars. The wind has quieted and the overcast, he imagines, is thickening again. He stirs the fire and sits back down.
For a long time there is only the sound of the fire burning, the occasional shifting of the coals. Occasionally, marking the silence into long spans, he hears the cracking of the floors and walls as the house contracts and settles into the night cold. He is thinking of Tom.
Tom had been a bulldozer operator with a battalion of engineers, following the invasion into Italy. One morning they were sent up into the mountains where a battle had been fought the night before. The field was strewn with the dead of both armies, and Tom’s outfit had orders to bury them. The area was still under threat of counterattack, and they were to do their work in a hurry. The ground was stony and thin and frozen, covered with a layer of snow. With considerable difficulty, Tom scooped out a long shallow grave. The bodies were laid in quickly, side by side in the naked grave, and he began covering them. He replaced the dirt he had moved, and to make the burial as deep as possible he began scraping up dirt from the area around the grave to mound over it. It was desperate work. Twice he became confused about the dimensions of the grave and dug out the bodies he was trying to cover. The forward movement of the heavy machine rolled them out of the pit before he could stop.
Now, grown still in the chair, the warmth of the stove around him, Burley doesn’t know if he is awake or asleep. Cold in his mind, he digs in the skimpy dirt, moving back and forth on the narrow shelf of the mountain. Beneath him he can feel the shove and pitch of the machine, the sound of the engine alternately straining and idling. Looking down as if from a height, he sees the unfinished long mound of a grave. Under the mound are the dead, lying side by side in their torn uniforms, a single long rank of them, facing up into the raw dirt. He scrapes at the frozen ground, loosening only handfuls at a time, and pushes it onto the grave—to make the dead safe there, to be done with them, to hide them forever. He is in a terrible hurry, and there is not enough dirt.
He uncovers a face. Tom’s. The boy lies on his side, his right arm crooked beneath his head. His eyes are shut, the dirt against his cheek like a blanket.
He wakes up. The house and the fire tick on into the silence. He sits still, trying to recover his presence there in the familiar room. It is time he was going to bed. But he puts on his hat and coat, and picking up his lantern at the kitchen door, starts back along the road to town.
THE HOTEL
The lobby of Mrs. Hendrick’s hotel, considering its public intention, is a cramped small room. The ceiling is too high for the length and breadth of it. Light from the one-eyed ramshackle fixture in the ceiling thins and dims, reaching down into it. In a steep diagonal across the back wall of the room a stairway goes up to the second floor.
Beneath the stairway, divided from the rest of the room by a short counter, there is a small triangular alcove, which was the office of the establishment in its more or less flourishing days. The alcove contains a double row of empty pigeonholes. The counter bears a frayed ink-marked green blotter, a crusted inkstand and pen, a small nickel-plated bell. None of this has been in use for years. Now all the business of the place can be transacted well enough in and out of Mrs. Hendrick’s snapping change purse, but she has maintained the little office as an appearance or reminder of her better days. The lobby is furnished with three wicker chairs and a wicker settee. They sit there empty, in conversational arrangement, offering hospitality in the empty room.
The dining room is a little better than twice as long and half again as wide as the lobby. Four ample tables stand in a row down the center of the floor. Light fixtures hang by cords from the ceiling at either end of the room, but only the most distant one is lighted. At the far end of the room a door opens into the kitchen, showing beyond it a large black cooking range. The table nearest the kitchen is the only one with a cloth on it.
At this last table Old Jack and the two lady boarders are seated. The old man sits at the end of the table toward the front of the building. At the opposite end is Mrs. Hendrick’s empty chair. The old ladies sit, facing each other across the table, on either side of the landlady’s place. The plates of the three women make a small close triangle, leaving as much of the table’s length as possible between them and Old Jack. The old ladies have woolen shawls drawn around their shoulders, and Jack still has on his coat and cap. The meal is nearly finished. The old ladies have stopped eating, and are leaning toward each other, talking almost in whispers. Now and then they glance down the table at Old Jack, but covertly, so as not to violate their pretense that they are unaware of his presence. As their glances at him show, their exchange of womanly confidences is a little thrilled at its surreptitious occurrence in the presence of the old man.
Old Jack is still eating. He has heaped his plate full for the second time, and has no more than half finished it. He eats with the forthright assistance of his left thumb, with a great wielding of his elbows. Whatever the old ladies say to each other at mealtimes, it always has a tacit reference to the old man’s table manners. At the moment there is a trickle of gravy on its way down his chin; sooner or later, they know, ignoring his napkin, he will wipe it off on his sleeve.
Mrs. Hendrick is standing just out of reach of his left elbow. She is holding out, vaguely in his direction, a nearly empty meat platter. She has been standing there for a full minute, waiting for him to notice her, her face set in a twist of impatience. Jack continues to eat, concentrating on the space between his plate and his mouth.
She pokes the plate at him. “Do you want any more of this meat, Mr. Beechum?”
“Naw’m,” Jack says. “You can take that away, Suzy. I’m done with it.”
Mrs. Hendrick’s name is not Suzy. None of the three women is named Suzy. But Old Jack simplifies matters by calling them all Suzy.
One of the old ladies giggles in confidential outrage at the other.
Mrs. Hendrick makes hard rapid tracks to the kitchen with the meat platter. She comes back and scrapes up the old ladies’ dishes and her own, and carries them to the kitchen. Her steps peck brittlely back and forth over the floor. She brings in the coffee pot and fills the triangle of cups at the ladies’ end of the table and sits down again. She passes the sugar and cream to her lady boarders.
Old Jack finishes eating and pushes back his plate. Mrs. Hendrick gets up and hustles around the table, her heels again picking out the thin hard code of her martyrdom. Sometimes she gets furious at Mr. Hendrick for having died and left her alone, and poor, and dependent on these distresses. She brushes Old Jack’s crumbs into his plate and takes it out to the kitchen. She pours his coffee and sets the cream and sugar by him, and goes back to her place.
The old man scoops in three heaping spoonfuls of sugar and pours in cream until his cup fills to the brim. He stirs, sloppi
ng the coffee out into the saucer. Holding cup and saucer unsteadily in his big hands, he pours the saucer full, and blows on it and drinks. He finishes the coffee in five saucerings, rapidly, with a loud mixture of breathing and blowing and guzzling, and gets up, scraping his chair backwards, scrubbing his mouth on his coat sleeve. He unhooks his cane from the corner of the table.
He looks at Mrs. Hendrick and gives her a large smile. There is a blunt obtrusive kindness in his expression, utterly unaware of the displeasure that she has been at such pains to make obvious.
“I thank you, Suzy. And good night to you.”
He turns and goes, walking heavily the length of the dining room and out the door, leaving his chair pushed back at an angle from the table.
Jack’s departure, as far as the two old ladies are concerned, is as disturbing as his presence. His leave-taking is absolute. The turning of his back completely dismisses the entire circumstance of the meal and its company—themselves. He bears away from the table a filled belly, but beyond that not a thought. The set of his head and shoulders, the momentous stomping and hobbling of his gait, suggest that he has never looked behind him in his life. He seems to participate unequivocally in the continuing deaths and completions of things. His knowledge is as forthright as his hunger. He speaks of the approach of his own death as much as a matter of fact as he speaks of the approach of Tuesday. He accomplishes everything as if he is both aware and willing that every breath he draws will be the last of its kind. To the old ladies there is something obscene in it. They exchange a series of self-conscious glances—as after a near stroke of lightning.
From where they sit they hear his cane and his footsteps thumping slowly up the stairs.
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 77