At each end of the hall a bulb the size of a walnut gives a thin weak light shadowing the offsets of the doorways. Into the half-dark of the hall the rooms exhale the cold musk of emptiness. Jack goes into his room, leaving the door open so that a little light drains in from the hall. He feels his way to the light switch, and turns it on. The room contains only an iron bed, a tall bare-topped chiffonier with a peeling oval mirror, a large rocking chair. That the bed is made up is the only sign that the room is lived in. Old Jack’s coming has changed nothing.
He shoves the rocking chair over to the window and hooks his cane over the arm of it and sits down. He leans back.
The room contains his sleep. It is there, waiting for him, folded in the iron bed. But he has to prepare for it. He has to get his mind ready for it beforehand. In the last few years, since he has become too old to work, he has slept a light short sleep. A sleep too easy to wake up from—his mind is always just barely submerged under it, as though he is looking up at light through an obscuring thin film of water. Unless he is careful he will wake up in the night and think of his fears.
Most of all he is afraid that before he dies he will be sick and unable to attend to himself. Death does not worry him so much. He has no time for the solemnity usually attributed to it, but it is a fact, at least, and can be considered and dealt with. He thinks of dying as a kind of job that will have to be done, and, as he tells Wheeler Catlett, he can do it. But the thought of sickness makes him afraid. He fears living on past sickness into dependence on other people. He dislikes the uncertainty of these thoughts. He has lived all his life loving solid objects, things he could hook onto with his hands and pull. He has loved to feel in his hands the thrown-back weight of his body.
Other times he will wake up thinking of the imperfections of his life. He will lie there, remembering his mistakes and stupidities and errors of judgment, furious at himself, furious and sickened at the impossibility of correcting the past. These recollections return to him like old pains. And once they start they come at him one after another. They are worse than nightmares; he cannot wake up from them, and he cannot go back to sleep.
And so he sits up by his window each night, waiting to need to sleep. He waits to go to bed until he feels he can trust his sleep to last until morning.
He goes to bed a good deal later now than he used to. But he has kept his old habit of getting up early. Long before dawn these winter mornings he will be out of bed and wide awake. After he puts on his clothes he draws the covers back over the bed. And then he turns out the light and feels his way to the rocking chair and sits down. When daylight comes he will be there at the window, waiting for it.
A single set of footsteps goes along the walk in front of the hotel, and farther down the street somebody is talking loudly in front of one of the stores. A door slams somewhere off in the town. Below him in the kitchen Mrs. Hendrick is rattling the supper dishes.
Up the street he can see lights in Mat Feltner’s house. Wheeler Catlett is there for supper, he remembers. For a few minutes he considers going over to Mat’s to pay a visit and talk to Wheeler. He thinks a lot of Wheeler—admires him, in fact, a good deal more than he aims to let him know. He imagines going in and sitting down and talking a while with Wheeler and Mat. They are fine men, and have good heads on them. And he would like to see Wheeler’s little boys. Wheeler has taught his sons to call the old man “Uncle Jack.”
“Uncle Jack,” the littlest one said, “you’ve got tobacco juice on your shirt.” That tickled Jack. And Wheeler’s embarrassment tickled him even more. That littlest boy of Wheeler’s would walk right up and tell Franklin D. Roosevelt he had tobacco juice on his shirt. Old Jack’s face creases into the shape of a large laugh, and he snorts. He thinks a lot of those boys of Wheeler’s. Every Christmas he buys a little something to give them. Wheeler appreciates that.
He would like to hear Wheeler say something about the war. Jack stays troubled about the war. There is too much dying. Too many young men dying. He mistrusts what he reads in the papers. The war is more serious, it seems to him, than the papers make it out to be.
It may be necessary to use up the lives of young men; Jack will agree to that. He has no liking for defeat. But after a choice has had to be made between terrible sacrifice and terrible defeat, it is a time of mourning.
The newspapers add up the deaths of young men as if they were some kind of loan, an investment in something.
What is dead is gone.
He reaches into the bib pocket of his overalls and takes out a small notebook in which there is a carefully folded newspaper picture of the President. He opens the picture and looks at it. The President sits there behind his great desk. His eyes look direct and straight out of the picture so that they seem to focus on Old Jack.
The President’s face is sober and tired, sorrowful. The strain of the war shows in it, the burden of knowing of so many deaths. It would take a lot of strength to know so much.
A great man, with a powerful head on his shoulders.
Jack thinks how it would be to sit in Mat Feltner’s living room, and talk with Mat and Wheeler and Franklin Roosevelt. It would be brilliant.
“Mr. President,” Wheeler says, “how much longer do you think it’ll last?”
“I don’t know.” The President looks straight at Wheeler. “It’s a hard proposition. We’ll have to fight them until they quit.”
That’s a responsible answer, Jack thinks. He has to say so. “That’s right,” he says. “Go to it. By God, we’re for you, sir.”
“Thank you, my friend,” the President says.
It is too late, now, to go over to Mat’s. They would not be expecting him. He will see Wheeler later in the week, anyhow.
Saturday afternoon, or maybe Friday, the two of them will drive out to spend a couple of hours or so seeing to things on Old Jack’s farm. And then maybe they will go on over to Wheeler’s daddy’s place, as they do sometimes, and visit a while there. Or go somewhere to look at a farm that Wheeler will be thinking of buying—and spend a while pointing out and describing to each other what could be done by way of improvement. Or maybe—it could be any day—Wheeler will have a case to try in one of the counties upriver, and will stop by and pick up Old Jack and take him along. They usually ride all the way to the courthouse without talking much, Wheeler’s briefcase and maybe a law book or two on the seat between them. There’s too much going on inside of Wheeler then. It is as if, while they are on the way to the trial, Wheeler’s mind and his nerves are drawing down like the spring of a steel trap. And with Wheeler—who, in Old Jack’s opinion, has a mind like a steel trap—that is a mighty formidable thing to see happening. Because once he stands up in one of those courtrooms, with the judge and the jury and the opposing lawyer and the plaintiff and the defendant and the crowd of courthouse regulars and loafers and idle farmers and the framed portraits of four or five generations of judges all looking at him, Wheeler’s intelligence shines. Whether he wins or loses, Wheeler shines, Old Jack can see that. Every point Wheeler makes has the clean sound to it of a good axe chopping into a locust stump. And Old Jack, in his seat in the back of the room, says “Ah!” On the way home, after Wheeler has got limbered up and relaxed a little, Old Jack will slap him on the knee and tell him: “You’re all right, son. You’ve got a powerful head, and that’s fine. Mighty fine.”
He folds up the President’s picture and puts it back. He thumbs through the notebook until he finds a clean page; and then he takes a short pencil out of his pocket, and begins to write down a column of figures.
That pocket in the bib of his overalls is Old Jack’s place of business. That is where he keeps his old silver pocket watch and his notebook and pencil; he tells Wheeler he uses the pocket to hold what he has got left of his mind. He and Wheeler both know that he’s still got a shrewd head on his shoulders, but they let on as if he would have no mind at all if he had no pocket to put it in.
It is true enough that the old man no
longer has any memory for figures. And all his accounts and receipts are kept in a file in Wheeler Catlett’s office in Hargrave. He does his figuring in the notebook by guess, estimating and imagining what he cannot remember or never knew, and coming up invariably with a monstrous error in the result. But he has the habit of figuring, and so he figures, night after night, sitting by himself in his room, chewing furiously at his cud of tobacco, his imagination freewheeling among wishes and guesses, going up one side and down the other of what he presumes to be his farm accounts.
This is his farming, the remnant of habit and fascination from his life’s work, which he claims he has died out of now, all except his mind. He relishes his ciphering. The figures come into his mind smelling of barns and grain bins and tobacco and livestock. His figures grunt and bleat and bray and bawl. This is the passion that has worn him out, and made him old, and is still a passion. As he labors over it, the notebook becomes as substantial in his hands as a loaded shovel.
Scratching and stabbing with the pencil, he makes a column of figures representing his guesses as to what his earnings have been since the first of the year, and his predictions of what he will have earned by the year’s end. Beside that column he makes another, guessing and predicting his expenses. He adds both columns, and subtracts expenses from earnings. If the margin of profit strikes him as too small he begins again, and repeats the operation, increasing the earnings and economizing on the expenses, until he comes up with a figure that suits him. The next night he does the same thing, disregarding all the figures he has already made. And then, while they make their weekly drive out to the farm, he reads off his latest figures to Wheeler.
“No, Jack,” Wheeler says. “You can’t make that much.”
And then they have an argument. Old Jack argues. And then Wheeler argues. And when Wheeler stops the car in front of the barn they both figure in the notebook.
“Lord no!” Wheeler says.
It is an argument that neither of them ever wins. Jack never admits that he has lost, but he can never bring himself to think that Wheeler has lost, either—not for a minute. What he does believe, what he keeps very firm in his mind, is that between him and Wheeler it does not matter who wins, which is to say that between them the idea of winning is not a very important idea. As a matter of fact, nothing would trouble him more than to beat Wheeler in an argument.
“Well, then, Wheeler,” he says to mend their dispute, “I reckon we’re going broke then.”
Wheeler laughs. “No we’re not, Jack. We’re going to do fine. Don’t you worry.”
Old Jack slaps his hand down onto Wheeler’s knee. “You’re all right, son.”
To tell the truth, Old Jack loves Wheeler as much as he would have loved his own son if he had ever had one—maybe more. Loves him stubbornly and strictly by his own rules, but devotedly and generously nevertheless. He has been seen more than once sitting on the back bench of a courtroom, grinning and crying shamelessly as a child while Wheeler makes his closing speech to the jury.
“Listen to that boy,” he says. “He’s a shotgun. Lordy lord.”
THE GRASS MAY GROW A MILE
The room was Virgil’s. It was hers and Virgil’s. Now it is hers.
But not hers. And this house is not hers.
When she and Virgil married they came here to live—a short time, they thought, until their own house would be built. They had made their plans.
And then, soon, Virgil was called into the war. Both her parents were dead. She stayed on, to wait.
“They want you to stay here,” Virgil told her. “And I do.”
“You’re welcome here. You know you are,” Margaret and Mat told her.
She knew she was. She could not have refused them if she had wanted to.
Margaret and Mat made her welcome. They did all that was possible to make it easy for her to be there. She stayed, feeling that she belonged because Virgil belonged.
In the still room, Virgil’s and hers, not hers, she lies in bed, looking up into the dark. She is not sleepy yet. With the bigness of her pregnancy she is uncomfortable any way she lies. It will be difficult to sleep.
Below her own window she can see the elongated shape of the living-room window printed in yellow light on the yard. Mat is still down there. At this time on most nights they would all still be there in the living room, still talking. Now, divided in separate rooms, they have made themselves lonely—to think alone, as now they must.
Virgil was gone more than a year and a half, and then, in the last summer, he came home for two weeks. He had to leave again. For her, that short time of his presence was nearly as painful as his absence. It began nothing, ended nothing—a brief touching, an interruption of his absence, in which there seemed little to be said, nothing to be planned—a troubled bearing of the nearness of his departure. She loved him; she would be with him a few days; she would live beyond them, as she would have to, remembering them. A certain amount of happiness was possible for a little while; she would see to it that he knew nothing but her happiness. After that she would wait again. It was simple enough. She would do what she had to do. Wait. She had learned to do that.
“I’m getting better at it every day,” she told Virgil. “I’m a champion waiter.”
“You’re a champion waitress,” Virgil said.
She never wasted a chance to smile. And it seemed to her that there was a finer reality in her bogus happiness than in her sorrow. It was a gift to Virgil—what she could give him; she kept him from knowing what it cost her. And, curiously, this bogus happiness became the source of a real happiness—fugitive and small, but triumphant in a way, and precious to her.
One afternoon, two days before he had to go, they filled a picnic basket and walked out across the ridges in the direction of the river. They stopped on the point of the farthest ridge. At the end of a long gentle slope, the ground tilted upward again and made a small grass-covered knoll over the woods on the bluff. From there they could see the bottoms in the long bend of the river, and for miles on either side of them the valley lay open and broad.
They stood together at the top of the knoll, looking.
“This would be a fine place for a house,” Virgil said. “What do you think?”
“Yes. The loveliest place.”
“Then right here is where I’m going to build you a house.”
“Build us a house.”
“I’ll build you a house. And then you can give me back half of it. If you want to.”
She laughed. She still remembers the sound of her laughter. “Yes. I want to. I’ll give you all of it. And you can give me all of it.”
“And that’s the way it’ll be. We’ll give this house to each other. We’ll pass it back and forth, like a kiss.”
“After the war?”
“After the war. And now too.”
He picked up a flat rock and laid it down on the center of the knoll.
“There’s the front doorstep.”
He found more stones, and, pacing out the dimensions, marked the boundaries of an ample house, its rooms and doors.
Watching him as he moved back and forth in the imagined courses of walls, she was happy. She was happier than she remembered being. Beyond his absence, it began. She could see it.
He finished his design, and stood in the middle of it, smiling, looking at her.
“Come in.”
She came in.
They gathered wood and built a fire. A little later they spread their picnic and ate. Afterward, while the fire burned, they sat on in the light of it, talking. At dark a soft wind had got up; it made sound now in the woods below them.
When Virgil was a child, he told her, Mat took him and Bess out to where he was having a new barn built; they had wanted to watch the carpenters, and pestered Mat until he let them come along. The framing of the barn had been completed, but the roof and the siding still had to be put on. They stayed through the afternoon, playing with wood scraps and watching the car
penters. And then, shortly before quitting time, it began to rain. Mat came hunting them and, taking their hands, hurried them inside the barn.
“Let’s get in out of the wet.”
And he brought them in, and stood there, his face extravagantly serious, while the rain poured down on them between the open rafters.
“Daddy, we’re getting wet,” Bess kept saying. She would look up at him, her eyes begging, pointing down at the wetness of her dress.
Mat looked down at her. His hat brim had filled with water, and when he tilted his head it poured down like a veil in front of his face. “It’s lucky we got this barn built in time,” he told her. “We’d have drowned if it hadn’t been here.”
And then they had to give in to his joke and laugh. They stood there in the warm rain, holding hands, laughing, until the shower went by.
Now, as by some return of that free joyfulness, he had made this house that was no house, and had given it to her. It was no house that was their house. Strangely, it had made them glad. After what had been their estrangement—in the seeming futility of talking or hoping, in the nearness of Virgil’s departure—their desiring of this house was like a bet made, making the thought of winning possible. In this house that was the hope of a house they gambled toward what might be.
Hannah was happy. Her sadness that he would leave again was still in her, and was not changed. But also she was happy, and now her happiness seemed to her to exist apart from her sadness, and to be as great.
As the fire burned out the dark grew. Hannah gave herself into the possession of this house of theirs. There, in the dark, away from the other house where she had spent her waiting, its walls were nearly real. It made a new belonging imaginable. The fire had opened a space of light which was the space of a house—which remained, though the fire had not. Her house was as near her as his hands touching her, the weight of him.
In his absence their child grew in her. She no longer felt herself to be waiting, sorrowful and mute, on the edge of Virgil’s absence. Her body seemed to turn around a new center. The thought of Virgil’s coming back enclosed her and she enclosed his child. Everything leaned inward around the child, the beginning, in her, of both their lives.
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 78