His first vice, his professed badness with the women, was cured by time. He wore it out and discarded it—or was worn out and discarded by it; and lived beyond it, and kept the overhauled memory of it for stock in trade during his retirement.
And his vocabulary was completely renovated in collaboration with Brother Preston soon after he was hired by the church to be janitor and grave digger. Since then the only thing that has broken him loose from righteousness and sent him climbing back up into the upper ranges of his old eloquence was the news that his grandson Billy, Grover’s boy, had become the pilot of a four-engined airplane. And he has continued to need all the words he knows to express his appreciation of that glory.
He pushes the door wider open with the point of his cane, and then grabs the doorjamb with his free hand and climbs into the shop.
“What do you know, Uncle Stanley?”
Uncle Stanley cannot possibly have heard, but according to his theory of social procedure, this is the time for a greeting to be offered and accepted. He bites into the air four or five times as though pumping himself up. And then he yells back, at the top of his voice, and as pathetically and sickly as possible at that volume:
“Fair to middling, Jayber, by golly. But, by dab, ain’t it been a awful winter?”
Jayber’s first inclination is to kick the chair around and help himself to the comfort of a private grin. But remembering that the mirror is behind him, he wipes his own face straight with the back of his hand, and waits. The old man has said exactly what Jayber and nearly everybody else in Port William could have predicted last week that he would say, for the second article of his theory holds that all greetings surely must take the form of a question about his health. But the townsmen, who know his theory, take pains to avoid the question, knowing he will answer it anyhow. With the exception of Brother Preston and two or three helplessly well-intentioned female members of the church, it has been ten years since anybody asked Uncle Stanley how he feels.
Now that the greeting is done with, he removes his grin and sits down. He looks up at Jayber out of the bristling of his whiskers and eyebrows, and bites off some more air.
“Yes sir, by golly, it’s been a hard winter. It’s been hard on the old bugger, by golly. I was just telling the madam here the other night, by dab, I believe it’s weakened me. I believe it’s aged me.”
Jayber lets himself laugh now, and says loudly, “It’s not the cold that’s getting you down, Uncle Stanley. You’ve just been too active at night for an old buck.”
That’s flattery. Uncle Stanley grins. His mouth draws open like a rubber band; you could loop the corners of it over his ears.
“Aw-aw now, Jayber, that time’s done gone.” But he shakes his head, and then nods. “I’ve seen the time, though. I call back forty, fifty years, I could work all day, by juckers, and wench like a tomcat all night.” He laughs in sincere admiration. “With the best of them. By grab, I didn’t know what a night’s sleep was. When I heard the roosters crow I just come home and et breakfast and went to work. But not anymore. It’s done gone by.”
“I can’t believe that, Uncle Stan. Some of them told me they hear you romp and stomp and bellow like a bull all hours of the night.”
“Naw. Too late for that, Jayber. If I was still able to bother any women it wouldn’t be the madam. When Grover was born that about fixed it between me and her. Said all that foolishness might be a pleasure to me, but wasn’t nothing but suffering and trouble to her. Said, by grab, I could just sleep in the back room. By juckers, I’ve put up with her all these years for her conversation. And can’t hear what she says a third of the time. Hard on a man! By dab by grab.”
Mrs. Gibbs is a stout member of the Port William church and sings in the front row of the choir. She was the only one of the congregation who voted outright against hiring Uncle Stanley to be janitor. For maybe forty years nobody has seen the two of them together in public. If Uncle Stanley is sitting out on the front porch, Miss Pauline will be sitting on the back porch. She keeps house for him and cooks his meals and sits down at the table with him, but only because it’s her “duty as a Christian,” not because she wants to. Otherwise they live like strangers who happen to have rooms in the same hotel. She has forced Uncle Stanley to live behind her back, and he probably forced her to force him, and she probably forced him to force her to force him, and so on and so on; it’s just as well to accuse time and the world and Port William, which are also, and just as uncertainly, to blame. Since the first few years of it, the marriage of Uncle Stanley and Miss Pauline has been an armistice, likely to break into hostilities any minute. Neither of them makes any bones about it. Whenever the question of increasing Uncle Stanley’s wages or of giving him a little “token” at Christmas is put to a vote before the congregation, Miss Pauline votes against it. And Uncle Stanley is apt to publicize, in the normal course of his conversation, at the top of his voice, anything from the trouble Miss Pauline is having with her bowels to the events of their wedding night.
Once the old man gets started there is no telling when or where he will stop. As long as he is doing all the talking he is certain, for a change, what the conversation is about, and he aims to make it worth his trouble. Jayber listens to him, usually, with a growing sense of guilt and alarm. If there was anybody else in the shop it would be mostly funny, but always when he is the only one in the audience Jayber feels himself helplessly implicated in what the old man is saying. He never intends to get him started. He will be carrying on what seems a harmless conversation, with the best intentions in the world, and then all of a sudden Uncle Stanley will have taken off into some outrageous confession—not just spoken, published. And Jayber feels like somebody who intended to light a cigarette and set the town on fire. The old man has no secrets, no concern for privacy, no wish for dignity, no notion of responsibility that might stop him or make him lower his voice. It is not that Jayber fails to be amused and even tickled at what he says, and not that any particular thing he says is not in one way or another more amusing than disturbing; but running along with the amusement is the nearly terrifying certainty that there is no limit to what he might say, or would say if he knew how. Once that awful mouth of his loosens up and starts running, anything is possible. Nothing has any value except conversational. Nothing is worth anything except as it maintains the sound of his own voice bubbling up into the silence of the world. Listening to him, Jayber sometimes thinks that the words don’t come out of his mouth, but disappear into it. That mouth is an abyss that the whole world and the planets and stars might be sucked into and vanish forever. He can be heard distinctly, in calm weather, fifty or seventy-five yards in all directions, advertising at a shout the failure of everything to mean anything.
In the face of Uncle Stanley’s devouring garrulousness, as confirmed and free a bachelor as he is, Jayber always finds himself taking up the defense of marriage. Not so much the defense of any particular marriage—not, by a long shot, of Uncle Stanley’s—but of marriage itself, of what has come to be, for him, a kind of last-ditch holy of holies: the possibility that two people might care for each other and know each other better than enemies, and better than strangers happening to be alive at the same time in the same town; and that, with a man and a woman, this caring and knowing might be made by intention, and in the consciousness of all it is, and of all it might be, and of all that threatens it. At these times it seems to Jayber that, of all the men in Port William, he’s the most married—not in marriage, but to this ideal of marriage. He is bound in this way, as he is bound, beyond his friendships and his friends, to an ideal of friendship.
These are the last remainders of Jayber’s ideals. He holds to them against the possibility that life will mean nothing and be worth nothing. He is a despairing believer in these things, knowing that everything fails. The ideal rides ahead of the real, renewing beyond it, perishing in it—unreachable, surely, but made new over and over again just by hope and by the passage of time; what has
not yet failed remains possible. And the ideal, remaining undiminished and perfect, out of reach, makes possible a judgment of failure, and a just grief and sympathy.
In Port William, or beyond it or above it, Jayber imagines a kind of Heavenly City, in which each house would be built in a marriage and around it, and all the houses would be bound together in friendships, and friendliness would move and join among them like an open street. His living in Port William has been a bearing of the descent of the town from that ideal—as though at the end of each night, out of his mind and his desire, he gives painful birth to the new real morning and the real town—as though he watches the descent of all things from Heaven, like a snowfall, into the aimless gap of Uncle Stanley’s mouth. But he is also the adulterer of his marriage, the servant of opposite houses, faithful to both and unfaithful to both—slipping away from his Heavenly City, to which he has sworn his devotion, to become the lover of all the perishing lights and substances of Port William and of the weather over it and of the water under it. After so long, it seems to him that he is the native and occupant of both places, and passes freely between them, and in serving either serves both.
A NEW CALLING
Tonight Jayber has ceased to listen to Uncle Stanley. He sits looking out into the dark street and at the light in Milton Burgess’s store, letting his mind run. Out of kindness, he pretends to be listening, nodding his head now and then in a movement he intends to be ambiguous, but which he knows Uncle Stanley will take for encouragement.
The old man runs down finally, and Jayber lets him be quiet a few seconds to make sure. Then, with his voice carefully noncommittal, he says:
“Well.”
“Says, which?”
“Well!”
“Yessir!” Uncle Stanley says.
He’s quiet for nearly a minute, and Jayber sees that he is getting down to his business, whatever it is. He looks out the window, slowly opening and shutting his mouth, thinking over what he has to say. When he turns back, he prods Jayber’s shin with the point of the cane and says, “I’ve got a proposition for you, Jayber. I’ve been trying to get a chance to talk to you all day.”
“What’s on your mind, Uncle Stanley?”
“Well, I got a job to offer you. Keeping care of the graveyard. Preacher told me to find somebody to do it.”
“You mean dig the graves?”
“Well, that’s part of it.”
“About all of it, ain’t it?”
“Well, some of the time. But in the summer you’ve got to cut the grass. And ain’t so many dies in the summertime. In the winter just about all of it’s digging the graves. Mud, or ground froze hard as a bull’s horn, by grab, and every kind of weather, and ain’t hardly enough pay to make it worth the trouble. But it’s a job, and there’s a little money to it, and every little bit helps if you want to look at it that way. I quit looking at it that way. And, by grab, I quit, I did.”
“How come you’ve quit?”
“How’s that?”
“What did you quit for?”
“Why now, by gob, preacher and that undertaker come up day before yesterday wanting me to go out there by myself in that rain and dig two graves in one day. I says, ‘By grab, I won’t do it. I’m too old. I can’t do it. All I can do to dig one grave in a day.’ ‘Well now,’ preacher says, ‘Mr. Gibbs, perhaps you ought to try.’ ‘Try nothing,’ I says, I did. ‘You look at that ground out there. That ground’s so wet you could dig a grave with a bucket as quick as you could dig one with a shovel. That’s a job of work. I reckon you don’t know a job of work. But I do. Because I’ve done several.’ ‘Well,’ preacher says, ‘what are we going to do?’ ‘Do?’ I says. ‘We’re going to get somebody to help me dig them graves or they ain’t going to get dug, and you can just keep them corpses until I get around to ’em, that’s what we’re going to do.’ ‘Mr. Gibbs,’ he says, ‘you was hired to dig them graves.’ Made me mad, he did. I says, ‘Now look a here, they’ve set around here for six weeks in a row and ain’t a one of them died, and now here two of them ups and dies in one day. It ain’t right, and I quit.’”
“Did you dig the graves?”
“Well, I dug one of them two. Preacher got them big old boys of Siler Smith’s to dig the other one. By grab, you ought to seen it. Them big old idiots wallowing and tromping around in that mud. They’d dig out a little hole and it’d cave in on them; and they’d throw out a shovelful of mud and a shovelful would run back in. And them a fighting it like killing snakes and cussing till you’d a thought they’d a woke up everybody there. Even I could hear them. I got mine dug and went home about the middle of the afternoon, and they’d just got theirs down about waist deep. Some of them said the preacher and that undertaker finally had to come in to help them, and they was all out there with a lantern still digging when midnight come.”
Uncle Stanley has to stop and laugh.
“Well, they dug a pond, shaped sort of like a funnel. I know just how it happened because I made the same mistake myself when I was new at the work. When you dig one of them holes in the mud, if you don’t be careful about tramping around the edges of it, and don’t watch what you’re doing when you cut down the sides, to do it just so, well it’ll widen out at the top quicker than you can deepen it at the bottom. When the preacher and the undertaker and them boys got done gauming around in it and tramping around it and falling into it and climbing out of it, that grave must have been eight foot wide. And tracked and tramped and muddied around the edges till it looked like where a sow’d had pigs. They throwed the dirt out on the downhill side because it was easier, and it rained a hard one before daylight, and there wasn’t nothing to keep half the hillside from draining right into the hole, and she filled plumb to the brim. That undertaker was there half the morning unrolling that imitation grass of hisn, trying to make a kind of shore to it, so the family and friends of Mrs. Brewster wouldn’t notice they was attending one of them naval burials. He let on he didn’t see me coming, on account of the words I’d had with him and the preacher the morning before, but I walked right up like the sun was shining and we was the only friends each other had. ‘Well,’ I says, ‘the Jordan’s running a little muddy this morning, ain’t she?’ He went right on about his work like he never heard me. I says, ‘Is this going to be a baptizing or a funeral?’ He tried not to say anything, but I see it coming up in him, and finally he had to let it out. ‘You’d look a damn sight better with your mouth shut,’ he says. ‘I’m just here waiting for the boat,’ I says. And then I let up on him and give him a hand. We bailed out the hole, but the rain wouldn’t quit, and it was filling up again.
“Well, Grover come down by the house after the funeral, and he said in spite of all the talk and flowers and artificial grass it still looked more like a boat launching than a burial. ‘You’ve heard of crossing to Jordan’s other shore,’ I says. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘if that’s how it’s done, Mrs. Brewster’s on her way. Go look.’ I put on my coat and went up. That undertaker had just bundled all his muddy grass and trappings into the hearse and gone back, and nobody was left in the graveyard but the preacher. He was standing there in the rain with his hands in his pockets watching Mrs. Brewster’s coffin. It was floating just as dandy as you ever seen. He was as glad to see me as if we was both preachers. It showed all over his face. He thought I’d just walk up and pull out a plug or something, and everything would be fine. But I knew it wasn’t no simple matter, and I wanted him to know it, so I just happened up to the edge of the grave like a casual bystander and took a long look. I says, ‘Well, well, well, you’ve got a right smart little problem here.’ I says you. He looked across at me like I was an angel fresh out of Heaven. ‘What’re we going to do, Mr. Gibbs?’ he says. He says we, so I taken it up. ‘Well,’ I says, ‘we could catch her and tic her up until the water goes down. Or,’ I says, ‘if it don’t go down, we could load her with rocks and try to sink her.’ And right there’s when the wobbling shaft jumped off of the bobbling pin. It come a
little closer to him than I meant it to, to tell you the truth. He’d got his mind all made up to hire me back, I seen that. But I’d done ruined it and made him mad, and I swear to you, Jayber, I done it more or less by accident. But there wasn’t no undoing it, and I just had to stand there and watch him swell up. He was mad enough to drown me and bury me right in the same water hole with Mrs. Brewster, but he didn’t want to be ill-mannerly. I thought he’d bust. I says to myself, ‘Now you’re going to hear it.’ Because if I ever seen a thirty-minute cuss piling up in a man I seen it then. But finally he says, just as even and quiet: ‘Mr. Gibbs, after you get done filling these here two graves, perhaps you can find someone else to take your job.’
“It wasn’t that I hated to lose the work and the little dab of pay I was drawing out of it, but I did hate to end on hard feelings. So I said very friendly: ‘Well now, Preacher, it won’t be easy, because you don’t find a man that can dig a grave just anywhere you look. There’s sleights to every trade, Preacher,’ I says, ‘by grab, and there’s sleights to this one. You and that undertaker, now you all thought poor old Uncle Stanley didn’t have no more brains than it took to bend his back, and that he’d been doing this work all these years without learning anything about it. But now you all can see from this here mess that it takes considerable know-how to do the job the way it ought to be done. Now it’s a job that ain’t going to be easy to fill, but I’ll look around, Preacher, and I’ll find you a good man. And no hard feelings.’
“But he never softened. ‘Thank you very much, Mr. Gibbs,’ he says, ‘by grab, I’ll appreciate it if you’ll find someone right away.’ I says, ‘Now Preacher, there’ll be some things he won’t understand how to do right off, but I’ll stay around with him and oversee his work and learn him how to do a good job for you. And no hard feelings, by grab,’ I says.
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 80