“‘That’ll be perfectly fine, Mr. Gibbs,’ he says. ‘Well,’ I says, ‘do you want him to keep care of the church too, or just the graveyard?’ ‘Just the graveyard, for now, will be all right,’ he says.
“So I’ve been studying about it, Jayber, and I figured you was the only one with enough brains and time that could use the money. The work’s hard, but it ain’t what you’d call steady. Sometimes everybody’ll be alive for three or four months in a row.”
“What did you do about Mrs. Brewster?” Jayber asks.
“Aw, me and them old boys of Siler Smith’s, we bailed the water out again and rolled in a few mudballs.
“Well, what about it, Jayber? You want to take this job? I’ve got to find somebody. You was the first one I thought of and I thought you might appreciate it.”
“Are you sure the preacher won’t hire you back, Uncle Stanley? Don’t you reckon he’ll change his mind if you go and ask?”
“Aw now, Jayber. He won’t. I done tested him out. Well, to tell you the truth, I did go ask him, by grab. I went to his house last night, and I asked him. I even told him the madam wanted me to have the job again. But he said he’d just stick to the understanding we’d worked out.
“Anyhow, Jayber, I’m too old to do it much longer. It’s just getting more than I can do.”
“Why, Uncle Stanley, you just said you dug a grave by yourself in half the time it took the Smith boys and the preacher and the undertaker to dig one.”
“Aw, I can still dig them all right, Jayber, ain’t no worry about that. But I’m getting so derned old that when I get one dug I can’t hardly get out of it.”
The old man falls quiet, and confusion crosses his face like a shadow.
“Let me think,” Jayber says.
“Says which ?”
“Let me think!”
Uncle Stanley perks up and keeps watch while Jayber thinks.
The idea of extra money is foreign to Jayber’s way of life. For a minute he doesn’t know what in the world he would do with it. But he knows that in the back of his mind there has been, not exactly troubling him, but asking for his attention, the question of what he’ll do with his old age. He has been a little uneasily on the lookout for an ending to his life. Until now he has silenced the question with the reply that he will just barber right on through to the end. But now, for the first time, here is another possibility.
Jayber would like to fish. He would like to become a fisherman. Suddenly and surprisingly the whole vision blooms before him. It becomes imaginable and desirable and even possible in a single stroke. Put a little money aside every week, and before too many years he could build a small house on the river bank. The land would not cost much, would be practically worthless except for such a use as he would have for it, and he would build the house himself out of used lumber. He would stay there and fish and be quiet until the end of his days. He would cease being a public man and become a private man. He would fish in the river as though that was the highest calling that had ever come to a man. And he would fish in his mind. He would have a boat—he could see it, painted green, floating lightly as a leaf among the willows at the foot of the bank.
“I’ll tell you what, Uncle Stanley. I’ll take the job. And then I want to hire you to stay on as supervisor. I’ll do the work and you can furnish the know-how, and we’ll split the money.”
“And now,” he says to himself, “you’ve started something.”
He has, he realizes, changed his life. He has, from the moment just past, begun to live like a man possessed by an idea and a plan—a man who suddenly knows what he will do for years ahead if he is able—a man possessing not only a life, but a death. He has changed beyond anything he could have imagined a minute ago. But also, for the first time since he made up his mind to leave the university, he is uncertain that he wanted to do what he has done.
But there is no uncertainty in Uncle Stanley. He is delighted. This is a realization of his highest ideal: a position of authority with half-pay and no work. He would not ask more of Heaven.
“Well, Jayber, I was going to offer to stay along with you and learn you the sleights of it, and see to it that you don’t get into any problems.”
He saws his cane across Jayber’s shin.
“But that proposition you just made, now, by grab, that was mighty kind. It was white, by grab.”
Jayber starts to say something, but he does not have a chance. Uncle Stanley is going to do all the talking. They are partners now. They are a team, and Uncle Stanley is the leader. Now that he has said yes, Jayber is to have nothing more to say.
“Next one dies, now, that’s our start,” Uncle Stanley’s saying. “Preacher’ll let you know and you let me know, and we’ll start in. Maybe tomorrow you ought to come and let me show you where I keep the tools and give you a key to the shed.”
Every new idea is better than the last. Uncle Stanley never realized what great authority he had until he lost it, and now he has had it given back to him. It is a resurrection. He thought he was a goner, but now his life is twice as abundant as before.
He goes into a discourse on the sleights and subtleties of gravedigging, a discourse on method: how to dig a grave in the rain, in the snow, in mud, in clay, in rock, in hard ground, in soft ground, on sloping ground, on flat ground, on top of a rise, along the edge of a drain, in frozen ground, in hot weather, in cold; how to dig them big, how to dig them small; what to do with the dirt; how to fill, how to mound, how to sod, how to set a tombstone; what to do with wilted flowers. His erudition and eloquence surprise him. He knows things he did not know he knew. Gravedigging becomes the science and art that explains the world.
Still pretending to listen, Jayber gets up and sweeps the floor and sets the place to rights and begins stropping his razors. He is a fisherman, thinking of the river, biding his time.
LIGHT AND WARMTH
A car pulls off the road in front of the shop. The door slams. The shop door opens and Big Ellis comes in. He stands inside the door nodding and smiling at Jayber and Uncle Stanley. It has been several weeks since Big Ellis has been to town, and Jayber is surprised to see him.
“Who dug you up?”
Big Ellis laughs as freely as a child.
“The woman run me out. Said not to come back until I got some of this hair and beard cut off. Said it was like living with a horse.”
“Paying customer?”
“She let me have a little money.”
“You mean I’m really going to collect? Let me see your money.”
Big Ellis pulls a handful of coins out of his pocket and holds them out.
“Welcome, sir.”
Jayber brushes off the barber chair. Uncle Stanley is still talking. When Big Ellis came in the old man just waved his arm at him as though he was passing by, and went on with his lecture.
“What’s he talking about?”
“He’s giving me a lesson.”
“Oh,” Big Ellis says. He begins unbuttoning his overcoat. His hair has grown out over his collar, and he has at least a week’s growth of whiskers.
“I’ll have to charge you twice for cutting all that off.”
“Well, it’s the woman’s cream money. Go ahead.”
The thing about it is that Big Ellis means it, the woman’s cream money or not. His face, the smile widening on it to show Jayber that anything he wants to do will be all right, is the most pleasant and agreeable single object in the neighborhood of Port William. Smiles and laughs have wrinkled and creased it like an old leather glove. Big Ellis wants to please. He wants everybody around him to be pleased. That is his weakness and his nature and his passion. If he offers you a cigarette he means for you to take the whole pack. If you happen to be at his house when mealtime comes, you eat, and while you are reaching to the meat platter Big Ellis will spoon you out another helping of beans and his wife will refill your glass.
He gets into the chair and Jayber pins the cloth around his neck.
“What kind of lessons is he giving you?”
“Gravedigging lessons.”
Big Ellis gets tickled and Jayber has to wait.
“Have you gone into that business?”
“I’ve just contracted to take over Uncle Stanley’s job. The graveyard part of it.”
Uncle Stanley has just finished saying that if you strike bedrock you’ve got to blast. And now he is telling how to set the charges. A few years back, after he got so deaf, he remembers, he let off a blast on one side of the hill while they were holding a burial on the other side. You got to be careful about that.
Burley Coulter comes in.
“Look who’s back,” Jayber says. “What do you know, Burley?”
“Not much. What do you fellows know? How’s everything over at your house, Big Ellis? You haven’t been out much lately.”
“Pretty good,” Big Ellis says. “Well, a fellow just as well stay home, hadn’t he? Weather no good. No money. No place to go. Jarrat ain’t working you too hard?”
“Not much he can do.”
“You find any sand and plaster up there in my head, Jayber, don’t be surprised,” Big Ellis says.
“All right, I’ve got over being surprised at what I find in people’s heads. What’re you doing with sand and plaster in yours?”
“The ceiling fell in over home the other night. If it hadn’t hit me in the back of the head, it would’ve hit the woman right square in the face.”
Burley hangs up his hat and sits down.
“We’re going to have some more rain, ain’t we?”
“Looks like it. I’d have thought it would’ve cleared and frosted maybe.”
“This keeps up there’s going to be water in the bottoms.”
“Well, everything happens for the best,” Big Ellis says.
Usually such a remark would either end the conversation or change the subject. But this time, to Jayber’s surprise, Burley takes it up, and in a tone that does not leave room for argument:
“It don’t do any such of a damned thing.”
“What I mean, the Lord knows best, don’t He?”
“Well,” Jayber says, “He’ll have the final say, anyhow. So if there’s a flood you all just as well go down and fish in it.”
“Hanh?” Uncle Stanley says.
“Burley,” Big Ellis says, “we’ve got a new graveyard man in Port William.”
Jayber takes a bow.
“You?”
“Who else in this town has both brains enough and time enough?”
Burley laughs, and they can tell from the sound of it that he is sorry for his shortness with Big Ellis.
“You’ve gone into business. Port William’s a corpse factory, and now you’re the foreman.”
“No, Uncle Stanley’s still in charge. I’m just his second-in-command. I’m going to be the shovel specialist.”
“How come the old man to give up his job?”
“Well, he says he’s getting too old for it. Says he can’t hardly get out of them graves once he gets them dug.”
They laugh.
“Uncle Stanley hasn’t wintered too well,” Big Ellis says.
“He says he won’t be around many more winters.”
“Did he say that?”
“He said he can’t stand many more like this last one.”
Burley turns to Uncle Stanley and raises his voice:
“I expect the old boy’ll be around a long time yet. Bothering the women. How about it, Uncle Stan, can you still take up on the bit?”
“Aw, ain’t no good at all, Burley. Them days are gone.”
Jayber tilts the chair back, and begins lathering Big Ellis’s face.
Now that he has regained his audience, Uncle Stanley goes into a long reminiscence of his younger days—his dog days, he calls them. And winds up:
“Oh lordy lordy lordy lordy. But not anymore.”
“That’s not what I heard, Uncle Stanley,” Big Ellis says. “Some of them was telling me about you.” He laughs and looks over his stomach at Burley. “Said they seen a bunch of young girls walk past Uncle Stanley’s house a Saturday or two ago, and there was Uncle Stanley marching up and down the top of that road bank, nickering like a stud horse, and that cane just whirling.”
He looks up over his stomach at Uncle Stanley, who is pleased out of his mind, and then drops his head back and laughs, splattering white flecks of lather up into the air over his face.
“You’d better be still,” Jayber tells him, “unless you want your throat cut.”
But Big Ellis is so tickled now at the picture he has made of Uncle Stanley that Jayber, laughing too in spite of himself, has to wait again.
As soon as Big Ellis finishes laughing he is immediately sorry to have made fun of the old man. And so now he will try to make up for it: “I saw Billy when he came over today, Uncle Stan.”
Uncle Stanley wants to hear that again, clear. He leans over and puts his hand behind his ear.
“Says which?”
“I saw Billy when he came over in his airplane. He came right over my barn and then on over to Grover’s place.”
That’s all it takes. That’s the word. Billy! If Billy ever so much as hinted that he would like to bomb his grandfather’s house, Uncle Stanley would get right up and walk out, and stand on the other side of the road with his hat over his heart and watch him do it. It seems to him that he and Grover and all their forebears back to Adam have lived only for these minutes when their Billy comes roaring over the town in his bomber. He dreams of this brilliant young man leaning his head and elbow out the window of his huge flying machine, swooping like a hen hawk over all the little towns of the world—majestic and glorious as a railroad engineer and the Archangel Michael rolled into one.
“Yes sir! By dab, by grab, God durn, I seen him myself.”
He goes out the door on the crest of his wave.
And they resume.
“That old boy of Grover’s didn’t have brains enough to hold his ears apart, did he?”
“Aw, they’ve educated him since he got to flying.”
“They may have trained him. They haven’t educated him.”
They laugh, and then Big Ellis, his voice so gentle and generous as to allow even Billy Gibbs a place on earth and in Port William, says: “Well, a fellow ought to think the best he can of a fellow oughtn’t he? Old Billy, he was a little chuckleheaded and wild, but that’s just a boy, ain’t it?”
Suddenly—whether because Big Ellis said “was,” or because his words recovered Billy Gibbs himself, their neighbor and fellow man—suddenly the war is around them again, as though it has come up in the dark to crowd the walls of the little room. They become silent. And a thought runs among them like a path, and joins them and divides them: What if he dies? What if he is sent away tomorrow and never comes back?
And now they feel the raw night leaning against the lighted small room, and they know with a terrible certainty that one will not explain the other. In this dimly lighted place they sit divided, filled with thoughts of struggle and of darkness. They contemplate the death of Billy Gibbs, as though it already exists and awaits him.
Mat Feltner comes in blinking from the dark street, and stands at the stove. They greet him, and he replies. He unbuttons his coat and pushes his hat back off his forehead.
“Nathan gone back, Burley?” Big Ellis asks.
“This afternoon.”
“He was over to see Annie May and me the other day. We appreciated it. They’re going to send him back across the water, ain’t they?”
“He thought they might. He didn’t know.”
“That’s a long way from home. Fellow like me wouldn’t know what to do there, even if there wasn’t a war. But I reckon a young man like Nathan, he’ll do all right, won’t he? Told me he was even learning to talk like them.”
“Yeah. I guess in a way it’s giving him a lot of chances.”
“Take a fellow like me and put him across the river, and I’m l
ost. Ain’t you?”
Jayber finishes shaving Big Ellis and sets up the chair, and turns it so Big Ellis can see himself in the mirror.
“How’s that?”
“I wish I’d been born rich in place of pretty. What I owe you, Jayber?”
“Sixty cents.”
“Is that double?”
“That’s half-price.”
“I’ll match you for it.”
“You match me. All right.”
Each of them flips a coin and slaps it down onto an arm of the barber chair.
“Heads.”
“Heads it is. Keep your money.”
“Naw, I’m going to pay you anyhow.”
“Why, I’m not going to take your money. You won.”
“That don’t matter. I want you to take the money. Come on, Jayber. I just done that for a joke.”
Big Ellis’s world is turning slowly upside down. For the sake of friendliness and fun, he is persistently in and out of trifling wagers on the fall of a coin or the length of something or the weight of something. “A fellow has to have a little sport, don’t he? A little fun?” But he never means to win.
Big Ellis tramps along with the coins held out in his open hand, backing Jayber around the barber chair.
“Take your money and go on.”
“Ain’t going to do it.”
And then Big Ellis, who would be a match for two like Jayber, picks him up by the waist and holds him and puts the money in his pocket. He takes his coat and hat, and goes out the door putting them on.
“Good night to you fellows. Thank you, Jayber.”
And they hear him start his car and gun the engine, and the car lurch out onto the road.
Jayber climbs back into the chair.
They’re silent a few minutes. As soon as they cease to talk they are surprised at how deep the silence is. Except for them the town is asleep. The light has gone out in Burgess’s store. The silence in the little shop is also the silence of the town and of the whole dark countryside. In it the only living thing might be the fire stirring and breathing in the stove.
Though his hands are warm, Mat holds them out into the heat over the stove.
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 81