He goes out and, seeing that Dolph Courtney has opened up and Ernest Finley has come for his sandwiches, starts down to the drugstore.
Old Jack going in, Ernest coming out, they meet in the door.
“Good morning, boy.”
“Morning, Uncle Jack.”
“Well, are you on your way to work?”
“Going to try it another day.”
“You’re all right, son, You’re a good ’un.”
Old Jack likes to see a man start his day’s work when the day starts. But instead of comforting him, the sight of a man getting up the way he ought to only makes him more bitter toward Wheeler—and everybody else in the country who is still lying in bed. He cannot get used to this new fashion of sleeping until the sun is three or four hours high. He cannot imagine how a man could ever do anything worthwhile in a day he had already slept the best part of.
“Morning!” Dolph calls from the back of the store where he is cooking his breakfast.
But Old Jack does not hear him. He has turned around to watch through the door glass while Ernest gets into the truck and starts to his work. All his life—when he was on his place, in his place—he and the ones who worked with him got up before the sun.
“If they stay with me they’ve got to get up!” he thinks, repeating in his mind words he has said many times aloud. He feels the emptiness of that boast now. Now the truth is that there is not a soul living—Wheeler included, damn him—who cares whether Old Jack gets up at daylight or not. And everybody knows that after he does get up there is not much he can do. But he demands that he get up. And once he is up, because his life has taught him, he can see what needs to be done. A man who has learned to see cannot help seeing.
“Ay, Lord!”
“What’s that, Uncle?”
Dolph’s gold tooth is shining in the middle of a grin.
“Too damn many people sleeping in the daytime,” Old Jack says.
He pauses, the necessity of speaking to Dolph making him realize that he is making the wrong point.
“And better off asleep, some of ’em.”
Old Jack’s anger has carried his indictment far beyond the point where it might apply to any fault of Wheeler’s. He is well aware of that and is comforted by it. Now, watching Dolph eat his breakfast—thinking how Dolph’s wife will come flopping up to Burgess’s store in her bedroom slippers about nine o’clock, eyes still half shut, hair full of curlers—Old Jack feels all of his anger go out of him, leaving only sadness that what he has said is true.
“Surely,” he says, “a man can get up and be ready when the time comes.”
He looks at Dolph and shakes his head. He might just as well be hollering down a groundhog hole. But he will say what he means.
“Look at Mat Feltner up there. His boy’s gone, he’s getting old, he’s troubled in his mind—and you’ll never see him hit a half-assed swat at a fly.”
Toot! Toot-toot!
Old Jack is on his way out, Dolph Courtney forgotten, before the horn stops blowing.
Outside he sees that it is not Wheeler at all, but somebody in a truck, already going out of sight up the road.
But before he has time to be disappointed Wheeler is there, his car coming up over the rise beyond Mat’s house, slowing up and stopping in front of the hotel. Old Jack waves his cane.
“Oh, Wheeler! Whoo! Hold on!”
Wheeler lets the car roll on down the street to where Old Jack is hurrying to meet him, and stops and opens the door. Old Jack gets in, puts his packet of sandwiches on the seat between them, puts the point of his cane between his feet, slams the door, laces his fingers over the crook of the cane.
“How’re you, Wheeler?”
“All right, Uncle Jack. How’re you?”
“Tol’bly well.”
“It’s a fine morning.”
“It is that.”
They are both over their anger and glad to see each other. Old Jack suddenly feels a lot better than tolerable. He is on his way home, his day begun. He glances over at Wheeler, who is looking mighty fine in his suit and clean white shirt, and feels a tremor of pride that he knows that fine man.
“Wheeler,” he says, “you’ll see that you’ll be in good shape today on account of getting up early. It gives you time to think over what you’ve got to say, don’t it?”
He could not help saying that, though now that he has said it he reckons maybe he should not have.
“Right!” Wheeler says, laughing. “I’ll be two times better than I usually am—if I can just stay awake until I get there, and find some breakfast.”
Laughing too, Old Jack says, “A real lawyer would have finished breakfast two hours ago.”
Well, he is glad he brought it up. There is no doubt now that their quarrel is over.
Wheeler, from his side of the car, has been watching Old Jack with amusement and growing sympathy. The old man is sitting there in his whopsided old cap and big coat and puttees, blood dried on his face from last night’s shaving, leaning toward the windshield, taking in everything, and it comes to Wheeler what this day means to him.
They drive out past the edge of town and turn right onto the Bird’s Branch road. The gravel road stays up high along the backs of the ridges, and as they go along they can see miles of the country, the points and ridges marked by long shadows in the red light of the sun still not far above the horizon. They go slowly into the turns and slants of the road, talking about the weather and the prospects of the year. Finally Wheeler asks:
“Have you seen Mr. Feltner lately?”
“I see him every day.”
“How do you think he looks?”
“Ay, Lord! He looks like a man that’s hurt.”
Wheeler, as if considering that, says nothing for a minute, looking down the road. And then he says: “Bess is worried about him, and so am I. He’s taking this mighty hard.”
“It’s hard on all of them.”
“Yes, but Mrs. Feltner and Hannah have the baby to think about and get ready for. That seems to be some help to them. But Mr. Feltner doesn’t—or won’t—have anything but his work. And he’s doing too much of that. I’ve never seen him tireder.”
“Ah! And everything he does is bound to remind him of what he hoped for his boy.”
“Yes.”
Old Jack touches Wheeler’s leg with the end of his cane to make Wheeler look at him.
“Do you think his boy’s alive?”
Wheeler doesn’t answer for what seems a long time, as though he is wishing Jack had not asked. “Not likely,” he says finally, “though we may not know for certain for a long time. And may never.”
Seeing that the old man is saddened by what he said, Wheeler says kindly: “Nothing anybody can do, Uncle Jack.”
But surely Wheeler knows better than to think that is any consolation. It is just the truth. And a man who is depending on the truth to console him is sometimes in a hell of a fix. To Old Jack, the sorrowful thing exactly is that there is nothing anybody can do.
“Not a thing in the world. And he’s as fine a one as ever set foot on the ground.”
They come to Old Jack’s place—a big white house set back from the road in a yard full of trees, clean well-fenced pastures and fields sloping away from it, barns and outbuildings all painted white too and in good repair. It is plain from the look of it that a man’s competent love for it has dwelt in it. Old Jack has neglected nothing, let nothing go.
Wheeler stops in front of the barn and names a time late in the day when he will be back. Old Jack gets out and stands watching and then listening while Wheeler drives out to the road and disappears and then the sound of his engine goes out of hearing over the next hill. Much as he likes to be with Wheeler, he is glad he has gone.
The sun has risen above its first redness now, and is slanting down clear and bright. The dew is still on. The pastures are in excellent shape, the grass thick and deep. In the fresh sunshine, amidst the green of the tr
ees and the grass, the buildings are white and clean. Old Jack stands and looks, gathering it all in. The place itself comes back into his mind. They come together like the two halves of the same thing. There is smoke rising from the kitchen chimney, and he hears from somewhere out back of the barn the sound of harrow disks striking rock, which tells him that his new tenant is at work. That is a relief. He purposely gave no warning of his visit, the better to get an idea of this man’s way of doing, but he came half afraid of the pain it would cause him if this one too proved incompetent or lazy.
During his declining years Old Jack has had a number of tenants who contracted to raise the tobacco on the shares and to work by the day when he needed them and they could spare the time. Most of these were men living on neighboring farms who wanted to take on the extra work, and except for one, who was called to the Army after staying only a year, all of them have proved unsatisfactory in one way or another. Most of them, in fact, nearly worried Old Jack to death with their poor ways of doing—messing at their work or neglecting it, losing his tools or leaving them in the rain, forgetting to fasten gates, mistreating the stock. Sooner or later he would always get disgusted with them and make them go, or they would become sulky under the demands he made on them and quit. It was a bad situation, Jack knew, but nothing else seemed possible. And in spite of everything, because he was still living there, and was constantly watchful and busy, the farm stayed in good shape.
But when he had made up his mind to move to town, he and Wheeler decided that a more stable arrangement would have to be made. Old Jack left everything to Wheeler. A young man—the tenant for the past year on a neighboring farm—was recommended, was interested, and a contract was signed in January in Wheeler’s office. Since then, on his trips with Wheeler to the farm, and on chance meetings in town, Old Jack has seen his tenant maybe a dozen times, but only briefly, without having a chance to form a judgment of him. Until recently he has just trusted Wheeler’s continuing good opinion, knowing he would find out for himself sooner or later.
He has always liked the young man, but has wondered about him too. And he has wondered what will happen to his place now that he no longer lives on it. The question has troubled him. He would have come out two weeks ago if Wheeler had not stalled him, waiting for better weather.
Standing in front of the barn, he has already begun his exploration of the young man’s ways, looking into the fence corners and into the open sheds and at the back porch of the house. All that he can see is orderly. The tools that are not in use have been put into the sheds out of the weather. The gates and doors are all closed and latched. Rows of young vegetables are growing in the garden. A flock of hens is scratching around the henhouse in the sun. In one of the front fields he can see three milk cows grazing, and there are a couple of sows and pigs in one of the small pens below the barn. All that is as it should be. These people are not the kind who will be running to the grocery store to buy all they eat. That means a great deal, to Old Jack’s way of thinking.
The young man’s wife is carrying water from the well into the kitchen, and Old Jack imagines that she is heating water to wash clothes. The first time she came out she waved to him and called, “Good morning!” And he waved to her. Since then she has gone on with her work, paying no attention to him. It pleases him that she has started her work so early in the morning, and that she goes about it without stopping to talk. Though he has seen her only a few times, and then at a distance, he can tell that she recognized him, and that pleases him too. For a long time he can remember exactly the cheerfulness of her voice. He makes up his mind about her on the spot. She is a good woman.
Turning and going into the feed barn, he puts his packet of sandwiches up on a shelf inside the doors, and goes back through the clean-swept driveway, opening the stalls and looking in. All the stalls have been freshly bedded. The barn looks the way it ought to. He goes to the other barns and buildings. Everywhere there is the same orderliness. Everywhere he can see the signs of the presence of a good man, a good manager, a good head—a kind of intelligence that he recognizes and feels akin to.
He goes through the lot gate and, following a pair of wheel tracks worn in the grass, walks out along the broad back of the ridge. The tracks turn after a couple of hundred yards, cross a shallow swag, go through a grove of big white oaks, and come to a second gate, which opens into the broken field where he expects to find his tenant.
When he first comes into the field there is no one in sight. He sits down on a sled up the fence a few rods from the gate, and rests and waits. Before him lies the long, evenly worked strip of crop ground, sloping gently toward the woods on the lower side. Looking up and down the length of it, he sees nothing at first except a few black birds walking over the newly stirred earth. And then over the rise to his left a team of three horses, two blacks and a bay, comes into sight, stepping at a brisk pace, their heads nodding, a brown plume of dust rising behind the harrow as they draw it along. As they come nearer down the long field, Old Jack can hear the harness creaking, the rattling of the trace chains and the metal tripletrees. Now and then the disks of the harrow grate on a stone. The horses stride powerfully over the loose ground.
Knowing a good team when he sees one, Old Jack comes wide awake. He sits, leaning a little forward now, on the edge of the sled. He grins and shakes his head.
“Ay, Lord!” he says.
You can see that there is no deadhead sitting behind that team of horses. The man is driving, not riding. And though Jack has not heard him utter a word, the horses move in a way that shows they know exactly who they have behind them and what he expects.
With a great rattling and creaking and loud breathing the big team draws down toward Old Jack, and then even with him.
“Whoa! Whoa, boys!”
The tone of the young man’s voice is full of praise. He speaks as he might speak to three other men well known to him. The horses stop and stand. The young man turns to Old Jack, grins, raises his hand.
“Good morning, sir!”
He loops the reins over a lever and steps off the harrow, hurrying toward the sled. Old Jack, seeing how he hastens at his work, gets up and goes out across the harrowed ground to meet him—in a kind of panic trying to remember what his name is.
“How are you, Mr. Beechum?”
For the life of him, Old Jack cannot think of the young man’s name. Usually it does not matter to him what somebody’s name is. But he has begun to think a lot of this young fellow, and he would like to call him by name.
“I’m all right, son. You’re working a good team of horses.”
“They do pretty well,” the young man says.
But Old Jack can see that he knows they do better than pretty well, and that he recognizes the value of the compliment and appreciates it. Old Jack was a fine horseman and teamster in his day, and it is clear that the young man knows that.
They talk briefly about the weather and about the prospects for the crops. Old Jack asks a question or two, and the young man answers. He is a lean, hard-muscled fellow, clean-cut, with the curious ability to look neat in dirty work clothes. Respectfully and good-humoredly he fulfills what he considers to be his duty to his landlord, explaining what he has done and how he has done it and what he plans to do and what his thoughts are about the work of the farm. And beneath the pleasantness with which he does this explaining can be felt his confidence in his own work and his own judgment. A good head. Old Jack gets the impression that his opinions and approval are not being asked for, and instead of being angered by the young man’s independence as he would have expected, he finds that he is delighted. It is a meeting of two of the same kind. While he was taking the measure of the younger man, his own measure has been taken. That tickles him. When his last question has been answered, he raises his hand.
“You go right ahead. Satisfy yourself, and you’ll satisfy me.”
Old Jack never said that to anybody before. He looks at the young man, wondering if he u
nderstands, and sees that he does.
The young man nods. “I thank you.”
Starting back toward the harrow, he says, “Well, will you be around a while, Mr. Beechum?”
“About all day, son,” Old Jack says, waving. “I’ll be talking to you.”
He watches the young man swing up onto the harrow seat and take the reins in his hands.
“Come up, Prince! Dan!”
The horses step at once into the pace they were going in when they stopped. The young man does not look back. As though no interruption has taken place, the great hooves lift and fall, the harrow disks slice through the ground, the plume of dust rises into the sky.
Old Jack stands and watches until the man and team reach the end of the field and make the turn and start back, and then he goes to the sled again and sits down. The terms of an unexpected happiness have begun to work themselves out in his mind, the possibility of an orderliness in his history that he has not dared to hope for, a clean transition from his life to the life of another man. It is as though he has come to a window looking out onto a lighted country where before was only darkness. While the young man makes the long rounds of the field, the old one continues to sit there on the sled and watch.
After a while he sees the wife come through the gate carrying a water jug. Seeing him, she comes on up the fence and offers him a drink, which he accepts and thanks her. She smiles.
“He went out this morning and forgot to bring it,” she explains. “I thought he might be thirsty.”
“It’s a fact, honey,” Old Jack says. “He might.”
He cannot remember her name either.
When he has drunk and thanked her again, she takes the jug and goes out across the worked ground to meet her husband, who stops the team and takes a long drink. Putting the top back on the jug, he says something to her. Old Jack is too far away to hear what he says, but he can see his white teeth as he smiles. The wife does not come back to where Old Jack is, but goes directly to the gate. As she looks at him and waves, going out, he raises his hat to her and bows.
After she goes, the sun growing warm against his back, he drops off to sleep, leaning forward a little over his hands, which are folded on the crook of the cane.
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 95