“Well. I swan.”
She’s silent a moment, and then he can hear the bail of the bucket rattle. “I reckon I’d better get on.”
She goes around to the back porch. He hears her set the bucket down and, after a pause to take the overshoes off, go into the kitchen. Very shortly she comes out again and strains the milk and carries the filled crocks to the cellar. Though he goes ahead swiftly with his work, he is almost wholly attentive to the sounds she makes, translating them into visions of her as she moves among her tasks.
He scrubs out all the nooks and seams and edges on that end of the house, and moves his ladder again to the starting place. Going back to the shed, he tosses knife and brush into the pile of tools. The fog has begun to thin, and the pale disk of the sun to show through, but it will be some time yet before the wall will be dry. He sits down in the shed door and lights a smoke.
Ida comes out, carrying a water bucket. “A bad morning to paint.”
“Yes. Too wet.”
She goes to the well and pumps the bucket full and lifts it off the spout, turning toward him again. “This old fog. It makes you feel a thousand miles away.”
She goes back inside, leaning a little against the weight of the bucket, her free arm raised for balance, but stepping quickly up onto the porch and across it and into the kitchen.
Her footsteps go rapidly across the linoleum two or three times, and then he hears her washing dishes. She washes her breakfast dishes, the skillet and coffee pot, the milk buckets and strainer. She comes out and empties the dishwater over the yard fence and goes back. This time, preoccupied, she does not look in his direction, and he feels a secrecy in his presence there, a flickering of shame. But he listens again as she begins preparing their dinner.
He hears her footsteps recede toward the front rooms. Now she will straighten the house, sweep, make her bed, and go out to work in the field until time to finish up dinner. There is an almost unbearable sweetness in his knowledge of all this. He has come to follow her through her days with the pleasing anticipations and recognitions with which one reads a familiar and much loved passage, but with anxiety, too, as though the passage is but a fragment, leading to the verge of a revelation that is not told, or lost.
Suddenly, somewhere deep inside the house, he hears her begin to sing. He has never heard her sing before. The sound—muted, wordless, whole phrases inaudible—comes to him with the same sort of shock he felt when he looked into the child’s room. Any suggestion of change in her, or in his idea of her, is fearful to him—mainly perhaps for the reason that he has no way to respond to it. No matter how either of them may change, nothing changes between them. No matter what may happen, he is doomed to go on as always, obeying the void appearances of his old self and his old ways.
She quits singing. Presently he hears her footsteps return toward the back of the house.
His attention has been so fixed on Ida that he is alarmed to see that he is sitting in the full light of the sun. He does not know how long it has been shining on him, but he should already have been at work. The day seems to have slipped a little beneath him. What is he doing?
Shame gathers him up and with clear force turns him toward his work, and he submits to it with the relief of a man who has arrived at a critical solution, righted himself. Standing high on the ladder, for the better part of half an hour he concentrates with deliberative self-mastery on spreading white paint over the weathered cornice.
But as he reaches and turns at his work and turns back and leans to dip his brush, he can glimpse the wheel tracks of the road going down from the house to the barn. And his mind, as though it has gone wild and will not be brought to confinement again by the bait of a simple regularity, begins to stray out into the place.
His work, since spring, has followed the incline of that road upward from the barn to the house, repairing and painting the buildings along the way. He has made a difference in the time he has been there. But beyond the vestige of workmanly satisfaction it gives him to look back at it, there is a sense of irrevocable loss. Each one of those buildings represents one of the little periods of his life. Around each one in its turn his life formed a pattern. He has had an intimate knowledge of each one—has been attentive to the condition of every board and nail. And each has stood in its place in the transforming light of his dream.
But it was an intimacy purely professional, purely temporary. There is not one that he has had reason to go back to. And he has not been back. He will not go back. That is the condition of his trade. He has scarcely ever worked in a place that he did not come in some way to like. But then the liking was dependent on the work, and ended when the work did. Here the use of his skill, which always before has transcended and carried him past his jobs, has failed him. He is not able to relinquish this place as he passes through it. He cannot think of work beyond this work, a place beyond this place.
He has lost track of Ida’s whereabouts when he hears her speak to him.
“Mr. Finley.”
She stands at the foot of the ladder, ready to go to the field, holding a large white envelope. He can see the address written on it, heavily, in pencil. An ache of premonition swells in the pit of his stomach. He lays his brush across the mouth of the bucket, and takes a step down.
“I wanted to show you this. I got it yesterday. I’m sorry to make you get down.”
“That’s all right. I had to anyway.”
He sets the bucket on the ground and props his crutches under his arms. She hands him the envelope.
It is one of those stamped envelopes that you buy at a post office. There is no return address, and he cannot read the postmark. The handwriting of the address is awkward, blunt, black, deeply impressed in the paper. Looking down at it, Ernest stands as though shadowless, in an inescapable brilliance. He has begun to sweat.
“You want me to read this?”
“Sure. Go ahead.”
She is smiling, facing him with her hands clasped behind her. He would not be surprised to see her suddenly dance up and down. She reminds him just now of a young girl and that again makes her strange to him. Again he is aware how far his knowledge falls short of her.
He removes from the envelope a large sheet of lined paper and unfolds it. Again there is no address, there is no date. As on the envelope the black angular script is sunk into the paper as if by the weight of it: “Dear Ida, I am straightened up. I am coming home.”
Had that been all, the meaning might have revealed itself slowly, and might have been bearable. But Gideon had trouble spelling straightened. He spelled it twice—first “stratened” and then “straytened”—before he got it right. And somehow the record of that struggle—there are no erasures: the words are simply crossed out with a single deep stroke of the pencil—gives Ernest as immediate a sense of Gideon’s presence, wherever he is, as he has of Ida’s, who is standing within his reach. It seems to him that if it were not for the crutches, if he were not propped there like a tripod, he might fall. But he keeps staring down at the letter, the writing having disappeared into the bright whiteness of the page. He feels Ida becoming impatient for his response.
“That’s fine,” he says.
“Ain’t that fine?”
“Yes indeed. That’s good.”
Not a foot and a half from his hand he can see her, wearing the bonnet and the man’s shirt she has put on, as she usually does, to work in the field. That close, it seems to him that he can feel in the hair roots along the back of his hand the swelling and rounding of her breasts, soft under the faded blue cloth of that shirt that he knows to be Gideon’s.
“You’re surprised, I reckon, to be hearing.”
“No. I knew he’d be back. I didn’t know when.”
“You don’t know for sure yet. He didn’t say.”
“Well, it’ll be pretty soon. Soon as he can get here.”
She reaches and takes the letter out of his hand.
“I just wanted to show some
body.”
“Why sure,” he says. “I’m glad you’re going to be happy now.”
That is as far as he can go. He stands there on the high stalk of his pain.
She folds the envelope twice and buttons it in one of the shirt pockets.
“Yes,” she says. “Maybe I sort of will now.”
He seems to get through the rest of the day by holding on to the handle of the paint brush. He dangles from it, the place vanished around him as if sunk into the blinding whiteness of Gideon’s letter. He holds to the handle of the brush, spreading whiteness, as one would hold to the last hand’s-breadth of a swinging rope.
ANOTHER RESULT
Mat has washed his hands and come out to sit on the back porch to wait for supper. He quit work early, as he has for the past several days, and has been sitting there already for more than half an hour. Margaret is waiting for Ernest to come now before setting the food on the table.
On the arms of the rocker Mat’s hands have gone into a kind of sleep. The sun, ready to set, casts a last flush of reddish light against the westward end of the barn. He has been watching that light rise toward the peak of the gable. And the light does rise and crest and depart, reaching out over the rising edge of the night. He can hear Andy and Henry playing in the front yard. And now he hears Margaret cross the kitchen and stop in the door.
“Where do you suppose Ernest is? He’s never this late.”
“I don’t know. I reckon he’ll be along in a minute.”
“Do you suppose that old truck could have broken down somewhere?”
“Could have done it.” The more Mat thinks about that possibility, the more likely it seems.
“Well, maybe I’d better drive down that way.” He gets up regretfully, fishing in his pocket for his switch key. As he steps off the porch, he hears Margaret come out of the kitchen and sit down to wait in the chair he left.
He starts down through town toward the little farm in the creek valley. But as he gains speed he catches sight of Ernest’s truck parked in the alley between the post office and Jasper Lathrop’s store. He stops and backs up and pulls his truck in behind Ernest’s.
The presence of Ernest’s truck cancels the only probable explanation of his lateness. As Mat walks the few steps back out to the street, it occurs to him that, so far as he can remember, this is the first time in twenty-five years that he has not known within a reasonable guess where Ernest is and what he is doing. Mat feels an uneasiness in that thought that he did not expect. But he puts it aside and goes out to the street. He will look in the drugstore.
As usual this time of the evening, the drugstore is deserted. Dolph Courtney is sitting at one of the tables in the thickening twilight of the place—until a customer comes in he will not turn on a light—picking his teeth and watching the street. Mat opens the screen door and looks in.
“You seen Ernest, Dolph?”
“Not since this morning. Why? You looking for him?”
Mat turns away at once and lets the door spring shut behind him. He starts to cross over and ask at Burgess’s. And then he sees Jayber Crow and Burley Coulter coming up the street from the barbershop. Maybe Ernest went to get a haircut, he thinks, and got held up there. The logic of that makes him quickly happy, and just as quickly evaporates; Ernest would not be in the barbershop with Jayber gone.
“Jayber,” he asks, as the two men come up in front of the drugstore, “have you seen Ernest?”
A little to Mat’s surprise, both men’s faces immediately show the concern that he has begun to feel himself.
“Not for two or three days,” Jayber says.
Feeling their eyes on him as he goes, Mat walks up the street and back through the alley to Ernest’s shop. The door is shut, and he knocks.
“Ernest?”
There is no answer.
He works the latch and gives an experimental push to the door. It is not locked. He shoves it open and steps inside.
The big westward window over the workbench has filled the shop with a pinkish backwash of light from the sunset. And whether because that makes the lower three or four feet of the room proportionately darker, or because he is already warned by some glimpse, for a good many seconds after he steps through the door Mat does not see Ernest. But the room is filled with an intimation of what he will see. And a part of his mind is saying to him as if in a whisper: “You should not have come.”
“Ernest?”
And he sees then.
Against the far wall, a little out from the end of the workbench, Ernest is sitting on the floor, his head bent forward. His arms hang down wearily at his sides, the left hand and part of the forearm hidden in a freshly cut hole in the floor. The crutches, one resting on top of the other, lie beside him.
Mat crosses the room and, kneeling, picks up Ernest’s right hand and feels for the pulse. There is none. For maybe a full minute he kneels there, the dead wrist in his hands seeming to infuse its quiet into him and into the room. His mind, as if in a fit of avoidance having leaped clean over the fact of Ernest’s death, begins to grope at the problem of how to tell Margaret. The simplicity of it seems its difficulty—that he will have to go, without qualification or offer of hope, and tell Margaret: “Ernest is dead. He killed himself.”
His mind flinches again and turns back. “Why didn’t I know?” He leans and draws Ernest’s left hand up out of the hole in the floor. The wrist is cut deeply open, as Mat knew it would be. There are no more surprises.
He looks around for the auger and keyhole saw that Ernest used to cut the hole in the floor and sees them hanging in their places. And he sees on the right leg of Ernest’s pants the two dark narrow stains where he wiped the blade of his knife before returning it to his pocket. On the floor, a foot or so to the right of him, there is a neat pile of ashes and the extinguished butt of a cigarette.
Mat gently lays Ernest’s right hand back on the floor and bends his left arm so that the bloodied hand will rest in his lap. He lifts him, gathered in his arms as one would lift a child, touched beyond tears by the vulnerability and innocence of the abandoned body still pliant and warm, carries him to the workbench, and lays him down.
Chapter 16
SIX FEET
“Dang tootin!” Uncle Stanley says. “Man just up and put a end to hisself that way! Crazy. Bound to been!”
He is sitting on the lower lip of Ernest Finley’s grave, his feet dangling in the hole. To his right the top of Jayber Crow’s bald head can be seen at intervals as he straightens to throw out a spadeful of dirt. The grave is nearly as deep as it needs to be; they have been at work—or Jayber has—since early in the morning. On the headstone of Ernest’s mother’s grave, the nearest neighbor to the one he is digging, Jayber has put his hat and shirt, giving it the rather startling appearance of a man rising out of the ground.
It is a sweltering day and the ground is hard. The shade of a tall cedar a little to the west of the grave is still turned tantalizingly in the wrong direction. Jayber’s earth-stained undershirt is soaked with sweat. He hasn’t grown used to the work of gravedigging, and maybe he never will. Nothing in his experience as scholar and barber could have prepared him for the agony involved in loosening and spading out that much dirt.
“Six feet is a lot deeper than I thought it was,” he confessed to Uncle Stan from the bottom of the first one he dug.
“By grab,” Uncle Stanley said, “things look different from down there, don’t they, son?”
And that is the truth. There is a suggestiveness about the whole business that, though it seems not to affect Uncle Stanley, Jayber has never become immune to. Each time, as he digs his way down and grows tireder, he grows bluer. And today the mood is intensified by a particular sorrow, for as well as anybody did, Jayber knew Ernest and liked him.
He is tired now and hot and full of the misery of mortality, and about one time in three as he heaves the loaded shovel upward from the floor of the grave he makes an utterance which much against hi
s will sounds like a groan.
At the foot of the grave Burley Coulter is standing in his best clothes, his face set in disinterested amusement at the argument that has been going on, to his knowledge, for at least half an hour. He cleaned up and walked in to town in the middle of the morning with the intention of going to Mat’s house. But when he came by there the house was quiet, nobody in sight; he grew doubtful after all that the family would want to be bothered with outsiders at that time of day. And so he walked on past and out the road to the graveyard, where he knew he would find Jayber.
“Bound to be crazy,” Uncle Stanley says, “feller do that to hisself. It’s a dad-burned insult to humanity.”
“Oh,” Jayber says, “if you haven’t got the most unpardonable old mouth!”
“Says which?”
“I said, are you sure about that?”
“Durn right!”
Burley would really like to go on back to town. He is never very comfortable in Sunday clothes anyway, especially not in the hot sun watching somebody else work. His plan was to come out and talk a few minutes with Jayber, finding out—if Jayber knew—how Mat and his people were, and then go back to town and eat a sandwich at Dolph Courtney’s, and then go to Mat’s.
But since he came up and said good morning, he has not said another word. He was prepared neither for Jayber’s low spirits nor for the antagonism between Jayber and Uncle Stanley—two good reasons to be sorry he came and to wish to be gone. But he has stayed. Coat slung over his shoulder, hat pushed back, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled above his elbows, his tie loosened, his collar slowly wilting, he has stood there in a sort of fascination at the goings on, with a perishing hope that things will take a turn for the better. At one point he intended to stay until the job was finished, so he and Jayber could go to Mat’s together. But now he has about decided not to wait.
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 102