She was no pushover. She interested me enough that I was willing just to come along and wait to see what was going to happen. We sometimes went to the picture show, but what Clydie really liked to do was dance. On her night off, or late, after her shift was finished, we would go out to Riverwood or one of the other roadhouses where there was always a jukebox and sometimes even a band. Clydie liked for us to have a drink or two of whiskey, just enough to “spook us up a little,” as she put it, and make us a little dreamy, and then we would dance to slow songs in the semidarkness of one of those old nightspots. I didn’t really know how to dance. I did what Clydie called “the walking hug,” but she was biased toward the hugging part herself, and we did fine.
It came about that on nights when it suited her, which was pretty often, when we would get back to her house and I would be bringing the Zephyr to a halt, Clydie would say, “Won’t you come in for a cup of tea?”
It was some tea. There was an outside stairway that went up to her room at the back of the house, like the one that went up to my own upstairs, and we would go up, Clydie quietly and I silently. The rule was that I had to be as silent as if I weren’t there. Clydie and I passed our intimate life together inside a little globe of silence that leaked not a murmur of mine into the hearing of Aunt Beulah.
I remember the first night that Clydie invited me in. I said, “I would be delighted, my little Rose of San Antone.”
She said, “Jayber, listen. From the time we get out of this car, you have got to be quiet.”
I was a little whiskey-silly and excited too, and I didn’t listen. We got out and I took her arm and said something out loud, carrying on in a big way.
And then she took hold of my arm with a strength that was just shocking. She had her ways of clarifying your mind, when she wanted to. She whispered right in my ear, “Shh! If you make one more squeak, Jayber Crow, I’m going to knock you down and scream my friggin’ head off!”
You can imagine that I crept in to my reward even as a field mouse to its nest.
17
Forsaking All Others
Troy Chatham did not go to the war. Like me, he was 4-F. He had a “trick knee,” the result of a basketball injury. This had not much interfered with his participation in basketball, but it kept him out of the army. Perhaps it was thought that he could not endure “severe bodily exertion”—although, like me, he proved able to do so. Perhaps it was feared that he might become a “pension problem.” Troy called it his “million-dollar . wound.”
“Trick knee!” said Burley Coulter. “What he’s got is a trick head.”
Troy and Mattie were married in the late fall of 1945, shortly after her twenty-first birthday. The wedding would have taken place three years earlier, when Mattie and Troy graduated from high school, except that Athey and Della Keith would not consent to it. I believe that Athey and Della were right, but being right need not count for much, especially when the proof comes too late. And when the proof comes, what do you have to compare it with, so you know that proof is what it is?
Mattie was an obedient daughter who loved her parents. But they had tried her to the limit and they knew it. They were in a bad fix. Finally, they had to consent to a marriage they did not like—either that or lose the friendship of their only daughter in the same marriage without their consent. Mattie was a grown woman in love, and they had to let her go, with their blessing, enduring what could not be helped. And there was no use in thinking of that fluid, glistening instant that always seems, in looking back, to have come between what might have happened and what happened, when one might have made some little choice that would have changed forever the course of things.
Troy brought nothing to the marriage but himself and an automobile in which he had invested most of his earnings from wage-working and the little tobacco crop he raised with his father. He had sunk down in actual achievement from his days on the basketball team, but he continued to present himself in the manner of a star. He was all show, and he had the conviction, as such people do, that show is the same as substance. He didn’t think he was fooling other people; he had fooled himself. He thought he saw what he thought we saw. Sometimes after he left my shop, I would discover that my teeth were clenched.
It would have been easier if I could have thought that Mattie was willfully foolish or silly, in some way deserving of him. But this was impossible for me to think, given any number of things I knew. I had to propose to myself that she had seen something in him that I had not seen, and then I had to wonder what. I thought, and hoped, it was more than his undeniable physical attractiveness, though that might have been enough. I admitted, reluctantly, that he had energy; he was not lazy. With greater reluctance, I required myself to admit that he was not stupid. He had, in fact, plenty of intelligence—plenty more than he ever used, in fact. And then I thought, “Suppose there is somewhere in him, after all, some tenderness that he has shown only to her.” And then perhaps I could imagine a little how it was. Suppose you were a young woman, offering yourself to the life of this world, to the use of the life force, as young women do. Suppose this young man, excellently handsome and graceful and strong, out of his unquestioning self-confidence, turned toward you with tenderness, with need, such as he had shown to no one else. Suppose that you could not know that you yourself had made the tenderness in him that you felt. Suppose that within his tenderness you felt rewarded, cherished, and safe. Do you see?
Even yet, when I think of them at that time, newly married in their beauty and their young longing, I feel a shiver go over me, and it is not a shiver of foreboding, of knowing what is to come. It is a shiver of recognition of what the two of them desired, and of what, for a while, they even had.
Not long after they married, they moved into a newly vacated tenant house on the Keith place, for where else would they have gone? Nowhere better. In offering the house, Athey and Della did the obvious and the right thing, and at the same time began the undoing of everything.
It was a pretty good small house in a shady yard, well back in the bottom at the end of a lane. It had a good garden spot and its own outbuildings and barn. The spring of 1946 felt full of promise. The war was over. Prices were good—better, maybe, than they ever have been since. The new crop year was beginning. Troy put in his plant beds and started his plowing. Della walked back across the fields every morning to help Mattie fix up the house, and when he had his own work caught up Athey would come along. For a while, it may even have seemed to the Keiths that the old farm had received its rightful inheritors who would carry it on when the time came.
Athey Keith was one of the best farmers in the Port William neighborhood in his time. He had five hundred acres, nearly all in the river bottom, nearly all arable except for the hollows and the timber patches. Athey raised tobacco and corn, followed by wheat or barley, and then by clover and grass. He had cattle and sheep and hogs. In the long barn behind his house he would have a dozen or so good work mules of various ages. He would buy a few yearlings every fall, and sell a broke team or two in the spring. Everything on the place, including the crops and animals, was well kept and looked good, for Athey would have it no other way.
I can’t tell you exactly how Athey managed his farm. My knowledge of farming is mainly from looking and hearsay and my outdated memories of Uncle Othy’s little sideline farm at Squires Landing, and so I can’t give as many details as you might like. But Athey interested me, and I listened both to him and to whatever was said about him. What I do know is that he used his land conservatively. In any year, by far the greater part of his land would be under grass—for, as he would say, “The land slopes even in the bottoms, and the water runs.” He was always studying his fields, thinking of ways to protect them. He was doing what a lot of farmers say they want to do: he was improving his land; he was going to leave it better than he had found it. I know too that his principle was always to maintain a generous margin of surplus between his livestock and the available feed, just as between the fertility of
his land and his demands upon it. “Wherever I look,” he said, “I want to see more than I need, and have more than I use.” And this is a principle very different from what would be the principle of his son-in-law, often voiced in his heyday: “Never let a quarter’s worth of equity stand idle. Use it or borrow against it.”
I learned a good deal about Athey from men who had been his tenants. In Athey’s time, and surely before, there had always been two tenant families on the place, each occupying the small farmstead allotted to it. As far as I ever discovered, Athey dealt generously with them, seeing that they had all the garden space they could use, pasture for their milk cows, grain for their poultry and meat hogs, and firewood from the woodlots and fencerows. He gave them work and paid them fairly when they were not in their crops. His assumption was that if they prospered, he would prosper. Not all of them liked him—not all of his neighbors liked him—for he was strict in his ways, and, though he was not a talkative man, there was never much room between what he said and what he thought. Whether they liked him or not, Athey’s tenants tended to prosper. In my time there have been several landowning farmers in the Port William neighborhood who got their start, and a good deal of their knowledge, as Athey’s tenants.
The Keith place included seventy-five or eighty acres of very good timber standing around slues and hollows, along the river, and in the sizable corner that lay on the far side of Coulter Branch. Athey logged the woodlands on the main tract only for firewood and the posts and lumber he needed on the place. The woods beyond the branch he never used at all. This was maybe the finest stand of trees in our part of the country, and Athey was proud of it. He protected it from timber buyers by asking considerably more for it than its market value. As long as he could make a living farming, that patch of timber would always be worth more to him than to them. He called it the Nest Egg. Whose nest egg it was he never said.
Coming into my shop one day and finding Athey in the chair, Burley Coulter hung up his hat and sat down and said nothing, and then said, “Athey, ain’t you going to sell your big woods down by the branch?”
The question was oddly intoned. Burley was trying to sound as if he thought Athey ought to sell it, in case he was going to. But he was asking because he was afraid Athey was going to, and he was anxious to find out.
“Oh, I reckon not,” Athey said.
I knew that Athey knew that Burley was anxious. Athey wouldn’t lie to him, but he didn’t want to relieve him too quickly either. He was starting to enjoy himself. “Oh, I reckon not” could have meant either that he wasn’t going to sell the timber, or that he was thinking of selling it.
“Well,” Burley said, shifting in his chair, “they tell me you been offered a right smart piece of money for it.”
“Why, Burley, it’s worth more than that to me just for the squirrels.”
Burley said, still doubtful, “You eating them squirrels, Athey, or just raising them for the market?”
“Oh, I reckon I eat ’em. There’s some mighty good eating has come out of them woods, Burley,” Athey said, knowing that Burley knew this better than he did. He smiled mostly to himself, as if he knew many other things besides.
Burley who now saw that Athey had leveled with him about the sale of the woods, leaned back. “It takes a mighty good rifle to shoot a squirrel out of one of them tall trees.”
“I wait for them to come down,” Athey said.
That was a fairly long conversation for Athey at that time. He was still in his power then. When he would come in for a haircut, he would just be pausing in the midst of a swing; he always had something going on at home that he wanted to get back to.
Della kept as busy in and about the house as Athey in the fields and barns—cleaning and washing, cooking, laying up food, feeding hands at harvesttime. Between them they kept the cellar and smokehouse well stocked and more always coming in from the garden and barnyard and fields.
“Hard work makes for a good appetite,” Doc Markman said learnedly in my shop one day.
“What helps my appetite,” said Athey, “is knowing I got something to eat.”
They were a sight to see, Della and Athey were, in their vigorous years. They had about them a sort of intimation of abundance, as though, like magicians, they might suddenly fill the room with potatoes, onions, turnips, summer squashes, and ears of corn drawn from their pockets. Their place had about it that quality of bottomless fecundity, its richness both in evidence and in reserve.
It was because of what he had in reserve that most people called Athey “Mr. Keith.” Even Uncle Othy called him “Mr. Keith,” though he had known him as a boy. When we would pass the Keith place on our longish buggy ride to church on Sunday mornings, Uncle Othy would always say something complimentary: “Well, I see Mr. Keith has got a good crop of corn, as usual”; “I see Mr. Keith has got a fine pair of young mules.”
Burley called him “Athey” by the same privilege by which he hunted his woods: Athey liked Burley; they were neighbors. I call him “Athey” because, after he and Della moved into Port William and he began coming almost every day to sit a while with me in my shop, he told me to do so, acknowledging, I think, his decline in the world from host to guest.
For (and, you might say, of course) that is where Athey was going to end up: in town. He and Troy were different, almost opposite, kinds of men.
Athey said, “Wherever I look, I want to see more than I need.” Troy said, in effect, “Whatever I see, I want.” What he asked of the land was all it had. He had hardly got his first crop in the ground before he began to say things critical of Athey and his ways. “Why hell!” he would say, “it’s hard to tell what that old place would produce if he would just plow it.” Or: “Why the hell would a man plow just forty acres of a farm he could plow all of?” He would say these things leaning back in his chair, his ankle crossed over his knee, his foot twitching. He was speaking as a young man of the modern age coming now into his hour, held back only by the outmoded ways of his elders. This was the substance of his talking at town, where mostly he was looked at and listened to without comment. He was not yet ready to present his case to Athey. So far, he was just propping himself up, asserting his superiority perhaps just by habit; nothing had required him to suspect that the reference point or measure of what he did or said might not be himself.
In coming to the Keith place, he had come into an order that perhaps he did not even recognize. Over a long time, the coming and passing of several generations, the old farm had settled into its patterns and cycles of work—its annual plowing moving from field to field; its animals arriving by birth or purchase, feeding and growing, thriving and departing. Its patterns and cycles were virtually the farm’s own understanding of what it was doing, of what it could do without diminishment. This order was not unintelligent or rigid. It tightened and slackened, shifted and changed in response to the markets and the weather. The Depression had changed it somewhat, and so had the war. But through all changes so far, the farm had endured. Its cycles of cropping and grazing, thought and work, were articulations of its wish to cohere and to last. The farm, so to speak, desired all of its lives to flourish.
Athey was not exactly, or not only, what is called a “landowner.” He was the farm’s farmer, but also its creature and belonging. He lived its life, and it lived his; he knew that, of the two lives, his was meant to be the smaller and the shorter.
Of all this Troy had no idea, not a suspicion. He thought the farm existed to serve and enlarge him. And it seemed that this was the way it was going to be. In that first year of 1946, because of the newness of his situation and Athey’s enforcement of the farm’s restraints and demands—by working much and spending little, and by Mattie’s savings and skills learned from her mother—Troy did well. He contracted little debt, easily paid out of the year’s earnings, with a good sum of money left over. All he had to do was learn and keep on, work and be patient.
In the fall of that year, Mattie and Troy had their first child—De
lla Elizabeth, named for her grandmothers, and called Liddie. Later, just before Christmas, after he had sold his crop, Troy bought a tractor and several implements, using a considerable portion of his year’s profit as a down payment and borrowing the rest from the Independent Farmers Bank. In town—but not, or not yet, in Athey’s hearing—he said that in the spring we were going to see him “cut loose.”
Buying a tractor at that time was not unusual. A lot of people were doing it. The young men who had been in the war were used to motor-driven machinery. The government was teaching a new way of farming in night courses for the veterans. Tractors and other farm machines were all of a sudden available as never before, and farmhands were scarcer than before. And so we began a process of cause-and-effect that is hard to understand clearly, even looking back. Did the machines displace the people from the farms, or were the machines drawn onto the farms because the people already were leaving to take up wage work in factories and the building trades and such? Both, I think.
You couldn’t see, back then, that this process would build up and go ever faster, until finally it would ravel out the entire old fabric of family work and exchanges of work among neighbors. The new way of farming was a way of dependence, not on land and creatures and neighbors but on machines and fuel and chemicals of all sorts, bought things, and on the sellers of bought things—which made it finally a dependence on credit. The odd thing was, people just assumed that all the purchasing and borrowing would merely make life easier and better on all the little farms. Most people didn’t dream, then, that before long a lot of little farmers would buy and borrow their way out of farming, and bigger and bigger farmers would be competing with their neighbors (or with doctors from the city) for the available land. The time was going to come—it is clear enough now—when there would not be enough farmers left and the farms of Port William would be as dependent as the farms of California on the seasonal labor of migrant workers.