Читать книгу The Memory of Old Jack - Wendell Berry - Страница 9

Two: Ben

When Mat Feltner walked out into his front pasture in the course of his morning chores, he saw Old Jack standing on the hotel porch like the monument of some historical personage. It was still gray then, and he could only dimly make out the figure of the old man within the shadow of the porch roof.

Later, bringing the milk to the house, he looks again, and then he stands and looks, for Old Jack is still there as before, the dawn having come upon him.

Mat’s grandson, Andy Catlett, who has been feeding and watering the hogs, comes quietly into the yard and stands beside him.

“How’s the boy?” Mat says. And then, remembering that this is Andy’s last day to be there—tomorrow he will be going away to school—Mat reaches his arm around the boy’s shoulders and hugs him. They stand so for another moment, silently looking at Old Jack, who is looking away.

“Well,” Mat says, as if to end a conversation of some length, “let’s go eat breakfast.”

They go in and strain the milk and wash, and come back to the kitchen.

Sitting down at the table, Mat frowns and shakes his head.

“What’s the matter?” Margaret asks.

Mat, who does not know that he has given any sign, looks up at his wife and smiles. “Nothing,” he says. And then, knowing she will not believe that, he says, “Uncle Jack. He’s been standing over there since before daylight. Just like he’s bolted to the porch.”

Margaret only nods. Mat lifts his coffee cup; she fills it and sits down.

Old Jack has become a worry to them. In the last several weeks his mind seems to have begun to fail. They have been watching him with some anxiety, they and the others of the community who care about him, for fear that in one of those spells when he seems to go away from himself he will fall and be hurt or will be hit by a car. They have all found him at the various stations of his rounds, just standing, as poignantly vacant as an empty house. And they have watched him, those who care about him, because they feel that he is going away from them, going into the past that now holds nearly all of him. And they yearn toward him, knowing that they will be changed when he is gone.

Mat suddenly laughs. “Burley Coulter was saying the other day that Uncle Jack’s turning into a statue. That’s going to be his metamorphosis. One day he’ll just stop the way he does and never start again. The birds’ll roost on him.”

Margaret concedes a smile to Burley’s fantasy But she changes the subject. “Mat, we ought to bring him here. It’s time. If we don’t, we’ll be sorry”

“I’d be sorrier to have imposed something on him he didn’t like,” Mat says. “I’m not going to do it, Margaret. He’d feel a burden to us. He’d feel dependent and useless, and I don’t want to do that to him. He’ll be happier staying where he is, paying his own way If he gets to where he can’t do for himself—which I hope he won’t—then we’ll bring him here.”

He speaks more strongly than he feels, for what he has in the back of his mind, what he is not willing to say is that he is going to put off for as long as possible the extra work that the old man’s needs would make for Margaret, whose health is no longer good. Not that what he has said is not true.

“Besides,” he says, “he wouldn’t come.”

And that is true. He would not. He would not allow himself to be meddled with.

“When he needs help, we’ll help him,” Mat says.

That is what he owes. That is what Old Jack has always given him— not help that he did not need but always exactly the help he has needed. Mat is sixty-nine years old. Since before he remembers, Jack has been there to be depended on. When Mat was born, Jack was already such a man as few men ever become. He has been faithful all those years. It is a faith that Mat has reciprocated in full. But Jack’s faith has been the precedent and model. All his life Mat has had Jack before him, as standard and example, teacher and taskmaster and companion, friend and comforter. When Jack is gone, then Mat will be the oldest of that fellowship of friends and kin of which Old Jack has been for so long the center. He feels the impending exposure of that—nobody standing then between him and the grave. He feels a heavy portent in the imminent breaking of that strand of memory reaching back into the Civil War, on the end of which Old Jack now keeps so tenuous a hold.

“When he needs it, we’ll help him. When he don’t, we won’t. Ain’t that what you’d want?”

“Well,” Margaret says. “Hunt him up directly, and see about him, and tell him to come to dinner.”

“I’m going to. Now see how far ahead of you I was?”

They laugh. He has quoted his hired hand, Lightning Berlew, who, when given an instruction, always says, “Well, I expect I’m just a little bit ahead of you,” and when he has carried it out, usually not very satisfactorily, “Now see how far ahead of you I was?”

Mat gets up and puts on his hat.

“Andy” he says, “take my truck and go help Burley and Jarrat unload what they’ve got on the wagons.” As he leaves, he tips his hat to Margaret.

He goes through the chicken yard gate and across the chicken yard and, by another gate, into the barn lot. The sun is bright now. The river valley is filled with a white billow of fog that trails out into the draws of the upland, growing transparent at its edges.

Lightning is coming up through the pasture from his house, taking his time, and Mat stands to wait for him. Lightning walks, as usual, with his hat brim pulled so low over his eyes that he has to tilt his head far back in order to see; this gives him the vaguely wandering look of a sleepwalker.

After Joe Banion’s sudden death of a heart attack in the fall of the year before, Mat was without help for several months. Not long after Joe’s burial, his wife, Nettie, had taken his ancient mother and gone off to live with her sister in Cincinnati; that left the house empty but for weeks Mat was able to find nobody to move in. He could not compete with city jobs for the best of the younger men, and he had not much mind to put up with the worst. But the worst, or near it, was what he finally got: a couple Wheeler Catlett had only heard of, this Lightning and his wife, Sylvania—known, Mat learned later, as Smoothbore—who arrived with all their belongings packed inside of and tied onto an exhausted Chevrolet.

“Tell me niggers been living here,” Lightning said engagingly to Mat as he untied the mattress from the car roof.

“If it doesn’t suit you,” Mat said, “that’ll be just fine.”

And that was when he learned the first principle of Lightning’s character: there is no earthly way to insult him.

“Well,” Lightning said, “that ain’t nothing a little warshing won’t take care of.”

The house hadn’t really been the issue. If Nettie had been willing to stay, Mat would gladly have built another house to accommodate whatever new help he could get. And he wanted her to stay, not just for Margaret’s sake, but because he felt that Nettie—and, even more, Aunt Fanny—belonged there. On the other hand, he could not blame them for leaving. All their kin had gone, and Nettie, who had never learned to drive, felt that she was too old to learn. She wanted to go.

Mat was little enough concerned with “the race problem” in those days, but his bonds with those people went deep. He mourned their departure as he had mourned Joe’s death, and missed them painfully when they were gone. In the spring, he and Margaret drove to Cincinnati to see Nettie and the old woman, following Nettie’s directions to a red brick tenement near the ball park. It was a Sunday afternoon, hot, the streets lined with people sitting out in chairs and on stoops. They entered a dark, stale-smelling building and climbed to the flat that Nettie had rented on the third floor. Nettie was glad to see them, but quiet, uncertain, strange to them suddenly, no longer held to them by any common ground. She missed Port William; she guessed she always would; she liked very well the new people she worked for. But Mat was most touched by the figure of the old woman who was seated in a sort of alcove between a refrigerator and a window that looked out through the iron of a fire escape at the back of another tenement. She seemed shrunken and resigned, her hands emblematically still, lying in her lap. Where was her garden, where were her plants and speckled hens, where were the long paths of her rambles in the pastures and the woods?

“Aunt Fanny” he said, “you’re a mighty long way from home.”

“Lord, Mr. Mat,” she said, “ain’t it the truth!”

They didn’t stay long. They had come to offer themselves in some way not well understood and had found themselves to be only strangers, useless to the needs of that place. They threaded the crowd of the street back to where they had left their car. Driving home, Mat was full of a fierce sorrow. If he had spoken, he would have wept. If he could have, if they would have come, he would have brought them home. But he knew that his grief went against history, no stranger to him, whose son was dead in the war; he knew there were not even any words to say. And yet he grieved for Nettie and Aunt Fanny, and for the thousands like them, the exiled children of the land to which their history had been a sacrifice. He knew he had seen the end of what deserved to end better than it had.

And now here comes Lightning Berlew. Mat told him when he moved in that he would expect him to be at the barn at five, before breakfast, to help do the morning chores; he could milk one of the cows for himself.

“I don’t want no milk,” Lightning said, and he came out no earlier than six-thirty.

Mat offered him a plot of ground and the use of whatever tools he needed to make a garden. Lightning did not even bother to refuse.

Mat said nothing. He had recognized his adversary by then and knew he would have to settle for what he could get, as long as there was anything to get. He even knew how it would end: one morning the house would be empty and the old car gone; he would know neither why nor where nor exactly when.

“Morning,” he says.

“Hidy!” says Lightning. He is taking his time, the picture of the man of leisure, head tilted back, picking his teeth with the sharpened butt of a burnt match. He comes across the lot and stops in front of Mat.

“Take the tractor and wagon,” Mat says, “and go get with Nathan and the others and help them. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Lightning grins his most accommodating grin, his mouth full of silver and gold. With perfect condescension he says, “Well, I expect I’m just a little bit ahead of you.” He bites down on the match and reaches into his pocket for his cigarettes.

It makes Mat furious. But, as he often does, he deals with his anger by being correctly generous. He had another thing in mind.

“Lightning,” he says, “do you want to kill a hog for yourself this fall?”

“Huh?”

“Do you want a meat hog?”

“I might.”

“Well, you can have one of mine. But you’ll have to pen it down at your house and feed it out.”

“I just might,” Lightning says. He goes to get the tractor.

Mat stands still a moment, letting his anger subside, and then starts down toward town.

Lightning will not take the hog. Mat knows that. Then why did he ask? Because it is right? To walk the second mile? Maybe. But maybe, too, for some perverse fascination in seeing the man so steadfastly prove himself a fool. Maybe to allow him to elaborate the accusation there is to be made against him. Mat knows, he knows perfectly well, what Lightning will be doing. At night after work, instead of tending a garden or feeding a hog or doing anything that might be of permanent good to him, instead even of just sitting still, he will have his old Chevrolet pulled into the barn door; he will be lying under it, trying to make it run well enough to get to Hargrave on Saturday night. And while he works on the car, the lady Smoothbore will be sitting there on a bucket, encouraging him, for she apparently has her own reasons for wanting to get to Hargrave. Though the two of them live and work on the place, they have no connection with it, no interest in it, no hope from it. They live, and appear content to live, from hand to mouth in the world of merchandise, connected to it by daily money poorly earned. They worry Mat a good deal more than he will yet admit.

When he comes around the house the hotel porch is vacant and he is startled for a moment. It is as if he had concluded, from Old Jack’s immobility earlier, that he would be there whenever he looked again. But if the old man is not on the hotel porch this time of morning, he will be at Jasper Lathrop’s store or at Jayber Crow’s barbershop. Mat cuts across the road to Jasper’s.

The store, whose large front windows face the morning sun, is bright with dust motes whirling in the air from the sweeping that Jasper has just given it. Several women stand at the front counter, talking, waiting to pay for their groceries. But the vital organ of Jasper’s store is not the cash register where the women wait; it is the great rusty stove that stands in the back with a bench and several chairs in a half-circle around it. The bench and the chairs have already begun to collect the old men and the idlers who will spend the day loafing among the business places of the town. And standing around the stove, talking and laughing, are several of the younger men, who have stopped by for cigarettes or a visit before going to work, waiting a little, hoping the day will warm and the cold dew dry off the tobacco before they have to get into it. Though there is no fire the chill of the morning is on their minds, and they stand near the stove.

Old Jack is sitting in the angle of the arm and back of the bench, at the end nearest the stove. His coat is misbuttoned so that the left side of the collar rises under his ear. One of the ear flaps of his corduroy cap is dangling. His hands resting on his cane, he is gazing point-blank into the brightness of the front windows. He makes no sign that he has heard, no motion of recognition, when Mat speaks to the other men. Looking at him, Mat feels his absence. He leans over and lays his hand on Old Jack’s shoulder.

Way back in Old Jack’s mind there is a hillside deep in grass, with trees scattered over it, shading it, and trees around it, and at the foot of the slope a pool of water, still, with the mottled white trunk of a sycamore reflected cleanly in it. He is standing at the edge of the field, looking out into it. He has been there a long time. And now he feels himself touched. A hand has gently grasped his shoulder. It seems to him that it must be Ben Feltner’s hand. In the touch of it there is a sort of clarity, a sort of declaration. Not many men Old Jack has known could offer themselves so openly in a touch of the hand. He looks up at Mat, who stands leaning between him and the light. His eyes dazzle.

“Is it Ben?”

“No, Uncle Jack. It’s Mat. How are you?”

“I’m all right.”

“You feeling all right?”

“Yessir!”

“Well, Margaret said tell you to come to dinner.”

“I will that,” Old Jack says. He smiles, pleased with the invitation, and with Margaret, whose goodness he trusts but never takes for granted.

And then he reaches out and grips Mat’s forearm in an unsteady rough caress. Though Mat’s hair is as white as his own, it is very much the gesture of an older man toward a younger one. It is an uncle’s gesture, a statement of deeply interested kinship.

“I’m obliged to you, honey.”

The wind is stirring the grass of the pasture, and his eyes go back to it. He is at the edge of the field. He would like to walk out into it, he would like to lie down in the shade of one of the trees there by the side of the pool of water. But he is not able to do it now. Though he does not turn his head or look away he knows that Ruth is standing among the trees behind him. She will not leave him, but neither will she come up beside him and step out with him into the bright field or lie down with him in the shade.

But on his shoulder is the live print, both memory and feeling, of Mat’s hand, that is like Ben’s, or is Ben’s; or the touch of it is Ben’s, for what it signifies has shed men’s hands like leaves and lived on. It is Ben’s kindness, his sweetness of spirit, that has survived in Mat. But there is also in Mat a restless intelligence, an eagerness for things as they ought to be, an anger and grief against things as they are, that he got from his mother. That is Beechum. Mat has never had Ben’s patience. Or as much of it as he has ever had, he has had to learn, like Old Jack, out of sorrow.

Jack knew Ben Feltner nearly forty years, and he never saw him in a hurry and he never saw him angry With Ben that never seemed the result merely of self-control, but rather of an abiding peace that he had made—or maybe a peace that had been born in him—with himself and the world, a willingness to live within the limits of his own fate. Both of them having grown up in his gentle shadow, Jack and Mat have respected and stood in awe of the deep peaceableness they knew in Ben, both of them having failed of it, and at great cost, for so long.

“Jack, my boy,” Ben used to say, “the world will still be there when you get to it.” To Jack, and later to Mat, when they would be fuming about what might happen, he would say: “Let tomorrow come tomorrow, my boy.” Jack was nearly sixty before he learned to do that—but he did learn it, finally. And Ben used to say: “Let the past be gone. Let the dead lie.” He would say that, smiling his remote, knowing smile, his hand on his beard. “Let it go by, Jack, my boy.” Old Jack never has learned that.

Ben Feltner, that saintly man, dead. Forty-one years in his grave. And Jack Beechum, who was, except in blood and name, his son, has grown old enough to be his father.

“Jack, you want a chew o’ tobacker?”

The one hollering in his ear is no stranger to Old Jack, who has known him for five generations, from his grandfathers to his grandsons, but who cannot now call his name, though he can remember his father’s name and his grandfather’s.

“Nawsir, Irvin,” he says. “But thank you, son. I’m obliged to you.”

There are only a handful of living names that he can remember. But so direct is his dealing with his failure that he calls the men Irvin, or he calls them son, as he calls all but a few women Suzy or honey. That is his courtesy. They are all young enough to be his sons and daughters now.

Old Jack not having looked at him, the other man returns the cut plug to his pocket and resumes the conversation on his right.

Reminded, Old Jack gets out his own twist of tobacco—the native product, known as “long green”—and cuts off a chew. For a moment he attends to the sounds and smells around him in the store. From the front come the voices of women, laughter. Beside him the talk of the men drones on—something he has passed through and beyond. He does not listen to the words. And his eyes keep their fixed gaze upon the windows straight in front of him. The glare of their morning light, like darkness, suits him as well now as sight. When he wants to, or needs to, he can still see well enough, but it has got so it takes an effort, as though to draw the world together; it seems less and less worth the trouble. His vision, with the finality of some physical change, has turned inward. More and more now the world as it is seems to him an apparition or a cloud that drifts, opening and closing, upon the clear, remembered lights and colors of the world as it was. The world as it is serves mostly to remind him, to turn him back along passages sometimes too well known into that other dead, mourned, unchangeable world that still lives in his mind.

Upon the touch of Mat’s hand that bears in it so accurately the touch of Ben’s, Old Jack has turned, as on a pivot, back deep into his memory. Now at the age of about eight, three years after the end of the war, he is standing down in the driveway at dusk, looking up at the old house. It is gray for want of paint, and it bears other marks of neglect, as though whatever intelligence inhabits it has turned away and forgotten it. The loss and defeat of the past are still present in it. Already he has learned to stay away from the house as much as he can, shying out of its shadows and memories into the daylight. For him the house is full of the insistent reminding of a past that he never knew, a life that was larger, more coherent and abundant and pleasant than the life he knows. From the drift of subdued talk that has gone on around him he has gathered few facts, nothing at all resembling a sense of history, but rather a vague intimation of an old time of great provisioning, big meals, laughter, bright rooms in which men and women were dancing. And he knows that old time was ended by the war.

Before he ever knew them, his brothers, grown men when he was born, rode off to join the Fourth Kentucky Cavalry. Hamilton and Mathew their names were. He knew that they had gone to fight against the Yankees. Why they went may still be a matter of conjecture. Even in the days of their grandfather the farm had not been a large one; there had never been more than a family or two of slaves; the family had no life-or-death stake in any of the institutions that its two sons undertook to defend. As a boy, Jackmerely assumed that they had done as they should have done. Strangers from somewhere else were trying to tell them what to do, and they would not stand for it. Perhaps it was as simple as that. Perhaps it was as inevitable that they should have gone to war as it was that they should have gone to it on horseback, cavalrymen by limitation. It was the choice of the men of their kind; they did not think to do otherwise.

They left, Jack knew, on a morning in September, 1862, after the tobacco had been housed, having refused to sign with the recruiters until the crop was in. Though Jack was too young—he was later repeatedly told that he was too young—to remember them, he has nevertheless kept all his life a strange, unfocused vision of their departure. Was he only told about it, or did he actually see it, held up in his mother’s or in Nancy’s arms to watch them go? It is a clear bright cool morning, the taste of fall in the air. The two of them, Ham and Mat, ride down the driveway under the shadows of the trees, their horses, a chestnut and a bay, going side by side. Each of them has a roll of blankets tied behind his saddle; each carries a rifle across his saddlebow. Their hats are tilted forward to shade their eyes, for they are riding into the sun. What did they look like? He does not know. They move as in a sort of peripheral vision; when he attempts to concentrate his memory upon them, to examine them as with a direct look, they fade away. It seems to him that as they ride to the end of the driveway and turn onto the road and go out of sight they do not look back. It seems to him that as he watches them they have already seen the house for the last time and their backs are turned to it forever. This is not simply the knowledge of retrospect; because the vision of their departure met the knowledge of their deaths in the anachronistic mind of a child, the two have fused, so that it seems to him, in his vision, that he watches them depart with the clear foreknowledge that they will not return. And they did not. Mat was killed the next month in their regiment’s first engagement, at the Battle of Perryville, and Ham in Morgan’s third fight at Cynthiana in June of 1864.

He does not remember any of the circumstances surrounding the news of Mat’s death. Long before Mat’s life became a fact to him, his death was also a fact. But he can remember when they heard of the death of Ham. Jack was four then. Mainly he remembers that for two or three days after the news came he was not permitted to see his mother. His father sat long at a time by the dead hearth in the front room, looking at the floor. Nancy and the cook kept Jack in the kitchen with them, taking him on walks outside when he got restless. In the house they spoke in whispers. That whispering has always stayed in his mind, an awesome portent, full of the intimation of tragedies and mysteries. Why would a man be killed? What happened to him then? How long was forever? And he remembers Nancy hugging him and rocking him at night beside one of the upstairs windows. He knew that she was crying.

And before the spring of the next year his mother was dead, and they had buried her among the tilting stones and the old cedars in the graveyard at Port William. It has always been of heavy significance to him that she died before the war’s end, in the bitterness and sorrow, and what seems to him to have been the darkness, of its last winter.

And so by the war’s end the old house was infected with a sense of loss and diminishment, and with a quietness. It was as though, entering one of the still rooms at dusk, the boy could hear the solemn echoes of a failed delight, or the departing footsteps of his brothers, whose coats still hung on pegs in one of the upstairs closets. But more than anything else the quietness of the house bore the recollection of the quietness that had surrounded the final long illness of his mother.

As he thinks of himself standing there in the driveway more than eighty years ago, he feels again a dread that was inescapable then and that he never forgot. The memory is without antecedent; perhaps the recollection has already lasted longer than the event. It is getting dark. The swifts have begun dropping into the chimneys. It is the time when the sorrows of the house return to it and brood in it. Of all who were once there, only he and Nancy and his father are left. There will come a time when Jack’s own vigor and spirit will overpower the melancholy of the house—a time when, with a bravado almost intimidating to himself, he will appropriate his brothers’ forsaken clothes and wear them out. But that time is yet long away. Now the house will be full of the presence of an unappeasable sorrow, and he dreads to enter it, and he knows he must. Soon now they will be calling him.

By his sixth year Jack’s mind had already learned what would be one of its characteristic motions, turning away from the house, from the losses and failures and confinements of his history, to the land, the woods and fields of the old farm, in which he already sensed an endlessly abounding and unfolding promise. He stayed outdoors as much as he could, following the men to the fields when they would let him, wandering the woods and the creeks when they would not. Outside, away from the diminished and darkened house, there had already begun the long arrival of what was to be. Away from the house he was free; he felt the power of his own moods and inclinations; he followed the promptings of his curiosity about whatever was going on in the fields and the woods. He was always in somebody’s way, trying to see what was happening. “Get back!” they would have to be telling him. “Get out the way! How can I see what I’m doing with yo’ big head stuck in the way?” The black hired men corrected and instructed him, usually with good humor; they were resigned to this, knowing that if they did not do it nobody else was apt to. They taught him to work. As the price of staying with them he learned what they wanted him to know. What he wanted from them, what he asked of the fields where they went to work, was relief from the failed history that had been shut away from time, stalled and turned back upon itself, in the house. He wanted that sense of the continuous arrival of time and weather that one might get from standing day and night on the top of a hill.

There would come times, later, when he would have to turn from the hazards and bewilderments of that implacable arrival, always hastening as he grew older, back toward his history. Needing experience older than his own in order to know what to expect and what was possible, he would turn to Ben Feltner, as later the younger men would turn to him.

His father had suffered too much from his experience, had felt too great a futility in it, to be able to offer it to the boy. Instead he made a sort of pet of him. From the time Jack was three years old until he got big enough to want to be busy on his own, his father kept him with him whenever he was able; he would take him to work with him, or lift him up onto the saddle in front of him when he went on horseback. Sitting at the table after a meal or in the front room before bedtime, he would pull the boy up into his lap to pat him and hug him. But for all that, it was a strangely silent relationship that the two of them had. Jack said little for fear that he would touch or rouse the pain that he sensed in his father. And his father, because he was weary of his life, or because he had grown fearful of such knowledge as he had, said only what was necessary: “Come on” or “Jump down” or “Yes” or “No.” Sometimes they would ride to town and back, the boy straddling the saddlebow in front of his father—Jack can still remember, can still feel, his father’s hand and forearm crooked around his waist—and they would never say a word. Or they would be together half a day in the field, just as silently, while the father worked and the boy played near him. At those times he was always aware that his father kept a kind of vigil over him. He would look up from his play to see his father standing and gazing at him; his father would smile and nod, or he would raise his hand in a kind of salute, as though he were watching from a great distance.

But he was never comfortable with his father, who had always about him the melancholy of the house and its deaths. He got from his strange companionship with his father the sense of a forbearing, almost tender kindness that later he would remember with pleasure and with regret. But what he consciously learned and understood of manhood he got from Ben Feltner.

It was when Jack was eight that Ben began his courtship of Nancy—a courtship that would last, by the dispensation of Ben’s patience, for eleven years, while Nancy fulfilled and completed her duties as the woman of her father’s house. They were married in 1879, after Nancy had buried her father, and mothered and brought up and kept house for her young brother until she thought he could be left to look after himself. So far as Jack knew there was never a formal proposal. When the time came—the three of them were sitting in the kitchen, having eaten—Ben said: “Jack, my boy, I believe it’s time we put you on your own.” And Nancy, blushing, looking out the window, said, “Yes, Jack, I think it’s time.”

She was as much a mother to him as he ever needed her to be. She taught him his manners, saw to it that he got what schooling was available to him, and when there was no school she set him problems in arithmetic and had him read to her from the Bible. When he balked at that or at any other task, she turned not to their father but to Ben. “Why, Jack” Ben would say, “it’s no more than ought to be asked of a man.” Ben took care not to have Jack in sight too much of the time. But when Jack was in Ben’s sight, he obeyed him; it never occurred to him not to, for Ben was just and he knew how much to ask.

From the war until the father’s death the farm deteriorated. At first Jack was too young to give any care to it, and his father had become satisfied to do only what was necessary to hold it together and to stay alive on it. By the time Jack finally got big enough to be of use, the old man had abandoned even that effort; his only urgency by then was to keep anything more from happening. But the place was going badly downhill, and they were borrowing money. As he approached manhood, seeing what needed to be done, Jack began to chafe and fret against the restraints of his father’s obsession. “Goddamn it,” he would say to Ben,“all he says is no.” And out of the shadows of so many years he can hear Ben: “Be easy, now. Be a little easy.”

It is growing dark, and the boy, Jack Beechum, is standing as he has been standing for a long time, the stones of the driveway beginning to press painfully against the soles of his bare feet. He is looking up the driveway at the gray walls of the house that would not be painted again until the time of his own marriage. (His marriage, the beginning of his story, when Ruth would come to the house as his bride—he would have it painted and put right by then.) The trees of the yard have grown shadowy, the leaves now indistinct in their mass. The work is done at the barn, the men have gone home for the night, the place has fallen quiet. He feels the melancholy of the old house reach out toward him and touch him like a draft of cold air.

And then, behind him, he hears a horse stepping along the road. He turns and sees a man turn in at the gate on a high-headed bay. The man, whom he has seen before but does not know, rides up beside the boy and stops. He is a young man with good eyes and a heavy brown beard, whose squareness of build and breadth of shoulder make him appear less tall than he is. He leans forward, his two hands crossed over the pommel of the saddle—at ease, as though he might mean to stay quite a while right there.

“My boy,” he says, “might your sister be home?”

“She ain’t ever anyplace else,” Jack says.

Ben clears his throat. “I see.” He raises his head and looks for some time at what is now only the silhouette of the house, as though he is making some intricate calculation about it. Does he want to go to the house? Or not?

“I see,” he says. And then, as if remembering something clean forgot, he looks down again to where the boy is standing, by the left foreleg of the horse, and smiles. “Can you show me where to put my horse?”

“Yes sir.”

“Do you want to ride?”

“Yes sir.

The man reaches down with his right hand. “Well, take a hold of that, and give a jump.”

Jack does as he is told, and is swung up and behind the man’s back. It is done powerfully, all in one motion, and the man has made a friend.

“I’m Ben Feltner,” he says. “Who are you?”

“Jack Beechum.”

“That’s what I thought ”

Jack settles himself behind the saddle and takes hold of the waist of Ben’s coat. There is something comfortable about this man, whose hat and big shoulders now loom up so, a new horizon, in the fading light, who smells of horse sweat and pipe smoke.

“Are you set?” Ben asks.

“Yes sir.”

Ben clucks to the horse.

“You came to see my sister?” Jack asks, wondering a little, for few people come to the house to see any of them any more.

“Your sister Nancy Beechum?”

“Yes sir.”

“Well, I came to see her.”

And they ride up the driveway toward the house, forbidding to Jack because of other people’s sorrows, but where he will come to sorrows enough of his own. As he pictures it now, even back in that far-off old time it seems already expectant of her who was to come.