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
