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
