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
