The Memory of Old Jack. Wendell Berry
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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