The Memory of Old Jack. Wendell Berry
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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