LITMIR.BIZ

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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 of declaration. Not many men Old Jack has known could offer themselves so openly in a touch of the hand. He looks up at Mat, 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

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