That Distant Land, page 29
Jake’s triumph that year was that he had Col and Lillybelle working on the setter. He had accomplished this by great practical and psychological cunning, which he acknowledged to me by many stealthy winks and grins, but he could not help saying to me, once, to their faces: “Damn, Andy, I got ’em where I want ’em now!” He had them where he wanted them because he had them in his power; because he drove the setter, he could see to it that they did not stop work for any frivolous reason, and he drove at a pace that nudged relentlessly at the limits of their speed and endurance. The big black mules drew the setter down one long row after another, and Col and Lillybelle rode the low seats with their laps full of plants, placing them one at a time into the ground, grumbling and muttering at Jake’s heedless back.
Each morning, when we had got enough plants pulled from the bed to get the setter started, Jake and Col and Lillybelle would start setting, Leaf would take three mules and the disk and prepare the ground ahead of the setter, R. T. would take another team and keep the setter supplied with water and plants. And Reenie and I would continue pulling plants from the beds, helped out by Leaf and R. T. when they had time to spare.
It was pretty work when you had time to think about it, and weren’t too tired to care. We drew the white-stemmed, green-leafed plants out of the moist ground of the beds, and laid them neatly in bushel baskets and old washtubs. R. T. hauled them to the patch where the setter crew spaced them out in the long rows. They would wilt in the heat that day, but by the next morning or the next, they would be sticking up again, pert and green and orderly, in the dew-darkened ground. Each night when we quit, Jake would say to me, fairly singing: “We’re getting it done, Andy boy! We’re leaving it behind!”
At the end of the day, my father would come to take me home. If we were working late, which we almost always did, he would drive back to where we were. If the ground was too wet for him to drive in the fields, he would stop at the barn and blow the horn, and I would quit and hurry to meet him.
As we got near the end of the tobacco setting and Jake’s elation grew, he stepped the pace up on Col and Lillybelle a little dangerously, enjoying their complaints, his own silence deepening in response. And then one night he made an invention that he liked so well that he would tell about it for years afterwards. We were working late. It was well after sundown and everybody was tired. Nearing the end of a round, Jake said, “One more round, and then . . .”
As he came to the end of the next round, he said, “One more, and then . . .”
At the end of the next he said it again.
Col, unable to stand it any longer, said, “And then what, old man?”
His voice dancing on laughter, the trap sprung at last, Jake said, “And then do another’n.”
That couldn’t last, of course. It all blew up in a big fracas right before dinner the next day. We could hear it clear to the plantbeds: Col making a profane speech on the theme of insurrection, Lillybelle swearing and crying, Jake protesting in the voice of surprised reason: “Well, I didn’t know you was upset. Why didn’t you all say something?”
Too much had been said by then to permit things to be put back the way they had been. After dinner Jake told Lillybelle to stay at the house. He drafted Ester out of the kitchen, put her on the setter with Leaf, and sent Col to the plantbed with Reenie and me.
I was sorry to have Col at the plantbed, for I had been having a good time talking with Reenie. She was curious, I think, as to what manner of creature I might be, and she drew me out by soliciting my opinions. I was full of strong opinions, which became even stronger when I discovered that they amused her, and even inspired her sometimes to agree. She liked strong opinions. In return, she told me at length about herself. She was living with her mother and her two sisters, Trill and Juanita. Juanita was the oldest, and was engaged to a goofy old boy named Calvin Sweetswing, a match that Reenie looked down upon from a great height: “She’s going to marry that bug-eyed silly thing! I wouldn’t sweep under his lazy feet for all the cows in Texas!” But she seemed to dismiss the matter, nevertheless, with a sort of approval: “Well, anyhow, it keeps her out of my hair.” Trill was another matter. Trill was only a year older than Reenie, and pretty too, as Reenie was willing to admit, and her taste in young men was very close to Reenie’s. In fact, it was not unusual for them to like the same young man, and then they did not get along. Reenie was beginning to be uneasy about being so long away from home. She reminded me frequently that she did not know what Trill might be up to.
“Do you like R. T.” I asked her.
“That silly thing?” She stuck out her tongue and laughed. I laughed too, in eager disloyalty to R. T.
Being Reenie’s confidant there in the plantbed was a fine pleasure, surprisingly satisfying, and I hated to give it up. I had to, of course, when Jake sent Col to work with us. Col clearly knew how to talk to beautiful young women better than I did. He knew just what to say, and just how to say it. Some of his opinions were even stronger than mine, and Reenie was even gladder to agree with them. They talked, facing one another across the bed, and I listened, admiring Reenie from afar. Grudgingly, I admired Col too. He did have his ways. If Reenie had not been there, I knew, he would have been killing time—making smokes, adjusting his hat, changing places, getting up to do little jobs that did not need to be done, groaning about the pain it gave him to work in a stoop, looking off for any help that might be coming down from the sky—Mr. Noah Count himself. But with Reenie there he worked quickly and well, putting grace into it, paying attention to what he was doing, and talking to her all the time, as if absentmindedly, as if she might be just anybody else. I would have given anything to be able to talk to her that way. He had style. His cuffs were turned back from his wrists as if to keep them from getting dirty, his hat was tilted just so, and he had a matchstick pinched between his front teeth. I couldn’t figure how that matchstick worked, but it worked; it was the master touch.
Knowing that Col was there with Reenie made R. T. desperate. He would hurry off to take a new supply of plants to the people in the field, or get a load of water from the pond, and then hurry back and stay until Jake hollered to him to get the hell on over there with more plants. He would load the sled then and, with a lot of backward looks, hurry away again.
The weather turned fine, and after the blowup between Col and Jake, the work went smoothly. It got to be Friday afternoon, and we were going to try to finish up by Saturday night. Col and Reenie and R. T. and I were at the plantbed. Jake hollered for water, and R. T. left to bring a new load from the pond. As soon as he was gone, Col’s and Reenie’s way of talking to each other changed a little, as it had begun to do. It was not a big change, but when R. T. was out of the way they spoke as people do when they are alone. For all the attention they paid to me, I might as well have been a spirit.
Reenie got up and carried an armload of plants to a basket a little way up the bed and put them in it, and then returned to her place and stood with her hands on her hips, resting. I can see her now, across all the years, as plainly as if I were still looking up at her across only the plantbed. She wore a cotton dress, red with a pattern of tiny white and yellow flowers, full-skirted, tight in the bodice. She had rings on her fingers, silver bracelets on her wrists. She had taken off her shoes. The sun behind her, her hair was all a tangle of red lights. She gave you the nice warming impression that you get from certain women, at a certain brief time in their lives, that she perfectly filled her skin: there was nothing wanting anywhere, and nothing wasted. And then, without any invitation whatsoever, my mind informed me how excellent it would be to kiss her.
She gathered her skirt and lifted it a little as she knelt and went to work again. “I’m going to go home,” she said. “If Daddy won’t take me, I’m going to get a ride with Wheeler.”
Col looked up at her quickly and studied her, but she was looking down.
“Tomorrow will be Saturday,” she said. “I got to be home by dinnertime tomorrow.”
“Aw,” Col said, drawing the words out gently as if speaking to a child, “you don’t want to go home yet.”
“Oh, yes, I do. I’m worried about Trill. I’m scared she’ll get something I won’t.”
Col was kneeling there across from her, his right hand holding a plant still rooted in the bed. But he had stopped. He had not pulled the plant. Perhaps he never did. He said, “Maybe you’ll get something she won’t.”
While they looked at each other, time stopped. Or I suppose it did, for it is a moment that has not stopped happening yet in my mind, and whatever happened next never got into my mind at all. I knew that something powerful had passed, something strange to me, as from another world, and yet pertaining to all that I had ever known in this one.
I was not exactly transfixed, for I must have kept working, but it seems to me that nothing happened at all until R. T. pulled up beside the plantbed and said, “Whoa!” He was silent a moment, looking, standing on the sled with the lines in his hands, and then he said, “Where’d Col and Reenie go?”
I looked then, and they were gone. “I don’t know.”
He leapt off the sled then and started to run. I got up and pitched my handful of plants into a basket and started after him.
It was one of those brilliant late spring afternoons that make things look both substantial and translucent as if made entirely of light. The sun had got down into the last quarter of the day, and the light was stretching out across the hollows and ridges and woodlands of the farm. Jake’s mules drew the setter across the patch slowly, as if its lengthening shadow made a friction on the ground, but all the rest was light. It gleams in my memory now, leaf and cloud, thicket and grassy ridge, as luminous almost as the great blue sky itself.
R. T. was running, it seemed to me, as fast as a horse, down off the ridge where the plantbeds were, on a long slant toward the woods in the hollow, and I did not catch up with him until he got in among the trees, where he had to slow down. By then it had come to me what we were running for: Col and Reenie had gone off to jigjig, though it came to me at the same time that jigjig was not the right name for it. Nor was any other word I knew. They had gone beyond all our words, somewhere beyond anywhere we knew. R. T. knew it as certainly as I did, I think, and that was why he was running so nearly out of his head. What he planned to do if he found them, I do not know. I doubt that he knew.
We sped over the ground like two young hawks. We looked into wooded hollows where the sunlight slanted in long girders, and little encampments of mayapples stood green and perfect among the heavy trunks. We searched the dry trashy floors of locust thickets. We looked into leafy rooms under the low drooping branches of sugar maples. We looked, as we leapt over them, into grassy coverts and nests in the pasture draws. We hunted over the whole farm, and though we did not find Reenie and Col in any of its receptive and secret places, all of them, the whole country, came alive for me with a possibility that I had not thought of before and have not ceased to think of since, beyond all the words that I have learned.
It wore us out finally. We gave up and started for the house, walking slow, upset because we could hear Jake calling R. T., who had not done his chores. We knew that R. T. was going to catch it. It was way after sundown, a star or two was shining, and we could smell the damp coming up out of the hollows.
I heard my father’s horn. He had come to take me home, and I felt farther away than I had ever been.
The Discovery of Kentucky *
John T. McCallum said he just felt it was his patriotic duty to take part in the inaugural parade in Frankfort.
“Jayber Crow,” John T. said, “I just feel like anybody that can do something ought to do something.” He always called people by their whole names; he didn’t want people to get the idea that they could expect favors from him. He was a trader.
“Why, sure,” I said. “Now just hold still a minute. I want to see if I can shave around your ear without cutting it off.”
John T. had no more humor than a bucket of ashes. He could not see the funny side of anything. If Burley Coulter came into the shop and announced that a certain creek had been so high he couldn’t get over it but he had just waited until it got a little higher and went under it, John T. would just stare at him as if he was an affront to the scientific spirit. It followed that John T. was laughed at a good deal, which he did not know. That he did not know it made whatever was funny even funnier. Everybody observed him with a good deal of interest.
And so if John T. had determined that looking good with his team of four black Percherons in the inaugural parade was his patriotic duty, then it was his patriotic duty, and whatever feelings he had about it would be patriotic feelings, and he would feel them seriously.
The real cause of John T.’s seizure of patriotism was an old black mare named McCallum’s Polly C. and three of her daughters that John T. drove in public at every opportunity. Old Poll and her three daughters were jet black, of a like conformation, size, and style, and they were, as John T. said himself, “up and down good ones, every one of ’em.” John T. and his horses lived on a river bottom farm closer to Hargrave than to Port William. By farming, stock breeding, and shrewd trading, he had made himself tolerably well off, accumulating his money both by making it and by keeping it. John T. was tight; you couldn’t drive a flaxseed in his ass with a sledge-hammer, as Burley Coulter often said. Burley was one of those who observed John T. with interest. The utter predictability of John T.’s humorlessness and self-absorption was wonderful to Burley, who took the same satisfaction in it that he might have taken in a circus dog.
It would have stood to reason for John T. to get his hair cut at Hargrave, since he lived closer to there than to Port William, but he liked my price which was fifty cents cheaper than at Hargrave. A lot of people enjoy getting a haircut, having a comfortable seat in a pleasant place and doing nothing for a while. But not John T. He was always in a hurry, even when he had a proposition like the inaugural parade on his mind. It was a Tuesday morning and not another soul in the shop, but John T., being a horse trader, had a reputation for subtlety and confidentiality to keep up, and he told me his idea in a voice as sly and guarded as if it were a dangerous secret and the room full of people.
The theme of the parade this year, he said, was to be “Kentucky for Progress.” The various floats would all be captioned: “Forward with Kentucky Agriculture”—or coal or timber, or whatever. “We,” John T. said, were going to have a float that would be a covered wagon drawn, of course, by four splendid black mares, and surrounded by armed men dressed as pioneers who would represent the discovery of Kentucky.
“But what has that got to do with progress?” I asked.
“It was progress at one time,” John T. said. “And how can you progress if you ain’t ever been discovered?”
“I see. Kentucky Pioneers Look Into The Future—is that the idea?”
“That’s it,” he said. “We’ll write that on the side.”
But of course John T. wasn’t telling me this just to let me in on his wonderful thought. He proposed to furnish the covered wagon, the four-horse team, and the ideas. He wanted me to furnish the crew of pioneers.
“Now you all grow out your hair and beards, see. Make some coonskin caps. Carry guns and shoot them, to make it lively and real. Carry liquor jugs—you know, with water in them—so you look like authentic Kentuckians.”
As if we were not already authentic Kentuckians. As if Kentucky had been discovered by people who, before they came, were authentic Kentuckians.
“It’ll be purely Christian,” John T. said. “There ain’t no profit in it.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”
Which I did, off and on, for the rest of the day, but I kept it to myself until evening, when Burley happened in, not for a haircut, but just to sit a while and visit, as he often did.
“Well,” I said, “big doings are going to be done, this time, at the inauguration of our honorable new governor.”
“How’s that?” he said.
“John T.’s going to do them.”
And then I told him the whole thing: the looking like authentic Kentuckians, the coonskin caps, the guns, the shooting of the guns, the liquor jugs with water in them. “He says it’s our patriotic duty,” I said.
Burley had not, to my knowledge, been involved in a celebration since the war’s end. He was well past fifty then, and perhaps he was asking himself whether or not he any longer had within him the requisite celebratory spirit. While I was talking, he stared without expression at the wall. He did not move for some time after I had finished. And then he looked straight at me, and I saw something kindle way back in his eyes.
He said, “Jayber, I believe I hear my country calling.”
“Well, remember, he wants it to be lively and real.”
“It’ll be that,” he said.
It wasn’t a thing I wanted to push—if it happened, it would happen and I didn’t say anything more about it. Neither did Burley, who came and went as he always did. We didn’t speak of the subject again for a couple of weeks.
And then one evening Burley came in and outwaited the other loafers, and when the last one had gone he said, “Well, I’ve recruited a little party for the discovery of Kentucky.”
“Who?”
“Well, for one, me.”
“Fine.”
“And you.”
“All right.”
“And Petey Tacker.”
“Why?” Petey was the undertaker down at Hargrave. I wasn’t sure how he fitted in.
“Petey’s a big gun collector and shooter, you know. He loads his own shells. We’re not going to employ live shot and ball on this expedition, I don’t guess, are we?”
