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 is growing dark, and the boy, Jack Beechum, is standing as he has been standing for a long time, the stones of the driveway beginning to press painfully against the soles of his bare feet. He is looking up the driveway at the gray walls of the house that would not be painted again until the time of his own marriage. (His marriage, the beginning of his story, when Ruth would come to the house as his bride—he would have it painted and put right by then.) The trees of the yard have grown shadowy, the leaves now indistinct in their mass. The work is done at the barn, the men have gone home for the night, the place has fallen quiet. He feels the melancholy of the old house reach out toward him and touch him like a draft of cold air.
And then, behind him, he hears a horse stepping along the road. He turns and sees a man turn in at the gate on a high-headed bay. The man, whom he has seen before but does not know, rides up beside the boy and stops. He is a young man with good eyes and a heavy brown beard, whose squareness of build and breadth of shoulder make him appear less tall than he is. He leans forward, his two hands crossed over the pommel of the saddle—at ease, as though he might mean to stay quite a while right there.
“My boy,” he says, “might your sister be home?”
“She ain’t ever anyplace else,” Jack says.
Ben clears his throat. “I see.” He raises his head and looks for some time at what is now only the silhouette of the house, as though he is making some intricate calculation about it. Does he want to go to the house? Or not?
“I see,” he says. And then, as if remembering something clean forgot, he looks down again to where the boy is standing, by the left foreleg of the horse, and smiles. “Can you show me where to put my horse?”
“Yes sir.”
“Do you want to ride?”
“Yes sir.
The man reaches down with his right hand. “Well, take a hold of that, and give a jump.”
Jack does as he is told, and is swung up and behind the man’s back. It is done powerfully, all in one motion, and the man has made a friend.
“I’m Ben Feltner,” he says. “Who are you?”
“Jack Beechum.”
“That’s what I thought ”
Jack settles himself behind the saddle and takes hold of the waist of Ben’s coat. There is something comfortable about this man, whose hat and big shoulders now loom up so, a new horizon, in the fading light, who smells of horse sweat and pipe smoke.
“Are you set?” Ben asks.
“Yes sir.”
Ben clucks to the horse.
“You came to see my sister?” Jack asks, wondering a little, for few people come to the house to see any of them any more.
“Your sister Nancy Beechum?”
“Yes sir.”
“Well, I came to see her.”
And they ride up the driveway toward the house, forbidding to Jack because of other people’s sorrows, but where he will come to sorrows enough of his own. As he pictures it now, even back in that far-off old time it seems already expectant of her who was to come.
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