The Memory of Old Jack: A Novel

The work satisfied something deeper in him than his own desire. It was as if he went to his fields in the spring, not just because he wanted to, but because his father and grandfather before him had gone because they wanted to - because, since the first seeds were planted by hand in the ground, his kinsmen had gone each spring to the fields. When he stepped into the first opening furrow of a new season he was not merely fulfilling an economic necessity; he was answering the summons of an immemorial kinship; he was shaping a passage by which an ancient vision might pass once again into the ground.

Now when he walked in his fields and pastures and woodlands he was tramping into his mind the shape of the land, his thought becoming indistinguishable from it, so that when he came to die his intelligence would subside into it like its own spirit.

She mourns for the future, as the past has taught her. And yet there is a rejoicing in her, persistent and unbidden as the beating of her heart.

It is a Sunday morning early in the May of 1889. The weather is clear and warm. There has been rain, and the littlest streams are brimming and shining. The spring is at its height. The grass of the yard and the pastures is lush, the green of it so new that it gleams in the sun. The trees are heavily leafed, their new growth still tender, unblemished. And the whole country lies beneath an intricate tapestry of bird song. He is on his way to church - one of the pilgrimages that he occasionally makes in uneasy compensation for the extravagances of Saturday night.

The modern ignorance is in people’s assumption that they can outsmart their own nature. It is in the arrogance that will believe nothing it cannot prove, and respect nothing it cannot understand, and value nothing it cannot sell.

The modern ignorance is in people's assumption that they can outsmart their own nature. It is in the arrogance that will believe nothing that cannot be proved, and respect nothing it cannot understand, and value nothing it cannot sell.

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

He gave him the steadiness, and he gave him the little uneasiness and the pressure, that a young man can only get from an older man’s knowing eye.

Mat felt the change upon himself. Now he was the oldest, and the longest memory was his. Now between him and the grave stood no other man. From here on he would find the way for himself.

Or rather that crisp command fell upon the current of his thought like a dry leaf on the surface of a deeply flowing stream, to be borne forty years away.

In the presence of that hunger and that eager filling, Old Jack eats well himself. But his thoughts go to the other men, and he watches them. He watches the older ones—Mat and Jarrat and Burley—sensing their weariness and their will to endure, troubling about them and admiring them. He watches the five proven men, whom he loves with the satisfaction of thorough knowledge and long trust, praising and blessing them in his mind. He watches them with pleasure so keen it is almost pain.

But she is glad to prolong the walk. She is moved by him, pleased to stand in his sight, whose final knowledge is womanly, who knows that all human labor passes into mystery, who has been faithful unto death to the life of his fields to no end that he will know in this world.

He loved to handle cash, and he drove himself and all that belonged to him in the direction of money as if it were as far off as heaven and as if he were running out of time;

The sermon is merely a presence, a distant drone among the humming and singing that the air is already full of, borne away on the fragrance that draws through the windows.

He has to reach down with his feet to tread the floor.

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.

Used as he is to the expansive labor of the fields, he is enjoying the smallness and neatness of this task.

Sitting there, eyes shut, head tilted back, hands at rest upon his cane's crook, he seems to sink immeasurably, to float down into a well of light as warm and red as blood. He has met the sun at its entrance to the earth, where it is blooded and then darkened. It burns away the shadow and ash of the flesh of his old age, and he lives again, light and strong, in his mind. And now, as if out of an old history living in his hands returns to him the presence and the touch of her who loved him as he was.