Chapters 30 and 31 Summary

Della Keith died at eighty-four, and the Keith estate passed to Mattie and on to Mattie's one surviving child, Athey Keith. Troy and Mattie's marriage is affected by her ownership of the land versus his huge debt and failure. Jayber learns details of Troy's debt through barbering and through Troy, himself, who is not a private person.Troy is unaware of how much Jayber dislikes him. Troy mortgages Mattie's farm and turns it into a dairy farm and later an indoor pig farm; Jayber suspects he is "just an incurable chucklehead" who continues to dig himself deeper into debt in order to appear large. Jayber goes to the Athey property and finds it ruined, overplowed, grown, unharvested and lifeless, with trees bulldozed, fences gone and a large patch of broken machinery. Mattie personally continues to live in the ways of her...