Jayber Crow, Page 3

  As close to the river and involved in its traffic as we were, you would think that sometime or other we would have traveled on it, but we never did. The world of travelers was another world to us, and it charmed us no end. We talked a great deal of what we had seen come and go on the boats. And there was the Princess, a showboat that would tie up at the landing once or twice a summer. The calliope would play, drawing the people down off the ridges and out of the hollows; there would be a night when we would all sit wide-eyed in the presence of a world entirely unlike our own; and then it would go cranking off upriver in the morning and our life would go on as before.

  Though it verged on the world of flow and travel, Squires Landing was a world in place. We were too busy to go anywhere. Besides the landing and the store, we had to look after the farm and the garden and the many branches of Aunt Cordie’s housekeeping. Aunt Cordie was always surrounded by food that was growing or getting fat, or being gathered or canned or cured or dried or cooked. We ate very little from the store, which stocked mostly the things people couldn’t raise: salt and flour and New Orleans molasses in barrels, pepper, cloves, nutmeg, vanilla, coffee, cheese, cloth in bolts, hardware, coal, harness, and so on. And Uncle Othy bought eggs and cream and old hens and other produce that the housewives brought in when they came to buy.

  As everywhere, people would come in to pass the time, whether they bought anything or not. When Uncle Othy had to be busy in his crop, Aunt Cordie and I went down and kept the store. When Aunt Cordie and I went wandering off to gather wild greens or berries, Uncle Othy kept an eye on the house. We really didn’t go much of anywhere except up to Port William to church on Sunday morning. We could easier have gone to Goforth Church, but that was Methodist. Port William, anyhow, was our town.

  Our nearest neighbors were Put Woolfork and his family on the upriver side, and on the downriver side Arch and Ada Thripple and their grown daughters, Wanda and Bernice.

  We hardly ever saw Put Woolfork’s womenfolk or children, but we saw Put every day. Aunt Cordie would say, “Now, that Put. He puts them all to work over there—I know he does—and then he comes over here to where he won’t even have to see them working. He’s got little enough sense to think he’s smart.”

  And Uncle Othy would always answer, “I reckon I go to all the sweat and worry of keeping store just to provide Put Woolfork a place to set down.”

  Put didn’t often buy anything. Neither he nor any of his family ever came to our house, and we never went over to theirs. “I see enough of him as ’tis,” Aunt Cordie said.

  But we often walked across the hillside to the Thripples’ to sit till bedtime, or they walked over to sit with us. Aunt Cordie taught me to call them Aunt Ada and Uncle Arch, and I did. She also insisted that I call their daughters Miss Wanda and Miss Bernice, and I did that too, but only in Aunt Cordie’s presence.

  The Thripples were good, industrious people like Aunt Cordie and Uncle Othy. They took care of themselves, were good neighbors, and I never heard them speak an envious word. Uncle Arch farmed about fifty acres, mostly hillside with a narrow strip of bottom. He stayed busy all the time, though he didn’t hurry much; he never had a lot to say, and was in most ways quiet. But he had one oddity that interested everybody and that nobody could account for. The old man was famous all over the Port William community for the noise he made working a team. Days would go by sometimes and we would hear not a whisper from over there, and then Uncle Arch would hitch up Dick and Bob and go to work, and then you could hear him all over the valley. He just ranted and rared.

  And I remember this:

  The only neighbors we had across the river—the only ones we ever saw—were an elderly black couple, Ben and Ellie Fewclothes. The story was that Uncle Ben had wandered into our part of the country from somewhere down south when he was a young man, with nothing of his own but the ragged clothes he was wearing. They called him Ben Fewclothes and perhaps because he needed a new one, he took the name. He and Aunt Ellie had a farm in the big bottom over there—about thirty acres or so, bordering on a slue. It was good land, and they made a pretty self-sufficient thing of it, the way all the farming people did then, or tried to. I called them Uncle Ben and Aunt Ellie. You might be thinking by now that I had a lot of aunts and uncles, but that was just the courtesy of those days; children were not allowed to go around first-naming older people.

  Uncle Ben would come over occasionally, but not often. He didn’t fish much, at least not in the river, and didn’t own a boat. But Aunt Ellie was a regular customer at the store, and whenever she came over she and Aunt Cordie would sit down together and visit and talk a while. Aunt Ellie conducted herself very consciously as a lady—was precise and careful always in her manners and her speech. Every Saturday morning she would come down the dug steps in the bank with a basket of eggs, a bucket of cream, and sometimes two or three old hens with their legs tied. Without much raising her voice, she would call out, “Mister Dagget! Mister Dagget!” And Uncle Othy would go in the boat and set her over the river to do her weekly dealing. After I got big enough, one of my favorite duties was to go along to help.

  When we got to the far side, I would step up into the bow of the johnboat, and while Uncle Othy held the boat steady against the bank I would help Aunt Ellie to step in and situate herself and her bucket and basket and whatever else she had brought. She would always say, “Well! Thank you, honey!” And then I would go back to my seat in the stern, and Uncle Othy would row us across. When we got to the landing on our side, I would go forward and help Aunt Ellie get ashore. And she would say again, “Well! Thank you, honey!”

  We were bringing Aunt Ellie across one fine Saturday morning in June. The river was as still almost as glass; it was quiet all around, except for Uncle Arch Thripple who was up on his hillside plowing tobacco with old Dick. Uncle Arch was ripping as usual:

  “Get up, Dick! Haw! Haw! Whoa! Get over haw! Get up! Gee, Dick, damn you to hell! Whooooa! Haw! Get up, Dick!”

  And Aunt Ellie, perhaps unable to resist, looking neither at Uncle Othy nor at me but speaking in her precise way as if to the swallows flying over the water, said, “Seem like Mistah Thripple having trouble with his Dick this mo ning!”

  I caught it—I was old enough by then—and was about to laugh, but Uncle Othy looked quickly at me and said, “Sh!”

  From start to finish, I was pretty much Aunt Cordie’s boy. When she spoke of me to other people, she always called me “my boy,” tenderly and proudly, for I was her helper. She was on in years and somewhat slowed, but she was seldom idle. We went steadily from one thing to another, from can see to can’t see, and then on by lamplight, and I helped her with everything: keeping up the fires, maintaining the lamps, cooking, cleaning fish, dressing poultry, washing the dishes, washing the clothes, cleaning the house, working in the garden, putting up food for winter. Aunt Cordie was good company and always kind, but she saw to it that I did my work right. The best part of my education, and surely the most useful part, came from her.

  When Aunt Cordie didn’t need me, I would go down and hang about in the store and listen to the talk. For there was always talk. “More talk than business,” Uncle Othy would say. But perhaps he liked the talk as well as the business; at least he always took part, and he was seldom alone. Sometimes he would let me help a little in the store, or would recruit me for some farming job that required more than two hands. But Uncle Othy was persnickety in his ways and hard to please; I liked better to work with Aunt Cordie.

  I was Jonah Crow in those days. When I thought of myself, I thought, “I am Jonah Crow.” A pretty name. I imagined that my mother had loved the sound of it. I was Jonah Crow entirely.

  Aunt Cordie had several pet names for me. When she used my right name, she pronounced it with an air of preciseness, as if to show respect for my great namesake.

  Uncle Othy said “Jony” for the same reason that he said “sody” and “asafedity” and “Indiany” But when he was calling me down, he said “Jon-ah” wi
th a heavy stress on the second syllable. “Jon-ah, get out of that, sir!”

  It has been a many a day since I thought of myself as Jonah Crow. To me, it seems that Jonah Crow was a small boy who once lived at Squires Landing with Aunt Cordie and Uncle Othy Dagget for several years. In those years, the only change seemed to be that from one Christmas to the next the boy grew a little taller.

  And now, a long time past the time of that boy, I live again beside the river, a mile and a half downstream from Squires Landing, maybe two and a half from Goforth, having traveled so far, by a considerable wandering and winding about, in only seventy-two years.

  Back there at the beginning, as I see now, my life was all time and almost no memory. Though I knew early of death, it still seemed to be something that happened only to other people, and I stood in an unending river of time that would go on making the same changes and the same returns forever.

  And now, nearing the end, I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time. Toward the end of my life at Squires Landing I began to understand that whenever death happened, it happened to me. That is knowledge that takes a long time to wear in. Finally it wears in. Finally I realized and fully accepted that one day I would belong entirely to memory, and it would then not be my memory that I belonged to, and I went over to Goforth to see if there was any room left beside my parents’ graves. I learned that there was room for one more; if it belonged to anybody, it belonged to me. I went down to the Tacker Funeral Home at Hargrave and made my arrangements.

  Some days, sitting here on my porch over the river, my memory seems to enclose me entirely; I wander back in my reckoning among all of my own that have lived and died until I no longer remember where I am. And then I lift my head and look about me at the river and the valley, the great, unearned beauty of this place, and I feel the memoryless joy of a man just risen from the grave.

  What I liked best to do with Uncle Othy was go along with him in the boat or the buggy. He loved to fish and to eat fish, and so we would often be on the river, the first and last thing of the day, to run a trotline or raise a net. I loved to be out there in the early mornings and the late evenings, for then the river would seem spellbound, we and it caught in the same spell. It would be quiet, beckoning us into the presence of things. Uncle Othy would feel adventurous at those times and was easy to get along with. He took care to teach me to fish and to handle the boat.

  Except for our trip to church on Sunday morning, our only regular use for the buggy was to take groceries to Dark Tom Cotman. After he was struck blind, Tom Cotman said, “I’m dark,” and ever afterward that was what they called him: Dark Tom.

  To get to his place, we would follow the river road—it was just a track in those days, with gates to open as you went along—across the branch and up past Woolforks’ and over the Willow Run bridge. After a little more than a mile, where the river came in closest to the hill and there was no bottomland at all, Dark Tom’s house stood on the hillside, looking right down at the river.

  A long wire had been anchored in the river and stretched tight to a post in the yard. For wash water, when his well was low, Dark Tom hooked a weighted bucket onto the wire, let it slide down into the river, and hauled it up again by a rope tied to the bail. Other wires led from the back porch to the privy, the coal pile, and the barn where he milked his cow and fed his hens and fattened his hog. When he got beyond the wires, he felt his way along with a stick. Sometimes he would feel his way clear down to the landing and spend half a day talking. When he got drunk, he said, he got around by falling: “I’ve surveyed the whole geography hereabouts in man-lengths.” He had been in the Spanish-American War, and had a pension. The neighbors, of course, helped him out, but he did pretty well on his own.

  He sent his list one day, as he usually did, by somebody coming down to the landing. Uncle Othy boxed up his order, and that evening we took it up to him in the buggy. Dark Tom was in the kitchen, frying corn batter cakes on a griddle. Uncle Othy set the box down inside the door and then stood, leaning against the jamb, and talked a while with Dark Tom. I didn’t hear what they said because I was too taken up with what was happening there in the kitchen. It is another of those moments long past that is as present to my mind as if it is still happening.

  Dark Tom was frying the batter cakes one at a time, feeling at the edges with the spatula to tell when to turn them. When they were done, he laid them on a plate on the seat of a chair at the end of the stove. His black-and-brown-spotted foxhound, Old Ed, was sitting by the chair, and every time Dark Tom laid down a batter cake Old Ed promptly ate it, all in one bite, and then sat and licked his chops until Dark Tom laid down another batter cake. I should have said something, I suppose, but I didn’t think of it. At the time, and for years afterward, I thought that Old Ed was eating Dark Tom’s supper, taking advantage of his blindness, and that Dark Tom and Uncle Othy were too occupied by their talk to notice. Later it occurred to me to wonder if that was merely Dark Tom’s way of feeding his dog. It is a question with me still, and the answer has altogether disappeared from the world.

  That would have been in the summer of 1923. Though of course none of us knew it, Uncle Othy was then living the last of his days in this world. One afternoon Put Woolfork found him lying in the mud down on the riverbank, where he had gone to bail out his boat after a hard rain. Put hollered for us, and Aunt Cordie sent me running across the hill to the Thripples’. Put and the whole Thripple family helped us to get Uncle Othy up the hill to the house and into bed, and then stayed and watched with us. Uncle Othy died just a little while after dark.

  And that left Aunt Cordie and me to keep things going there on the place and at the store. We were not, I believe, anyways near equal to the job. The neighbors, especially the Thripples, were always coming over to help us with something. Uncle Arch took over the crop on the halves, but that still left us a lot of work. And we missed Uncle Othy. We were always needing him to help with something or tell us something, but we missed him just for his own sake too. We needed to hear him say, “Hurry along with them biscuits, Cordie, for I got things that needs a-seeing to,” or, “If you can’t do it, son, quit and get out of the way. Don’t send a boy to do a man’s work.”

  It was a time under a shadow, and yet I remember being happy, for I had responsibilities then, and I knew that I was useful. I took charge of the milking and the care of the animals, and at the store I had the hang of things better than Aunt Cordie did. I had been watching Uncle Othy for years, and I knew how much he stocked of this and that and how he arranged things. And since I had been going to school some, up at the mouth of Willow Run, I could keep track of the figures.

  I could see that Aunt Cordie was grieving, and yet she took care to be a good companion to me. She praised my work, calling me “my boy,” and told me stories, and would sit with me by the hour after supper, playing Rook or Old Maid. We were, in a way, playmates.

  And then toward the end of the next summer I saw her begin to fail. She got so she couldn’t remember things. And she would have to rest two or three times coming up from the store to the house.

  One day, standing in the kitchen door, she called loudly, “Oh, Othy! Oh, Othy!”

  I said, “Aunt Cordie, Uncle Othy ain’t here.”

  And she said just as nicely, as if I had put her mind at rest, “Well, I reckon that’s why he don’t answer.”

  Sometimes she would look at me with a worry in her eyes that I didn’t understand until later, and she would say, “I don’t know. Honey, I just don’t know.” She meant she didn’t know what would become of me after she was gone.

  One evening when the wind blew up the river with the first cold edge of fall, she stopped to rest as we were coming up from the store. She turned and looked north, the way the wind was coming.

  “It’s got a chill in it,” I said. “We’ll need a fire tonight.” I remember I was looking forward to the fire, the good warmth.

  But she said, “Child, I just don’t know if
I can endure another winter.”

  I can see now that she had given up. She had searched inside herself, looking for some sign that she still desired to live, and had found none. She wanted to live for me, maybe, but not for herself.

  One morning I woke up and realized that it was daylight already and I had heard not a sound. Though there was frost on the ground, I didn’t even wait to put on my shoes but just barefooted it over to the Thripples’.

  Aunt Cordie had died in her sleep, an easy way to go. I am thankful.

  I was a little past ten years old, and I was the survivor already of two stories completely ended.

  4

  The Good Shepherd

  Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told. As almost any barber can testify, there is also more than needs to be told, and more than anybody wants to hear. The story of the next dozen years of my life could be made long, but I want to be careful to offer you only the proper handful—just enough to describe the course that carried me away from the Port William neighborhood and then twelve years later brought me back again to the proper end of my life, to the love of my life, Mattie Chatham.

  Aunt Cordie, departing, left behind her the problem of me. What, as she had wondered, was going to become of me? I could not stay on at the landing by myself, though of course that is what I wanted to do. I remember arguing, to the forces of seniority and authority who had to decide what was to become of me, that staying on was what I could do, that I was well able to do so. But of course I was only a child trying to call back a lost world.