Jayber Crow (14 page)

The first thing I did, though, was eat the rest of my cheese and crackers. I sat on the porch, with water all around me, taking in the sights and eating my breakfast, eating slowly again because the supply was short. While I ate, a little flock of Dominecker chickens stood at the edge of the water and watched me. The house was on the outside of a bend. For
a little way in front of the house the water was quiet, flowing slowly along without a sound, almost without a wrinkle on its surface. But out beyond and maybe a hundred yards upstream, the current came rattling full-force through the tops of the trees along what had been the shore. It sucked and swirled straight toward me as if about to carry off the yard fence, and then it swerved away and went out of sight beyond the corner of the house. The river was carrying a tremendous freight of drift—tree limbs and trees and all manner of human things such as bottles and buckets and barrels. I saw a johnboat go past, turned upside down, and a privy and just the four legs of a table sticking up, and a dead cow. I saw a fodder shock go by with several chickens riding on it. It was possible to imagine a couple of happy endings to that story, but neither one was likely. Chickens in that fix pretty certainly were not going to die of thirst.

I was sitting not six inches above the surface of the water, and you can't be that close to a flood and not feel the size and power of it and also a kind of fascination. If you let yourself, you could sit for hours and watch it, just to see the next thing that would float by. And also you feel a little yen for a boat, and you imagine putting your boat right into the current and letting it carry you away. I could see a line of dead grass blades and leaves and little twigs rising up and floating along the edge of the water, and I knew it was still rising. And in fact it would rise another foot before it crested at about noon the next day.

When I had eaten and then watched the water until I began to get cold, I stirred about, looking for something dry enough to burn. I hoped for something worthless, but all I found was a pile of kindling already split and a rick of firewood in the barn. So then I had to take some care to justify myself. I figured that if it was my wood and a stranger came along in such a time, I wouldn't begrudge him a few sticks.

I carried the wood and kindling out to a place well away from the buildings and started a fire. When the fire was going good, I pumped a bucket of water and set it over the fire to heat. I carried my hot water back to the wash table on the porch. I gave myself a pretty good bath and a shave, and dug a change of clothes out of my box, and then went over and stood by the fire until I was warm. It was good to be clean and warm and dry, and the fire cheered me up.

But I had to admit that I had come to another jumping-off place. I was
back again in my native country. I knew exactly where I was. But what was I going to do? Suppose I made my way on down to Squires Landing. I couldn't just walk up to the door and announce to whoever in the world might be living there that I had come home. I still belonged to it in a way, but it didn't any longer belong to me. And even supposing that I wanted to go to Squires Landing, which wasn't far as the crow flies, I would have had to go I didn't know how far around the backwater in Willow Run to get there. And if I wanted to see Port William again, supposing I did, I would have to get around the backwater in Willow Run
and
Katy's Branch. Furthermore, I didn't have anything to eat and before long I was going to be hungrier than I was already. So I had to think again.

I knew that if I went back by the road, as I had come, it would be a long way before I would be able to buy something to eat. Also, I couldn't find that I had even the smallest wish to go back the way I had come. I decided that I did want to see Port William again. Beyond that, I didn't know what I would want. From where I was I could follow the water's edge downstream and then into the Willow Run valley. When I got around the backwater there, I could cross Cotman Ridge and come down into Goforth. There was, I supposed, still a store at Goforth where I could buy something to eat—if Goforth was still above water. I had a long, hard walk ahead of me, and the best I could do was just start out and put one foot in front of the other until I got to Goforth. Or somewhere.

So I washed the soot off the bottom of the water bucket, and turned it and the washpan upside down on the wash table, and weighted the whole business with rocks so it wouldn't float away. There was corn in the crib, and I shelled what I thought would be a two or three days' supply for the chickens that had been watching me ever since I got there. And then I shouldered my box and went on.

 

I was in woods, thickety in places, soon after I left the house. It was impossible to hurry there, and so I settled myself into patience. There was plenty to look at, and I picked my way along, staying close to the water because I was thrilled in a way by the sight of it and its nearness and by the difference it made. The sound of it, so close, was almost too much, so that I also had to resist a little urge to get away from it. The air
was full of a hundred different sounds of pouring and of tree branches beating together, and my mind got full of those sounds. I was going along, not listening but just hearing, not looking but just seeing, not thinking anymore of where I was trying to go or even of how I was going to find something to eat, just setting one foot in front of the other.

And then, still following the edge of the water, I slowly turned away from the swift current and the uproar into the Willow Run valley, where the backwater lay as quiet as a pond—or rather a lake; it was wide enough—over open fields that last summer had been in pasture and crops. Everything was so still there, and the river's commotion so near, that it seemed you could hear and feel the silence. And then I saw something that made me stop.

Maybe fifty or sixty yards out on the water a man was standing in a boat. When I first saw him, he was just standing there with his back to me, he and the boat and the water all so still that I could see the gleaming line where boat and water touched. He was right where the muddy backwater from the river met the clearer water from Willow Run. Presently the man leaned and lifted a jug into the boat, and then he began to draw in a rope that was tied to the ear of the jug. I saw that he was raising a long slatted basket, which he hauled to the surface and rolled over into the boat. He did this gracefully, wasting not a motion, moving confidently and rapidly. There were several fish in the basket, and he placed them carefully into a half-barrel filled with water.

There came a time when I knew he had seen me, though he had not looked right at me. He went on about his business, and I continued to watch him from my place among the trees at the edge of the water. He looked to be forty or a little past. He was broad in the shoulders and strongly built. He wore a canvas hunting coat, much creased and stained, and a felt hat that no longer remembered the shape it had when it was new.

When he had let the basket back down into the water and had laid it again into its place, he tossed out the jug. And then he walked back to the middle seat, sat down, and looked straight at me. “Hello!” he said. He did not raise his voice, and in the quiet I heard him as well as if I had been in the boat with him.

I knew him then. He had fought in that dark war that had been so
fearful to me only to hear about when I was a child. Sometimes when he was out hunting he had stopped by the store at Squires Landing for a bite to eat to keep from going home. I had changed far more than he had, and I knew he could not know me.

I said “Hello!”

He was no longer looking at me, but at the water and the trees and the general state of things. He took out a sack of tobacco and began to make a cigarette, not ceasing at the same time to look about.

I felt called upon to continue the conversation, and so I said, “Some flood!”

He lit his cigarette. “I'd say it's a right good one,” he said. “But then what did we expect?”

He hadn't looked back at me. I couldn't think of an answer to his question, and he sat there at ease, smoking and continuing his casual study of the day and the weather.

Finally I said, “Wouldn't you be Burley Coulter?”

He looked straighter at me than he had before. “Well, I reckon I ought to know you, but I sho don't.”

“My name is Jonah Crow. They call me J.”

“Well!”

“I was born at the blacksmith shop at Goforth and lived a while at Squires Landing.”

“Aw! You're the one that lived with Uncle Othy and Aunt Cordie. You went away when you was just a little bit of a boy—after Aunt Cordie died.”

“And here I am back, passing through again. I'm trying to get to Port William.”

He gave a little laugh. “Well, I reckon you can get there, if you don't mind a lot of winding about.”

“Well,” I said, “I've
been
winding about.”

“Or,” he said, “I could set you down below Katy's Branch, and then all you'd have to do would be climb the hill.”

“That would be fine,” I said.

He was thinking again and didn't answer.

After he had thought, he said, “Well, well. I remember you. I sure do. And what's your line of work, Mr. Crow?”

“I'm a barber.”

He had a further thought, then, that amused him. “Now, I reckon you work in one of them big fancy shops—in Louisville, I imagine—with fans in the ceiling and a shoeshine stand and a pretty woman that files fingernails.”

“Not hardly,” I said. “At present, I'm out of a job.”

“Well, now! Ain't that a coincident! Or did you know? They're fresh out of a barber at Port William.”

I heard him, and then all of a sudden I was afraid. I said, “How come?”

“Aw,” he said. “Barber Horsefield. I don't reckon you knew him.”

“No.”

“Well, he pulled out—I reckon it was ten days or two weeks ago.”

I said again, “How come?”

“Well, he had a big family, and Port William will starve a barber with a big family, if he won't raise anything to eat, and Barber Horsefield didn't believe in raising anything that don't grow by itself, like babies and hair and subjects of conversation.”

“The shop's for sale?”

“Oh, I
imagine
it is.”

Then it was my turn to look about at the state of things and think.

He tossed away the butt of his cigarette as if he had all of a sudden remembered his manners. He rowed over to where I was, spun the johnboat around like a top, and pushed its stern right up to my feet.

“If you're going to Port William, get in.”

I set my box in, gave the boat a little shove away from the shore, and stepped in myself.

“Well,” I said.

“Well, what?”

“Well, I would like to take a look at that shop.”

He only nodded to show that he had heard. He was looking over his shoulder, rowing carefully to get the boat through a winding way among the treetops and out into the river.

When we were free of the trees, he set the boat right in the channel and down we went, just booming along. Not far below the mouth of Willow Run we passed by Squires Landing. Having kept it so clearly in my mind for so long, I saw it now in the strangeness of time. It was a
floating world, I thought, a falling world, a floating world rising and falling. All the buildings were still there, changed by whatever had happened during the last twelve years, and by the flood that had risen up to the foundation of the store and had carried a good-sized barn into the road in front of the house. But it seemed to me that even if everything had been changed, I would have recognized it by the look of the sky.

So far, what I have told you about Burley Coulter is what I saw and heard that day. Why he was where he was when I found him, I learned only after a while. I don't mean for you to believe that even barbers ever know the whole story. But it's a fact that knowledge comes to barbers, just as stray cats come to milking barns. If you are a barber and you stay in one place long enough, eventually you will know the outlines of a lot of stories, and you will see how the bits and pieces of knowledge fit in. Anything you know about, there is a fair chance you will sooner or later know more about. You will never get the outlines filled in completely, but as I say, knowledge will come. You don't have to ask. In fact, I have been pretty scrupulous about not asking. If a matter is none of my business, I ask nothing and tell nothing. And yet I am amazed at what I have come to know, and how much.

I know, for instance, that on that January morning Burley had three baskets in the backwater in Willow Run valley, not just the one I saw him raise. He had started out on Friday morning, about when I left Lexington. He had known that people in the bottoms and on the lower slopes of the valleys would be in trouble and needing help. But also—and I know this just from knowing him—the rising water called out something young and wild in him, and he couldn't stay away from it. He had
hunted all over the country and knew everybody, and so he worked his way upstream in the deadwater and the eddies close to shore, looking in at the farmsteads that were reachable at that stage by boat, and helping where help was needed. At night, because he was liked and welcomed almost everywhere, he stayed wherever he had got to when dark fell. He worked with other boatmen along the shores of the river and in the valleys, first of Katy's Branch and then of Willow Run.

By noon on Black Sunday, everything had been done that could be done. Everything was safe that could be made safe. Burley, who had spent the night before at the house of his old hunting and fishing partner, Loyd Thigpen, well above the water on one of the slopes of Willow Run, was there again, eating a splendid meal featuring pork sausage, hot biscuits, and gravy. Loyd Thigpen, though he was getting on in years, was as answerable to the excitement of the time as Burley was, and they had been in the boat together for the past day and a half.