Jayber Crow (32 page)

And then I came aware that Athey had lowered the newspaper and was looking at Hiram over the top of his glasses. And then pretty quickly everybody except Hiram came aware of it. And then Hiram came aware of it. He saw where everybody was looking, and he looked around fast right into Athey's stare.

Athey said, “Some white people do too. Did you ever think about that?”

Athey had what I needed and didn't have: seniority and authority. Prompt, regardless courage too. He was a man of standing.

He wasn't finished, but he held Hiram still just by looking at him for what seemed like two minutes before he said any more. Hiram was still grinning, but only with his teeth.

“It might prove out to be,” Athey said, “that if we can't live together we can't live atall. Did you ever think about that?”

Athey was a storyteller too, as it took me some while to find out, for he never told all of any story at the same time. He told them in odd little bits and pieces, usually in unacknowledged reference to a larger story that he did not tell because (apparently) he assumed you already knew it, and he told the fragment just to remind you of the rest. Sometimes you couldn't even assume that he assumed you were listening; he might have been telling it to himself. With Athey you were always somewhere in the middle of the story. He would just start talking wherever he started remembering.

For instance, he knew the whole life history of Fraz Berlew, most of which, by the connivance or contrivance of Fraz himself, was funny. (Fraz was Fielding Berlew's father. The chair, so to speak, that had been held by Fielding in my time had been held by Fraz in the time before.) But there was, in Athey's telling, no sequence to the story at all. The sequence was in the events that reminded Athey of some part of the story. He would, say, fold the newspaper and put it aside, and tell just this much:

“Fraz Berlew was drunk and wandering. He wandered into a saloon
down at Hargrave. The saloonkeeper was out and the place was empty. Fraz just helped himself to a considerable portion of the merchandise, and wandered on.

“When he wandered back again the saloonkeeper was there. He said, ‘Fraz, did you come in here and drink up a bunch of my whiskey while I was gone?'

“And Fraz said, ‘I can't rightly say. But it sounds like me.'”

Athey's best story was a long one that I had to hear in a good many of Athey's fragmentary remembrances before I figured out that it was one story and not at least two. Not having Athey at hand in all the circumstances in which he remembered it, I will try to tell it put together.

Athey never knew his mother—that is its necessary beginning. She died before he was a year old, leaving him to be raised partly by his father and partly by a widowed Negro woman, Aunt Molly Mulwain, once a slave and the mother of the woman who, in a later age, I would know as Aunt Ellie Fewclothes.

Carter Keith was a good father. He kept Athey with him as much as his work and, later, Athey's schooling would allow. The Keith place was always astir with work in those days. Everybody on the place would be up and the men and boys at the barns while the stars still shone, and at work by first light. Carter Keith followed the rules that he handed on to his son: He made use of all the daylight he had and would ask no man to do anything that he would not do himself. His tenants and hands knew this and so respected him, and they worked hard.

In the fall and winter, in addition to his farming, Carter Keith had made a sideline of trading in livestock, tobacco, corn, hay, and other things that his neighbors had to sell. What he bought, together with the produce of his own place, he gathered at his landing, loaded onto the steamboats, and sent down the rivers to Louisville or beyond.

From the time he could follow, Athey went to work with his father. From the time he could straddle a pony, he went with his father on his trading trips through the neighborhood. They might ride eight or ten miles, winding about through the creek valleys and over the ridges, gathering up a bunch of calves, it might be, or a few weanling mules, and driving them back home by dark (if they were lucky). And so early in his life Athey rode with his father over the same country that later he
himself would court, dance, hunt, and trade over. In his life Athey had traveled much, though not extensively. He knew more of the history and geography of the country between Bird's Branch and Willow Run than most people know of the United States.

Athey didn't intend ever to be separated from his father. “That boy stays as close to me as my conscience,” his father would say. By the time he was six, Athey considered that he had found his work in this world. And so his father had to make him go to school. Carter Keith (and this also his son took from him) did not speak much, but he spoke pointedly.

He said, “Well, by God, you're going, and your opinion in the matter is of no consequence.”

And then, seeing that Athey was sulking, Carter said: “Moreover. If you get a thrashing up there, you'll get the full brother to it down here. You mind what I tell you.”

And so when school was in session, Athey did his morning chores, ate his breakfast, and walked the children's path up through the woods to Port William School, starting alone and arriving finally with an assortment of children, mainly Rowanberrys and Coulters. And when he walked back down again, no matter how he delayed, he found his evening chores waiting for him. His father would light the lantern and hand it to him. “If you come home in the dark,” Carter Keith said, “you have got to do your chores in the dark.”

When he was twelve Athey was big enough to harness a mule, and his father let him have a little crop of his own. By then, when his father would go away he would tell Athey, “You look after things.” Athey thought himself a man, but he was wrong. He said, “I was riding for a fall.”

That year his father had an exceptionally nice bunch of shoats, due to be fat and ready by the time the nights turned cold. The word had got out and a number of people had spoken for them—neighbors, people in Port William, some from farther away.

It happened, as hog-killing time came on and the talk went around, that the hog-buyers got together with Carter Keith and made a deal by which they would do the slaughtering and work up the meat down at the Keith place to avoid having to move the live hogs, and Carter in turn would provide scalding box, gam'ling pole, firewood, and other necessities at a small surcharge per head. They were going to kill a full two
dozen hogs, which would be a big job, but with all the help they had and some careful management they expected to do everything in two days.

The appointed time, when it came a few days after Thanksgiving, turned out to be more complicated than any man would have expected, let alone a boy. The complications came in stages.

First, Carter Keith had accumulated a shipment of tobacco that he would have to accompany to Louisville on the next boat. Which happened to come so early on the day of the hog-killing that you couldn't even call it “morning.” When they first heard the Falls City blow it was not a long time after midnight. They dressed and went down with a lantern to hail the boat.

After the hogsheads of tobacco were on board, Carter Keith, standing on the end of the gangplank, shook hands with Athey, who was standing on the shore. “Look after things,” he said. “See that they have what they need. They'll know what they're doing.”

The boat backed away and headed downstream, its lights soon disappearing around the bend, leaving Athey alone and in charge. This was the first complication, but he wouldn't understand that it was a complication until he had understood the second complication, which was still several hours off.

He returned to the house and got back into bed in his underwear and shirt, hoping for more sleep, but had hardly shut his eyes when the wagons of the hog-killers began arriving. The wagons brought, altogether, ten men: Lute Branch, Dewey Fields, Webster Page, Thad Coulter, Stillman Hayes, John Crop, Miller Quinch, Big Joe and Little Joe Ellis (who were no kin), and a small, stout-built man Athey remembered only as Tomtit. Some had bought hogs; some had come to help.

His father had emptied the barn to give stall room to the visitors. Athey went out with his lantern and showed them where to put their teams. Somebody had brought an extra scalding box, so there were two. He showed them where to dig the trenches for the scalding boxes, one on each side of the long gam'ling pole. They dug the trenches, laid fire in them, set the scalding boxes over the fires, and filled the boxes with water.

While the men stood by the fires, waiting for the water to heat and for the daylight to get strong enough to shoot by, Athey did his morning
chores and then rushed to the house to get his breakfast. He did not even take his cap off. He dragged out his chair and sat down in it without drawing it up. “Give me my breakfast!” he said to Aunt Molly, who was bringing it.

She withdrew his plate. “Now,” she said, “ain't you something, Mister Man. You take off that cap, and square yourself to that table, and act a nickel's worth civilized.”

Whereas his father only ruled him, Aunt Molly owned him outright, at least when he was in the house where she could get at him. He did as she said. She gave him his breakfast. When he had eaten it, she let him go. By the time he got back to the barn lot, two hogs were shot and stuck, ready to scald. He pitched in, determined to do a man's work that day.

The second complication was in the person of Put Woolfork, who left his mother's little farm above Squires Landing before daylight that morning, driving a mule to an old spring wagon with springs relaxed almost to the axles. Only the summer before, Put had acquired a wife to help his mother help him with his farmwork. And he had got wind of the hog-killing.

“He had it planned out,” Athey said. “He was a man who believed in thinking if it would get him something for nothing.”

If he attended the hog-killing and worked or appeared to work, Put thought, then surely they would give him a couple of heads and maybe a backbone, maybe even a sparerib or two. Maybe the more finicky among them (if anybody could be finicky in that hard time) would make him a present of kidneys or hearts or livers or milts or sweetbreads. At the very least, he would have a day of company and talk and a tub or two of guts to throw out for his chickens and dogs. He had two washtubs for that purpose in his wagon.

On his way downriver along the interconnecting farmtracks that passed for a road in those days, Put stopped at the Billy Landing to see what news of that quarter he might take in trade to the hog-killing. The Billy Landing didn't amount to much. The store there was a rough, nearly empty building where Jim Pete Markman went to appear busy when he got tired of sitting at the house. He and Put understood each other. Jim Pete's actual calling in this world was not storekeeping but whiskey-making. At that, Athey said, he was the best there ever was: “It was
prime stuff, as smooth as a baby's cheek—you could gargle with it—and it had a kick like a three-year-old mule.”

When Put had discharged the news from upriver and taken aboard all that Jim Pete could or would contribute, Jim Pete asked him what brought him down that way on so brisk a morning.

“Oh, they're having a monstrous big hog-killing down at the Keith place,” Put said. “Fat hogs by the dozen, and I don't know who all.”

“Well, where was I?” Jim Pete said. “Nobody told me about it.” And for a minute he sat and thought.

“Well,” he said, “I'll tell you what. Kill one for me and I'll furnish the whiskey”

“Why, sure. That'll be just fine,” said Put, who had no entitlement to agree to any such thing.

Put was the Julep Smallwood of his day and age. Above all things he loved the taste of somebody else's whiskey. “Why not?” he said.

“No sooner said than done,” Jim Pete said.

He brought out a small keg containing maybe three gallons of his surpassing product and stood it at Put's feet in the wagon. And Put set forth for the hog-killing, a rich man with his offering.

When he got to Carter Keith's barn lot, he set the keg on a big chopping block that had been upended in a handy place. “Boys,” he said, “Jim Pete wants you to kill one for him, and he's furnishing the whiskey”

And there that keg sat in the midst of the people, Athey said, like the golden calf.

Mr. Dewey Fields, who was the senior man of them, eyed it as if that was exactly what it was. “We ain't having none of that here,” he said.

And not another one of them said a word.

“That,” Athey said, “was when I ought to have picked up the axe that was leaning right there and split that keg wide open. I was big enough to do it and I had the right. But that was when I played the boy and not the man. After that, I stayed a boy more or less to the end of it.”

Put Woolfork did help some, and Athey of course helped. The visitors had brought lunches and they ate in shifts, hardly stopping work. Athey went to the house for his dinner. He submitted himself to the eyes of Aunt Molly like a good boy, hoping to get by, but she accused him as soon as he had drawn up to the table.

“What you got out there on top of that block?”

Embarrassed and trying not to sound like it, Athey said, “That's a keg of red-eye that Jim Pete Markman has sent down here for a hog.”

“Red-eye!” she said. “Listen at you!”

Athey felt that whatever was going to go wrong at the barn had already been foreseen and judged at the house. He felt himself to be in the hands of fate. He didn't waste any time getting outside again.

By three o‘clock, it may have been, they had twenty-five hogs scraped and gutted and hanging from the gam'ling pole. (Athey himself, sure in his confusion that his father would not want to be indebted to Jim Pete Markman, had insisted that they kill the twenty-fifth to pay for the whiskey.)