Jayber Crow (5 page)

“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.

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.

By then I had no living relative, or none who was known to me. The people around Squires Landing were poor, scratching a living from hillside patches as hard-worn as their clothes. The Thripples were old. And there are several good and pressing reasons why people are not eager
to take in a ten-year-old boy they are no kin to. There was no Aunt Cordie to come to my rescue this time. I had used up my allotted supply of Aunt Cordies. There had been one, when I needed her the most, and that was all.

I don't mean to say that one was not enough—one was enough and more—but only that there was no second. And so I went out of the hands of love, which certainly included charity as we know it, into the hands of charity as we know it, which included love only as it might.

I was sent away to a church orphanage called The Good Shepherd up in the central part of the state. It was a beautiful place, that orphanage. The superintendent's home and office were in a fine old brick house set well back from the road in a lawn shaded by big trees. Behind it, scattered over a broad hilltop, were the dormitories, the dining hall, the school building, and the gymnasium. When I lit there, I felt so far away from home that I might as well have been in another world.

My first memory is of the long driveway sweeping up among the trees to the superintendent's house. And then, immediately, I remember meeting face to face, across the top of a large desk, the superintendent himself, Brother Whitespade, one of the crossest of Christians, who said in a big, pretty voice, “IAh! This will be Mr. Crow.”

Brother Whitespade's desk was as wide as a field. It was as wide maybe as an ocean. For a minute or two I didn't think I could see across it. And then I could see Brother Whitespade over there, looking at me pointedly through a pair of steel-rimmed eyeglasses and smiling in a way that gave me no comfort. His stare was the most concentrated part of him. Otherwise he was a soft man with a smooth face, wavy hair, and a tight collar. But all that he was seemed to be gathered up in his eyes and pointed across that wide desk at me.

I knew all of a sudden that I was facing a man who was filled with power, and that I had no power, none. I could not have told you this then, for the knowledge did not come to me in words. It came into me as a hollow place that opened slowly and ached under my breastbone. I knew that I had come there by no thought of my own. I was a long way removed from any thought of my own. I had no thought.

I was who? A little somebody who could have been anybody, looking
across that wide desk at Brother Whitespade. I knew that I could not even leave until he told me to go.

“Jonah Crow,” he said, looking at a paper on his desk. And then he looked back at me. “Mr. Crow, since I believe you have not yet found your way to Nineveh, I will call you J.”

And I saw him write in large, curving strokes my name as it was to be: “J. Crow.”

I remember waking up in my dormitory room the first several mornings, for maybe a minute or two not knowing where I was, and then knowing. I would recognize the chest of drawers, the two chairs, the table, the two iron cots, the other boy still asleep. And I would be filled with a strange objectless fear, as if in the twinkling of an eye I had been changed not only into another world but into another body. Shrunken by fear, I lay on my back and looked straight up at the ceiling, waiting for something to move.

When the wake-up bell sounded over the hilltop and the other boy stirred in his bed and this new world began to assemble itself in small motions and sounds, the fear left me. I would know then that I would make it until night, when again in the narrow cot in the dark room I would cover my head and, in despair of anything else to do, go immediately to sleep.

I thought at first that Brother Whitespade, by changing my name to J., had made me a special case. But I soon found out that all of us orphans—who were called “students”—were known by the initial letters of our first names along with our last names. My roommate, for example, was T. Warnick. If the institution had received a second Warnickby the name, say, of Thomas Robert, he would have to be called R. Warnick. If he had had no middle name, he would have been assigned an initial arbitrarily: N. Warnick or P. Warnick, whatever Brother Whitespade chose. The girls too all were named by the same method. We were thus not quite nameless, but also not quite named. The effect was curious. For a while anyhow, and for how long a while it would be hard to say, we all acted on the assumption that we were no longer the persons we had been—which for all practical purposes was the correct assumption. We became in some way faceless to ourselves and to one another. You would discover,
for example, that E. Lawler's original first name was Elizabeth. But she would not look like Elizabeth Lawler; she would not look precisely like E. Lawler, either. I remember walking around saying my name to myself—“Jonah Crow, Jonah Crow”—until it seemed that it could never have belonged to me or to anybody else.

 

At Squires Landing everything seemed to be held close in mind—in my mind or in some older or larger mind that my mind belonged to. The world was present when I shut my eyes, just as it was present when I opened them. At The Good Shepherd I entered for the first time a divided world—divided both from me and within itself. It was divided from me because it did not seem to be present unless I watched it. Within itself, it was divided between an ideal world of order, as prescribed and demanded by the institution, which was embodied most formidably by Brother Whitespade, and a real world of disorder, which we students brought in with us as a sort of infection. Though of course I could not sort it all out until afterward—not, really, until after I had come back to Port William—I know now that order was thought to emanate from the institution, and disorder from nature. Order was of the soul, whose claims the institution represented. Disorder was of the body, which was us.

We stood in line for meals, for our thrice-daily entrances into the school building, for church, for almost anything that required going through a door. There were daily inspections of our rooms. There were nightly bed checks. There were supervised study halls and recreation periods. We were all assigned jobs that were necessary to our own feeding and shelter, and of course our work was closely supervised. We all, I think, had the feeling that we were being watched, not by God, which was the endlessly repeated warning, but by Brother Whitespade and his faculty, who evidently lusted to know all that we least wanted to tell. And to these ever-watching eyes we reacted in ways peculiar to ourselves. Some lived lives of flagrant indifference or transparency, seeming to have no secrets that they wanted to keep. Others, like me, developed inward lives of the intensest privacy.

But whether we were loud or quiet, sociable or solitary, we were constantly involved in sins against the institutional order. We lived within a
net of rules tightly strung between ourselves and the supposed disorder and wickedness of the world. But the meshes were always a little too wide; the net could never quite become a wall. There was leakage in both directions. Not all of us, maybe, but anyhow most of us boys were forever crossing back and forth between constraint and upheaval. And so we seemed forever involved in some form of punishment: gathering demerits, receiving hard licks on the seat of our pants, losing little privileges that seemed to have been given for the purpose of being revoked.

You will get the impression that I am looking back very critically at my old home and school, and I acknowledge that I am. But I mean to be critical only within measure. It is true that I dislike the life of institutions and organizations, and I am slow to trust people who willingly live such a life. This is not a prejudice, but a considered judgment, one that The Good Shepherd taught me to make, and so I acknowledge a considerable debt to that institution. But when, to be fair, I ask myself what I would do if confronted with a hundred or so orphan children of two sexes and diverse ages and characters all to be raised and educated together, then I remain a critic, but I can't say with confidence that I would do better.

As a matter of fact, leaving all my criticisms in place, I can say that I have kept some fine memories of my years at The Good Shepherd. I remember getting up early to walk among the trees on the front lawn while the light was fresh and the dew undried and the official forces still asleep. And when I stood in line before going into the dining hall or the school building I could see, off on the horizon, a good old brick farmhouse with trees and brick outbuildings. It was all well proportioned and laid out. Especially in the sunlight of early morning or late afternoon, it looked to me like a vision of Paradise. And I like to remember myself standing in my fixed and appointed place, always a little lonely and a little homesick, watched and under suspicion, looking over at that beautiful house at the point of the meeting of earth and sky. I would let my mind go there and make itself at home.

Although I can't say that I liked school, when I wanted to be I was a good enough student. I liked learning, especially the learning that could be got by reading. I made fair grades, but I and my teachers knew that I could have done better. I was, they said, like a good horse who would
not work; I was a disappointment to them; I was wasting my God-given talents. And this gave me, I believe, the only self-determining power I had: I could withhold this single thing that was mine that I knew they wanted. I had ways of not allowing myself to be fully present in the classroom, even though I was physically confined there. I looked out the windows. A window opening on nothing but the blank sky was endlessly attractive to me; if I watched long enough, a bird or a cloud would appear within the frame, and I watched with patience. A window that looked out into a tree was a source of inexpressible happiness, for it permitted me to observe the foraging of the birds and the life history of leaves. When my attention was called back into the room, as sooner or later it always would be, I let my mind wander. I found out that I could not willfully place my mind elsewhere, but that, if I let it loose from what it was expected to be doing, it would go elsewhere. “J. Crow,” they would say, “I am not out there in that tree,” or “J. Crow, would you honor us by paying attention to this problem up here on the blackboard?”

And I would say “Yes, ma'am” or “Yes, sir,” as if only too happy to have their help in dealing with my waywardness.

If the classroom was not my natural habitat, the library pretty much was. The library was a long room across the back of Brother Whitespade's house. There were lots of windows along the east wall, and comfortable chairs in front of the windows, tables here and there, and several tall cases of books. The books had mainly been donated, I think, and some of them practically nobody would have wanted to read, but there were some good ones too. The librarian was a nice lady named Mrs. Eades, who was hospitable and quiet and kind. Now and then our teachers would send us to the library on some project or other, but there were times too when we were free just to go: Saturday mornings, and every night between supper and study hall.

Back in a corner between a bookcase and one of the east windows, there was a small table where I liked to sit and read. It was one of the best places in the world to be on a rainy Sunday afternoon in the winter. And I like to remember sitting there on a bright Saturday morning in the spring, with the window open and the sun shining in and the spirea bushes in bloom outside. At first I read books about horses and dogs, because I wanted a horse and a dog. And then I read several books about
a boy named William Greenhill, an orphan like me, and then
The
Swiss
Family
Robinson
and
The
Boy's King
Arthur
. I read the stories of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, two more orphans, and Rip Van Winkle, and David Copperfield, another orphan.

One day I found in a trash can the hinder part of a little anthology of American poems. The cover and a lot of pages had been torn away, so that my copy began: