Jayber Crow (6 page)

I thought
tintinnabulation
was the finest word I had ever seen. I kept that piece of a book with me until I came back to Port William. I still have it.

In my last years of high school I read Thomas Paine's
The
Crisis
and “Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson and
Walden
by Henry David Thoreau, a book that made me want to live in a cabin in the woods. I drew a picture of the cabin I wanted to live in, and drew the floor plan, and made a list of the furniture and dishes and utensils and other things I would need.

I don't remember exactly when, but I started copying out passages that I liked into a tablet. And then I started making what I thought were improvements on the things I copied; I was uneasy about that, not being sure it was right. Also I kept a list of words I especially liked:
independent
, I remember, was one, and then
tintinnabulation
and
self-reliant
and
free
and
outside
. There got to be a good many.

Among the books in the library were two large blue volumes containing photographs of World War I. And so at last I saw what had been going on over across the sea in that winter of 1917 and 18 when I had heard the rumors of war and imagined people shooting one another in darkness. I studied those pages by the hour, for the battlefields did look as though they had been passed over by something vast and pitiless, as our riverbanks at home had looked, scoured by the ice.

After I quit waking up afraid, feeling that I might be nowhere, I began getting used to the place. I began to take for granted that I was somewhere, and somewhere that I knew, but I never quite felt that I was somewhere I wanted to be. Where I wanted to be, always, day in and day out, year in and year out, was Squires Landing and all that fall of country between Port William up on the ridge and the river between Sand Ripple and Willow Run. When I heard or read the word home, that patch of country was what I thought of.
Home
was one of the words I wrote in my tablet.

Lying in bed in the dark before I went to sleep, I would picture myself coming up the hill to the house at Squires Landing. I would go around the house to the back, the way we always did, and up onto the porch and through the kitchen door. I would go through the house slowly, room by room, looking at everything: the kitchen table with three places set and covered with a cloth, the skillet and the pots and the kettle on the stove, Aunt Cordie's chair in the living room, her little stand table, her Bible lying on the table by the good Aladdin lamp, the beds in the bedrooms, the quilts on the beds, the rag rugs on the floors, the cracks in the wallpaper, Uncle Othy's whetrock on the mantelpiece and his old straw hat on its nail over the washstand. I liked especially to return to my own bedroom, which was the eastward one, the brightest of the two rooms upstairs. When I went in, it would be early in the morning, in summer; the room would be clean-swept, full of light and moving air, the shadows of the curtains swaying on the floor.

I would wander into the store and on down to the garden and the riverbank and back up by the coal tipple. It seemed to me that I could remember even the leaves and the grass blades and the little rocks in the paths. It would all be so real to me that I would think I couldn't stand it if I didn't just get up and go back.

But always in these imaginings I would be the only one there. For some reason, I could never make myself remember Aunt Cordie or Uncle Othy. I could remember them only by being reminded of them. I never knew when this would happen, but when I was reminded they would just all of a sudden appear to me as they had been on a certain day—Uncle Othy rowing the boat, Aunt Cordie walking down to the
garden, using her hoe as a walking stick—and then I would see them plain.

Sometimes when I wasn't trying to think about it, one of the old times would come over me entirely, and I could remember sitting in Aunt Cordie's lap while she rocked me and sang, “Old Crammy was dead and lay in her grave.” Or I would hear Uncle Othy spelling
woodp
ecker: “Wee-w-double-o-d-sockeedledypeck-e-double-ek-ek-r.”

Of course, what I wasn't telling myself, and maybe was trying not to know (though I did know), was that at Squires Landing, and Goforth too, things were already changed. The things I was remembering were gone from everywhere except my mind.

I would remember these rememberings after I went back to be the barber in Port William, for of course one of the first things I did after I had settled in was go to look again at both of my old homes. In my dreams of remembrance, I had failed to reckon not only with the certainty of change under any circumstances, but also with the new circumstances of automobiles and improved roads. Already the only surviving blacksmith shops were those in the towns. My father's shop, which had opened right onto the Katy's Branch road, had been torn down when the road was widened. And our house had burned. There was nothing there even to recognize—just a patch of weeds and tree sprouts with a chimney sticking up in the middle.

At Squires Landing the buildings and all were still in place, but were not cared for as they had been when Aunt Cordie and Uncle Othy were alive. The landing and the little farm still provided a living for the family that lived there, but you could see that the days of such enterprises were numbered. Goods were being trucked into the country by then, not brought by the river, and the stores at the river landings and crossroads were losing out to the bigger ones in Port William, just as, in another ten years, the stores in Port William would begin losing out to yet bigger ones in Hargrave or Louisville.

And so there would always be more to remember that could no longer be seen. This is one of the things I can tell you that I have learned: our life here is in some way marginal to our own doings, and our doings are marginal to the greater forces that are always at work. Our history is
always returning to a little patch of weeds and saplings with an old chimney sticking up by itself. And I can tell you a further thing that I have learned, and here I look ahead to the resting of my case: I love the house that belonged to the chimney, holding it bright in memory, and I love the saplings and the weeds.

 

I have all this in mind again now, as I remember myself remembering in my first years at The Good Shepherd. I was just a scantling boy, scared and out of place and (as I now see) odd. Not just lonely, but solitary, living as much as I could in secret, looking about, seeing much, revealing little. I was being preserved by the forces of charity in an institution, and at the same time I was preserving in myself a country and a life, steadfastly remembered, to which I secretly reserved my affection and my entire loyalty. I belonged, even defiantly, to what I remembered, and not to the place where I was. My not belonging to the institution, I suppose, is the reason I remember the next thing I must tell about.

For a while after they had come to The Good Shepherd, the newcomers were known as “newboys” and “newgirls.” This status of newness we sooner or later simply wore our way out of. Eventually we would not be new anymore, but familiars having names (of a sort) and local histories.

Eventually I also was no longer new. I was J. Crow to my classmates, and they were names to me. We remembered each other from the past. But having been once a newboy myself, I remained aware of the other newboys and newgirls when they came in. I was not helpful to them, I am ashamed to say; I was too secretive and shy and sly for that. But I was always aware of them. They drew my sympathy, and I watched them.

I remember a little girl, the E. Lawler I mentioned before, who came to The Good Shepherd when she was about seven years old. She was a slight, brown-haired, sad-looking, lonesome-looking girl whose clothes did not fit. She looked accidental or unexpected, and seemed to be without expectation, and resigned, and so quiet that even in my selfishness I wished I knew of a way to help her.

I watched her all the time. When her class went out to play, she did not take part but only stood back and watched the other girls. She always wore a dress that sagged and brown cotton stockings that were always wrinkled. She was waiting. I did not understand that she was waiting,
but she was. And then one day as her classmates were joining hands to play some sort of game, one of the girls broke the circle. She held out her hand to the newcomer to beckon her in. And E. Lawler ran into the circle and joined hands with the others.

I wrote
E
.
Lawler
in my tablet so that I would not forget her.

One thing you would sooner or later realize about The Good Shepherd was that it had no neighbors. Like (I think) most institutions, it was turned inward, trying to be a world in itself. It stood at the edge of the little town of Canefield, which it looked upon as a threat to its morals. In his many chapel talks and sermons, Brother Whitespade suffered over the possibility that some of the Canefield merchants might sell cigarettes to The Good Shepherd children for some of the tiny allowance of spending money we received, and over the possibly regrettable results of mixing between our older girls and boys and the older boys and girls of Canefield, who had not had the advantage of orphanhood and the moral instruction of Brother Whitespade.

And so The Good Shepherd, officially, was enclosed within itself. When we went out among the fleshpots of Canefield, as when we went anywhere, we went in groups carefully chaperoned. And outside influences were handpicked by Brother Whitespade. Remembering, as always, the free and casual comings and goings at Squires Landing, I wrote
neighbor
down in my tablet.

As a part of the general effort to protect us from outside influences, The Good Shepherd had its own barbershop—a chair and mirror and little backbar in a room in the basement of the boys' dormitory. The barber,
a friendly man named Clark, came in the afternoon two days a week, and so kept us boys respectably shorn. One of my jobs, after I reached the responsible age of twelve, was to be the barber's assistant. I swept the floor and shined the mirror and kept things in order. And then, because I longed for knowledge, Barber Clark showed me how to care for the equipment. He taught me how to clean and oil the clippers, and how to hone and strop a razor. By little stages, as I got older and taller, he taught me to cut hair and even to give a shave, letting me practice on him, good and brave man that he was. I got so I was good at it and liked to do it.

Because The Good Shepherd tried so hard to be a world unto itself, the students, especially the older ones, naturally hungered for the world outside. Among the high-school boys, whose hunger and boldness were greatest, there were always escape artists who stuffed their beds and stole away at night to visit town girls, to buy cigarettes, to purchase such as they could afford of the wares of the bootleggers in the hollow below town. They would sometimes get caught, of course, and would get punished, and of course would try their luck again. Not everybody went in for this, but for the ones who did it was a sort of guerrilla warfare. They would not have been easy in their minds if there was something they could have got away with if they had not got away with it.

My own temptation was not to go into the town at night but to escape into the countryside in the daytime. It was a fine, lovely part of the world—excellent, rolling farmland, with old ashes and oaks in the pastures, divided by streams with trees along the banks and patches of woods along the steeper slopes of the valley sides. As long as the weather was cold, I stood confinement pretty well, but as soon as the weather warmed and the buds began to swell on the water maples, I would begin to itch and ache to get out. I wanted room. I wanted to follow paths or streambanks a while just to see where they would take me. And from the time I was about thirteen, there would be times—Saturday mornings or Sunday afternoons or between classes and supper—when I would just go.

Over the ridge beyond The Good Shepherd there was a sizable stream, Dowd's Fork, that at one place ran by a big, shelving outcrop of limestone. Sometimes a whole band of us boys would disappear from official notice and go over there to swim. We would have two or three hours of
outlawry: swimming, diving out of the overhanging trees, and then sitting around in our birthday suits, smoking cigars that we bought at a little general store by the railroad bridge.

But even more I liked to go by myself, to begin just with whatever whim or disgruntlement or longing got me started, and walk without reference to anything but my own interest or curiosity until it came time to turn back. If nobody was around, I looked into barns and corncribs. I followed paths and the courses of streams. If I got hot, I would take a swim. One cold, bright, windy March day I came upon an abandoned house where several farmhands had built a fire on the hearth and were loafing and talking, the ground being too wet to plow. They let me warm myself at their fire and were nice to me. Sometimes I would take a book and climb into a tree along Dowd's Fork and read all afternoon. These excursions were worth whatever punishment I received if I got caught.

Sometimes, of course, I got caught. One fall afternoon, after the frosts had killed the summer foliage, I put a fishing line in my pocket and stole off toward Dowd's Fork. I was almost out of sight when for some reason I looked back, and I saw Brother Whitespade standing, facing in my direction, at the back of the library. I immediately pitched myself onto the ground, hoping he couldn't see that far, but thinking that, if he could, the dead weed stalks would hide me while I crawled into better cover. But when I raised my head to peep around, Brother Whitespade was coming straight toward me, wading through the weeds, raising his knees high. I put my head down and crawled faster, but when I looked again he was still coming straight toward me. And only then, and much too late, I realized that I was wearing (of all things!) a bright red sweater.