Jayber Crow (9 page)

That was in the early spring of 1935, just as the jonquils were starting to bloom. I brought my involvements at Pigeonville to an end with a few short farewells. What had happened seemed not to have happened to
me so much as to the world, which seemed all of a sudden to have got a lot bigger.

Since I couldn't stay where I was, I had to think of someplace else. I could have gone in one direction as easily as another, and so I went to Lexington, which was the nearest city. I had never lived in a city, and I thought I would like to try one. I had my several pieces of folding money in the lining of my jacket and in my shoe, but they weren't enough to go far. Pretty soon I was going to need a job; I thought Lexington would be the place for that. I trusted my willingness; I didn't aim to be any kind of crook, but short of that I would do whatever anybody would pay me for. I had in the back of my mind the idea that I would take courses at the university and sooner or later graduate. If I was freer than I had ever been in my life, I was not yet entirely free, for I still hung on to an idea that had been set deep in me by all my schooling so far: I was a bright boy and I ought to make something out of myself—if not a minister of the Gospel, then something else that would be (I had by now actually thought this) a cut or two above my humble origins.

I owned a few books and a few clothes, a razor, a toothbrush, and a comb. I packed it all into a smallish cardboard box bound with several wraps of cord to make it easy to carry, and just after daylight I set off for Lexington afoot. It made me happy to have all my belongings in a box that I could carry with one hand and walk wherever I wanted to go. I thought, “I could go anywhere. I could go to the North or the West. I could just put one foot in front of the other until I would see places and things I have never imagined.”

But after I walked four or five miles, a man driving a truck loaded with fat hogs stopped and gave me a ride, much to the relief of my feet.

I climbed into the cab, which was neat as a pin, set my box on the floorboard, and said thank you to the driver.

“You entirely welcome,” he said. “Entahrly” was the way he said it.

He seemed to wait for me to say something else. When I didn't, he said, “Well, are you traveling or going somewheres?”

He was studying me out of the corner of his eye as he watched the road, and I eased my hand down to where I could feel the little sheaf of bills inside my jacket lining and held them tight. I knew there were people in this world who would cut your throat for a quarter.

But he didn't look like that kind. He was a small, neat man with eyebrows that were too bushy and ears that were too big for the rest of him. His chin stuck out, when he wanted it to, as though he used it for pushing open doors. His clothes and shoes were nearly spotless, which you wouldn't expect of a man hauling hogs. He was smoking a pipe. After my walk in the frosty morning air, that warm cab fragrant with pipe smoke was welcoming to me.

I said, “I'm heading over about Lexington.”

And then, when I offered no more, he said, “Well, have you got a name?”

“J.,” I said.

He stuck his hand out. “Sam Hanks.”

I could have laughed, if I had let myself, or just as easily have cried. I knew who Sam Hanks was. He was the main livestock and tobacco hauler in Port William. He was the nephew of Miss Minnie Proudfoot who lived on Cotman Ridge above Goforth. All in a pang I remembered seeing his truck in front of my father's shop with a set of new racks, which I suppose my father had made. He had stopped by the store at Squires Landing a many a time.

It was a touchous moment. I felt like I was on top of a tall pole, ready to fall off. I could have told him who I was and he would have known. And yet it was too much. I had been ten years gone, and I had no thought of ever going back. To have identified myself to him would have been like raising the dead. I didn't have the heart. Also (as I was proud to think) who I was was my own business.

I shook his hand and said, “Where you from, Mr. Hanks?”

“Port William. Ever heard of it?”

“No,” I said. “Are you a right smart ways from home?”

“Not too far,” he said. “But usually I run to Louisville more than Lexington. Lately, though, I been coming up here some. People down home get tired of giving their stock away at Louisville, so they try giving it away in Lexington.”

“Do you raise stock yourself?” I asked, because in fact I couldn't remember.

He drew on his pipe a little. “No. There's plenty of people to do that—and borrow money and pay interest, like as not, for the privilege.” He said “privi-lege,” in a way I remembered.

“No,” he said, “I'm just the man that hauls it to where they can give it away. Me, I ain't aiming to owe anybody anything. I am an independent man, and take my hat off to nobody.”

That was Sam Hanks—an independent man indeed, as stubborn as independent, and almost absolutely principled. In the time to come I would know him well. He was a man quiet enough, inclined, like most Port Williamites, to keep his own vital concerns to himself, but he could be goaded into a kind of eloquence. What goaded him invariably was the suggestion that there was any human under Heaven to whom Sam Hanks ought to take off his hat.

His great enemy—and frequent client—was John T. McCallum. John T. did not goad Sam Hanks in order to enjoy his eloquence; their differences were profound and sincere. John T. was full of the spirit of patriotism and progress and he venerated public figures; he was therefore deeply affronted by Sam Hanks and could not resist the thought that Sam might be brought to see things in the proper way. In later years, when the two of them would converge in my shop, they always worked their way sooner or later to some version of the same conversation.

John T., for instance, would itch until he had to invite Sam Hanks to go with him to hear the governor speak from the courthouse porch in Hargrave.

And Sam Hanks would reply,
“
Hell,
no
!”

“Well, why not?”

“Because he ain't got anything to say that I want to hear.”

“Well, he's your elected governor.”

“He may be the elected governor of Kentucky, but he ain't the elected governor of
me
.”

“And I reckon the elected president of the United States ain't the president of you, either.”

“The Old Marster elected me president of myself.”

“What are you? Some kind of a communist or something?”

“I'm Sam Hanks and a grown man.”

On that morning in 1935 I had not yet heard Sam Hanks on the subject of his own independence, freedom, and dignity. But if he had proceeded to enlighten me I would not have been surprised, for you could
see that he had his ways. Something about him told you that he was easily offended. And something about him made you feel that you would not like to be the one to do it.

He looked slantwise down at my box, and then looked me over again in a way that made me realize I didn't look as neat as he did and my clothes weren't as good. In the college I would have looked like a poor student. Out on the road with my box, as I all of a sudden knew, I looked like a bum.

He said, “You got folks there at Lexington, I reckon.” He was a true son of Port William, where, as Art Rowanberry used to say, people don't have what you would call their own business.

“No,” I said.

He said, “Well, are you from around here somewheres, or are you from somewheres else?”

And then I lied: “We been living over about Bell's Fork.”

“And now you're hellbent for the big city.”

“I'm going to try it a lick or two and see what it's like.”

“Well,” he said, “let me put it this way. What are you aiming to do when you get there?”

“Work,” I said.

“What at?”

“I don't know.”

“Hunh!”
he said. “Do you think the country nowdays is full of people out at night with lanterns, looking for boys to pay wages to?”

“No,” I said. But he was making me uneasy. I was beginning to feel silly, and needing to give myself the dignity at least of desperation. With an ease that startled me I lied again: “Well, Mam's sick, and we're living with Grandpap, and he ain't able. So I reckon it's up to me.”

“Are you the only boy?”

“I'm the only chick in the nest.”

“The only one!” he said. “Well, there comes a time when we got it to do. And when that time comes, my opinion, we ought to do it.”

“That's right,” I said.

He took a little time then to revive the fire in his pipe, and then he said, “Fine country.”

“The finest,” I said. It was too. Even in that lean time there was good stock everywhere. The ewe flocks were just coming out onto the green wheat and barley fields with their young lambs.

We rode and looked a while, and then Sam Hanks said, “Do you know anybody in Lexington?”

“No, sir,” I said. “I don't know anybody”

He took a slow, thoughtful draft on his pipe. “Now, where I'm going to is the stockyards,” he said. “But if I was you, I wouldn't hang around there. You don't want to be no drover in no damned stockyards. A young man like you needs
a future.”

“Yessir,” I said. “I appreciate your advice.”

We were coming into Lexington then. He was dealing with the traffic and the lights. He had put the pipe in his pocket.

“Not bossing you,” he said, “but if I was you, which I know I ain't, I'd go over about the trotting track. You being a country boy and all, you could make your way there, maybe.”

We got to the stockyards. He drove in, turned, and backed up to a chute.

When we got out we could hear the bawling and bleating and squealing in the yards, and the drovers shouting.

I raised my hand. I was going to call “Much obliged!” to Sam Hanks and go my way, but he was coming toward me around the front of the truck. He hooked me by a quick thrust of two fingers into a pocket of my jacket, as if to hold me while he spoke his mind. He pointed.

“The trotting track is yonder,” he said, raising his voice over the clamor of the yards. “You'll find it. You won't have any trouble. Good luck to you. There's bastards in this world that would cut your throat for a quarter.”

And then I did say, “Much obliged,” and walked away in the direction he had pointed.

I was already several blocks away when I put my hand into my jacket pocket and felt paper. It was a new five-dollar bill that never had been folded but once.

 

And so the first money I made on my entrance into the great world was liar's wages. It didn't make me feel a bit better. But I didn't go back.
Sam Hanks had probably already unloaded and started home. I was stuck with my lie, and I was going to be stuck with it for some time to come.

Maybe because I was ashamed, I took Sam Hanks's advice and headed for the trotting track. As he had said, it wasn't hard to find. He may have been wrong about the future it offered, but I did like it better than the stockyards. At the trotting track the animals—which were mostly horses, with a dog or a goat or a pet rooster thrown in here and there—weren't all crowded together into pens but lived one to a place in stalls that were roomy and dry and light and well bedded. In fact, the horses lived better than a lot of people, including some of the grooms and stable hands who took care of them. They were worth more money than a lot of people, and they had the best grain and hay and straw; they never wanted for shelter or medical care or new shoes, and they were attended to like kings and queens. The horses were royalty at the trotting track, and their needs came first.

The drivers and trainers, you could say, were the princes—or anyhow the best of them were. They amounted to something; they were the ones who knew, and when they spoke the others listened. Below them were the grooms and stable hands. The trotting track was an orderly little world, ordered by the force of one idea: the idea of a paramount trotting or pacing horse that would stride down to the wire, not just in front of every other horse in the race but in front of every other horse that ever had raced up to that time. Everybody in that world was set in motion by this one idea.

It seemed wrong to me that some horses should fare better than some people in that time when so many went without enough to eat or wear, or even without a tight roof over their heads. And yet I too for a time came under the spell of the idea of the supreme horse. And some of the actual horses were wonderful. They had speed and courage and spirit and beauty. I remember several that just to see them standing in their harness like lords of the world could send a chill over you from head to foot.

I'm sure that the “future” Sam Hanks spoke of was there for some. And maybe, if I had been destined to it or called to it strongly enough, it might have been there for me. But my future, as it turned out, proved to
be elsewhere. I hadn't even glimpsed it yet. I had imagined no future. Who she was who would have my heart to own I had not imagined.

With Sam Hanks's five-dollar bill added to the several others that made my savings, I had a pretty good little nest egg, for the times, and I protected it like the Holy Grail. Nobody needed to tell me that the world I was in now was not the world of the college, where I'd had my scholarship and a sure job and, you might say, connections. The world I was in now could fix a man mighty quick to where he would need more than I had saved just to keep living. Suppose I got sick or broke a bone. So I made a law for myself that I wouldn't spend a cent of my savings unless I absolutely had to, but would live on present earnings only.