A Place on Earth (Port William) (11 page)

Jayber Crow mostly grew up and went through high school in a church
orphanage called The Good Shepherd.

It was there, as the school barber's flunky and understudy, that he
learned barbering, although at that time he had no thought of making
his living by it; it was simply a duty, assigned him by the superintendent,
to permit him to earn a part of his keep. He was, to the frustration and
annoyance of his teachers at The Good Shepherd, both bright and utterly
careless as a student. After he learned to read he would customarily read
his textbooks, or read all that interested him in them, within two or three
weeks after they were given to him, and after that he refused to open
them again. He read everything he could lay his hands on; by the time he
left The Good Shepherd he had read and reread the meager supply of
readable books to be had there. He managed, by the random force of his
curiosity, to learn a good deal, and most of the time there was enough
coincidence between what he learned and what he was expected to learn
to allow him to make passing grades.

He was vastly more inclined to learn than to be taught; that made
him the natural enemy of his teachers, and he suffered for it. He came
away from The Good Shepherd, he said, bearing more marks of schol- any discipline on his tail, by a considerable margin, than his teachers had
ever been able to imprint on his mind.

In his last year of high school he decided to become a minister of the
church that had raised him. Whether this was because of some feeling of
obligation, or some vague wish to do good, or what, he no longer is sure.
After the later failure of his motive, he was unable to be certain what it
had been.

He was given a scholarship to a small college run by the church, and
spent nearly three years there, waiting tables in the women's dining hall,
and continuing to be a recklessly bright and unsatisfactory student. But
the college had a better library than the orphanage, and he made good
use of that. In his third year, by a sort of boiling over of his intelligence,
he began to question the theological assumptions of his professors, and
then his own. In the spring of his third year he resigned his scholarship,
and said he was sorry.

He thought then that he might make a teacher of himself. He worked
in a barbershop to pay his way through a year and a half of classes at the
state university. After the religious confinements of the orphanage and
the college and his pastoral ambition, his freedom in the university town
excited him, and he began a careful exploitation of it. He divided his free
time between the library of the university and the bars and brothels of
the town-not anymore by his old recklessness, but by a strict husbanding of his time and money. By carefulness, he discovered, he could do
pretty much as he pleased, and among other things he pleased to do more
studying than was required of him. He became, for the first time, systematic and competent as a student. His grades improved. During that
time he was quiet and deliberate; his extravagances were as methodical
as his cautions; most of the time he was alone. For a while it seemed to
him that he was satisfied with himself. He was managing to save a little
money.

But he failed again, as if the failure of his first ambition infected his
second. It was the same failure of certainty and of purpose. He was
utterly free. It was, he believed more and more, the freedom of being on
his way from nowhere to nowhere. It was often a depressing and lonely
freedom. His leaving the church college had cancelled all but his earliest
beginnings. His year and a half at the university had failed to offer an imaginable future. Sometimes he half believed that, having been born
by nobody's intention, and brought up as a mistake by public duty, he
had come finally into his fated inheritance, the failure of all purpose. He
had made no friends. He owed nothing to anybody. He became more
and more depressed under the burden of his freedom.

He left, less because he wanted to leave than because he no longer
wanted to stay. He packed his clothes and books into a box, paid his rent,
and put the rest of his savings into the lining of his jacket and his shoe.
The simplicity of it startled him. In ten minutes he had cancelled out a
year and a half. When he ate breakfast he was on his way out of town.

Three mornings later, having walked the better part of the way, wandering the backroads to circumvent the waters of the great flood of
1937, he arrived in Port William, near which he had been born and had
lived his earliest years. The town's most recent barber had left. Using his
savings as a down payment, Jayber bought the shop. He slept that first
night in the barber chair, half freezing, his head drawn like a terrapin's
into the collar of his voluminous raincoat. In two days he was in business.
The question if this was the fortune he had come in search of passed out
of his mind; barbering suited him well enough, and would support
him-if enough hair would grow in Port William, and when he looked
over the prospects he figured enough might. His given name was Jonah;
he signed himself J. Crow; the town christened him jaybird, and then
Jayber.

His barbershop, which is both his place of business and his home, is a
tiny frame building in the swale of the branch. The shop has two stories,
a single small room in each. The downstairs room is the shop, walled with
white-painted bare boards, the floor polished by the tramping underfoot
of the shorn hair of generations; it smells of hair, hair tonic, shaving
lotion, mug soap, and tobacco smoke. In the center of the floor there is
a rusty stove, which serves in winter as a source of heat and a spittoon,
and in summer as a spittoon and a foot-prop. The barber chair is placed
near the door in front of a long mirror; beneath the mirror a board shelf
bears an assortment of bottles of tonic and lotion, a whetstone, a large
ornamented shaving mug and brush, an array of scissors and razors and
combs, a cigar box containing the cash proceeds of the day. On a table at
the end of the shelf a metal water container with a faucet perches on a two-burner coal-oil stove. In the open spaces along the walls are maybe
a dozen ill-matching chairs. Jayber rarely has so many customers as he
has chairs, but the shop is also a loafing and talking place, a sort of living
room, for the townsmen, and forJayber himself. In any assemblage at any
time there will be more of whatJayber calls "members" than there will be
customers. Around the walls are a number of calendars of various years,
none turned past its respective January. And hanging here and there
from nails driven in at random, there are Indian relics, hornets' nests,
extra big stalks of tobacco or ears of corn that the farmers have brought
in. Anything found or plowed up in the town or the neighborhood that
might be classed as odd or interesting, and that conceivably could serve
as a subject of conversation, is apt sooner or later to wind up hanging
from a nail injayber's shop-and will be duly examined and talked about
and forgot and left hanging. Over the years the shop has become a kind
of museum in which the town has put down what it thought about.

The upstairs room, reached by a stairway up the side of the building,
is as private as the lower one is public. Jayber has managed to cram all
the essentials of his life into it: bed, books, table, chair, dresser, kitchen
cabinet, cookstove. Few in Port William have ever been there, and those
only rarely not that Jayber makes any particular attempt at privacy, but
there is seldom an occasion or reason for anyone to come there. The
shop is his living room and guest room, to which most of the men of the
town consider they have a standing invitation. To eat or sleep or read he
goes upstairs and is alone. To work, or for company, he goes down and
opens the shop. He keeps no regular hours. His shop may be closed for
three days at a stretch, or open any hour of the night.

He has continued to be a student of sorts, as far as short funds and
few books and erratic habits have permitted. He is likely to know something, if not a good deal, about anything-and likely to have to be asked
before he will tell what he knows. He has come to a few friendships, all
of them made and kept in the public atmosphere and easy talking of the
shop. At one time or another, in one way or another, he has befriended
nearly everybody he knows. There is an offhand goodness in him that
has made him welcome among the men of the town. They know him
for good company and a good talker. They take for granted that talking
is as much his business as hair-cutting-at any rate, none of them ever feels obliged to get his hair cut to justify his presence in the shop. When
Jayber finishes with a customer and asks ' Whos next?" he is as likely as
not to find that nobody is, and then he will climb into the chair himself,
and, if no new customer comes in, talk half a day. He practices-sometimes willingly, sometimes by the sufferance of impositions on his good
nature-a kind of poor man's philanthropy. He lends considerably more
money than he ever has the heart to collect, and is apt at Christmas to
play Santa Claus, secretly, to the children of the ones who owe him most.
His shop is occasionally used as a roost by husbands and sons too drunk
to go home. Now and then he puts in a weekend drinking and wenching
down in Hargrave, and he makes no apologies. He is seldom invited into
the domestic life of Port William; he knows it by its manhood and boyhood passing in and out the door of his shop.

After he ate supper Jayber had a smoke, and then unloaded his table and
washed his dishes and put them away. He took his time. Working or loafing, his life is mostly public. Privacy is his luxury-his chance to be quiet,
to pay a little attention to what may be going on inside his head. He did
not come back downstairs until he remembered that the fire would be
getting low.

When he opened the shop nobody was waiting for him. He sat down
in the barber chair and leaned it back and crossed his ankles over the foot
rest. And then remembered the fire again, and got up and fixed it, and sat
back down. He came into the shop while most of the town was still at
supper, and now he hears things beginning to stir again: doors slam here
and there, a car engine starts and goes out of hearing over the rise-footsteps, two single sets and then a pair, come down the street, past the
door-two or three doors up the street a boy's voice calls "Here, Mike!"
The boy waits and whistles and calls again. It has been dark nearly an
hour.

Jayber sits up and takes another smoke, wishing somebody would
come in. Three times a day, morning and noon and after supper, the
town starts up out of a silence and begins again. These are the times he
finds it most difficult to be alone. There is an impulse in him, these times, to close the shop and go out and talk a while with anybody he may meet,
take up with anybody who may be coming by, and go with him wherever he may be going. His absences from the town always begin with
this impulse.

But now Uncle Stanley Gibbs comes through the door. This is the
third time since morning that Uncle Stanley has been in. As a general
rule the old man does not come to the shop except to get a haircut, but
he got one just three or four days ago, and so Jayber supposes he must
have something in particular on his mind. On his two previous trips the
shop was crowded, and he seemed satisfied and even a little relieved just
to sit down and pretend to be listening while the others talked. Both
times he got uncomfortable after a few minutes and, muttering industriously to himself, throwing out the pretense that he was having an awfully
busy day, hustled up the street toward the church.

He has pushed the door open, but is still standing out on the sidewalk.
In his old age he has grown into the habit of doing only one thing at a
time. He would not talk and scratch or look and walk at the same time to
save his soul. Now that he has opened the door, he glimpses in, peeping
up at Jayber and then around at all the empty chairs and then back at Jayber. His collapsed bristly old face is set in its normal expression of outrage that the world does not make enough noise. When he walks from
his house over to the church-footing the white line down the middle of
the road-he is always seeing shoot out in front of him automobiles and
trucks and buses he never heard coming. He knows, he says himself, that
he could burn up in his house any night while his neighbors all stand at
the door yelling "Fire." And hard to tell how many times he has been
insulted right to his face and not known it. Hour after hour the world
pours itself into his deafness like a high waterfall that turns to mist
before it can strike and make a sound. His face, by habit, wears his furiousness-not in response to anything in particular, but just in case something or somebody may be taking advantage of him.

Uncle Stanley stayed young a long time. He was wild as a bear, he
claims, and stout as a mule and bad around the women. He has remembered himself a good deal worse than he ever was, but this "memory" of
his wildness is a comfort to him.

In his prime he had a sort of local fame as a curser. The economy of his vocabulary, and the dexterity and versatility of his use of it, were
remarkable. He could talk for thirty minutes without saying a word fit
for the hearing of a woman or a child. They called him Stanley Ay-God
By-God Gibbs.

His first vice, his professed badness with the women, was cured by
time. He wore it out and discarded it-or was worn out and discarded by
it; and lived beyond it, and kept the overhauled memory of it for stock in
trade during his retirement.

And his vocabulary was completely renovated in collaboration with
Brother Preston soon after he was hired by the church to be janitor and
grave digger. Since then the only thing that has broken him loose from
righteousness and sent him climbing back up into the upper ranges of
his old eloquence was the news that his grandson Billy, Grover's boy, had
become the pilot of a four-engined airplane. And he has continued to
need all the words he knows to express his appreciation of that glory.