Jayber Crow (10 page)

It was far from easy. There were plenty of people who needed work as much as I did, or more. There were considerably more than a pair of hands for every handle. And at the trotting track it helped if you were known. Of course, I wasn't known. I could have turned up from anywhere, and I didn't know a soul. All I could do was hang around and look willing. If a hand was needed on the handle of a fork and I was there and nobody else was, then I would earn a nickel or a dime cleaning out a stall. I carried buckets of water. I ran—and I mean ran—for coffee and sandwiches. Whenever I caught the scent of a small coin looking to change pockets, I tried my best to furnish the pocket.
“I'll
do it!” I'd say. “Let
me
do it!”

And in that way I got to be recognized a little. It got so that when some odd job needed doing, somebody would jerk his head in my direction and say,
“
He'll do it! Let
him
do it!”

But if you've never tried it, you'd be surprised how long it takes to make a dollar out of nickel-and-diming at little jobs that come just now and then. It was a good thing for me that you could get a pretty good meal (if you weren't particular where you got it) for a quarter. I was a long way from what you would call steady employment. However willing I was, I was a long way from working for anybody in particular. And hard to tell how long it would have been before anybody would have let me actually touch a horse.

I was lucky that spring was coming, for it was clear right away that present earnings might keep me clothed a little on the decent side of nakedness, and fed a little short of full, but they were not going to buy me a place to sleep. And so, lost and ignorant as I was, I made a good discovery.
There were drivers and regular hands who, if they saw you still hanging around after dark, would let you go up in a loft and sleep in the hay. They would always make you turn out your pockets to see that you had no matches, and then they would say, “Boy, if anybody asks you, I didn't tell you you could sleep up there. I don't know a
thing
about it.”

And then I made another good discovery. I liked those nights of sleeping in the hay. I still like to remember them. If I could I would find an old horse blanket—a cooling blanket was best—and double it and lay it down on the hay and pile a forkful or two of hay on top of it, and then just burrow in. That was fine when the nights were cold. When they were warm, I could just lie down anywhere on a pile of hay, or even in the bedding on the floor of an empty stall. Aside from eating and keeping warm, I didn't have anything on my mind, and I slept good.

After the human stir had quieted down, and the stable hands had quit talking and laughing or shooting craps, I loved to lie there in the dark, listening to the horses eating their hay or shifting about in the bedding. Now and again I'd hear a snort or a dog barking, and off in the distance the sounds of traffic and trains. I always went to sleep before I thought I would. The next thing I knew, roosters would be crowing and horses nickering, and though it would still be dark the horsemen would be up and busy, putting the morning ration into the troughs and fresh hay in the mangers. They were fanatical about feeding times. You could set your watch by them, if you had one. I would lie still a little while just to enjoy the sounds, and then I would get up too, to be on hand for little jobs and maybe a few scraps of somebody else's breakfast. As I said, I didn't have any cares except for a few necessities, and I felt industrious and alert and on the lookout in those days.

It was hard to keep my box of personal things either safely in sight or well hidden, but that got easier. And I wore my old jacket with my money in the lining like it was my skin. I almost never took it off.

“Boy,” somebody was always saying, after the weather began to warm up, “ain't you hot in that jacket?”

And even if the sweat was running down my nose and dripping off, I would say, “I ain't hot!”

For bathing and shaving, I would wait until after dark and borrow a water bucket, or slip into a public restroom.

I went on in that hand-to-mouth, day-to-day fashion until well into
June without looking forward or back and without any plans at all. And then everything changed, by surprise.

One of my problems, living on present earnings, was that my hair kept growing. People were beginning to say, “Boy, when you going to get you a hairnet?” And one or two even started calling me “girlie.” It was beginning to interfere with business.

So I decided I'd have to sacrifice one day's eating money to a proper haircut. Not far from the track was a sort of run-down barbershop on a run-down street. When I got there not long after dinnertime I was the only customer. I climbed into the chair and told the old barber to civilize my mop.

He hadn't even shaved was the kind of barber he was. As he started in on me, he started talking, as barbers generally will. He waved his comb toward a second chair that sat idle, covered with a cloth, and said that he and another barber had once stayed busy there all day every day with hardly time to sweep up the cut hair. And he went on to name all the famous horsemen who had been his customers, and he was telling me a number of things that various ones of them had told him.

Maybe I was a good listener, or maybe he hadn't had a customer for several days, but he went on and on with his talk about how good the times had been there in the shop back in the old days, stopping now and then to let fly a streak of ambeer at a spittoon under the backbar.

He went on so much that finally I got to feeling dishonest, sitting there listening and not saying anything. So I said, “Well, what happened?”

He said, “What do you mean what happened?”

“There's surely been a comedown,” I said. “It don't look like you say it used to.”

He hadn't been working very fast, and now he slowed down even more. He took another wild shot at the spittoon. “Well,” he said, “the other fellow died.”

“Well, what about you?” I said. “You're still among us.”

He didn't say anything for a while. He seemed to be refining his work, leaning way back to keep his bifocals homed in, and cutting little snips just here and there.

“Verily,” he said. “I ain't sober all the time anymore.”

And then for a longer time he didn't say anything but seemed to be
thinking, or maybe he was embarrassed by his confession. Maybe he was just snipping his scissors in the air over the top of my head.

Finally he spat and cleared his throat. “You don't know a barber looking for a job, I don't reckon, do you?”

“Yessir,” I said. “Me.”

He quit work entirely then and came around in front of the chair and stood there with his scissors in one hand and his comb in the other, looking at me, with his face all bristly and the white whiskers around his mouth stained with ambeer.

Finally he said in a low voice, “Hunh!”

He was brisk about his work after that. He brushed off the loose hair, shaved around my ears, and whisked away the neckcloth.

I had no more than stood up and was reaching into my pocket to pay him when he climbed into the chair.

“Suppose you just give me a haircut,” he said, “and let's see.”

He needed a haircut as badly as I needed to give him one, and I didn't hesitate. I flipped the neckcloth out over his lap, pinned it around his neck, and went to work. It had been a long time since I had barbered anybody, but I took my time and was careful. After I had cut his hair, without either of us saying a word I put in the headrest, tilted him back, lathered his face, and gave him a shave. He turned out not a bad-looking fellow, and a good deal younger than I had thought.

He got up and looked at himself this way and that in the mirror while I stood holding out my coins.

When he had seen enough, he said, “Turnabout's fair play. Keep your money.” And then he said, “When can you start?”

We struck a deal. He would furnish shop and equipment, and I could keep half of whatever I earned. I said all right, but what if I wanted to take a couple of courses in school? He said he would keep things going while I was gone, if I wasn't gone too much, and if I would do the same for him. I said all right, if he wasn't gone too much, and we shook. He was Skinner Hawes, he said, from down about Sweet Home, and I don't know to this day if Skinner was his real name or not.

 

Maybe a lot of people could say the same—I think they could; the squeak between living and not living is pretty tight—but I have had a
lucky life. That is to say that I know I've been lucky. Beyond that, the question is if I have not been also blessed, as I believe I have—and, beyond that, even called. Surely I was called to be, for one thing, a barber. All my real opportunities have been to be a barber, as you'll see, and being a barber has made other opportunities. I have had the life I have had because I kept on being a barber, you might say, in spite of my intentions to the contrary.

Now I have had most of the life I am going to have, and I can see what it has been. I can remember those early years when it seemed to me I was cut completely adrift, and times when, looking back at earlier times, it seemed I had been wandering in the dark woods of error. But now it looks to me as though I was following a path that was laid out for me, unbroken, and maybe even as straight as possible, from one end to the other, and I have this feeling, which never leaves me anymore, that I have been led. I will leave you to judge the truth of that for yourself; as Dr. Ardmire and I agreed, there is no proof.

Anyhow, I told Skinner Hawes that I could start right then. There was little enough work to be done—one haircut all afternoon—but I put in the time cleaning the place up. Skinner had fallen into the habit of putting things just anywhere and then letting them lie until he wanted them again, if he could find them. The only dusting that had been accomplished there in a long time had been done by the seats of the customers' pants. The big front window was about as transparent as an old bed-sheet.

So I carried out a big pile of old newspapers and
Police
Gazettes
and dusted everything and washed the windows and mirrors and swept the floor and mopped it. When quitting time came I went back to the trotting track and retrieved my box of possessions from where I had hidden it. On the way back I invested my haircut fund in a pretty good supper.

For two or three nights I slept on the floor of the shop, and then I found a poor old widow lady in a poor old house with a room to rent for the little that I thought I could afford. The room was just a little longer and wider than I was. It had an iron cot, a table, and a chair, and a few nails driven into the wall for hanging things up. It was the first room I'd ever had in my own right, paid for by me, with my own door that I could shut and lock. As long as the rent was paid, it was my room, and I liked
the feeling. I came and went through a side door. The landlady was a nice woman who would have taken me to raise, as the fellow says, if she had seen enough of me. But even when I was there I was never much in sight and made no commotion. I could have been a mouse in the wall.

At the shop, I saw right away that we would have to do something to stir up business. Skinner's old customers had fallen away, partly, I thought, because they didn't like the way he and the shop looked. Cleaning up the shop and keeping Skinner shorn and shaved would help, I thought, but we'd have to get the word out. So I got some paper and lettered out a few little signs. They said: SKINNER'S BARBERSHOP. 2 CHAIRS AT YOUR SERVICE. GOOD PRICES. PLENTY OF SITTING ROOM
.
And then I listed our “special prices” for the next two weeks, knocking a nickel off of everything. I didn't even ask Skinner; I just did it. And then I tacked up my signs on some trees and barn doors over at the trotting track, and I advertised a little too by word of mouth.

All that I had done didn't amount to much, really, but it seemed to help. The place looked better, and people began to drift in from the trotting track and other places, either to loaf or to get a shave or a haircut. We made them feel welcome, whether they were loafers or customers, hoping that the loafers would become customers, which sooner or later they mostly did. It wasn't long until we had enough regular customers to keep us going.

They were a mixed lot, I will have to say. We had people from the shops and stores in the neighborhood, people who lived nearby—decent-enough working people, most of them. We also had several second-string touts and gamblers from over at the track, a pimp or two, and maybe worse than that. I was pleased, for it seemed to me that I was getting a good look at city life and hearing talk and learning things I probably couldn't have learned anyplace else. And I did learn a good deal. For a barber, I never was very talkative. Mainly I listened. At Skinner's Barbershop I heard people taking things for granted that I had never even imagined before. And I mean several
kinds
of people, talking about several kinds of things. But we never did get any of the famous horsemen Skinner continued to brag that he had barbered in the old days.

We were doing all right. I don't mean to say we were getting rich, but we were getting the things we needed and paying for them. I was eating
my meals with the comforting thought that in several hours I was almost certainly going to eat again. And I had gone back to saving my money. I would go to the bank to change my small bills into bigger ones, so as not to accumulate too big a wad in my jacket lining or my shoes. But I never opened an account. I knew I was being reckless with my money, risking losing it or having it stolen or burnt up, but it was my money and I didn't trust anybody to take care of it but me. A bank account just didn't appeal to me. I was too standoffish and sly. I never deposited a dime in a bank until about three years after I set up shop in Port William. And even now I like to have a few bills stuck here and there, where only I know where they are.