Jayber Crow (13 page)

I was a refugee too, I suppose, but of a different kind. Just to look, you couldn't have told me from the others, but inwardly I knew the difference and I tried not to be in their way. I hadn't lost anything I wanted to keep. I hadn't carried all the downstairs furniture upstairs and then fled away, or stepped off a porch roof into a boat with a baby in my arms, or turned all the livestock out to save themselves if they could. And I wasn't waiting either, really. I was on my way. My mind had changed as completely as if I had never thought of going to Louisville. I was on my way home, as surely as if I had a home to be on the way to. And to my surprise,
I might add, for not a one of my teachers had ever suggested such a possibility. I suppose that in my freedom, when it came, I pointed to Port William as a compass needle points north.

Or maybe the needle was the five-dollar bill that Sam Hanks trusted to me on the basis of a lie.

What I was feeling mainly was pure relief. I stood a little apart from the others in that warm air, breathing it in and out, feeling the life ache back into my feet and hands, looking at the people and the strange luxurious light of that place.

And then gradually it came clear to me that we weren't just a helpless, aimless mob of strays, but people were there who were in charge of us—people setting up cots, moving about, asking if anybody was sick or hurt, giving help where it was needed. And then it came to me that I was smelling food. I looked around a little and saw that several smiling ladies were handing out bowls of soup and pieces of bread.

As I knew I wasn't exactly in the same fix as the other people, I didn't go to the table in any kind of rush but waited until I could go without getting in front of anybody. Especially I didn't want to push in ahead of any of the children. But when the way got clear, I went. I got my bowl and my spoon and my piece of bread and went off to the side again and sat on my box and leaned my back against the wall. I stuck my nose into the steam rising off of that hot soup and let my heart rejoice.

Pretty soon people began putting their children to bed. And the grown-ups who had no children were finding places for themselves. I didn't take one of the cots, but found a little nook behind a statue of a man of another time and folded up my raincoat for a pillow and lay down on the floor with my back to the crowd and my box between me and the wall.

I was thoroughly tired, and I didn't exactly lie awake, but I didn't exactly sleep either. As soon as I shut my eyes I could see the river again, only now I seemed to see it up and down its whole length. Where just a little while before people had been breathing and eating and going about in their old everyday lives, now I could see the currents come riding in, at first picking up straws and dead leaves and little sticks, and then boards and pieces of firewood and whole logs, and then maybe the henhouse or the barn or the house itself. As if the mountains had melted and were
flowing to the sea, the water rose and filled all the airy spaces of rooms and stalls and fields and woods, carrying away everything that would float, casting up the people and scattering them, scattering or drowning their animals and poultry flocks. The whole world, it seemed, was cast adrift, riding the currents, whirled about in eddies, the old life submerged and gone, the new not yet come.

And I knew that the Spirit that had gone forth to shape the world and make it live was still alive in it. I just had no doubt. I could see that I lived in the created world, and it was still being created. I would be part of it forever. There was no escape. The Spirit that made it was in it, shaping it and reshaping it, sometimes lying at rest, sometimes standing up and shaking itself, like a muddy horse, and letting the pieces fly. I had almost no sooner broke my leash than I had hit the wall.

 

In a funny way, it was hard for me to get up and leave that place. Finding such a shelter on such a night had probably saved my life, and I had this feeling that I oughtn't to leave until I found somebody to thank. I felt sort of captured by gratitude. And too, after coming in with them out of the cold darkness and passing the night with them, I felt a belonging with those people as though they were kin to me. But it seemed I had already received all the help I had a right to. I didn't want to stay until all the people woke up and the good women came back and started serving breakfast.

I'm an early riser. I come wide awake right out of sleep, and generally know the time within maybe five or ten minutes. When I stood up and made sure of my box and unrolled my raincoat, the place seemed unearthly quiet. Only two or three of the men had wakened and were sitting and smoking on the edges of their cots—farmers, I imagined, with no chores to do that morning, and they were worrying about their places and their animals. All the others were asleep, and I remember how small and still and tender they looked. If I could have done it, I would have liked to tiptoe around and just lay my hand on each one.

I put on my raincoat carefully to keep from making a noise and put my hat on. One of the wakeful men looked at me and nodded and I nodded back. And then I picked up my box and eased away.

The rest of my journey might have gone better if I had had a map.
Back in those days, filling stations gave away road maps, but they were meant for people who drove cars. I didn't know how they would feel about giving a map to somebody on foot, and I didn't ask. On the other hand, maybe a map wouldn't have helped me much.

The main trouble, as you would expect, was the high water. I have been watching the stages of this river for most of my life. I know how easy it is to suppose that you can sight a line across the valley floor and know everywhere the water will be when it gets to that line, and I can tell you that most of the time you will be wrong. It is almost impossible to sight a level line, to begin with. And then it is almost impossible to imagine how perfectly the river seeks its level and fulfills itself. In the time of a big flood, a road that you think of as an upland road may get to the bottom of a hill and all of a sudden disappear under water where the river has backed up into a creek valley for several miles. And of course there is never any telling when a hard rain will put a creek over a road, even if it is well above the level of the flood.

I was traveling by instinct again, and having a hard time of it. My instinct was to keep turning toward the river as I made my way downstream, going in a direction generally northwest, the way the river flowed, but always nudging northward or northeastward so as not to go too far astray.

But of course I did go astray. North of Frankfort the country is rougher than what I had come through the first day, the ridges narrow, the hollows steeper and more frequent, and the roads hellaciously crooked. I didn't know the names of the roads or where they went. Almost nobody I asked knew where Port William was, let alone Squires Landing. Whenever I asked directions or caught a ride with somebody who asked where I was going, I would just say, “I'm trying to get down the river.” I got a lot of bad advice. People either didn't know the way or were guessing, or they were mistaken about where the roads were blocked. I traveled by going wrong and then going right and then going wrong again, lost most of the time in the web of backroads, walking and occasionally catching rides, and sometimes even trying shortcuts through fields and woods. It is only forty-some miles from Frankfort to Port William, but it took me better than two days, and hard to tell how many miles, to get there.

Luckily for me, in that day and time that country was still full of little hillside farms, where I could get a drink of water from a clean spring or barn cistern and find a hayloft I could creep into at night. And at a lot of the crossroads there were little stores where you could get a cheese or baloney sandwich or a can of sardines and a few crackers, along with as much advice as you wanted about almost anything, and always a good fire to sit and eat beside. On this part of my trip I used my head and kept some rations in my pockets, just in case. That turned out to be a better idea than I thought, for I had forgot it was Saturday and the next day the stores were mostly closed. Aside from being more or less lost all the time, the biggest problem I had was finding a dry place to set down my box when I wanted to rest. It rained nearly all the time. There wasn't a scrap of dry ground anywhere that wasn't under a roof. I made up my mind that if ever I went traveling again—which, as it has happened, I never have—I would not carry my things in a cardboard box.

By the third day—the day known as Black Sunday, because then the sky and the rivers did their worst—I had pretty much used up my feeling of excitement and adventure. I was getting tired and sore-footed, and my hands hurt so from carrying my box that I was always shifting it from one hand to the other and watching for a barn or shed where I could set it down for a minute or two. When the rain and sleet quit I would carry the box on my shoulder, and that would be a relief for a while, but mostly the rain and sleet didn't quit. Mostly it poured down, and the visible world was just a few acres around me. I settled down to my journey like it was just a hard job of work that I had to do. For long stretches sometimes I would walk looking straight down at my feet, so that while I walked along it seemed that I was staying in place and the world was turning backward beneath me like a big wheel. When I looked up again I would see that I had come a considerable way since I had looked the last time, and that would be a pleasure.

I walked most of that Sunday afternoon, none of the few passersby ever offering me a ride, and by the time the sun must have been going down, I felt that I was getting close to the Port William country, though in fact I had not the least idea where I was. I was somewhere on earth under the falling rain, somewhere I had never been before. Pretty soon I spied a barn close to the road and not too close to a house. It was feeding
time. I watched from a row of trees along a rock fence while the farmer fed and watered a pen full of shoats and led several mule colts out to drink. When he had finished and gone away, the light was failing. I went quiet and easy over to the barn and let myself in. The loft was full of excellent, fragrant timothy hay. I ate a can of sardines, saving half of my crackers and two slices of cheese for breakfast, made myself a good bed in the hay, and slept like a dead man.

 

I don't believe I moved, or even dreamed, until morning. After I opened my eyes, I didn't move. Until I could see daylight through the cracks in the wall, I just lay still, feeling rested and at peace, thinking, “Now I am close. Today I will be there.” I said those words in my mind, and as I said them, I was moved. I had been gone for twelve years, and it had been a long time since I had thought of myself as being “gone.” But now, as if all of a sudden, I was going back. And being so close was not just something I thought I knew. It was a feeling I felt. It was such a feeling, maybe, as brings birds back to their nests, or foxes to their holes. I had not thought of going back for years, not since I got over my homesickness at The Good Shepherd. From then until Friday night, I had never thought of going back, and this was only Monday morning, and yet this feeling came over me that I had strayed back onto the right path of my life. It was as if in all my years of wandering, even when I had been the most uncertain or lost, I had been crossing back and forth across my path as if now and again I had seen a sign, “j. CROW'S PATH,” but without an arrow. I was telling myself, “It won't be the way you remember it. Things will be changed. People will have died. Trees will have fallen.” And yet, lying there in my hay burrow in the dark loft, my body still seeming asleep and my mind wide awake with the thought that I was now close by, I was happy. When the first light came, I slipped away.

It had stopped raining. Maybe the worst was over, I thought, but the clouds were still low. It was a gray, drippy morning. With the rain stopped, I could see that the road was leading out along the crest of the ridge toward the river valley, and pretty soon I could see the backwater lying over the bottoms on the far side. And then the road went into the woods and down the hillside, and soon I could hear the river. I knew pretty well what that meant—before long, if I wanted to follow that
road, I was going to have to swim. But I had had my fill of backtracking, and anyhow I was anxious to see if I could tell where I was. So I followed the road on down until it went under water, and then cut downstream along the hillside through a weedy pasture and a gullied tobacco patch.

And then I came to a little farmstead—a house, a barn, a corncrib, a henhouse, a smokehouse, a privy—perched on the slope with the woods behind it and water now right up to the floor of the house. I called, but everybody was gone. The hill went up too steeply behind the house to leave room for a back porch, but there was a side porch off the kitchen and a well nearby. I had pumped a drink and stepped across water from the well top onto the porch before I realized that I knew where I was. I don't remember figuring it out. It just all of a sudden came over me, so that in one breath I was lost and a stranger, and in the next I was found.

I was at Dark Tom Cotman's place, where I had watched Old Ed eating the batter cakes. Dark Tom, it seemed, was gone—dead, I supposed—and a family was living there. A rusty tricycle was sitting by the smokehouse, and one little pink sock was hanging on the clothesline. The man of the house seemed to be a fisherman as well as a farmer, for there was a good dip net hanging under the eave of the smokehouse, along with some snooded hooks for a trotline. And so they had a boat to get away in. When I looked in through the window-light in the kitchen door I saw that the room was bare except for the cooking stove, and I imagined that they had carried all the furniture upstairs before they left.

They had forgot a little table that stood on the porch right beside the kitchen door. A water bucket and washpan were on the table, and soap in a dish, and a little mirror fastened to the wall above. The sight of the mirror reminded me that for three days I had not thought about how I looked. When I peeped into the glass, I saw somebody it seemed I was not very well acquainted with. Since the year I had begun to grow whiskers, I don't think I had ever gone three days without shaving. My face was as dirty as my hands.