Jayber Crow (45 page)

“Much obliged to you, sir,” I would say. And I would say, to remind him, “No need for you to part with that. I'll just give you the use of it.”

 

The first thing I did, once I was moved in and had my household plunder situated to where I could find things, was plant a garden.

When Beriah Easterly died, Jarrat Coulter had bought the Billy Landing property, which now belonged to Nathan. There was a patch of good bottomland there, maybe four or five acres, well above most floods, that the Coulters always liked to keep in alfalfa, row-cropping it just whenever the alfalfa stand needed renewing. The little field was awkwardly
placed for the Coulters, reachable by road from their home places only by a considerable roundabout, but over the years they had taken good care of it.

“Now, Jayber,” Burley told me, “You'll want to put your garden over there. That corner next to your house is a good black piece of ground. And it's close enough to you that you can keep the deers and coons out of it—for sure, if you have a dog.”

I had never even mentioned a garden, but Burley, as before, was taking satisfaction in seeing me well set up in the world. Though he no longer went there much, he loved this place that he had given me the use of, and he loved the thought of my living there. He was seeing visions, and was full of advice and eager to help.

It surely did suit me to have a garden. The two properties were divided only by a gulley from a culvert under the road, and my first thought in response to Burley's proposal was that I would build a nice footbridge across the gulley. I knew also that I needed a garden, for I was going to have to be careful, as always, in my economic arrangements. But it was a new life I was beginning, and I wasn't sure how it was going to work.

“It's in sod, ain't it?” I said. “How'll I plow it?”

“Oh,
I'll
take care of that,” Burley said. “It don't need plowing. I'll just disk it up good and loose. You worry about gathering up seeds and stuff and getting ready.”

What he did, of course, since he didn't count himself an equipment man and disliked driving machines on the road, was send Nathan to do it. Burley wasn't inclined to put himself forward much. Mostly he left the planning of their work to Nathan. But Burley had seniority, and when he did ask, Nathan would comply.

Burley was right about the ground. Nathan disked it thoroughly and left it level, in nice shape. That evening Burley walked down to hear my compliments. We went over to look. He reached his hand into the ground, raised a fistful, and let it fall through his fingers. “Not a thing wrong with that, is there?”

I said, “Not a thing that I can see.”

It was a dark, deep sandy loam that looked almost good enough to eat. By the evening of the next day I had planted potatoes, onions, early greens, carrots, and salad stuff, and had set out a row of cabbages. When
the ground had warmed a little more and the danger of frost had entirely passed, I planted corn, yellow summer squash, beans, and other heat-loving things. I set out three dozen tomato plants.

Making the garden completed my departure from Port William. At that season I had naturally regretted giving up my garden in town. I had mourned over it, remembering the way the fresh young plants had looked in the long rows behind the shop. They had been art and music to me. But now I had planted another garden in another place in a different kind of ground, and expectation pulled my mind away.

And Burley was right too in seeing that a gardener in my circumstances needs a dog. I have had a couple of Border collies that Danny Branch picked up for me in his endless tradings. Once they catch on that you don't want the deer and coons and groundhogs eating your garden, those good dogs will make a lifework of driving them out, and a Border collie is not so apt to wander as a hound is.

 

In those early days on the river I was living one of my happiest times. The visions of my mind filled me from morning to night, and I would go to sleep thinking of what I would do the next day. I had lots of work to do. The house had from time to time been stayed in, but until I came it had never been lived in. It owed its survival to Ernest Finley's good work at the beginning, and to the durability of the wide old yellow poplar boards. But now it required many small repairs. For days and days I was eagerly employed with rule and square and hammer and saw. I patched and repaired and replaced. I added new shelves and cabinets to suit my own notions and needs. None of this was fine work. It was all of used lumber and was crude enough. But it was neat too, all proportioned and placed in a good way. It would be hard to tell you, hard for you to believe, how pleased I was by the new nailheads gleaming in the old boards. I bought lime and a brush and by degrees, moving the furniture here and there, whitewashed the walls inside, which brightened and cheered the place considerably. I built a new privy to replace the one that had floated off in the flood of 1964. I cut back the branches and the saplings that had closed in around the house.

Every little difference I made seemed a significant change in the world. I would finish a piece of work and then I would stand and look
and admire the way it fitted in with everything else. Just sweeping the porch seemed to make the tree limbs spread and hover more gracefully above it. Where a falling limb had poked a hole through a screen, I took a fine wire and stitched on a patch, and then sat a while and looked out the window, feeling that my work had improved the view.

Everywhere I looked, the prospect was new and interesting. Nowhere I had lived before had been so intimate with the world. A pair of phoebes were nesting under the eaves above the porch. Owls called at night, sometimes right over the roof. I would hear a fish jump and look up to see the circles widening on the water. Sometimes, just sitting and looking, I would see the fish when it jumped. Birds were nesting and singing all around—all kinds of birds, and I began to learn their names. Every tree seemed to be offering itself to the use of the birds. And there was the river itself, flowing or still, muddy or clear, quiet or windblown, steaming on the colder mornings of winter or frozen over, always changing its mood, never feeling exactly the same way twice.

There was a good dug well at an old house site up by the side of the road, not too long a carry, and so I had a faithful supply of drinking and cooking water. But I also put up a lead trough along the eave at the back of the house, with a downspout and rain barrel at each end. I cut up a fallen locust and made a footbridge so I could get to my garden without climbing down into the gulley and then out again. I made handrails for the bridge, which were unnecessary but made my bridge look, from a distance, like a bridge. For a while, as a sort of tribute to good sense, I had to stop myself from walking across it three times every time I crossed it once. I loved to hear the sound my steps made, passing over it.

With Burley's plentiful help and advice, I built a little johnboat. For lightness and durability I built it out of some excellent poplar boards that Mart Rowanberry found for me stored away in a barn. Burley and I (I mostly) sawed out the pattern with a handsaw, put a nice rake in the bow, flared the gunnels, laid in the ribs and rails and seats, set in the oar-locks. We caulked it and painted it green. One afternoon we slid it down the hillside and down the bank and onto the water. It floated light as a leaf in the dappled shadows. That moment was a height of joy that I have never altogether come down from. I opened a path down the slope and dug a fine flight of steps into the riverbank.

I had learned, once, from Uncle Othy how to fish with a trotline. That had been a long time ago, and now I had to learn again from Burley. From that time until now, when the stage of the river has been at all promising, from early spring until late fall, I have usually had a line or two in the river. The river and the garden have been the foundations of my economy here. Of the two I have liked the river best. It is wonderful to have the duty of being on the river the first and last thing every day. I have loved it even in the rain. Sometimes I have loved it most in the rain.

No matter how much it may be used by towing companies and water companies and commercial fishermen and trappers and the like, the river doesn't belong to the workaday world. And no matter how much it is used by pleasure boaters and water-skiers and the like, it doesn't belong to the vacation world either. It is never concerned, if you can see what I mean. Nothing keeps to its own way more than the river does.

Another thing: No matter how corrupt and trashy it necessarily must be at times in this modern world, the river is never apart from beauty. Partly, I suppose, this is because it always keeps to its way.

Sometimes, living right beside it, I forget it. Going about my various tasks, I don't think about it. And then it seems just to flow back into my mind. I stop and look at it. I think of its parallel, never-meeting banks, which yet never part. I think of it lying there in its long hollow, at the foot of all the landscape, a single opening from its springs in the mountains all the way to its mouth. It is a beautiful thought, one of the most beautiful of all thoughts. I think it not in my brain only but in my heart and in all the lengths of my bones.

Danny Branch was Burley Coulter's son by Kate Helen Branch. He had his mother's name because she and Burley never married. Or, you could say, they were married without benefit of church or state. Kate Helen's mother was a Proudfoot, and so I guess Danny and I are cousins, at some remove.

Burley, not being a very official person, saw no reason to make Danny officially his son until Danny was grown and Kate Helen was dead—though he had helped unofficially (and in fact in most of the conventional ways) in the boy's upbringing. It was only after Kate Helen's death that Burley, in rather leisurely stages, laid public claim to Danny, brought the young man and his bride, Lyda, to live with him in the old weatherboarded log house where the Coulters had begun, and made him lawful heir to all his worldly possessions.

Danny, by then, was already heir to much of his father's character and knowledge. They were good people, Kate Helen and Burley, and Danny was worthily their son. He also was a son of the Depression. He was born in 1932, right in the bottom of it, and before it ended he had grown into knowledge of it. He got what he thought was the point: national prosperity, and especially the prosperity of the nation's farmers, was not
permanent; it was not to be depended on; the predictions and promises of politicians and their experts were not to be depended on; if it all had come to nothing once, it all could come to nothing again. As much as any of the old-timers, he regarded the Depression as not over and done with but merely absent for a while, like Halley's comet. He suspected that the world of the Depression was in fact the real world. And so he became a sort of old-timer himself, more like his father or Art Rowanberry (or, for that matter, me) than most of his contemporaries, who tended to think that everything was going to get better and better, if not in Port William then surely somewhere else. He pretty much took a stand in the old way of farming he learned as a boy. He never quit working horses or (mainly) mules. And as Burley's tenant and then his heir, he made the old farm produce as much as it could of the things he and his family needed. He had perceived, with the help of some instruction from his elders, that there were people in the world who proposed that he should work hard for his money, and that they would then take it from him easily. He did not consent to this. He was, as a result, said to be “tight,” which meant that he never spent any money he didn't have to spend, he rarely bought anything new, and he had a pronounced leaning toward any good thing that he could buy cheap or get free.

His wife, Lyda, was a good match for him, except that she would sometimes oppose his fiscal reluctance when it came to the children. There would now and then be some joking about Danny—to the effect, for instance, that he could mash the face off of a dime between his thumb and forefinger, or that he walked on his heels to save his toes—but he was pretty generally respected too. He and Lyda, in fact, were generous people, good to Burley, to their children, and to their neighbors. They were tight of pocket, you might say, but free of heart.

Danny and Lyda's economy included the woods and the river. They ate a lot of wild game—fish, deer, squirrels, rabbits, and such. When their farmwork wasn't pressing them, Danny and his boys would keep a boat in the river down by my camp house. Their boat would seldom be the same one two years in a row. Occasionally they would have no boat at all. The boat, like a good many things the Branches had, would be one they had made or had got cheap and had fixed up. Like a good many things they had, it was for sale if the price was right. More often than not,
their boat (like mine) would be powered only by oars. But sometimes it would have an outboard motor that they had picked up cheap or dragged out of a junk pile and fixed up and made to run. The Branches seemed uninterested in getting somewhere and making something of themselves. What they liked was making something of nearly nothing.

 

After a late start, Danny and Lyda had seven children: Will, Royal, Coulter (named Coulter Branch, Danny said, for the stream that ran down off the Coulter ridges), Fount, Reuben, and then (“Finally!” Lyda said) the two girls, Rachel and Rosie. I won't need to make much mention of the children; I name them all together now to give them my blessing. If the world lasts, there are going to be Branches around here for a long time. As the boys grew older, they made do with old cars and old farm equipment as they earlier had made do with old bicycles and outboard motors. This is the way they will survive—by being marginal, using what nobody else wants, doing well the work that nobody else will do. If they aren't destroyed by some scientific solution to all our problems, they will go on though dynasties pass. By this late year of 1986 Danny and Lyda have already got a whole company of grandchildren.