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 jou
rney 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.
The first thing I did, though, was eat the rest of my cheese and crackers. I sat on the porch, with water all around me, taking in the sights and eating my breakfast, eating slowly again because the supply was short. While I ate, a little flock of Dominecker chickens stood at the edge of the water and watched me. The house was on the outside of a bend. For a little way in front of the house the water was quiet, flowing slowly along without a sound, almost without a wrinkle on its surface. But out beyond and maybe a hundred yards upstream, the current came rattling full-force through the tops of the trees along what had been the shore. It sucked and swirled straight toward me as if about to carry off the yard fence, and then it swerved away and went out of sight beyond the corner of the house. The river was carrying a tremendous freight of drift—tree limbs and trees and all manner of human things such as bottles and buckets and barrels. I saw a johnboat go past, turned upside down, and a privy and just the four legs of a table sticking up, and a dead cow. I saw a fodder shock go by with several chickens riding on it. It was possible to imagine a couple of happy endings to that story, but neither one was likely. Chickens in that fix pretty certainly were not going to die of thirst.
I was sitting not six inches above the surface of the water, and you can’t be that close to a flood and not feel the size and power of it and also a kind of fascination. If you let yourself, you could sit for hours and watch it, just to see the next thing that would float by. And also you feel a little yen for a boat, and you imagine putting your boat right into the current and letting it carry you away. I could see a line of dead grass blades and leaves and little twigs rising up and floating along the edge of the water, and I knew it was still rising. And in fact it would rise another foot before it crested at about noon the next day.
When I had eaten and then watched the water until I began to get cold, I stirred about, looking for something dry enough to burn. I hoped for something worthless, but all I found was a pile of kindling already split and a rick of firewood in the barn. So then I had to take some care to justify myself. I figured that if it was my wood and a stranger came along in such a time, I wouldn’t begrudge him a few sticks.
I carried the wood and kindling out to a place well away from the buildings and started a fire. When the fire was going good, I pumped a bucket of water and set it over the fire to heat. I carried my hot water back to the wash table on the porch. I gave myself a pretty good bath and a shave, and dug a change of clothes out of my box, and then went over and stood by the fire until I was warm. It was good to be clean and warm and dry, and the fire cheered me up.
But I had to admit that I had come to another jumping-off place. I was back again in my native country. I knew exactly where I was. But what was I going to do? Suppose I made my way on down to Squires Landing. I couldn’t just walk up to the door and announce to whoever in the world might be living there that I had come home. I still belonged to it in a way, but it didn’t any longer belong to me. And even supposing that I wanted to go to Squires Landing, which
wasn’t far as the crow flies, I would have had to go I didn’t know how far around the backwater in Willow Run to get there. And if I wanted to see Port William again, supposing I did, I would have to get around the backwater in Willow Run and Katy’s Branch. Furthermore, I didn’t have anything to eat and before long I was going to be hungrier than I was already. So I had to think again.
I knew that if I went back by the road, as I had come, it would be a long way before I would be able to buy something to eat. Also, I couldn’t find that I had even the smallest wish to go back the way I had come. I decided that I did want to see Port William again. Beyond that, I didn’t know what I would want. From where I was I could follow the water’s edge downstream and then into the Willow Run valley. When I got around the backwater there, I could cross Cotman Ridge and come down into Goforth. There was, I supposed, still a store at Goforth where I could buy something to eat—if Goforth was still above water. I had a long, hard walk ahead of me, and the best I could do was just start out and put one foot in front of the other until I got to Goforth. Or somewhere.
So I washed the soot off the bottom of the water bucket, and turned it and the washpan upside down on the wash table, and weighted the whole business with rocks so it wouldn’t float away. There was corn in the crib, and I shelled what I thought would be a two or three days’ supply for the chickens that had been watching me ever since I got there. And then I shouldered my box and went on.
I was in woods, thickety in places, soon after I left the house. It was impossible to hurry there, and so I settled myself into patience. There was plenty to look at, and I picked my way along, staying close to the water because I was thrilled in a way by the sight of it and its nearness and by the difference it made. The sound of it, so close, was almost too much, so that I also had to resist a little urge to get away from it. The air was full of a hundred different sounds of pouring and of tree branches beating together, and my mind got full of those sounds. I was going along, not listening but just hearing, not looking but just seeing, not thinking anymore of where I was trying to go or even of how I was going to find something to eat, just setting one foot in front of the other.