Jayber Crow

  And then, still following the edge of the water, I slowly turned away from the swift current and the uproar into the Willow Run valley, where the backwater lay as quiet as a pond—or rather a lake; it was wide enough—over open fields that last summer had been in pasture and crops. Everything was so still there, and the river’s commotion so near, that it seemed you could hear and feel the silence. And then I saw something that made me stop.

  Maybe fifty or sixty yards out on the water a man was standing in a boat. When I first saw him, he was just standing there with his back to me, he and the boat and the water all so still that I could see the gleaming line where boat and water touched. He was right where the muddy backwater from the river met the clearer water from Willow Run. Presently the man leaned and lifted a jug into the boat, and then he began to draw in a rope that was tied to the ear of the jug. I saw that he was raising a long slatted basket, which he hauled to the surface and rolled over into the boat. He did this gracefully, wasting not a motion, moving confidently and rapidly. There were several fish in the basket, and he placed them carefully into a half-barrel filled with water.

  There came a time when I knew he had seen me, though he had not looked right at me. He went on about his business, and I continued to watch him from my place among the trees at the edge of the water. He looked to be forty or a little past. He was broad in the shoulders and strongly built. He wore a canvas hunting coat, much creased and stained, and a felt hat that no longer remembered the shape it had when it was new.

  When he had let the basket back down into the water and had laid it again into its place, he tossed out the jug. And then he walked back to the middle seat, sat down, and looked straight at me. “Hello!” he said. He did not raise his voice, and in the quiet I heard him as well as if I had been in the boat with him.

  I knew him then. He had fought in that dark war that had been so fearful to me only to hear about when I was a child. Sometimes when he was out hunting he had stopped by the store at Squires Landing for a bite to eat to keep from going home. I had changed far more than he had, and I knew he could not know me.

  I said “Hello!”

  He was no longer looking at me, but at the water and the trees and the general state of things. He took out a sack of tobacco and began to make a cigarette, not ceasing at the same time to look about.

  I felt called upon to continue the conversation, and so I said, “Some flood!”

  He lit his cigarette. “I’d say it’s a right good one,” he said. “But then what did we expect?”

  He hadn’t looked back at me. I couldn’t think of an answer to his question, and he sat there at ease, smoking and continuing his casual study of the day and the weather.

  Finally I said, “Wouldn’t you be Burley Coulter?”

  He looked straighter at me than he had before. “Well, I reckon I ought to know you, but I sho don’t.”

  “My name is Jonah Crow. They call me J.”

  “Well!”

  “I was born at the blacksmith shop at Goforth and lived a while at Squires Landing.”

  “Aw! You’re the one that lived with Uncle Othy and Aunt Cordie. You went away when you was just a little bit of a boy—after Aunt Cordie died.”

  “And here I am back, passing through again. I’m trying to get to Port William.”

  He gave a little laugh. “Well, I reckon you can get there, if you don’t mind a lot of winding about.”

  “Well,” I said, “I’ve been winding about.”

  “Or,” he said, “I could set you down below Katy’s Branch, and then all you’d have to do would be climb the hill.”

  “That would be fine,” I said.

  He was thinking again and didn’t answer.

  After he had thought, he said, “Well, well. I remember you. I sure do. And what’s your line of work, Mr. Crow?”

  “I’m a barber.”

  He had a further thought, then, that amused him. “Now, I reckon you work in one of them big fancy shops—in Louisville, I imagine—with fans in the ceiling and a shoeshine stand and a pretty woman that files fingernails.”

  “Not hardly,” I said. “At present, I’m out of a job.”

  “Well, now! Ain’t that a coincident! Or did you know? They’re fresh out of a barber at Port William.”

  I heard him, and then all of a sudden I was afraid. I said, “How come?”

  “Aw,” he said. “Barber Horsefield. I don’t reckon you knew him.”

  “No.”

  “Well, he pulled out—I reckon it was ten days or two weeks ago.”

  I said again, “How come?”

  “Well, he had a big family, and Port William will starve a barber with a big family, if he won’t raise anything to eat, and Barber Horsefield didn’t believe in raising anything that don’t grow by itself, like babies and hair and subjects of conversation.”

  “The shop’s for sale?”

  “Oh, I imagine it is.”

  Then it was my turn to look about at the state of things and think.

  He tossed away the butt of his cigarette as if he had all of a sudden remembered his manners. He rowed over to where I was, spun the johnboat around like a top, and pushed its stern right up to my feet.

  “If you’re going to Port William, get in.”

  I set my box in, gave the boat a little shove away from the shore, and stepped in myself.

  “Well,” I said.

  “Well, what?”

  “Well, I would like to take a look at that shop.”

  He only nodded to show that he had heard. He was looking over his shoulder, rowing carefully to get the boat through a winding way among the treetops and out into the river.

  When we were free of the trees, he set the boat right in the channel and down we went, just booming along. Not far below the mouth of Willow Run we passed by Squires Landing. Having kept it so clearly in my mind for so long, I saw it now in the strangeness of time. It was a floating world, I thought, a falling world, a floating world rising and falling. All the buildings were still there, changed by whatever had happened during the last twelve years, and by the flood that had risen up to the foundation of the store and had carried a good-sized barn into the road in front of the house. But it seemed to me that even if everything had been changed, I would have recognized it by the look of the sky.

  9

  Barber Horsefield’s Successor

  So far, what I have told you about Burley Coulter is what I saw and heard that day. Why he was where he was when I found him, I learned only after a while. I don’t mean for you to believe that even barbers ever know the whole story. But it’s a fact that knowledge comes to barbers, just as stray cats come to milking barns. If you are a barber and you stay in one place long enough, eventually you will know the outlines of a lot of stories, and you will see how the bits and pieces of knowledge fit in. Anything you know about, there is a fair chance you will sooner or later know more about. You will never get the outlines filled in completely, but as I say, knowledge will come. You don’t have to ask. In fact, I have been pretty scrupulous about not asking. If a matter is none of my business, I ask nothing and tell nothing. And yet I am amazed at what I have come to know, and how much.

  I know, for instance, that on that January morning Burley had three baskets in the backwater in Willow Run valley, not just the one I saw him raise. He had started out on Friday morning, about when I left Lexington. He had known that people in the bottoms and on the lower slopes of the valleys would be in trouble and needing help. But also—and I know this just from knowing him—the rising water called out something young and wild in him, and he couldn’t stay away from it. He had hunted all over the country and knew everybody, and so he worked his way upstream in the deadwater and the eddies close to shore, looking in at the farmsteads that were reachable at that stage by boat, and helping where help was needed. At night, because he was liked and welcomed almost everywhere, he stayed wherever he had got to when dark fell. He worked with other boatmen along the sh
ores of the river and in the valleys, first of Katy’s Branch and then of Willow Run.

  By noon on Black Sunday, everything had been done that could be done. Everything was safe that could be made safe. Burley, who had spent the night before at the house of his old hunting and fishing partner, Loyd Thigpen, well above the water on one of the slopes of Willow Run, was there again, eating a splendid meal featuring pork sausage, hot biscuits, and gravy. Loyd Thigpen, though he was getting on in years, was as answerable to the excitement of the time as Burley was, and they had been in the boat together for the past day and a half.

  “Compliments on your vittles, Mrs. Thigpen,” Burley said as he buttered his seventh and eighth biscuits and reached for the pitcher of sorghum molasses.

  “They do very well,” said Loyd Thigpen, knowing his man, “but don’t it ever come over you at a time like this that you’d enjoy to have a good mess of feesh?”

  “Well,” Burley said, “being as it’s up and we can’t help it, we might as well fish.”

  They agreed that they would put out Loyd’s fish baskets that afternoon, Burley would take what fish he found in them on his way home the next morning, and after that Loyd would raise them for himself.

  And so when I came upon him that Monday morning, Burley was ready to raise the third basket, but for the moment was standing there so quietly just to warm his hands in his pockets and enjoy himself, afloat in the flooded world.

  While we were going down the river we didn’t say anything. Keeping his own direction out there in the confusion of currents took all of Burley’s attention, and I had plenty to look at and think about on my own. Among other things, I was wondering where and how we were going to get ashore. But at a certain place, Burley pulled us out of the channel and through an opening among the tops of the shore trees. And then we were in the woods. As the slope of the hillside rose under us, the tops of the trees rose over us, and it was clear going among the trunks of some fairly big elms and box elders and water maples and sycamores and a few walnut and ash.

  Burley rowed by the gable and roof of what looked to be a camp house. He said, “It don’t look like it now, but I slept there Thursday night.”

  The hillside was steep in that place. Not far behind the house, Burley pulled up beside a sort of wooden cage, only the top of which was visible above the water. He put the fish he had caught into the cage, saving out and stringing two nice catfish that weighed about five pounds apiece. Then he rowed to shore.

  “From here,” he said, “we got to walk or fly.”

  He laid his oars in the bottom of the boat, picked up the two fish, and stepped ashore. When he had got out, I followed, carrying my box.

  He tied the boat to a tree and started up the slope toward the road, which wasn’t far. He hadn’t looked at me again.

  I said, “Much obliged for the lift, Mr. Coulter.”

  He said, walking on, “Burley. Burley. Mr. Coulter’s my daddy.”

  I followed him on up to the road. When we got up there onto comfortable footing, he stopped and turned to me. He looked me over, from top to toe and from toe to top, and then he grinned at me, remembering, I think, that I had been “winding about” for three days.

  He said, “How was it you got here?”

  “Well,” I said, “by enacting my ignorance of geography—which is to say, by being lost the better part of three days.”

  He enjoyed that. “Afoot?” he said.

  “I got a few rides, but most of the time I was walking, I guess.”

  “And in all that rain!”

  “I’ve got a good raincoat,” I said.

  He looked me over again and said, “In fact you do.”

  He started on again. I was uncertain whether to come with him or not, until he said, walking along, carrying the fish, “What did you eat?”

  I told him more or less what, as I hurried to catch up.

  He said, “Are you hungry?”

  “I could eat,” I said.

  He said, “Well. Come on.”

  We left the road presently and went through a stand of big trees and then up along a little stream—Coulter Branch, as I would learn—that was coming down a lot faster than we were going up. After a longish climb we left the hollow and angled across a hillside pasture to a weatherboarded double log farmhouse right on the point of the ridge, from where we could look back over the woods and down to the flooded river. We went to the back of the house and up onto the porch.

  Before we got to the kitchen door, it opened. Burley’s mother, Zelma, a determined-looking woman with her white hair in a bun, stood there with her hand on the knob. She was wearing a clean apron over a long dark blue dress with long sleeves.

  “Burley Coulter!” she said. “I had given you up for drowned!” She was both aggrieved and half joking, as if she had worried about him too often to have worried too much. But she said, “Come here and let me see.”

  He went obediently to her, grinning. She pressed the sleeve of his coat to assure herself that his own arm was actually inside, and he bent and gave her a loud kiss.

  He made a little gesture with the fish.

  “Oh, Lord!” she said, pleased. “More fish to fry!” And then she looked at me.

  Burley said, “You remember that boy Aunt Cordie and Uncle Othy Dagget took to live with them? This is him.”

  “Well, honey, I didn’t know you! Lord, how long has Aunt Cordie been dead? It was when?”

  “Nineteen twenty-four,” I said.

  “Well,” Burley said, “he needs to be brought in and wrung out and hung up to dry. He’s been rambling around in the rain for three days.”

  “My land!” she said. “Come in, honey!”

  Burley had started out to a three-legged table leaning against the cellar wall, where he cleaned his fish. An old yellow tomcat was sitting on the table, eyeing the fish and licking his chops.

  Burley called back to his mother, “He’s a barber.” And then he said, “He’s hungry. Me too.”

  I stepped through the door and set down my box. Mrs. Coulter showed me where to put my coat and hat and overshoes, and where to wash. She started stirring about at the stove, building up the fire, sliding various cooking vessels over to the heat, putting a pan of biscuits into the oven to warm.

  “Dave and Jarrat and the boys already ate and went back,” she said.

  She set two places at the table and brought out a pitcher of buttermilk.

  “You never know,” she said, “when to expect that Burley Coulter to show up. Or disappear, either. When he does show up, you can expect he’ll be hungry. But as like as not he’ll bring something to cook. So maybe it all evens up. Somewhere.”

  She seemed at first to be talking to me, and then only to herself. But when she had set the pitcher down she turned and looked at me.

  “I don’t remember your name,” she said, “but you’re welcome.”

  “Jonah Crow,” I said.

  She drew a chair out from the table to bring it closer to the stove. “Come and get warm,” she said. “Sit down.”

  Mrs. Coulter fed us a wonderful big dinner, lamenting all the time that she hadn’t had much to fix and that all of it was warmed over, until Burley diverted her by telling about the flood—how high the water was, and who had had to move out, and so forth.

  “Well,” she kept saying, clearly proud of him and happy to be in possession of so much firsthand news, “did ever anybody hear the like!”

  When we had eaten every bite we could hold, washed down with several cups of hot coffee, and pushed our chairs back and rested for a few minutes in the warmth, Burley said, “I reckon you want to go see that shop.”

  I said, “I reckon I do.”

  So we got back into our wraps and I picked up my box and thanked Mrs. Coulter. We walked out a long lane on the backbone of the ridge and then took the road to town.

  When we passed the schoolhouse and came down into the swag, Burley walked up to the front of a small weatherboarded building, gave it a
pat with the flat of his hand, and said, “Here she is.”

  It was a two-story building, one room of about twelve by twenty-four feet over the top of another, the upper story reached by an outside stairway. It was as plain a structure as you could imagine, all rectangles, with a false front and a brick chimney poked up through the middle. And it was ungainly, too narrow for its height. The whole thing was slung a little askew like an old dog half-minded to lie down, and it was badly in need of paint. It was clearly several steps down from Skinner Hawes’s establishment, let alone the University of Kentucky, but in twelve years I had not seen anything I wanted so much.

  Burley was leaning to one of the front windows with his hands cupped around his eyes. “She’s ready for business,” he said. “Barber chair, setting chairs, stove—everything it needs, except a barber and some loafers.”

  I looked in the other window and saw that it was true. There were maybe a dozen chairs lined up along one wall. Some of the chairs were the wire-backed kind, some were hickory-bottomed. There was a big heating stove with a register in the ceiling over it to let warm air rise into the upstairs room. And the barber chair was one of the good old-fashioned ones, porcelain and polished metal and leather, well-worn but fine as a throne. Behind it there was a narrow little backbar, just a shelf painted white like the walls and ceiling. Above the backbar was a good-sized mirror and another, not matching, was on the opposite wall. The room was walled and ceiled just as it was floored, with six-inch tongue-and-groove boards nailed across the studs and joists, making it look longer than it actually was. The finish on the floor was simply wear, the treading of many feet for a long time, so that it was brighter in some spots than in others.