She was a pretty girl, and I was moved by her prettiness. Her hair was brown at the verge of red, and curly. Her face was still a little freckled. But it was her eyes that most impressed me. They were nearly black and had a liquid luster. The brief, laughing look that she had given me made me feel extraordinarily seen, as if after that I might be visible in the dark.
2
Goforth
The afternoon of my first memory of Mattie Keith (Mattie Chatham, as she was to be) would have been, I believe, in the spring of 1939, when I had been “in business” in Port William a little more than two years.
If you have lived in Port William a little more than two years, you are still, by Port William standards, a stranger, liable to have your name mispronounced. Crow was not a familiar name in this part of the country, and so for a long time a lot of people here called me Cray, a name that was familiar. And though I was only twenty-two when I came to the town, many of the same ones would call me “Mr. Cray” to acknowledge that they did not know me well. My rightful first name is Jonah, but I had not gone by that name since I was ten years old. I had been called simply J., and that was the way I signed myself. Once my customers took me to themselves, they called me Jaybird, and then Jayber. Thus I became, and have remained, a possession of Port William.
I was, in fact, a native as well as a newcomer, for I was born at Goforth, over on Katy’s Branch, on August 3, 1914—and so lived one day in the world before the beginning of total war. You could say that Goforth was somewhat farther from Port William then than it is now; all that connected them then was a wagon road, imperfectly rocked, wondrously crooked, and bedeviled by mud holes. Goforth had its own church and school and store, but people from over there came to Port William to bank and vote and buy the things they could not buy at Goforth.
I don’t remember when I did not know Port William, the town and the neighborhood. My relation to that place, my being in it and my absences from it, is the story of my life. That story has surprised me almost every day—butnow, in the year 1986, so near the end, it seems not surprising at all but only a little strange, as if it all has happened to somebody I don’t yet quite know. Certainly, all of it has happened to somebody younger.
My mother was Iona Quail, and through her I am related to the Cotmans, the Thigpens, and the Proudfoots. Her mother died fairly young, and because of that, perhaps, when she was too young my mother married a boy from somewhere across the river—“from off,” as we said. He came courting her afoot every Saturday night, walking six miles (so I’ve heard) to where he borrowed a johnboat opposite the mouth of Katy’s Branch, rowed across the river and up the creek to the first riffle, and then walked the rest of the way to the starveling little hillside farm above Goforth. The marriage was a have-to case. I was not thought of until too late, and this was something I seem to have known almost from birth. Around here it is hard for an interesting secret to stay a secret.
My father, whose given name was Luther, was by trade a blacksmith. His people could, or would, do nothing for him. My grandfather Quail, having only the one child, helped his new son-in-law to set up a little shop, with forge and anvil, across the road from Goforth Church, and to gather up some sticks of furniture for the house adjoining.
I have in memory only a few scattered pictures of my early lost life at Goforth. I remember sitting in my mother’s lap in the rocking chair beside the kitchen stove, and the sound of her voice singing in time to the beat of the rockers. I remember that in winter we lived mostly in the kitchen, for the kitchen was the only room with a stove. I remember my father’s shop, which I loved. I remember the plows and sleds that took shape there in the light of the open doorway. I remember my father bent over a horse’s hoof held between his knees. I remember the ringing of the anvil and the screech of hot metal in the slack tub. I remember walking from house to shop, holding my mother’s hand. I remember a hound named Stump and a horse named Joe and a cow named Bell. These and other things seem clear when they are off on the outer verges of my mind, but then, when I try to see them straight, they grow misty and fade away under the burden of questions. What did that kitchen actually look like? What was the song my mother sang as we rocked by the stove? I can remember my father’s stance and movements at his work, but I might as well never have seen his face. We lived, I know, a life with very little margin. We were not hungry or cold, but we had nothing to spare.
My first clear memories are of the terrible winter of 1917 and 1918. It was not terrible for me, at least not at first. For me, I suppose, life went on for a while as it always had. But I knew that the grown-ups thought it a terrible winter. There was, to start with, a war going on over across the sea—an idea as strange to me as if it had been going on over across the sky. I had no clear understanding of what a war was, but I knew that it killed people and that my elders feared it. I imagined people shooting one another in a darkness that covered everything.
And then snow fell until it was deep, and then it drifted and froze, and the cattle and horses wandered loose about the country, walking over the tops of the fences. The river froze and then a thaw came and it rained, and the river rose out of its banks. Great ice gorges formed that sheared off or uprooted the shore trees and wrecked steamboats and barges. People had never seen anything like that ice. No flood that they had known even resembled it. The ice groaned and ground and creaked. When it broke loose, nothing—nothing!—could stand against it. It crushed or tore loose and carried away everything it came to. It broke steel cables as if they were cobwebs. That was a legendary winter; nobody who lived through it ever forgot it. I have shorn many a whitened head that preserved inside it the memory of that winter as clear as yesterday.
And then that winter became terrible for me by more than hearsay, for both of my young parents fell ill and died only a few hours apart in late February of 1918. I don’t know how I learned that this had happened. It seemed to me that they just disappeared into the welter of that time: a war off somewhere in the dark world; a river of ice off somewhere, breaking trees and boats; sickness off somewhere, and then in the house; and then death there in the house, and everything changed. I remember a crowd of troubled people in the house. I remember crouching beside the woodbox behind the kitchen stove while several people offered to pick me up and comfort me, and I would not look up.
And then an old woman I knew as Aunt Cordie gathered me up without asking and sat down in the rocking chair and held me and let me cry. She had on a coarse black sweater over a black dress that reached to her shoetops and a black hat with little white and blue flowers on it there in the dead of winter. I can remember how she seemed to be trying to enclose me entirely in her arms.
“God love his heart!” she said. “Othy, we’re going to take him home.”
3
Squires Landing
And that was what they did. There really was nobody else to do it, but she treated me like a prize she had won. Uncle Othy too. They had had three children of their own, and all three had died as children. I suppose Aunt Cordie and Uncle Othy had a store of affection laid away that they now brought out and applied to me. Later I would know how blessed I had been.
Aunt Cordie had been born Cordelia Quail, my grandfather Quail’s sister. She married Otha Dagget, she liked to say, “because he could whistle so pretty” They lived where they had always lived: over on the river at Squires Landing, two miles and a little more from Goforth, and about four miles from Port William. I remember my life at Squires Landing from the first day.
By the time I came, the worst of that winter was over. The river was back in its banks and free of ice. But the shores that once had been lined with trees were now bare mud, except for here and there a broken stump, and here and there a big tree that had managed somehow to survive, though scarred and splintered by the ice. And in the bottoms were still great heaped-up jagged piles of ice that would not entirely melt away until summer. Where the ice gorge had passed, the shores of the river looked scoured and bitten and li
feless. Years later, when I saw pictures of the battlefields of World War I, I would be reminded of the Kentucky River valley in the late winter of 1918. But to me, then, that dead and shattered landscape looked only as it seemed it ought to look after the death of my parents and the loss of our old life at Goforth.
For a while after I came to Squires Landing, I would stay as close to Aunt Cordie as I could. I tried to keep her not just in sight but in reach. When she moved, I moved. “Be careful now, Cordie,” Uncle Othy would say. “Don’t tramp on the boy.”
And she herself told me once, “I was like an old hen with one pore forlorn little chick.”
I remember too how spring came, just when I thought it might stay winter forever, at first in little touches and strokes of green lighting up the bare mud like candle flames, and then it covered the whole place with a light pelt of shadowy grass blades and leaves. And I remember how, as the days and the winds passed over, the foliage shifted and sang.
I began to feel at home.
I will tell one story that was often told during that winter and spring. I heard it many times from several people, then and since, and I have thought of it many times.
There was a shantyboatman named Emmet Edge who had his boat tied up at the end of a big bottom upriver, where some of the Thigpens were living. The morning the ice gorge broke up, the Thigpens were in their stripping room with a good fire going, getting the tobacco ready for market. They heard somebody in a pair of gum boots—thwock! thwock! thwock!— coming as fast as he could step. There was a knock on the door, too loud, as if the knocker expected the ones inside to be asleep.
One of them slid back the latch, and old man Edge stepped in among them, not bothering to pull the door to behind him. His eyes were wide open and his face as white as his hair. At first he didn’t say anything but just stood looking at them as if he couldn’t decide they were real.
“Well,” one of them said, “what’s the matter, Mr. Emmet?”
And then he told his tale.
He had been expecting the ice to go, and had been awake most of two nights. The second night, he sat holding a pan in his hands between his knees, the way the old shantyboatmen used to do when the river was changing, so that if they went to sleep they would drop the pan and the clatter would wake them up. What he expected to do when the ice went, maybe he didn’t know himself.
And then it went. When he felt the boat heave, snapping its lines like sewing threads, he knew there wasn’t anything for him to do except get ashore, if he could.
He barely made it, scrambling through the great mill of broken and breaking ice, sliding and grabbing and falling and getting up again, until finally, having given himself up for dead, he got solid ground under his feet.
“So, boys,” Emmet Edge said, “I very nearly was a goner, and my boat is gone for certain.”
But the Thigpens—who had not had the wits scared out of them—said, well, maybe so, but they thought they at least ought to go back and have a look.
So they all walked back across the bottom to the place on the now-unrecognizable shore where Emmet Edge thought he had left his boat.
And there the boat was, sitting perfectly level atop a great heap of ice, just like the Ark on Mount Ararat. Not even a dish was broken. Emmet Edge hewed some proper steps into the hill of ice, moved back into his boat, and lived there while the spring warmth brought it gently down again onto the Thigpens’ last year’s cornfield, where it landed toward the end of May.
The Daggets kept the store at the landing and had a farm of a dozen or so acres—a shelf of bottomland and a scrap of hillside—on which they grew a little tobacco crop and a garden, and kept a horse, a milk cow, meat hogs, and flocks of chickens, turkeys, guineas, and geese. The life of that place had an amplitude I had not known before.
Squires Landing was just below the mouth of Squires Branch, a steep small stream that dried up in summer but after a hard rain tumbled furiously down over its course of heaped and shifting rocks. The house stood well up the hillside, overlooking the confluence of branch and river. Behind it were the henhouse, smokehouse, coal shed, and privy. Tucked in under the slope, down near the branch, was a small barn, where Uncle Othy housed his crop and sheltered his animals. The store stood on a narrow bench below the house and above the road. Below the road and the patch of bottom where the garden was, the river was always coming down and passing by and going on.
The river moved me strangely, and I loved it from the day I first laid eyes on it. When Aunt Cordie made me stay inside because of the weather, I would stand at the window and look upstream and downstream and across. The river was a barrier and yet a connection. I felt, a long time before I knew, that the river had shaped the land. The whole country leaned toward the river. All the streams flowed to it. It flowed by, and yet it stayed. It brought things and carried them away. I did not know where it flowed from or to, but I knew that it flowed a great distance through the opening it had made. The current told me that.
So did the boats. There were little landings like ours every few miles, and there was a fairly steady traffic of steam or gasoline packets that carried freight and passengers and livestock, and of towboats shoving barges loaded with coal or lumber. I remember the Hanover, the Revonah, the White Dove, the Richard Roe, the Falls City, and the Dot. The goods that Uncle Othy sold in his store all came by the river. The boats would whistle three times, pull in to shore, let down their plank, unload whatever cargo was directed to Squires Landing, load on whatever freight or creatures were outbound, and be gone quicker than you could believe, up or down. It was wonderful the way the river and the banks and the whole valley would be quiet, preoccupied with the lights and shadows and the regular business of a summer morning, and then you would hear that whistle, and all of a sudden there would be this commotion: the sound of a big engine, a bell ringing, shouts, blocks creaking as the plank was lowered, cattle bawling, pigs squealing, men cursing, the roustabouts chanting as they passed bags or boxes from hand to hand. I liked to watch them pen the fat hogs at the banktop and then force them across the gangplank onto the boat. You would hear some fancy language from the captain then, especially if a shoat got loose. Boat captains were the chief tyrants of the world in those days. They thought you could say anything to anybody from a pilothouse, and the black men who were loading or unloading the boat just had to grin and look away.
Often, forgetting Uncle Othy’s instructions and warning, I would venture as far into the thick of it as I could go, dodging here and there for a better look, for I wanted to see everything; I wanted to penetrate the wonder. I would be in the way and sometimes in danger. And then Uncle Othy would see me, and under the eyes of the experienced and worldly men of the boat, he would be embarrassed by me. He would speak to me then as he never did at other times: “Damn it to hell, boy, get out of the way! I told you! Damned boy ain’t no more than half weaned, and here he is in the way of working men.” He would be trying to get me thoroughly cussed before the captain could get a chance to do it.
There would often be passengers too, getting on or getting off, accompanied sometimes by valises or trunks. I could never get enough of watching them. They had, to me, the enchantment of distance about them. They would be going to or coming from Frankfort or Hargrave, Cincinnati or Louisville, or places farther away—places, all of them, that were only names to me, but names that seemed palpable and rich, like coins in the hand.
And so I came along in time to know the end of the age of steamboating. I would learn later that there had been other ages of the river that I had arrived too late to know but that I could read about and learn to imagine. There was at first the age when no people were here, and I have sometimes felt at night that absence grow present to my mind, that long silence in which no human name was spoken or given, and the nameless river made no sound of any human tongue. And then there was the Indian age when names were called here that have never been spoken in the present language of Port William. Then came the short ages of us wh
ite people, the ages of the dugout, the flatboat, the keelboat, the log raft, the steamboat. And I have lived on now into the age of the diesel towboat and recreational boating and water-skiing. And yet it is hard to look at the river in its calm, just after daylight or just before dark, and believe that history has happened to it. The river, the river itself, leaves marks but bears none. It is only water flowing in a path that other water has worn.
Or is that other water really “other,” or is it the same water always running, flowing always toward the gathering of all waters, and always rising and returning again, and again flowing? I knew this river first when I was a little boy, and I know it now when I am an old man once again living beside it—almost seventy years!—and always when I have watched it I have been entranced and mystified. What is it? Is it the worn trough of itself that is a feature of the land and is marked on maps, or is it the water flowing? Or is it the land itself that over time is shaped and reshaped by the flowing water, and is caught by no map?
The surface of the quieted river, as I thought in those old days at Squires Landing, as I think now, is like a window looking into another world that is like this one except that it is quiet. Its quietness makes it seem perfect. The ripples are like the slats of a blind or a shutter through which we see imperfectly what is perfect. Though that other world can be seen only momentarily, it looks everlasting. As the ripples become more agitated, the window darkens and the other world is hidden. As I did not know then but know now, the surface of the river is like a living soul, which is easy to disturb, is often disturbed, but, growing calm, shows what it was, is, and will be.