The smaller of the two rooms is the kitchen, with shelves and cabinets and a table that is hinged so as to fold up against the wall. The larger room is for sleeping and sitting. Both rooms have windows with sliding sashes and screens and heavy outside shutters that can be bolted shut if you go away, which I never have. Not yet. A porch goes along two sides. On the side toward the river, because of the narrowness of the bench, the porch rests on tall stilts. Outside the larger room, the porch is roofed and screened so that in summer you have, really, three rooms. The porch that is open to the weather has been replaced twice, once by Burley, once by me.
In his time Ernest kept the place well-equipped with bedclothes, cooking things, dishes, and other necessities. When he came down for a stay, provided the fish were biting, about all he needed to bring was cornmeal and lard.
When Ernest came home crippled from World War I, he had no further use for the place. He sold it to Burley Coulter, who at the time was pursuing a career as the Coulter family’s black sheep, and who therefore needed from time to time a home away from home. Over the years Burley had settled (and aged) into a quieter, more responsible life, and so the house had passed to me.
It is in most ways the best and in every way the most beautiful place I have ever lived in.
Sometime in the 1920s, I think, Burley painted the house with a paint that must at the start have been green. Over the years it had weathered to a flaky grayish blue-green that had something of the character of the lichens and mosses you see on tree trunks. It looked as old as the oldest trees around it. It had become a work of time, fitting the place as no work merely of hands could have done. The grace of the fashion of it was no longer just in its design and construction but also in the marks upon it of time and use and the way the trees around it had grown and shaped themselves during half a century.
For one man and a few sticks of furniture, it is plenty big. Especially in summer, when the doors and windows are open, it seems roomy, airy, and light. And yet I am always surprised, returning to it from the road or looking up at it from the river, to see how small and inconspicuous it is, tucked in against the slope, under the trees. It is a house, but sometimes it has the feeling of a burrow or a den in a hollow tree.
This hillside was cleared and cropped maybe twice or three times, like most of the hillsides around here. And the trees around the house are the ones that are quickest to return to abandoned croplands close to streams where the soil is fairly rich: water maples, elms, sycamores, locusts, box elders, a few cottonwoods and walnuts, a wild cherry or two, and down along the water’s edge, of course, the willows.
For the first several years I was here, I kept a sort of yard cleared for some distance around the house, once a year scything down the nettles and wild grasses and elderberry bushes and seedling trees. And I kept open a prospect on the river. This suited me for a while and seemed the proper thing to do. I loved the clarity and neatness my mowing and cutting made. And then one year I stopped, not from laziness (though using a scythe on a hillside will produce sweat enough) but just to give room and welcome to whatever would come. Since then I have mowed mainly my paths down to the river and across to the garden and up to the road and the woodpile and out to the privy. When the trees send their branches too close, I cut them back to keep them from scraping the walls or banging on the roof. The windfalls that are big enough I saw up and split for stovewood. Otherwise I let it be as it will. Now, sitting out on the porch in the summer among the tops of the young trees, I am among the birds. And in the last few years something wonderful has begun to happen. Not just near the house but all along the hillside, the seedlings of the true forest have begun to come to the higher ground: sugar maples and hickories and chinquapin oaks. Now that I am old, I talk to them, I talk to the birds, the way Athey Keith used to talk to the stray dogs and cats in his own exile up in Port William.
Wonders do happen. Another one was that the barber’s trade followed me down to the river. I didn’t expect that. I didn’t suppose it at all.
I hadn’t been down here more than two or three days—I was still in the midst of all the little jobs of settling in—when Art and Mart Rowanberry came down the path among the trees. It was a beautiful day with a good, warm, season-changing breeze blowing up the river. I had a pair of carpenter’s trestles set up on the porch, was building a new screen door.
“Well, now,” Art said, “ain’t it a fine day overhead!”
And Mart said, “Well, I don’t reckon you’re working.”
I said, “Oh, a little.” And then it came to me: He meant barbering. And I said, “Sure!”
It was a little hard to pretend that I was, in fact, “working.” I did not appear to be expecting customers. Books were piled on the seat of the barber chair and clothes were hanging over the back of it. My barbering tools were laid back on the top shelf of a cabinet in the kitchen. The neckcloths I had stuck away at the bottom of a chest in the other room. But I made the pretense. I unloaded the chair and gathered up my equipment in a hurry. Art stepped up and took his seat. Mart backed a sitting chair up to where he could talk to me and look out at the river at the same time.
“Now, you know,” I said, “I don’t have electricity here and can’t use the electric clippers.”
“That don’t make one bit of difference,” Art said. “What you don’t cut this time, I reckon you’ll cut the next. I reckon they was cutting hair a long time before they had electric.”
“Well, you’re getting it fixed up mighty nice,” Mart said, looking around.
And so the old life of the shop was born again, but this time out on the fringe of society, in the wilderness, you might say.
When I had cut Mart’s hair, they sat on, visiting a while, offered their help if ever I should need it, and, leaving, they laid their donations a little self-consciously on the table in the kitchen.
Others came. Mostly now it was the older men. I didn’t see much of the young men and the boys. (The young don’t come to the river anymore, even to swim or fish. You don’t often run into them hunting in the woods. Mainly, they don’t go where they can’t drive.) Nor did mothers come, bringing their little boys. I didn’t see anybody whose hair had got so it required styling. But my other old customers, when they had a little time on their hands, mainly on Saturdays, would come sauntering down the path from the road, sometimes three or four together, to get haircuts, to visit, to sit and talk and look at the river, and then to leave their donations, always dollar bills, somewhat secretly laid down on the kitchen table or on the shelf where the water bucket sits or by the lamp on the stand by the bed.
I was running, you might say, an “underground” barbershop, a guerrilla free enterprise off in the woods, born out of the world into the world again. My clientele you might describe as a nonrenewable resource. I haven’t gained many new clients, and the old ones have slowly dwindled away. But the ones who have remained have been faithful. Their coming is made even more an act of faith because in this house on the river I have no mirrors on the walls. Here, I am the sole judge of my work. When they climb into the chair, they have to trust me. They have to be willing beforehand to be satisfied with what I can do with scissors and comb and razor only. I became a barber from before my time, surviving after my time.
I took their donations freely as they were given. It was freedom we were living in, after all, down here on the river, on the edge of things. I had come here to be free (though only, maybe, for as long as possible) of the man across the desk, of the gloved hand of inspection and regulation. My customers (my friends, my guests) and I made a little bootleg society in which we freely came and went, took and gave.
Burley’s was the only donation I refused. He would offer and I would hand his money back.
“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 wh
ere 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.
28
Branch
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.