Jayber Crow

  By then I had no living relative, or none who was known to me. The people around Squires Landing were poor, scratching a living from hillside patches as hard-worn as their clothes. The Thripples were old. And there are several good and pressing reasons why people are not eager to take in a ten-year-old boy they are no kin to. There was no Aunt Cordie to come to my rescue this time. I had used up my allotted supply of Aunt Cordies. There had been one, when I needed her the most, and that was all.

  I don’t mean to say that one was not enough—one was enough and more—but only that there was no second. And so I went out of the hands of love, which certainly included charity as we know it, into the hands of charity as we know it, which included love only as it might.

  I was sent away to a church orphanage called The Good Shepherd up in the central part of the state. It was a beautiful place, that orphanage. The superintendent’s home and office were in a fine old brick house set well back from the road in a lawn shaded by big trees. Behind it, scattered over a broad hilltop, were the dormitories, the dining hall, the school building, and the gymnasium. When I lit there, I felt so far away from home that I might as well have been in another world.

  My first memory is of the long driveway sweeping up among the trees to the superintendent’s house. And then, immediately, I remember meeting face to face, across the top of a large desk, the superintendent himself, Brother Whitespade, one of the crossest of Christians, who said in a big, pretty voice, “IAh! This will be Mr. Crow.”

  Brother Whitespade’s desk was as wide as a field. It was as wide maybe as an ocean. For a minute or two I didn’t think I could see across it. And then I could see Brother Whitespade over there, looking at me pointedly through a pair of steel-rimmed eyeglasses and smiling in a way that gave me no comfort. His stare was the most concentrated part of him. Otherwise he was a soft man with a smooth face, wavy hair, and a tight collar. But all that he was seemed to be gathered up in his eyes and pointed across that wide desk at me.

  I knew all of a sudden that I was facing a man who was filled with power, and that I had no power, none. I could not have told you this then, for the knowledge did not come to me in words. It came into me as a hollow place that opened slowly and ached under my breastbone. I knew that I had come there by no thought of my own. I was a long way removed from any thought of my own. I had no thought.

  I was who? A little somebody who could have been anybody, looking across that wide desk at Brother Whitespade. I knew that I could not even leave until he told me to go.

  “Jonah Crow,” he said, looking at a paper on his desk. And then he looked back at me. “Mr. Crow, since I believe you have not yet found your way to Nineveh, I will call you J.”

  And I saw him write in large, curving strokes my name as it was to be: “J. Crow.”

  I remember waking up in my dormitory room the first several mornings, for maybe a minute or two not knowing where I was, and then knowing. I would recognize the chest of drawers, the two chairs, the table, the two iron cots, the other boy still asleep. And I would be filled with a strange objectless fear, as if in the twinkling of an eye I had been changed not only into another world but into another body. Shrunken by fear, I lay on my back and looked straight up at the ceiling, waiting for something to move.

  When the wake-up bell sounded over the hilltop and the other boy stirred in his bed and this new world began to assemble itself in small motions and sounds, the fear left me. I would know then that I would make it until night, when again in the narrow cot in the dark room I would cover my head and, in despair of anything else to do, go immediately to sleep.

  I thought at first that Brother Whitespade, by changing my name to J., had made me a special case. But I soon found out that all of us orphans—who were called “students”—were known by the initial letters of our first names along with our last names. My roommate, for example, was T. Warnick. If the institution had received a second Warnickby the name, say, of Thomas Robert, he would have to be called R. Warnick. If he had had no middle name, he would have been assigned an initial arbitrarily: N. Warnick or P. Warnick, whatever Brother Whitespade chose. The girls too all were named by the same method. We were thus not quite nameless, but also not quite named. The effect was curious. For a while anyhow, and for how long a while it would be hard to say, we all acted on the assumption that we were no longer the persons we had been—which for all practical purposes was the correct assumption. We became in some way faceless to ourselves and to one another. You would discover, for example, that E. Lawler’s original first name was Elizabeth. But she would not look like Elizabeth Lawler; she would not look precisely like E. Lawler, either. I remember walking around saying my name to myself—“Jonah Crow, Jonah Crow”—until it seemed that it could never have belonged to me or to anybody else.

  At Squires Landing everything seemed to be held close in mind—in my mind or in some older or larger mind that my mind belonged to. The world was present when I shut my eyes, just as it was present when I opened them. At The Good Shepherd I entered for the first time a divided world—divided both from me and within itself. It was divided from me because it did not seem to be present unless I watched it. Within itself, it was divided between an ideal world of order, as prescribed and demanded by the institution, which was embodied most formidably by Brother Whitespade, and a real world of disorder, which we students brought in with us as a sort of infection. Though of course I could not sort it all out until afterward—not, really, until after I had come back to Port William—I know now that order was thought to emanate from the institution, and disorder from nature. Order was of the soul, whose claims the institution represented. Disorder was of the body, which was us.

  We stood in line for meals, for our thrice-daily entrances into the school building, for church, for almost anything that required going through a door. There were daily inspections of our rooms. There were nightly bed checks. There were supervised study halls and recreation periods. We were all assigned jobs that were necessary to our own feeding and shelter, and of course our work was closely supervised. We all, I think, had the feeling that we were being watched, not by God, which was the endlessly repeated warning, but by Brother Whitespade and his faculty, who evidently lusted to know all that we least wanted to tell. And to these ever-watching eyes we reacted in ways peculiar to ourselves. Some lived lives of flagrant indifference or transparency, seeming to have no secrets that they wanted to keep. Others, like me, developed inward lives of the intensest privacy.

  But whether we were loud or quiet, sociable or solitary, we were constantly involved in sins against the institutional order. We lived within a net of rules tightly strung between ourselves and the supposed disorder and wickedness of the world. But the meshes were always a little too wide; the net could never quite become a wall. There was leakage in both directions. Not all of us, maybe, but anyhow most of us boys were forever crossing back and forth between constraint and upheaval. And so we seemed forever involved in some form of punishment: gathering demerits, receiving hard licks on the seat of our pants, losing little privileges that seemed to have been given for the purpose of being revoked.

  You will get the impression that I am looking back very critically at my old home and school, and I acknowledge that I am. But I mean to be critical only within measure. It is true that I dislike the life of institutions and organizations, and I am slow to trust people who willingly live such a life. This is not a prejudice, but a considered judgment, one that The Good Shepherd taught me to make, and so I acknowledge a considerable debt to that institution. But when, to be fair, I ask myself what I would do if confronted with a hundred or so orphan children of two sexes and diverse ages and characters all to be raised and educated together, then I remain a critic, but I can’t say with confidence that I would do better.

  As a matter of fact, leaving all my criticisms in place, I can say that I have kept some fine memories of my years at The Good Shepherd. I remember getting up early to walk among the trees on
the front lawn while the light was fresh and the dew undried and the official forces still asleep. And when I stood in line before going into the dining hall or the school building I could see, off on the horizon, a good old brick farmhouse with trees and brick outbuildings. It was all well proportioned and laid out. Especially in the sunlight of early morning or late afternoon, it looked to me like a vision of Paradise. And I like to remember myself standing in my fixed and appointed place, always a little lonely and a little homesick, watched and under suspicion, looking over at that beautiful house at the point of the meeting of earth and sky. I would let my mind go there and make itself at home.

  Although I can’t say that I liked school, when I wanted to be I was a good enough student. I liked learning, especially the learning that could be got by reading. I made fair grades, but I and my teachers knew that I could have done better. I was, they said, like a good horse who would not work; I was a disappointment to them; I was wasting my God-given talents. And this gave me, I believe, the only self-determining power I had: I could withhold this single thing that was mine that I knew they wanted. I had ways of not allowing myself to be fully present in the classroom, even though I was physically confined there. I looked out the windows. A window opening on nothing but the blank sky was endlessly attractive to me; if I watched long enough, a bird or a cloud would appear within the frame, and I watched with patience. A window that looked out into a tree was a source of inexpressible happiness, for it permitted me to observe the foraging of the birds and the life history of leaves. When my attention was called back into the room, as sooner or later it always would be, I let my mind wander. I found out that I could not willfully place my mind elsewhere, but that, if I let it loose from what it was expected to be doing, it would go elsewhere. “J. Crow,” they would say, “I am not out there in that tree,” or “J. Crow, would you honor us by paying attention to this problem up here on the blackboard?”

  And I would say “Yes, ma’am” or “Yes, sir,” as if only too happy to have their help in dealing with my waywardness.

  If the classroom was not my natural habitat, the library pretty much was. The library was a long room across the back of Brother Whitespade’s house. There were lots of windows along the east wall, and comfortable chairs in front of the windows, tables here and there, and several tall cases of books. The books had mainly been donated, I think, and some of them practically nobody would have wanted to read, but there were some good ones too. The librarian was a nice lady named Mrs. Eades, who was hospitable and quiet and kind. Now and then our teachers would send us to the library on some project or other, but there were times too when we were free just to go: Saturday mornings, and every night between supper and study hall.

  Back in a corner between a bookcase and one of the east windows, there was a small table where I liked to sit and read. It was one of the best places in the world to be on a rainy Sunday afternoon in the winter. And I like to remember sitting there on a bright Saturday morning in the spring, with the window open and the sun shining in and the spirea bushes in bloom outside. At first I read books about horses and dogs, because I wanted a horse and a dog. And then I read several books about a boy named William Greenhill, an orphan like me, and then The Swiss Family Robinson and The Boy’s King Arthur. I read the stories of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, two more orphans, and Rip Van Winkle, and David Copperfield, another orphan.

  One day I found in a trash can the hinder part of a little anthology of American poems. The cover and a lot of pages had been torn away, so that my copy began:Keeping time, time, time,

  In a sort of Runic rhyme,

  To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells

  From the bells, bells, bells, bells,

  Bells, bells, bells ...

  I thought tintinnabulation was the finest word I had ever seen. I kept that piece of a book with me until I came back to Port William. I still have it.

  In my last years of high school I read Thomas Paine’s The Crisis and “Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walden by Henry David Thoreau, a book that made me want to live in a cabin in the woods. I drew a picture of the cabin I wanted to live in, and drew the floor plan, and made a list of the furniture and dishes and utensils and other things I would need.

  I don’t remember exactly when, but I started copying out passages that I liked into a tablet. And then I started making what I thought were improvements on the things I copied; I was uneasy about that, not being sure it was right. Also I kept a list of words I especially liked: independent, I remember, was one, and then tintinnabulation and self-reliant and free and outside. There got to be a good many.

  Among the books in the library were two large blue volumes containing photographs of World War I. And so at last I saw what had been going on over across the sea in that winter of 1917 and 18 when I had heard the rumors of war and imagined people shooting one another in darkness. I studied those pages by the hour, for the battlefields did look as though they had been passed over by something vast and pitiless, as our riverbanks at home had looked, scoured by the ice.

  After I quit waking up afraid, feeling that I might be nowhere, I began getting used to the place. I began to take for granted that I was somewhere, and somewhere that I knew, but I never quite felt that I was somewhere I wanted to be. Where I wanted to be, always, day in and day out, year in and year out, was Squires Landing and all that fall of country between Port William up on the ridge and the river between Sand Ripple and Willow Run. When I heard or read the word home, that patch of country was what I thought of. Home was one of the words I wrote in my tablet.

  Lying in bed in the dark before I went to sleep, I would picture myself coming up the hill to the house at Squires Landing. I would go around the house to the back, the way we always did, and up onto the porch and through the kitchen door. I would go through the house slowly, room by room, looking at everything: the kitchen table with three places set and covered with a cloth, the skillet and the pots and the kettle on the stove, Aunt Cordie’s chair in the living room, her little stand table, her Bible lying on the table by the good Aladdin lamp, the beds in the bedrooms, the quilts on the beds, the rag rugs on the floors, the cracks in the wallpaper, Uncle Othy’s whetrock on the mantelpiece and his old straw hat on its nail over the washstand. I liked especially to return to my own bedroom, which was the eastward one, the brightest of the two rooms upstairs. When I went in, it would be early in the morning, in summer; the room would be clean-swept, full of light and moving air, the shadows of the curtains swaying on the floor.

  I would wander into the store and on down to the garden and the riverbank and back up by the coal tipple. It seemed to me that I could remember even the leaves and the grass blades and the little rocks in the paths. It would all be so real to me that I would think I couldn’t stand it if I didn’t just get up and go back.

  But always in these imaginings I would be the only one there. For some reason, I could never make myself remember Aunt Cordie or Uncle Othy. I could remember them only by being reminded of them. I never knew when this would happen, but when I was reminded they would just all of a sudden appear to me as they had been on a certain day—Uncle Othy rowing the boat, Aunt Cordie walking down to the garden, using her hoe as a walking stick—and then I would see them plain.

  Sometimes when I wasn’t trying to think about it, one of the old times would come over me entirely, and I could remember sitting in Aunt Cordie’s lap while she rocked me and sang, “Old Crammy was dead and lay in her grave.” Or I would hear Uncle Othy spelling woodp ecker: “Wee-w-double-o-d-sockeedledypeck-e-double-ek-ek-r.”

  Of course, what I wasn’t telling myself, and maybe was trying not to know (though I did know), was that at Squires Landing, and Goforth too, things were already changed. The things I was remembering were gone from everywhere except my mind.

  I would remember these rememberings after I went back to be the barber in Port William, for of course one of the first things I did after I had settled
in was go to look again at both of my old homes. In my dreams of remembrance, I had failed to reckon not only with the certainty of change under any circumstances, but also with the new circumstances of automobiles and improved roads. Already the only surviving blacksmith shops were those in the towns. My father’s shop, which had opened right onto the Katy’s Branch road, had been torn down when the road was widened. And our house had burned. There was nothing there even to recognize—just a patch of weeds and tree sprouts with a chimney sticking up in the middle.

  At Squires Landing the buildings and all were still in place, but were not cared for as they had been when Aunt Cordie and Uncle Othy were alive. The landing and the little farm still provided a living for the family that lived there, but you could see that the days of such enterprises were numbered. Goods were being trucked into the country by then, not brought by the river, and the stores at the river landings and crossroads were losing out to the bigger ones in Port William, just as, in another ten years, the stores in Port William would begin losing out to yet bigger ones in Hargrave or Louisville.

  And so there would always be more to remember that could no longer be seen. This is one of the things I can tell you that I have learned: our life here is in some way marginal to our own doings, and our doings are marginal to the greater forces that are always at work. Our history is always returning to a little patch of weeds and saplings with an old chimney sticking up by itself. And I can tell you a further thing that I have learned, and here I look ahead to the resting of my case: I love the house that belonged to the chimney, holding it bright in memory, and I love the saplings and the weeds.