Jayber Crow

  But after I walked four or five miles, a man driving a truck loaded with fat hogs stopped and gave me a ride, much to the relief of my feet.

  I climbed into the cab, which was neat as a pin, set my box on the floorboard, and said thank you to the driver.

  “You entirely welcome,” he said. “Entahrly” was the way he said it.

  He seemed to wait for me to say something else. When I didn’t, he said, “Well, are you traveling or going somewheres?”

  He was studying me out of the corner of his eye as he watched the road, and I eased my hand down to where I could feel the little sheaf of bills inside my jacket lining and held them tight. I knew there were people in this world who would cut your throat for a quarter.

  But he didn’t look like that kind. He was a small, neat man with eyebrows that were too bushy and ears that were too big for the rest of him. His chin stuck out, when he wanted it to, as though he used it for pushing open doors. His clothes and shoes were nearly spotless, which you wouldn’t expect of a man hauling hogs. He was smoking a pipe. After my walk in the frosty morning air, that warm cab fragrant with pipe smoke was welcoming to me.

  I said, “I’m heading over about Lexington.”

  And then, when I offered no more, he said, “Well, have you got a name?”

  “J.,” I said.

  He stuck his hand out. “Sam Hanks.”

  I could have laughed, if I had let myself, or just as easily have cried. I knew who Sam Hanks was. He was the main livestock and tobacco hauler in Port William. He was the nephew of Miss Minnie Proudfoot who lived on Cotman Ridge above Goforth. All in a pang I remembered seeing his truck in front of my father’s shop with a set of new racks, which I suppose my father had made. He had stopped by the store at Squires Landing a many a time.

  It was a touchous moment. I felt like I was on top of a tall pole, ready to fall off. I could have told him who I was and he would have known. And yet it was too much. I had been ten years gone, and I had no thought of ever going back. To have identified myself to him would have been like raising the dead. I didn’t have the heart. Also (as I was proud to think) who I was was my own business.

  I shook his hand and said, “Where you from, Mr. Hanks?”

  “Port William. Ever heard of it?”

  “No,” I said. “Are you a right smart ways from home?”

  “Not too far,” he said. “But usually I run to Louisville more than Lexington. Lately, though, I been coming up here some. People down home get tired of giving their stock away at Louisville, so they try giving it away in Lexington.”

  “Do you raise stock yourself?” I asked, because in fact I couldn’t remember.

  He drew on his pipe a little. “No. There’s plenty of people to do that—and borrow money and pay interest, like as not, for the privilege.” He said “privi-lege,” in a way I remembered.

  “No,” he said, “I’m just the man that hauls it to where they can give it away. Me, I ain’t aiming to owe anybody anything. I am an independent man, and take my hat off to nobody.”

  That was Sam Hanks—an independent man indeed, as stubborn as independent, and almost absolutely principled. In the time to come I would know him well. He was a man quiet enough, inclined, like most Port Williamites, to keep his own vital concerns to himself, but he could be goaded into a kind of eloquence. What goaded him invariably was the suggestion that there was any human under Heaven to whom Sam Hanks ought to take off his hat.

  His great enemy—and frequent client—was John T. McCallum. John T. did not goad Sam Hanks in order to enjoy his eloquence; their differences were profound and sincere. John T. was full of the spirit of patriotism and progress and he venerated public figures; he was therefore deeply affronted by Sam Hanks and could not resist the thought that Sam might be brought to see things in the proper way. In later years, when the two of them would converge in my shop, they always worked their way sooner or later to some version of the same conversation.

  John T., for instance, would itch until he had to invite Sam Hanks to go with him to hear the governor speak from the courthouse porch in Hargrave.

  And Sam Hanks would reply, “Hell, no!”

  “Well, why not?”

  “Because he ain’t got anything to say that I want to hear.”

  “Well, he’s your elected governor.”

  “He may be the elected governor of Kentucky, but he ain’t the elected governor of me.”

  “And I reckon the elected president of the United States ain’t the president of you, either.”

  “The Old Marster elected me president of myself.”

  “What are you? Some kind of a communist or something?”

  “I’m Sam Hanks and a grown man.”

  On that morning in 1935 I had not yet heard Sam Hanks on the subject of his own independence, freedom, and dignity. But if he had proceeded to enlighten me I would not have been surprised, for you could see that he had his ways. Something about him told you that he was easily offended. And something about him made you feel that you would not like to be the one to do it.

  He looked slantwise down at my box, and then looked me over again in a way that made me realize I didn’t look as neat as he did and my clothes weren’t as good. In the college I would have looked like a poor student. Out on the road with my box, as I all of a sudden knew, I looked like a bum.

  He said, “You got folks there at Lexington, I reckon.” He was a true son of Port William, where, as Art Rowanberry used to say, people don’t have what you would call their own business.

  “No,” I said.

  He said, “Well, are you from around here somewheres, or are you from somewheres else?”

  And then I lied: “We been living over about Bell’s Fork.”

  “And now you’re hellbent for the big city.”

  “I’m going to try it a lick or two and see what it’s like.”

  “Well,” he said, “let me put it this way. What are you aiming to do when you get there?”

  “Work,” I said.

  “What at?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Hunh!” he said. “Do you think the country nowdays is full of people out at night with lanterns, looking for boys to pay wages to?”

  “No,” I said. But he was making me uneasy. I was beginning to feel silly, and needing to give myself the dignity at least of desperation. With an ease that startled me I lied again: “Well, Mam’s sick, and we’re living with Grandpap, and he ain’t able. So I reckon it’s up to me.”

  “Are you the only boy?”

  “I’m the only chick in the nest.”

  “The only one!” he said. “Well, there comes a time when we got it to do. And when that time comes, my opinion, we ought to do it.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  He took a little time then to revive the fire in his pipe, and then he said, “Fine country.”

  “The finest,” I said. It was too. Even in that lean time there was good stock everywhere. The ewe flocks were just coming out onto the green wheat and barley fields with their young lambs.

  We rode and looked a while, and then Sam Hanks said, “Do you know anybody in Lexington?”

  “No, sir,” I said. “I don’t know anybody”

  He took a slow, thoughtful draft on his pipe. “Now, where I’m going to is the stockyards,” he said. “But if I was you, I wouldn’t hang around there. You don’t want to be no drover in no damned stockyards. A young man like you needs a future.”

  “Yessir,” I said. “I appreciate your advice.”

  We were coming into Lexington then. He was dealing with the traffic and the lights. He had put the pipe in his pocket.

  “Not bossing you,” he said, “but if I was you, which I know I ain’t, I’d go over about the trotting track. You being a country boy and all, you could make your way there, maybe.”

  We got to the stockyards. He drove in, turned, and backed up to a chute.

  When we got out we could hear the bawling
and bleating and squealing in the yards, and the drovers shouting.

  I raised my hand. I was going to call “Much obliged!” to Sam Hanks and go my way, but he was coming toward me around the front of the truck. He hooked me by a quick thrust of two fingers into a pocket of my jacket, as if to hold me while he spoke his mind. He pointed.

  “The trotting track is yonder,” he said, raising his voice over the clamor of the yards. “You’ll find it. You won’t have any trouble. Good luck to you. There’s bastards in this world that would cut your throat for a quarter.”

  And then I did say, “Much obliged,” and walked away in the direction he had pointed.

  I was already several blocks away when I put my hand into my jacket pocket and felt paper. It was a new five-dollar bill that never had been folded but once.

  And so the first money I made on my entrance into the great world was liar’s wages. It didn’t make me feel a bit better. But I didn’t go back. Sam Hanks had probably already unloaded and started home. I was stuck with my lie, and I was going to be stuck with it for some time to come.

  Maybe because I was ashamed, I took Sam Hanks’s advice and headed for the trotting track. As he had said, it wasn’t hard to find. He may have been wrong about the future it offered, but I did like it better than the stockyards. At the trotting track the animals—which were mostly horses, with a dog or a goat or a pet rooster thrown in here and there—weren’t all crowded together into pens but lived one to a place in stalls that were roomy and dry and light and well bedded. In fact, the horses lived better than a lot of people, including some of the grooms and stable hands who took care of them. They were worth more money than a lot of people, and they had the best grain and hay and straw; they never wanted for shelter or medical care or new shoes, and they were attended to like kings and queens. The horses were royalty at the trotting track, and their needs came first.

  The drivers and trainers, you could say, were the princes—or anyhow the best of them were. They amounted to something; they were the ones who knew, and when they spoke the others listened. Below them were the grooms and stable hands. The trotting track was an orderly little world, ordered by the force of one idea: the idea of a paramount trotting or pacing horse that would stride down to the wire, not just in front of every other horse in the race but in front of every other horse that ever had raced up to that time. Everybody in that world was set in motion by this one idea.

  It seemed wrong to me that some horses should fare better than some people in that time when so many went without enough to eat or wear, or even without a tight roof over their heads. And yet I too for a time came under the spell of the idea of the supreme horse. And some of the actual horses were wonderful. They had speed and courage and spirit and beauty. I remember several that just to see them standing in their harness like lords of the world could send a chill over you from head to foot.

  I’m sure that the “future” Sam Hanks spoke of was there for some. And maybe, if I had been destined to it or called to it strongly enough, it might have been there for me. But my future, as it turned out, proved to be elsewhere. I hadn’t even glimpsed it yet. I had imagined no future. Who she was who would have my heart to own I had not imagined.

  With Sam Hanks’s five-dollar bill added to the several others that made my savings, I had a pretty good little nest egg, for the times, and I protected it like the Holy Grail. Nobody needed to tell me that the world I was in now was not the world of the college, where I’d had my scholarship and a sure job and, you might say, connections. The world I was in now could fix a man mighty quick to where he would need more than I had saved just to keep living. Suppose I got sick or broke a bone. So I made a law for myself that I wouldn’t spend a cent of my savings unless I absolutely had to, but would live on present earnings only.

  It was far from easy. There were plenty of people who needed work as much as I did, or more. There were considerably more than a pair of hands for every handle. And at the trotting track it helped if you were known. Of course, I wasn’t known. I could have turned up from anywhere, and I didn’t know a soul. All I could do was hang around and look willing. If a hand was needed on the handle of a fork and I was there and nobody else was, then I would earn a nickel or a dime cleaning out a stall. I carried buckets of water. I ran—and I mean ran—for coffee and sandwiches. Whenever I caught the scent of a small coin looking to change pockets, I tried my best to furnish the pocket. “I’ll do it!” I’d say. “Let me do it!”

  And in that way I got to be recognized a little. It got so that when some odd job needed doing, somebody would jerk his head in my direction and say, “He’ll do it! Let him do it!”

  But if you’ve never tried it, you’d be surprised how long it takes to make a dollar out of nickel-and-diming at little jobs that come just now and then. It was a good thing for me that you could get a pretty good meal (if you weren’t particular where you got it) for a quarter. I was a long way from what you would call steady employment. However willing I was, I was a long way from working for anybody in particular. And hard to tell how long it would have been before anybody would have let me actually touch a horse.

  I was lucky that spring was coming, for it was clear right away that present earnings might keep me clothed a little on the decent side of nakedness, and fed a little short of full, but they were not going to buy me a place to sleep. And so, lost and ignorant as I was, I made a good discovery. There were drivers and regular hands who, if they saw you still hanging around after dark, would let you go up in a loft and sleep in the hay. They would always make you turn out your pockets to see that you had no matches, and then they would say, “Boy, if anybody asks you, I didn’t tell you you could sleep up there. I don’t know a thing about it.”

  And then I made another good discovery. I liked those nights of sleeping in the hay. I still like to remember them. If I could I would find an old horse blanket—a cooling blanket was best—and double it and lay it down on the hay and pile a forkful or two of hay on top of it, and then just burrow in. That was fine when the nights were cold. When they were warm, I could just lie down anywhere on a pile of hay, or even in the bedding on the floor of an empty stall. Aside from eating and keeping warm, I didn’t have anything on my mind, and I slept good.

  After the human stir had quieted down, and the stable hands had quit talking and laughing or shooting craps, I loved to lie there in the dark, listening to the horses eating their hay or shifting about in the bedding. Now and again I’d hear a snort or a dog barking, and off in the distance the sounds of traffic and trains. I always went to sleep before I thought I would. The next thing I knew, roosters would be crowing and horses nickering, and though it would still be dark the horsemen would be up and busy, putting the morning ration into the troughs and fresh hay in the mangers. They were fanatical about feeding times. You could set your watch by them, if you had one. I would lie still a little while just to enjoy the sounds, and then I would get up too, to be on hand for little jobs and maybe a few scraps of somebody else’s breakfast. As I said, I didn’t have any cares except for a few necessities, and I felt industrious and alert and on the lookout in those days.

  It was hard to keep my box of personal things either safely in sight or well hidden, but that got easier. And I wore my old jacket with my money in the lining like it was my skin. I almost never took it off.

  “Boy,” somebody was always saying, after the weather began to warm up, “ain’t you hot in that jacket?”

  And even if the sweat was running down my nose and dripping off, I would say, “I ain’t hot!”

  For bathing and shaving, I would wait until after dark and borrow a water bucket, or slip into a public restroom.

  I went on in that hand-to-mouth, day-to-day fashion until well into June without looking forward or back and without any plans at all. And then everything changed, by surprise.

  One of my problems, living on present earnings, was that my hair kept growing. People were beginning to say, “Boy, when yo
u going to get you a hairnet?” And one or two even started calling me “girlie.” It was beginning to interfere with business.

  So I decided I’d have to sacrifice one day’s eating money to a proper haircut. Not far from the track was a sort of run-down barbershop on a run-down street. When I got there not long after dinnertime I was the only customer. I climbed into the chair and told the old barber to civilize my mop.

  He hadn’t even shaved was the kind of barber he was. As he started in on me, he started talking, as barbers generally will. He waved his comb toward a second chair that sat idle, covered with a cloth, and said that he and another barber had once stayed busy there all day every day with hardly time to sweep up the cut hair. And he went on to name all the famous horsemen who had been his customers, and he was telling me a number of things that various ones of them had told him.

  Maybe I was a good listener, or maybe he hadn’t had a customer for several days, but he went on and on with his talk about how good the times had been there in the shop back in the old days, stopping now and then to let fly a streak of ambeer at a spittoon under the backbar.

  He went on so much that finally I got to feeling dishonest, sitting there listening and not saying anything. So I said, “Well, what happened?”

  He said, “What do you mean what happened?”

  “There’s surely been a comedown,” I said. “It don’t look like you say it used to.”

  He hadn’t been working very fast, and now he slowed down even more. He took another wild shot at the spittoon. “Well,” he said, “the other fellow died.”

  “Well, what about you?” I said. “You’re still among us.”