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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—but now, 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.”