Читать книгу Jayber Crow - Wendell Berry - Страница 17

7

The Great World

It was enough to make your head swim. There I went, walking away from Dr. Ardmire’s office down the empty corridor late in the afternoon, and once again all my life so far was behind me. I had a feeling of strangeness and a feeling of being free; I had no more obligations, no more fear of failure, for failure had already come and, in a way, had gone. My questions were still with me, but for the time being anyhow they weren’t crying out to be answered. I wasn’t yet as free as I was going to become, but I knew that I was freer than I had ever been before. More than anything, I was glad to be free of being a preacher. It has always taken me a long time to think of something to say, and then more often than not I say it to myself. I would have had no business trying to preach a sermon three times a week.

And then, even before I got out of the building, and without any intention on my part, the thought of Nan O’Callahan returned to me. But she didn’t come to mind this time as “Sister Crow,” the entirely supposed preacher’s wife of my hopeless daydreams. She came as herself, comely, weighty, fragrant, and warm.

That was in the early spring of 1935, just as the jonquils were starting to bloom. I brought my involvements at Pigeonville to an end with a few short farewells. What had happened seemed not to have happened to me so much as to the world, which seemed all of a sudden to have got a lot bigger.

Since I couldn’t stay where I was, I had to think of someplace else. I could have gone in one direction as easily as another, and so I went to Lexington, which was the nearest city. I had never lived in a city, and I thought I would like to try one. I had my several pieces of folding money in the lining of my jacket and in my shoe, but they weren’t enough to go far. Pretty soon I was going to need a job; I thought Lexington would be the place for that. I trusted my willingness; I didn’t aim to be any kind of crook, but short of that I would do whatever anybody would pay me for. I had in the back of my mind the idea that I would take courses at the university and sooner or later graduate. If I was freer than I had ever been in my life, I was not yet entirely free, for I still hung on to an idea that had been set deep in me by all my schooling so far: I was a bright boy and I ought to make something out of myself—if not a minister of the Gospel, then something else that would be (I had by now actually thought this) a cut or two above my humble origins.

I owned a few books and a few clothes, a razor, a toothbrush, and a comb. I packed it all into a smallish cardboard box bound with several wraps of cord to make it easy to carry, and just after daylight I set off for Lexington afoot. It made me happy to have all my belongings in a box that I could carry with one hand and walk wherever I wanted to go. I thought, “I could go anywhere. I could go to the North or the West. I could just put one foot in front of the other until I would see places and things I have never imagined.”

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 you 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.”

He didn’t say anything for a while. He seemed to be refining his work, leaning way back to keep his bifocals homed in, and cutting little snips just here and there.

“Verily,” he said. “I ain’t sober all the time anymore.”

And then for a longer time he didn’t say anything but seemed to be thinking, or maybe he was embarrassed by his confession. Maybe he was just snipping his scissors in the air over the top of my head.

Finally he spat and cleared his throat. “You don’t know a barber looking for a job, I don’t reckon, do you?”

“Yessir,” I said. “Me.”

He quit work entirely then and came around in front of the chair and stood there with his scissors in one hand and his comb in the other, looking at me, with his face all bristly and the white whiskers around his mouth stained with ambeer.

Finally he said in a low voice, “Hunh!”

He was brisk about his work after that. He brushed off the loose hair, shaved around my ears, and whisked away the neckcloth.

I had no more than stood up and was reaching into my pocket to pay him when he climbed into the chair.

“Suppose you just give me a haircut,” he said, “and let’s see.”

He needed a haircut as badly as I needed to give him one, and I didn’t hesitate. I flipped the neckcloth out over his lap, pinned it around his neck, and went to work. It had been a long time since I had barbered anybody, but I took my time and was careful. After I had cut his hair, without either of us saying a word I put in the headrest, tilted him back, lathered his face, and gave him a shave. He turned out not a bad-looking fellow, and a good deal younger than I had thought.

He got up and looked at himself this way and that in the mirror while I stood holding out my coins.

When he had seen enough, he said, “Turnabout’s fair play. Keep your money.” And then he said, “When can you start?”

We struck a deal. He would furnish shop and equipment, and I could keep half of whatever I earned. I said all right, but what if I wanted to take a couple of courses in school? He said he would keep things going while I was gone, if I wasn’t gone too much, and if I would do the same for him. I said all right, if he wasn’t gone too much, and we shook. He was Skinner Hawes, he said, from down about Sweet Home, and I don’t know to this day if Skinner was his real name or not.

Maybe a lot of people could say the same—I think they could; the squeak between living and not living is pretty tight—but I have had a lucky life. That is to say that I know I’ve been lucky. Beyond that, the question is if I have not been also blessed, as I believe I have—and, beyond that, even called. Surely I was called to be, for one thing, a barber. All my real opportunities have been to be a barber, as you’ll see, and being a barber has made other opportunities. I have had the life I have had because I kept on being a barber, you might say, in spite of my intentions to the contrary.

Now I have had most of the life I am going to have, and I can see what it has been. I can remember those early years when it seemed to me I was cut completely adrift, and times when, looking back at earlier times, it seemed I had been wandering in the dark woods of error. But now it looks to me as though I was following a path that was laid out for me, unbroken, and maybe even as straight as possible, from one end to the other, and I have this feeling, which never leaves me anymore, that I have been led. I will leave you to judge the truth of that for yourself; as Dr. Ardmire and I agreed, there is no proof.

Anyhow, I told Skinner Hawes that I could start right then. There was little enough work to be done—one haircut all afternoon—but I put in the time cleaning the place up. Skinner had fallen into the habit of putting things just anywhere and then letting them lie until he wanted them again, if he could find them. The only dusting that had been accomplished there in a long time had been done by the seats of the customers’ pants. The big front window was about as transparent as an old bed-sheet.

So I carried out a big pile of old newspapers and Police Gazettes and dusted everything and washed the windows and mirrors and swept the floor and mopped it. When quitting time came I went back to the trotting track and retrieved my box of possessions from where I had hidden it. On the way back I invested my haircut fund in a pretty good supper.

For two or three nights I slept on the floor of the shop, and then I found a poor old widow lady in a poor old house with a room to rent for the little that I thought I could afford. The room was just a little longer and wider than I was. It had an iron cot, a table, and a chair, and a few nails driven into the wall for hanging things up. It was the first room I’d ever had in my own right, paid for by me, with my own door that I could shut and lock. As long as the rent was paid, it was my room, and I liked the feeling. I came and went through a side door. The landlady was a nice woman who would have taken me to raise, as the fellow says, if she had seen enough of me. But even when I was there I was never much in sight and made no commotion. I could have been a mouse in the wall.

At the shop, I saw right away that we would have to do something to stir up business. Skinner’s old customers had fallen away, partly, I thought, because they didn’t like the way he and the shop looked. Cleaning up the shop and keeping Skinner shorn and shaved would help, I thought, but we’d have to get the word out. So I got some paper and lettered out a few little signs. They said: SKINNER’S BARBERSHOP. 2 CHAIRS AT YOUR SERVICE. GOOD PRICES. PLENTY OF SITTING ROOM. And then I listed our “special prices” for the next two weeks, knocking a nickel off of everything. I didn’t even ask Skinner; I just did it. And then I tacked up my signs on some trees and barn doors over at the trotting track, and I advertised a little too by word of mouth.

All that I had done didn’t amount to much, really, but it seemed to help. The place looked better, and people began to drift in from the trotting track and other places, either to loaf or to get a shave or a haircut. We made them feel welcome, whether they were loafers or customers, hoping that the loafers would become customers, which sooner or later they mostly did. It wasn’t long until we had enough regular customers to keep us going.

They were a mixed lot, I will have to say. We had people from the shops and stores in the neighborhood, people who lived nearby—decent-enough working people, most of them. We also had several second-string touts and gamblers from over at the track, a pimp or two, and maybe worse than that. I was pleased, for it seemed to me that I was getting a good look at city life and hearing talk and learning things I probably couldn’t have learned anyplace else. And I did learn a good deal. For a barber, I never was very talkative. Mainly I listened. At Skinner’s Barbershop I heard people taking things for granted that I had never even imagined before. And I mean several kinds of people, talking about several kinds of things. But we never did get any of the famous horsemen Skinner continued to brag that he had barbered in the old days.

We were doing all right. I don’t mean to say we were getting rich, but we were getting the things we needed and paying for them. I was eating my meals with the comforting thought that in several hours I was almost certainly going to eat again. And I had gone back to saving my money. I would go to the bank to change my small bills into bigger ones, so as not to accumulate too big a wad in my jacket lining or my shoes. But I never opened an account. I knew I was being reckless with my money, risking losing it or having it stolen or burnt up, but it was my money and I didn’t trust anybody to take care of it but me. A bank account just didn’t appeal to me. I was too standoffish and sly. I never deposited a dime in a bank until about three years after I set up shop in Port William. And even now I like to have a few bills stuck here and there, where only I know where they are.

I assumed that since I didn’t have the religion of Pigeonville College I didn’t have any religion at all. That seemed a big load off my mind. I felt as light as a kite. Anybody who had been to The Good Shepherd and Pigeonville College knew very well what was forbidden and what was not. I was well acquainted with the unforbidden, but now that I was accumulating a little money I invested some in the forbidden. Wherever I could locate the forbidden—and with our clientele, it wasn’t hard—I went and tried it. Wherever the sirens sang, I went ashore. Wherever I heard the suck of whirlpools and the waters gnashing on the rocks, I rowed hard to get there. It’s a little bit of a wonder that I didn’t get cast up from the depths in several pieces, or at least contract a foul disease.

Why I didn’t, I think, was stinginess and my wish to read books. I never shirked or shorted my work, and I never was free with my money. I found that I could experience the forbidden just as well on a tight budget, probably, as by squandering every cent I had saved. This was another of my good discoveries. I didn’t settle on any final terms with the forbidden. I just floated in and floated out. I was a cut-rate prodigal.

When the fall semester started at the university in the middle of September, I did what I had told Skinner Hawes I was going to do. I went over and paid the tuition fee and signed up for two courses. Looking back now, I can see how noncommittal and stealthy I had become. The official forces were there, seeing to the process of registration, and with them I was like a fox at night, passing through with as little commotion as possible. I can sort of see myself as I must have been that day, looking about for fear I would run into somebody who had known me before, filling out the papers with false information or as near none as possible. I said that my name was J. Crow, that I was from Diehard, Kentucky, that I planned on becoming a schoolteacher. Parents? None. Religion? None. National origin? Diehard. Race? Lost. Sex? Yes.

I didn’t come clean about anything, really. What I wanted were courses in book-reading, and I wasn’t particular which. Once I got over there in the actual presence of the classroom buildings and the library, it seemed to me that I hungered and thirsted to hear somebody talk about books who knew more about them than I did. I didn’t mean I wanted to be a schoolteacher. I just made that my pretense to be there, for I had never heard that anybody ever went to a university just to read books. There had to be a real reason—namely, something you wanted to do later. Anyhow, I never took any courses in the college of education. I signed up for literature courses.

And I thoroughly liked them. I could say I loved them. When the time came I would leave the shop and walk across to the campus and through the between-classes mobs of students to McVey Hall and climb the steps up to the classrooms and sit down. I would get there a little early if I could. I would stroll past the professors’ offices full of books and look in at the doors, and then wait in my seat in the classroom while the students sorted themselves out of the passing crowd and came in and took their seats. And then the professor would come in and call the roll and begin talking. This was what I longed for. I just sat and took it in. Even though I couldn’t quite make myself care whether I passed the courses or not, I took notes like everybody else. I remembered everything I read and heard. Maybe I was lucky, but for the courses I took I had professors who knew what they were talking about and loved to talk about it, and it seemed wonderful to me. I answered questions if I was asked, but I asked no questions. The professors were pretty aloof, like the university itself, and I was as aloof from them as they were from me.

I read in the textbooks that were assigned, and I also went to the library and checked out the books the professors talked about or recommended, and read them. Or read at them—some were dull. At the shop when I didn’t have a customer, I would climb into the chair myself and read. That caused some curious looks and some comment, but Skinner would jerk his head in my direction and say, “He’s taking courses. He’s going to become a gentleman and a scholar. Verily, I expect to see him walk in here someday and tell me he’s a professor.” That took care of that, and I let it go.

I read in my room at night, when I wasn’t out prowling. And some nights I went over to the library and read there. The library had beautiful rooms lined with books, and tables for reading and writing. And there was a perfectly lovely room called the Browsing Room, with shelf upon shelf of books, and several tall windows looking out into the trees, and easy chairs with reading lamps, and sofas. It was far and away the finest, most comfortable room I had ever seen in my life, and I loved to sit in it. If you were there on a Sunday afternoon you could sometimes steal a splendid nap on one of the sofas.

After The Good Shepherd and Pigeonville, the university was a big relief to me. Unless you were a girl, nobody cared much what you did. Nobody was going to call you in for a talking-to across the top of a desk—or, rather, they might invite you or “require” you, but they couldn’t make you come in if you didn’t want to, and they knew it, and mostly I think they didn’t care if you came in or not. If you failed your courses, you disappeared back into the outside world again, and they would see you no more.

The university was in some ways the opposite of The Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd looked upon the outside world as a threat to its conventional wisdom. The university looked upon itself as a threat to the conventional wisdom of the outside world. According to it, it not only knew more than ordinary people but was more advanced and had a better idea of the world of the future.

Otherwise, the university and The Good Shepherd were a lot alike. That was another of my discoveries. It was a slow discovery and not one I enjoyed—I was a long time figuring it out. Every one of the educational institutions that I had been in had been hard at work trying to be a world unto itself. The Good Shepherd and Pigeonville College were trying to be the world of the past. The university was trying to be the world of the future, and maybe it has had a good deal to do with the world as it has turned out to be, but this has not been as big an improvement as the university expected. The university thought of itself as a place of freedom for thought and study and experimentation, and maybe it was, in a way. But it was an island too, a floating or a flying island. It was preparing people from the world of the past for the world of the future, and what was missing was the world of the present, where every body was living its small, short, surprising, miserable, wonderful, blessed, damaged, only life.

I was going along and going along, led by this love I had of reading books and pushed by the feeling, left over from my earlier teachers, that I ought to make something out of myself and rise above my humble origins. I was attending my classes, doing the reading, taking the tests-even making good grades, though I pretty much didn’t care whether they were good or not. But aside from my declaration that I wanted to be a teacher, I had made no “career preparation” at all. I wasn’t taking required courses. I had a “faculty advisor” whose name I had never spoken and could not remember. I had not been in ROTC; I had not taken hygiene or physical education or a science. I had taken a course in which we had read some of Dante in English, and it made me wish I knew his Italian, but I had never enrolled in a course in any foreign language. I was not preparing for any career or life that the university recommended or that I could imagine. I tried to imagine myself as a teacher, but I had no more success at that than I’d had at imagining myself as a preacher—though, as before, I sort of dreamed of a salary and a wife. The future was coming to me, but I had not so much as lifted a foot to go to it. Maybe my failure at Pigeonville carried over into my time at the university, like an infection. Maybe my character was leading me astray. Maybe I was called to what I had not thought, as Professor Ardmire had said.

Along in the fall of 1936, after the weather got cold, about the time I finished figuring out that all the institutions I had known were islands, the whole weight of my unimagined, unlooked-for life came down on me, and I hit the bottom—or anyhow I hit what felt mighty like the bottom. For the first time, maybe, since my early days at The Good Shepherd, I felt just awfully lonesome. I felt sad beyond the thought or memory of happiness. Maybe I had felt those feelings before, but before I could stop them. Now I couldn’t stop them. It got so that whenever I was by myself I would think again and again of myself running barefoot over the frozen grass the morning Aunt Cordie died, and I would cry. When I was crying I would be hearing in my mind Aunt Cordie’s voice saying, “I don’t know. Honey, I just don’t know.”

One of the sights in Lexington in those days was an old Negro man, wearing a tall silk hat and a swallowtail coat, who walked all day up and down the sidewalk in front of some not-so-good houses close to the university. He had a certain length of the walk that he walked. When he got to the end of his walk in one direction he would make a low, graceful bow and turn gracefully and walk in the other direction. He walked back and forth, back and forth, day after day. I thought of him too.

Or I didn’t exactly think, of him or of myself or Aunt Cordie either. Maybe I wasn’t thinking then at all. It was just that when I wasn’t working or reading or going to class, or when I couldn’t sleep, these images would come into my mind. I would see myself running or the old man walking, or I would hear Aunt Cordie’s voice and I would cry.

By the time I had got to Lexington, I was so convinced of the temporariness of any stay I would ever make in this world that I hadn’t formed any ties at all. At the trotting track and at the shop, I made acquaintances, but I didn’t make any friends. At the university I came and went almost without speaking to anybody. Maybe I did and have forgot, but I don’t remember eating a meal with another soul during the year and about ten months I stayed in Lexington. For a long time I liked it that way. I enjoyed coming and going without telling or explaining, being free. I enjoyed listening without talking. I enjoyed being wherever I was without being noticed. But then when the dark change came over my mind, I was in a fix. My solitariness turned into loneliness. When I was alone those images moved and Aunt Cordie’s voice sounded in my mind, and I couldn’t stop them. What I had thought was the bottom kept getting lower in little jerks. When I cried it was getting harder to stop.

The memories of my days at Squires Landing—which I had once been able to walk about in, in my mind—had shrunk and drawn away. That old life had come to be like a little painted picture at the bottom of a well, and the well was getting deeper. The picture that I had inside me was more real than anything outside, and yet it was getting ever smaller and farther away and harder to call back. That, I guess, is why I got so sad. I was living, but I was not living my life. So far as I could see, I was going nowhere. And now, more and more, I seemed also to have come from nowhere. Without a loved life to live, I was becoming more and more a theoretical person, as if I might have been a figment of institutional self-justification: a theoretical ignorant person from the sticks, who one day would go to a theoretical somewhere and make a theoretical something of himself—the implication being that until he became that something he would be nothing.

I kept attending classes until the Christmas vacation began, and I kept on working, but I could see that I had come to another end. I had completely lost the feeling that I should make something of myself. Aunt Cordie’s voice troubled my mind, but it told me I didn’t look down on my humble origins and didn’t yearn to rise above them. It took me a long time to see what was happening to me then. I have known no sudden revelations. No stroke of light has ever knocked me blind to the ground. But I know now that even then, in my hopelessness and sorrow, I began a motion of the heart toward my origins. Far from rising above them, I was longing to sink into them until I would know the fundamental things. I needed to know the original first chapter of the world. I had no past that I could go back to and no future that I could imagine, no family, no friends, and no plans. I was as free as a falling stone or a floating chip—freer, for I had no direction at all.

When classes took up again after Christmas, I made up my mind not to go back.

Skinner said, “I thought you was going to school.”

I said, “I reckon not.”

I had a customer, and Skinner was sitting in his chair, reading a newspaper somebody had left. When I said “I reckon not,” he lowered the paper and looked at me, waiting for me to explain. I didn’t explain.

Finally he said, “Mmmm-mnh! Verily, I’ll be damned if ever I seen anything like it.”

Maybe because not going back to my classes was in a way doing something, another image began moving in my mind. I could see myself getting out of Sam Hanks’s truck at the stockyards, and I could see him coming around to face me. When he hooked his two fingers into my jacket pocket, I could feel the pull. More than I ever had before, I felt ashamed of my lie and wanted to undo it. I thought for a while of sending the money back, care of the postmaster at Port William. And then, without deciding not to, I didn’t.

One morning in the latter part of January, in 1937, instead of going to the shop, I packed my belongings into the same box I had brought with me from Pigeonville, leaving out what wouldn’t fit in, and laid a full week’s rent along with my key on the table in my room. I walked out of town as easily and freely as one of the old beat-down gamblers who would show up and hang around the shop for a few weeks or months and then be gone. I thought of taking leave of Skinner Hawes and my old landlady—but what for? To be asked for an explanation that I didn’t have?

I headed westward, for Louisville. I knew that along the rivers the waters were rising.