Jayber Crow. Wendell Berry
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began to occupy me of a night. How it came about I am not quite sure, but I began to suspect that I might be called to preach. My suspicion may have been no more than fear, for with all my heart I disliked the idea of becoming a preacher. But for as long as I could remember, I had been hearing preachers tell in sermons how they had received “the call”; this was often the theme of Brother Whitespade and the many visiting preachers who spoke at The Good Shepherd. Not one of those men had ever suggested that a person could be “called” to anything but “full-time Christian service,” by which they meant either the ministry or “the mission field.” The finest thing they could imagine was that an orphan boy, having been rescued by the charity of the church, should repay his debt by accepting “the call.” What was so frightening to me about this call was that once it came to you, it was final; there was no arguing with it. You fell blind off your horse, and then you did what the call told you to do. I knew too well that when another Jonah had refused the call to preach he was permitted to change his mind in the belly of a great fish.
This possibility of being called began to keep me awake of a night. I had heard no voice, but probably because I was starting to respond at about that time to the distant calling of girls, I could not shake the notion that I was being called by something that I knew nothing about.
I knew the story of the boy Samuel, how he was called in the night by a voice speaking his name. I could imagine, so clearly that I could almost hear it, a voice calling out of the darkness: “J. Crow.” And then I thought maybe the voice had called, and that I had almost but not quite heard it. One night I got out of bed and went to the window. The sky over the treetops was full of stars. Whispering so as not to waken my roommate, I said, “Speak, Lord; for thy servant heareth.” And then, so help me, I heard the silence that stretched all the way from the ground underneath my window to the farthest stars, and the hair stood up on my head, and a shiver came into me that did not pass away for a long time.
Though I knew that actually I had heard no voice, I could not dismiss the possibility that it had spoken and I had failed to hear it because of some deficiency in me or something wrong that I had done. My fearful uncertainty lasted for months. As the siren song of girls became ever stronger in my mind, I wondered if maybe that was the trouble. Finally I reasoned that in dealing with God you had better give Him the benefit of the doubt. I decided that I had better accept the call that had not come, just in case it had come and I had missed it. This was in the late summer before my final year at The Good Shepherd. I went to Brother Whitespade and told him I was pretty sure that I had received the call.
I did not at all foresee the benefits that followed. It turned out that I was the first, in Brother Whitespade’s several years at The Good Shepherd, who had been even pretty sure of having received the call. By my declaration, without intending to at all, I set the stage for well-paying hypocrisy and self-deception. Brother Whitespade was delighted with me. I had fulfilled his fondest dream. The once-lost lamb now proposed to become a shepherd. All of a sudden, with me, he no longer kept up the appearance of displeased and distant authority that he used to protect himself from everybody who might try to take advantage of him. Now he showed himself to me as just a man who thought too well of himself but wanted to be kind, who was too sure of a lot of things but also a little lonely. He began to treat me almost as a friend.
For his sake and my own, I am ashamed to tell you this, or even to remember it. For the truth is that I had not changed very much, if any. I did not become a better student or a tamer one, or less troublesome or troubled, or less inclined to wander away through any opening that presented itself. But now I had a reputation with Brother Whitespade, and therefore with the other official people, that was a perfect camouflage for what I had been and continued to be. Once I had the reputation, so long as I continued to talk up to it, I did not have to live up to it.
I continued to hold my professed intention to become a preacher, and I did as well as I could all the special tasks that were now assigned to me because of my professed intention. One of these was to speak from time to time in chapel, which Brother Whitespade thought would be good practice for me. For my first talk—hypocrite and fool that I was—I took my text from I Samuel 3, the story of the young Samuel and the voice of God.
I will add, to be fair to myself, that there was in all this a speck of sincerity. By then I had heard the Bible read quite a lot and had read it some myself. I liked the stories of Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Ruth, King David, and Daniel. I was truly moved by the story of Jesus, and had read every verse of the Gospels for myself. I can’t say that all of those stories had made any noticeable change in me, but I had them in mind and sometimes I thought about them. And sometimes I imagined things about being a preacher that appealed to me. I thought that if I became a preacher, I would have learned a great deal during my education, and I would spend a lot of my time reading. I liked those thoughts, and also the thought that I would live in a nice town with shady streets and be well-loved and admired by my congregation.
But the thought that I liked most was that I would have a wife. In the spring of my second year of high school, a copper-haired girl named N. (for Nan) O‘Callahan and I had stepped into the shadow of the spirea bushes by the library and had given each other a kiss that was the strongest thing that had happened to me since Aunt Cordie died and I came to The Good Shepherd. It was as if the world, leaving me upright, had turned itself upside down above my head and poured over me rivers and oceans of warm water. After that, it was clear to me that if I became a preacher I was going to need a wife. And so I imagined a wife with red hair like Nan O’Callahan’s. When I began to imagine her, I ceased entirely to imagine the nice town and the church and the congregation and the reading of books. I imagined my wife and me coming home from the grocery store late in the afternoon, our arms loaded with sacks of groceries—for at The Good Shepherd we were always a little hungry. I imagined us sitting at our kitchen table, eating a big supper that always ended with a cherry pie like Aunt Cordie used to make, with sugar glazed on the strips of the top crust. And then I imagined us together in the parsonage bedroom, enacting scenes that could have been enacted nowhere in the world but in the imagination of a lonely, ignorant boy.
Thus confused and hopeful and self-deluded, I emerged from The Good Shepherd with a scholarship and a job waiting tables at a small denominational college in Pigeonville, about forty miles away.
And Nan O’Callahan? She was gone long before I was. Our kiss in the shadow of the spirea was, in fact, a farewell kiss. She was going away to live with some relatives she didn’t know, and she didn’t want to leave without a trace. She wanted to think that somebody would miss her. And so that kiss passed between us, that moment of my sudden immersion in her welcoming warmth, living moisture, and good smell.
“Remember me, J. Crow,” she said. She gave me no address, probably not knowing what her address would be, and I never saw her after she left. But how could I forget her?
6
Pigeonville
And so I became a “pre-ministerial student” at Pigeonville College, beginning a curriculum of courses designed to prepare me for the pulpit, and waiting tables three times a day in a girls’ dormitory, which set me enough at cross purposes even without all the questions I had ahead of me that I had not yet even thought of.
And for a while, though I believe I felt the influence of my unthought questions, I continued not to think of them. One reason was that I had to get over another big change. It took me a while to deal in my mind with the knowledge that my life at The Good Shepherd had ended, that I would not go back, that I probably would not see again the people I had known there.
Now I had a new place and new people to learn about. All the circumstances and rules were new to me. I had more freedom now and I had to feel my way into it, see which barriers had fallen and which still were up. I had this feeling for freedom, you see, that I had carefully and quietly nourished for eight years at The Good Shepherd. I couldn’t be satisfied until I knew the boundaries and where the openings were, if any.
But at this school I not only learned what the rules were but even willingly kept them. As long as we did what was expected of us and kept the rules, we boys at least could come and go pretty much