Jayber Crow. Wendell Berry
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had to be busy in his crop, Aunt Cordie and I went down and kept the store. When Aunt Cordie and I went wandering off to gather wild greens or berries, Uncle Othy kept an eye on the house. We really didn’t go much of anywhere except up to Port William to church on Sunday morning. We could easier have gone to Goforth Church, but that was Methodist. Port William, anyhow, was our town.
Our nearest neighbors were Put Woolfork and his family on the upriver side, and on the downriver side Arch and Ada Thripple and their grown daughters, Wanda and Bernice.
We hardly ever saw Put Woolfork’s womenfolk or children, but we saw Put every day. Aunt Cordie would say, “Now, that Put. He puts them all to work over there—I know he does—and then he comes over here to where he won’t even have to see them working. He’s got little enough sense to think he’s smart.”
And Uncle Othy would always answer, “I reckon I go to all the sweat and worry of keeping store just to provide Put Woolfork a place to set down.”
Put didn’t often buy anything. Neither he nor any of his family ever came to our house, and we never went over to theirs. “I see enough of him as ’tis,” Aunt Cordie said.
But we often walked across the hillside to the Thripples’ to sit till bedtime, or they walked over to sit with us. Aunt Cordie taught me to call them Aunt Ada and Uncle Arch, and I did. She also insisted that I call their daughters Miss Wanda and Miss Bernice, and I did that too, but only in Aunt Cordie’s presence.
The Thripples were good, industrious people like Aunt Cordie and Uncle Othy. They took care of themselves, were good neighbors, and I never heard them speak an envious word. Uncle Arch farmed about fifty acres, mostly hillside with a narrow strip of bottom. He stayed busy all the time, though he didn’t hurry much; he never had a lot to say, and was in most ways quiet. But he had one oddity that interested everybody and that nobody could account for. The old man was famous all over the Port William community for the noise he made working a team. Days would go by sometimes and we would hear not a whisper from over there, and then Uncle Arch would hitch up Dick and Bob and go to work, and then you could hear him all over the valley. He just ranted and rared.
And I remember this:
The only neighbors we had across the river—the only ones we ever saw—were an elderly black couple, Ben and Ellie Fewclothes. The story was that Uncle Ben had wandered into our part of the country from somewhere down south when he was a young man, with nothing of his own but the ragged clothes he was wearing. They called him Ben Fewclothes and perhaps because he needed a new one, he took the name. He and Aunt Ellie had a farm in the big bottom over there—about thirty acres or so, bordering on a slue. It was good land, and they made a pretty self-sufficient thing of it, the way all the farming people did then, or tried to. I called them Uncle Ben and Aunt Ellie. You might be thinking by now that I had a lot of aunts and uncles, but that was just the courtesy of those days; children were not allowed to go around first-naming older people.
Uncle Ben would come over occasionally, but not often. He didn’t fish much, at least not in the river, and didn’t own a boat. But Aunt Ellie was a regular customer at the store, and whenever she came over she and Aunt Cordie would sit down together and visit and talk a while. Aunt Ellie conducted herself very consciously as a lady—was precise and careful always in her manners and her speech. Every Saturday morning she would come down the dug steps in the bank with a basket of eggs, a bucket of cream, and sometimes two or three old hens with their legs tied. Without much raising her voice, she would call out, “Mister Dagget! Mister Dagget!” And Uncle Othy would go in the boat and set her over the river to do her weekly dealing. After I got big enough, one of my favorite duties was to go along to help.
When we got to the far side, I would step up into the bow of the johnboat, and while Uncle Othy held the boat steady against the bank I would help Aunt Ellie to step in and situate herself and her bucket and basket and whatever else she had brought. She would always say, “Well! Thank you, honey!” And then I would go back to my seat in the stern, and Uncle Othy would row us across. When we got to the landing on our side, I would go forward and help Aunt Ellie get ashore. And she would say again, “Well! Thank you, honey!”
We were bringing Aunt Ellie across one fine Saturday morning in June. The river was as still almost as glass; it was quiet all around, except for Uncle Arch Thripple who was up on his hillside plowing tobacco with old Dick. Uncle Arch was ripping as usual:
“Get up, Dick! Haw! Haw! Whoa! Get over haw! Get up! Gee, Dick, damn you to hell! Whooooa! Haw! Get up, Dick!”
And Aunt Ellie, perhaps unable to resist, looking neither at Uncle Othy nor at me but speaking in her precise way as if to the swallows flying over the water, said, “Seem like Mistah Thripple having trouble with his Dick this mo’ning!”
I caught it—I was old enough by then—and was about to laugh, but Uncle Othy looked quickly at me and said, “Sh!”
From start to finish, I was pretty much Aunt Cordie’s boy. When she spoke of me to other people, she always called me “my boy,” tenderly and proudly, for I was her helper. She was on in years and somewhat slowed, but she was seldom idle. We went steadily from one thing to another, from can see to can’t see, and then on by lamplight, and I helped her with everything: keeping up the fires, maintaining the lamps, cooking, cleaning fish, dressing poultry, washing the dishes, washing the clothes, cleaning the house, working in the garden, putting up food for winter. Aunt Cordie was good company and always kind, but she saw to it that I did my work right. The best part of my education, and surely the most useful part, came from her.
When Aunt Cordie didn’t need me, I would go down and hang about in the store and listen to the talk. For there was always talk. “More talk than business,” Uncle Othy would say. But perhaps he liked the talk as well as the business; at least he always took part, and he was seldom alone. Sometimes he would let me help a little in the store, or would recruit me for some farming job that required more than two hands. But Uncle Othy was persnickety in his ways and hard to please; I liked better to work with Aunt Cordie.
I was Jonah Crow in those days. When I thought of myself, I thought, “I am Jonah Crow.” A pretty name. I imagined that my mother had loved the sound of it. I was Jonah Crow entirely.
Aunt Cordie had several pet names for me. When she used my right name, she pronounced it with an air of preciseness, as if to show respect for my great namesake.
Uncle Othy said “Jony” for the same reason that he said “sody” and “asafedity” and “Indiany” But when he was calling me down, he said “Jon-ah” with a heavy stress on the second syllable. “Jon-ah, get out of that, sir!”
It has been a many a day since I thought of myself as Jonah Crow. To me, it seems that Jonah Crow was a small boy who once lived at Squires Landing with Aunt Cordie and Uncle Othy Dagget for several years. In those years, the only change seemed to be that from one Christmas to the next the boy grew a little taller.
And now, a long time past the time of that boy, I live again beside the river, a mile and a half downstream from Squires Landing, maybe two and a half from Goforth, having traveled so far, by a considerable wandering and winding about, in only seventy-two years.
Back there at the beginning, as I see now, my life was all time and almost no memory. Though I knew early of death, it still seemed to be something that happened only to other people, and I stood in an unending river of time that would go on making the same changes and the same returns forever.
And now, nearing the end, I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time. Toward the end of my life at Squires Landing I began to understand that whenever death happened, it happened to me. That is knowledge that takes a long time to wear in. Finally it wears in. Finally I realized and fully accepted that one day I would belong entirely to memory, and it would then not be my memory that I belonged to, and I went over to Goforth to see if there was any room left beside my parents’ graves. I learned that there was room for one more; if it belonged to anybody, it belonged to me. I went down to the Tacker Funeral Home at Hargrave and made my arrangements.
Some days, sitting here on my porch