Jayber Crow. Wendell Berry
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let my mind go there and make itself at home.
Although I can’t say that I liked school, when I wanted to be I was a good enough student. I liked learning, especially the learning that could be got by reading. I made fair grades, but I and my teachers knew that I could have done better. I was, they said, like a good horse who would not work; I was a disappointment to them; I was wasting my God-given talents. And this gave me, I believe, the only self-determining power I had: I could withhold this single thing that was mine that I knew they wanted. I had ways of not allowing myself to be fully present in the classroom, even though I was physically confined there. I looked out the windows. A window opening on nothing but the blank sky was endlessly attractive to me; if I watched long enough, a bird or a cloud would appear within the frame, and I watched with patience. A window that looked out into a tree was a source of inexpressible happiness, for it permitted me to observe the foraging of the birds and the life history of leaves. When my attention was called back into the room, as sooner or later it always would be, I let my mind wander. I found out that I could not willfully place my mind elsewhere, but that, if I let it loose from what it was expected to be doing, it would go elsewhere. “J. Crow,” they would say, “I am not out there in that tree,” or “J. Crow, would you honor us by paying attention to this problem up here on the blackboard?”
And I would say “Yes, ma’am” or “Yes, sir,” as if only too happy to have their help in dealing with my waywardness.
If the classroom was not my natural habitat, the library pretty much was. The library was a long room across the back of Brother Whitespade’s house. There were lots of windows along the east wall, and comfortable chairs in front of the windows, tables here and there, and several tall cases of books. The books had mainly been donated, I think, and some of them practically nobody would have wanted to read, but there were some good ones too. The librarian was a nice lady named Mrs. Eades, who was hospitable and quiet and kind. Now and then our teachers would send us to the library on some project or other, but there were times too when we were free just to go: Saturday mornings, and every night between supper and study hall.
Back in a corner between a bookcase and one of the east windows, there was a small table where I liked to sit and read. It was one of the best places in the world to be on a rainy Sunday afternoon in the winter. And I like to remember sitting there on a bright Saturday morning in the spring, with the window open and the sun shining in and the spirea bushes in bloom outside. At first I read books about horses and dogs, because I wanted a horse and a dog. And then I read several books about a boy named William Greenhill, an orphan like me, and then The Swiss Family Robinson and The Boy’s King Arthur. I read the stories of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, two more orphans, and Rip Van Winkle, and David Copperfield, another orphan.
One day I found in a trash can the hinder part of a little anthology of American poems. The cover and a lot of pages had been torn away, so that my copy began:
Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells ...
I thought tintinnabulation was the finest word I had ever seen. I kept that piece of a book with me until I came back to Port William. I still have it.
In my last years of high school I read Thomas Paine’s The Crisis and “Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walden by Henry David Thoreau, a book that made me want to live in a cabin in the woods. I drew a picture of the cabin I wanted to live in, and drew the floor plan, and made a list of the furniture and dishes and utensils and other things I would need.
I don’t remember exactly when, but I started copying out passages that I liked into a tablet. And then I started making what I thought were improvements on the things I copied; I was uneasy about that, not being sure it was right. Also I kept a list of words I especially liked: independent, I remember, was one, and then tintinnabulation and self-reliant and free and outside. There got to be a good many.
Among the books in the library were two large blue volumes containing photographs of World War I. And so at last I saw what had been going on over across the sea in that winter of 1917 and 18 when I had heard the rumors of war and imagined people shooting one another in darkness. I studied those pages by the hour, for the battlefields did look as though they had been passed over by something vast and pitiless, as our riverbanks at home had looked, scoured by the ice.
After I quit waking up afraid, feeling that I might be nowhere, I began getting used to the place. I began to take for granted that I was somewhere, and somewhere that I knew, but I never quite felt that I was somewhere I wanted to be. Where I wanted to be, always, day in and day out, year in and year out, was Squires Landing and all that fall of country between Port William up on the ridge and the river between Sand Ripple and Willow Run. When I heard or read the word home, that patch of country was what I thought of. Home was one of the words I wrote in my tablet.
Lying in bed in the dark before I went to sleep, I would picture myself coming up the hill to the house at Squires Landing. I would go around the house to the back, the way we always did, and up onto the porch and through the kitchen door. I would go through the house slowly, room by room, looking at everything: the kitchen table with three places set and covered with a cloth, the skillet and the pots and the kettle on the stove, Aunt Cordie’s chair in the living room, her little stand table, her Bible lying on the table by the good Aladdin lamp, the beds in the bedrooms, the quilts on the beds, the rag rugs on the floors, the cracks in the wallpaper, Uncle Othy’s whetrock on the mantelpiece and his old straw hat on its nail over the washstand. I liked especially to return to my own bedroom, which was the eastward one, the brightest of the two rooms upstairs. When I went in, it would be early in the morning, in summer; the room would be clean-swept, full of light and moving air, the shadows of the curtains swaying on the floor.
I would wander into the store and on down to the garden and the riverbank and back up by the coal tipple. It seemed to me that I could remember even the leaves and the grass blades and the little rocks in the paths. It would all be so real to me that I would think I couldn’t stand it if I didn’t just get up and go back.
But always in these imaginings I would be the only one there. For some reason, I could never make myself remember Aunt Cordie or Uncle Othy. I could remember them only by being reminded of them. I never knew when this would happen, but when I was reminded they would just all of a sudden appear to me as they had been on a certain day—Uncle Othy rowing the boat, Aunt Cordie walking down to the garden, using her hoe as a walking stick—and then I would see them plain.
Sometimes when I wasn’t trying to think about it, one of the old times would come over me entirely, and I could remember sitting in Aunt Cordie’s lap while she rocked me and sang, “Old Grammy was dead and lay in her grave.” Or I would hear Uncle Othy spelling woodpecker: “Wee-w-double-o-d-sockeedledypeck-e-double-ek-ek-r.”
Of course, what I wasn’t telling myself, and maybe was trying not to know (though I did know), was that at Squires Landing, and Goforth too, things were already changed. The things I was remembering were gone from everywhere except my mind.
I would remember these rememberings after I went back to be the barber in Port William, for of course one of the first things I did after I had settled in was go to look again at both of my old homes. In my dreams of remembrance, I had failed to reckon not only with the certainty of change under any circumstances, but also with the new circumstances of automobiles and improved roads. Already the only surviving blacksmith shops were those in the towns. My father’s shop, which had opened right onto the Katy’s Branch road, had been torn down when the road was widened. And our house had burned. There was nothing there even to recognize—just a patch of weeds and tree sprouts with a chimney sticking up in the middle.
At Squires Landing the buildings and all were still in place, but were not cared for as they had been when Aunt Cordie and Uncle Othy were alive. The landing and the little farm still provided a living for the family that lived there, but you could see that the days of such enterprises were numbered. Goods were being trucked into the country by then, not brought by the river, and the