Jayber Crow (11 page)

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?