Jayber Crow (12 page)

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

Because, to save money, I had got around in Lexington purely by walking, I had invested in a raincoat and rainhat and also a good pair of overshoes. On the journey I began from Lexington, the Friday morning of January 22, I figure my rain gear paid for itself and turned a profit. The coat was made of a stiff fabric coated with rubber, and it had big pockets that I could reach all the way through to carry my box first with one hand and then the other. It must have been made for a fat man. Even though I was wearing my jacket under it, there was plenty of room in it for me and my box too. The hat was made of the same stuff and had a broad brim to shed the rain down past the collar of the coat. If I didn't sweat, I could stay dry in any kind of weather.

When I left Lexington early that morning, I was not sweating. The day was cold and wet. It had been raining, and it was still raining. It was going to rain. The rain fell steady and pretty hard, and there was no place you could think of where it wasn't raining. It was the kind of winter day that makes you forget that the weather was ever any different, and you feel like it has been winter all the way back to Adam. The people walking along the streets, the horses drawing the freight wagons, even the trucks and cars, all seemed resigned and slow, as if they were determined to keep going without hope.

I can't say that I was full of hope myself, but I was full of excitement. By the time I had taken just a few steps, I could feel that I was leaving behind the little closed spaces of my room and Skinner's Barbershop and the university, and was out in the wide world. I welcomed even the cold and the wet, and was glad when I went past the edge of town and there were farms on both sides of the road. I didn't feel sad and lonely anymore but just alert. I don't think I had even begun to have an idea where I was going, but wherever it was, that was where I wanted to go.

For the time being, I had in mind just to go and see the risen waters. Though I had never been to Louisville, the flood in Louisville had been a big thing in the newspapers, and I was going there to see it. From there, I thought, I would just let my way branch off wherever it would. I walked on the right-hand side of the road, not asking for a ride but in a position to take one if one was offered. My agreement with myself was that if I was going to go, I ought to be willing to go by my own means, which is to say by foot. I did get several rides, but not a one of them took me far. It is about twenty-five miles from Lexington to Frankfort, and I would guess I walked better than half that distance. But the trip itself turned out to be a good deal longer than twenty-five miles.

The first fellow who gave me a lift said the water was already over the road I was following. He said I ought to try the Leestown Pike, and he let me out at a side road that would take me across. After I got to the Leestown Pike I walked a long time toward Frankfort before I got to a sign saying that road was closed. And so I had to double back to another side road that took me across to Versailles. It was afternoon by the time I got there, and I had walked and ridden a long way and was still fifteen miles from Frankfort. I found a little eating joint there where I got two hamburgers and drank several glasses of water, and then I set off again.

The talk in the eating place and with the people who gave me rides was all of the flood. The Kentucky River had risen six inches an hour at Frankfort during the night and was still rising an inch an hour, which would be two feet a day. I had lived for my whole childhood, you might say, in sight of that river. I knew what a two-foot rise meant, once the river was out of its banks. For every inch it rose the water would widen by feet. And all along, as I was making my way back to it again, I got more and more excited. As I imagined the water rising in the river valley,
I seemed to feel it rising in me. That feeling was my old life coming back to me, though I hadn't the words or even a thought for it. As in those first weeks at The Good Shepherd when I had longed to go home, I now longed to see the waters.

By the time I got to Frankfort, dark was coming and the rain was turning to sleet. As soon as I was past the edge of town, a long time before I saw the river, the turmoil of the flood was right there to be seen. The streets were crowded with traffic and people walking—people needing shelter, people trying to help the people needing shelter, people going home from work or going about their usual business, and a lot of sight-seers too. You couldn't tell which was which, except that a lot of the walkers and riders were carrying things, like me, and I guessed they were the ones whose houses had been flooded.

I was tired by then and my hands were sore from carrying my box. But I was anxious too, for I knew that to get to Louisville I was going to have to cross the river, and I didn't know where.

I started asking people, “Where's the bridge?”

The first one I asked seemed not to hear me at all. He just hurried on by, staring straight ahead, with his shoulders hunched and his hands shoved down in his pockets.

And then I asked a woman, who said, “Lord God, honey,
I
don't know!”

And then I asked a man who seemed to know where he was. He smiled as people sometimes do when you have revealed your ignorance and said, “Which bridge?” raising in my mind for the first time the possibility that there was more than one.

I said, “The closest one.”

“That would be the St. Clair Street Bridge. I think you can still get across.” And he told me how to go.

But by then night had altogether fallen. The lights scattered along the streets and the headlights of the passing traffic glaring on the puddled water and glancing off the falling sleet were more confusing to me than the darkness. I kept having to ask for directions.

A long time before I got to the bridge I could hear the river, the great sort of hushing roar it makes when the currents are shoving and swirling along, sucking around the trunks of trees, and the tree branches are
shaking and clashing. The air was full of the fear of it—the waters rising and the sleet falling and the sky altogether dark above the little human lights that were winking and flashing and darting about. It was exactly what Aunt Cordie could make you imagine when she was in one of her end-of the-world moods—the signs being fulfilled, and the dreadful horsemen about to make their way across the earth.

When I got to the bridge, the entrance was barricaded with long trestles. I started around the end of one of them and this big sort of elderly policeman stepped right in front of me.

“Son,” he said, “you can't go over there.”

I said, “Why not?”

We were right in each other's faces, yelling to be heard above the crashing of the waters.

He said, “Hell fire, boy! Don't you know nothing? This bridge is liable to go any minute. They've lassoed a big barn right up the river yonder and tied it up to some trees. If that barn breaks loose and hits this bridge, she's a goner, and you too if you're on it.”

And then I said something that I had never thought of saying, that I didn't even know was the truth until I remembered myself saying it. Right then I only felt all of a sudden so lonely and homesick I could barely talk. I said, “I've got to get to my people down the river.”

He said, “Your people! Where?”

“Squires Landing!” I said, and then, thinking he probably had never heard of that place, I said, “Port William!”

Maybe he had heard of Port William. I don't know. Maybe he wasn't much of a policeman. Some troublesome kindness was working in him—you could see it. He said, “Son, I didn't see you come, and I didn't see you go.” He turned his back and went into shadows.

In a few steps I was out of sight and beyond all the street sounds. Out there on the bridge, I was closed in by the many-stranded sound of the river. It was like a living element. It was like a big crowd shouting. And above or within the uproar of the water, I could hear the sleet hissing down. I could feel the river throbbing in the bridge. I can't say that I was not afraid, but it seemed the fear was not in me but in the air, like the sound of the river. It seemed to be something I had gone into and could not expect to get out of easily or very soon. It didn't make me want to run.

When I got out about to the middle of the span, I stopped and looked upstream over the rail. A strengthless, shapeless cloud of light that in the daytime would have seemed a shadow hovered over the river. Without trying exactly to see anything, but sort of just letting myself see, I could make out the troubled surface of the water and the shapes of things moving swiftly down—great rafts of drift, barrels, bottles, sawlogs, whole trees, pieces of furniture. I even saw what looked to be the gable of a house, with what might have been a cat perched on top. Everything came turning in the currents, into sight and then out of sight almost faster than I could believe. Along what had been the shores I could see the trees shaking and battering their limbs together. And the waves and swirls of the water caught the human lights of the town and flung them hither and yon.

And this is what it was like—the words were just right there in my mind, and I knew they were true: “the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” I'm not sure that I can tell you what was happening to me then, or that I know even now. At the time I surely wasn't trying to tell myself. But after all my years of reading in that book and hearing it read and believing and disbelieving it, I seemed to have wandered my way back to the beginning—not just of the book, but of the world—and all the rest was yet to come. I felt knowledge crawl over my skin.

I went on across the bridge then, and felt myself let back down onto solid ground out of the shuddering darkness. Into my own misery too, for the cold had gotten into my clothes by then and I was shivering. The sleet had piled up on the roads and walks nearly ankle deep. The light gleamed and glared on the surfaces of everything, and glanced on the little grains of ice as they fell. And even where it fell into the light, the sleet was like a cold and bitter darkness falling out of the sky. It only then really hit me that I was alone and in need and helpless, and didn't know where to go. Water was already well over some of the streets. In places you could hear the currents slurring around lightpoles and the corners of buildings.

It took me a long time to make my way up to what I could feel was high ground. I had pretty certain knowledge of where the bridge and the
main course of the river were, but that was all. I had never been in that place before. I didn't even know anyplace I could ask for directions to. And instinct wasn't helping me a bit. I kept turning in to the wrong streets, where I would walk a little way and pretty soon hear again the sound of water flowing, or hear the sleet sizzling down onto a patch of dead water, and then I would turn back and cast out a little wider.

When you are in a fix like that, it is always easy to see where you made your mistake. I could see plainly where I had made mine. I had been so anxious first to get to the river, and then to get across, that I had never even wondered how I would find shelter for the night. I wished mightily that I had stopped while I was still out in the country and found a good dry loft full of hay to nestle down into. And since I was wishing, I wished that when I was in Versailles at dinnertime, poking away those two hamburgers, I had looked ahead to supper. It would have been easy then to buy a few slices of cheese or a can of sardines and some crackers and stick them into my pocket. But where I was now, everything that looked like an eating place or a grocery store was shut tight. I was getting so cold and tired and hungry that it got easy to imagine that the few hurrying people I met and passed in the streets would see that I needed help and would help me. And then I imagined that they were cold and tired and hungry themselves, and I wished that I could help
them
. I hadn't imagined yet that I might just out-and-out
ask
for help. My old habit of aloofness and solitude was too binding—though afterward I realized that my imagination hadn't been all that far from changing. I wasn't all that far from saying “Help me.”

But what happened was I finally blundered into a long, broad street where I met another policeman. He took a look at me and the bulge of my box under my raincoat, and said, “Buddy, are you looking for a place to go?”

When I unclenched my jaws to say, “Yes,” my teeth chopped it into about seven syllables.

He just took hold of my shoulder and turned me toward a big domed building looming up at the end of the street, and pointed. “Up there,” he said.

It was, of all places, the capitol. I recognized the shape of it from pictures.
I had never seen it before, of course. Really, I had never thought of it before, let alone expected to go there. And it was such an immense, imposing building. The closer I got, the more it seemed that nobody ought to go there who did not have somebody walking in front, blowing a trumpet. But I was a boy in need of a direction, and I went ahead.

Several other people—two or three families, it looked like—got to the door at the same time I did. They were sort of shuffling in, taking their turn, and I shuffled in behind them. Now that warmth was at hand, I realized that my feet were as numb as two rocks; I couldn't feel the floor.

The big hallway seemed full of people, children and grown-ups and old people, some laughing, some crying, some just standing and staring, some with suitcases or bundles, some well dressed, some without even enough clothes, some so grateful to be alive they didn't care whether they had enough clothes or not. I found a place to stand and set my box down between my feet and just stood there with the others. They all seemed to be waiting, and none of them seemed to know what they were waiting for. We were a sorry-looking bunch, all of us, dripping and shifting our feet and glancing about, and the great building with its high, shining walls and gleaming floor seemed not at all to have been expecting the likes of us. It was prepared for something altogether different from these cast-up people trying to quiet their babies and hold on to their children and keep track of the few possessions they had managed to save from the river, talking or listening as they told one another what had happened to them. Refugees is what they were, and ever since, when I have read of the refugees of war or other calamities, I have thought of them.