In the quiet, in the fall of moonlight upon it that last night of my life there, Port William slept and dreamed the dreams its history had brought it to. In the time of my stay it had suffered its own history, of course, but also the history of the larger world that contained it. In those thirty-two years that now seemed almost no time at all, the town had shrunk and declined. Some of its quiet that night was the quiet of sleep. Some was the quiet of emptiness and absence. The blacksmith shop was long gone. The hotel was gone; the empty lot where it had stood had become (in the way of Port William) a sort of happenso parking place for cars and pickup trucks. Burgess General Merchandise, which would remain standing for a little while yet, was closed, useless, as still as a grave. The poolroom was closed. The school was closed. Mr. Milo Settle and the garage were in decline and soon to be gone. The barbershop would be closed forever. In many of the houses, now, widows and widowers slept alone. Even in the daytime those houses had begun to give off the feeling of vacancy. Their windows had begun to have the look of sightlessness.
If you knew the place, if you had known it for long, you could not look at it without feeling that its life was being irresistibly pulled at by larger places. It was stretching itself farther and farther in order to hold together, traveling farther in order to stay in place. It was like a spider's web that will stretch so far and then break.
I thought, “Here once, forever gone.”
But then, in the flimsiness of time, in the moonlight, the presence of the town so strong upon me, I thought, “Now and forever here.”
It was a little port for the departure and arrival of souls, and was involved in more than time. It seemed all alight with the ghost that, so to speak, wore it. I walked slowly out of town and past the graveyard and on out to the Grandstand, from where I could see the valley a long way up and down. And then I walked back again. I fixed my breakfast and washed and packed up the dishes and the skillet. Daylight came. Soon Elton Penn was there with his truck. And then Burley and Nathan Coulter came, and Andy Catlett and Martin Rowanberry. We were ready to load up and go.
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With so many on hand to help, I was embarrassed at having so little to move. Subtracting the few things I was going to leave, and the things not worth keeping that I had kept only because I was used to them and now had thrown away or burned, I really didn't have very much. There was room to spare in Elton's truck. The only thing that taxed us much was the barber chair, which I was taking because it was comfortable. I had never moved it from its place in all the time I had been there. There was something shocking about taking it away, as though we were loading the chimney. There was something inconsolable about the bare circular print it left on the floor, unpolished by footsteps over fallen hair.
I was touched by a kind of pity when I saw the two rooms emptied at last. The little building that for thirty-two years had been as familiar to me as my own clothes now looked as if neither I nor anybody had ever lived there. Separated from the daily human life that had been lived in it, it looked almost unbearably flimsy and temporary and inadequate and purposeless and poor: “Ye must be born again.” I took Barber Horsefield's paper clock whose hands always pointed to 6:30, wrote GONE on the back of it, and hung it up once more in the window.
It was good to have the others there. They made of that momentous
day and my grief only a practical job of work. And I needed all the help I had in bringing the stuff down through the woods. It was a longish carry, and steep until we got to the narrow bench where the house stood.
But now the mood had changed. Even mine had. It was a pretty place and a pretty day. The spring wildflowers were blooming and the birds were singing all around. The river was up almost to banktop, with considerable current, calling forth thoughts of distance and drifting away as the risen river always does. Everybody was excited by the thought of new life beginning in a new place.
The others got to joking about the wild way I was apt to carry on, away off there by myself. Mart Rowanberry, who knew stories of certain social events that had occurred in Burley's younger days, jigged his knees a time or two to make the floor vibrate. “It ain't as stout as it used to be, Burley.”
Burley wagged his thumb at me in comment upon my age and solitary habits. “It won't
need
to be as stout as it used to be.”
By midmorning all my furniture was in place, my friends were gone, and I was unpacking my boxes of clothes, bedclothes, books, and kitchen things. I had a kettle of water boiling on the stove and was feeling pretty much at home.
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The camp house was built by Ernest Finley, the carpenter and wood-worker who was Mat Feltner's brother-in-law. He built it on a bench well above the river on a two-acre patch of land between the river and the road, bounded on the upriver side by Katy's Branch and on the downriver side by the property known as the Billy Landing, owned in those days and for a good while afterward by Beriah Easterly, who kept a little store there that never amounted to much and amounted to less and less as the years went by.
Ernest built the house in 1916 or thereabouts, when he was scarcely more than a boy. Even in those days, he was a solitary, quiet sort of fellow who loved to fish the rockbars and slips for bass or bream or new-lights. At that time, there wasn't a proper road going along the river. When Ernest went down to camp and fish, he considered himself to be pretty well beyond the workaday world of Port William.
He set the house on good stout yellow locust posts. He salvaged poplar
framing and siding from a tumbledown half-log house on the Feltner place. He bought new pine tongue-and-groove flooring and new galvanized tin roofing, which were delivered to him by boat at the Billy Landing. He built a tight two-room cabin. The part of his work that is under roof is still good to this day.
The smaller of the two rooms is the kitchen, with shelves and cabinets and a table that is hinged so as to fold up against the wall. The larger room is for sleeping and sitting. Both rooms have windows with sliding sashes and screens and heavy outside shutters that can be bolted shut if you go away, which I never have. Not yet. A porch goes along two sides. On the side toward the river, because of the narrowness of the bench, the porch rests on tall stilts. Outside the larger room, the porch is roofed and screened so that in summer you have, really, three rooms. The porch that is open to the weather has been replaced twice, once by Burley, once by me.
In his time Ernest kept the place well-equipped with bedclothes, cooking things, dishes, and other necessities. When he came down for a stay, provided the fish were biting, about all he needed to bring was cornmeal and lard.
When Ernest came home crippled from World War I, he had no further use for the place. He sold it to Burley Coulter, who at the time was pursuing a career as the Coulter family's black sheep, and who therefore needed from time to time a home away from home. Over the years Burley had settled (and aged) into a quieter, more responsible life, and so the house had passed to me.
It is in most ways the best and in every way the most beautiful place I have ever lived in.
Sometime in the 1920s, I think, Burley painted the house with a paint that must at the start have been green. Over the years it had weathered to a flaky grayish blue-green that had something of the character of the lichens and mosses you see on tree trunks. It looked as old as the oldest trees around it. It had become a work of time, fitting the place as no work merely of hands could have done. The grace of the fashion of it was no longer just in its design and construction but also in the marks upon it of time and use and the way the trees around it had grown and shaped themselves during half a century.
For one man and a few sticks of furniture, it is plenty big. Especially in summer, when the doors and windows are open, it seems roomy, airy, and light. And yet I am always surprised, returning to it from the road or looking up at it from the river, to see how small and inconspicuous it is, tucked in against the slope, under the trees. It is a house, but sometimes it has the feeling of a burrow or a den in a hollow tree.
This hillside was cleared and cropped maybe twice or three times, like most of the hillsides around here. And the trees around the house are the ones that are quickest to return to abandoned croplands close to streams where the soil is fairly rich: water maples, elms, sycamores, locusts, box elders, a few cottonwoods and walnuts, a wild cherry or two, and down along the water's edge, of course, the willows.
For the first several years I was here, I kept a sort of yard cleared for some distance around the house, once a year scything down the nettles and wild grasses and elderberry bushes and seedling trees. And I kept open a prospect on the river. This suited me for a while and seemed the proper thing to do. I loved the clarity and neatness my mowing and cutting made. And then one year I stopped, not from laziness (though using a scythe on a hillside will produce sweat enough) but just to give room and welcome to whatever would come. Since then I have mowed mainly my paths down to the river and across to the garden and up to the road and the woodpile and out to the privy. When the trees send their branches too close, I cut them back to keep them from scraping the walls or banging on the roof. The windfalls that are big enough I saw up and split for stovewood. Otherwise I let it be as it will. Now, sitting out on the porch in the summer among the tops of the young trees, I am among the birds. And in the last few years something wonderful has begun to happen. Not just near the house but all along the hillside, the seedlings of the true forest have begun to come to the higher ground: sugar maples and hickories and chinquapin oaks. Now that I am old, I talk to them, I talk to the birds, the way Athey Keith used to talk to the stray dogs and cats in his own exile up in Port William.
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Wonders do happen. Another one was that the barber's trade followed me down to the river. I didn't expect that. I didn't suppose it at all.
I hadn't been down here more than two or three daysâI was still in the midst of all the little jobs of settling inâwhen Art and Mart Rowanberry came down the path among the trees. It was a beautiful day with a good, warm, season-changing breeze blowing up the river. I had a pair of carpenter's trestles set up on the porch, was building a new screen door.
“Well, now,” Art said, “ain't it a fine day overhead!”
And Mart said, “Well, I don't reckon you're working.”
I said, “Oh, a little.” And then it came to me: He meant barbering. And I said, “Sure!”
It was a little hard to pretend that I was, in fact, “working.” I did not appear to be expecting customers. Books were piled on the seat of the barber chair and clothes were hanging over the back of it. My barbering tools were laid back on the top shelf of a cabinet in the kitchen. The neckcloths I had stuck away at the bottom of a chest in the other room. But I made the pretense. I unloaded the chair and gathered up my equipment in a hurry. Art stepped up and took his seat. Mart backed a sitting chair up to where he could talk to me and look out at the river at the same time.
“Now, you know,” I said, “I don't have electricity here and can't use the electric clippers.”
“That don't make one bit of difference,” Art said. “What you don't cut this time, I reckon you'll cut the next. I reckon they was cutting hair a long time before they had electric.”
“Well, you're getting it fixed up mighty nice,” Mart said, looking around.
And so the old life of the shop was born again, but this time out on the fringe of society, in the wilderness, you might say.
When I had cut Mart's hair, they sat on, visiting a while, offered their help if ever I should need it, and, leaving, they laid their donations a little self-consciously on the table in the kitchen.
Others came. Mostly now it was the older men. I didn't see much of the young men and the boys. (The young don't come to the river anymore, even to swim or fish. You don't often run into them hunting in the woods. Mainly, they don't go where they can't drive.) Nor did mothers come, bringing their little boys. I didn't see anybody whose hair had got
so it required styling. But my other old customers, when they had a little time on their hands, mainly on Saturdays, would come sauntering down the path from the road, sometimes three or four together, to get haircuts, to visit, to sit and talk and look at the river, and then to leave their donations, always dollar bills, somewhat secretly laid down on the kitchen table or on the shelf where the water bucket sits or by the lamp on the stand by the bed.
I was running, you might say, an “underground” barbershop, a guerrilla free enterprise off in the woods, born out of the world into the world again. My clientele you might describe as a nonrenewable resource. I haven't gained many new clients, and the old ones have slowly dwindled away. But the ones who have remained have been faithful. Their coming is made even more an act of faith because in this house on the river I have no mirrors on the walls. Here, I am the sole judge of my work. When they climb into the chair, they have to trust me. They have to be willing beforehand to be satisfied with what I can do with scissors and comb and razor only. I became a barber from before my time, surviving after my time.
I took their donations freely as they were given. It was freedom we were living in, after all, down here on the river, on the edge of things. I had come here to be free (though only, maybe, for as long as possible) of the man across the desk, of the gloved hand of inspection and regulation. My customers (my friends, my guests) and I made a little bootleg society in which we freely came and went, took and gave.
Burley's was the only donation I refused. He would offer and I would hand his money back.