“Yessir!” Burley said, seeing a vision. “Why a single man with a place like this would be fixed. He’d have his dwelling place and his place of business right together. And look a-here.”
He led me around to the side of the building where the stairs went up. Grinning, he pointed up to the little landing at the top. “A man could set up there of an evening,” he said, “and rock and look out.”
We climbed up and looked through the door glass into the upstairs room, which was completely empty.
From the landing or stoop or what you may call it, we could see the remainder of the property. The lot was twenty or so feet wide, giving room for a sort of driveway on the side where the stairs were. Below us we could see where coal had been piled. When he left, Barber Horsefield had taken everything but the black stain on the ground. Behind the building the lot continued back maybe a hundred and fifty feet to a brushy fencerow that divided that part of town from a large sheep pasture. In one of the back corners there was a privy under a good-sized wild cherry tree.
Burley went down first and turned to face me at the bottom of the stairs. He pinched my sleeve and gave a little pull. “What do you think about it?”
It was clear that he wanted me to buy the shop, but at the time I had no idea of his reason. Had he bought the shop himself from Barber Horsefield, and was wanting to sell it at a profit? Was he anxious to redeem his own vision of the good life a man could live in such a place? Or, maybe, did he like me?
I hoped so. But I said, “Well, what will you take for it?”
He laughed. “Oh, it ain’t mine. I don’t own anything I can’t carry or that won’t follow me when I whistle.”
“Well, who owns it?”
“The bank, so I hear. They took it to clear Barber Horsefield’s note. My opinion, Barber Horsefield got the best of the deal.”
“Where’s the bank?”
“It’s up the street yonder, but I believe it’s shut by now.”
I said, “Aw!” in a way that showed my disappointment more than I meant it to.
“But what we can do, we can go see Mat Feltner. He’s on the board.”
We went up the road then, past the poolroom and three stores and the Independent Farmers Bank and the post office and the church, and around to the back of a large house that was actually a farmhouse at one of the corners of the town. In Port William only strangers and preachers and traveling salesmen ever went to anybody’s front door. Burley knocked at the kitchen door and stood back with his hands inside the bib of his overalls.
A quick-stepping woman with a kind face opened the door, saw who was there, and said, “Why, hello, Burley.”
Burley took off his hat and I hurried to do the same.
“Howdy, Mrs. Feltner. We was wondering if Mat’s around.”
“He just came in.” She turned and called back into the house: “Mat!” And then she opened the door wider. “You all come in.”
“Aw, we’ll just wait here,” Burley said.
She shut the door, and then pretty soon it was opened by a man who looked too young to have white hair.
“Hello, boys. Come in.”
“Aw, Mat, our feet’s muddy.” Burley had put his hat back on and his hands were again behind his bib.
“No, they’re not,” the man said. “Come on in.”
He held the door open for us and we stepped inside. Mat Feltner glanced at me and saw that he didn’t know me, and then looked at Burley. “What have you got on your mind?”
And then Burley, as if preparing to auction me off, told him who I was, how I had come, where I was when he had found me, what my trade was, how he had showed me Barber Horsefield’s old shop, and how I liked it and wanted to ask about buying it. “He thinks it’s just the ideal place for a young fellow to settle down and take hold.”
Mr. Feltner—who would not be “Mat” to me for a long time—turned to me and stuck out his hand. “Mr. Crow, I’m Mat Feltner. I’m glad to know you. I knew your mother’s people. I remember the Daggets very well.”
There was nothing glancing or sidling about the way he looked at you. He looked right through your eyes, right into you, as a man looks at you who is willing for you to look right into him.
When we had shaken hands and he had given me that look, he pulled chairs back from the kitchen table. “Sit down.”
We sat down. He studied me for a minute again, and then he said, “You’re not married, Mr. Crow? You’ve got no family responsibilities?”
“No, sir.”
He laughed a little and glanced at Burley. “A single man might make it.” But he was serious when he looked back at me. “And you’ve got experience as a barber?”
“Yes, sir.” I told him my experience.
He sat, looking out the window, and I knew he was deciding whether or not to ask me why, if I had had a job, I was now looking for one. And I sat there trying to think, and failing, thinking only that whatever I would say was probably going to be a surprise to me.
He decided not to ask. He looked back at me and studied me up and down. We had come to the dare.
He said, “Three hundred dollars’ll buy the shop and whatever’s in it. We’ll need a third of the money down, the shop for collateral.” He went on to set out all the terms of the loan, fair enough, but very strict in what he would expect of me.
When he had finished the room was quiet. You will appreciate the tenderness of my situation if I remind you that I had managed to live for years without being known to anybody. And that day two men who knew who and where I had come from had looked at me face-on, as I had not been looked at since I was a child. And now there I sat with about a hundred and twenty dollars in bills in my shoe and in the lining of my jacket and, as I remember, thirty-five cents in my pocket.
I was not, as they now say, “mentally prepared.” My face turned red to the eyeballs—I could feel the heat radiating from it. Both men were watching me, waiting to hear if I wanted the shop on the proposed terms, and to see if I could come up with the money.
“I’ll take it,” I said. I worked a tight little roll of bills tied with string out through the hole in the lining of my jacket. And then I took off my overshoe and shoe and got the rest. I laid a fifty-dollar bill and two twenties and a ten on the table in front of Mr. Feltner.
It was a funny moment; a time would come when even I would think so. But that day it was hard. I felt revealed, as if to buy the shop I had had to take off all my clothes. But Burley and Mr. Feltner never allowed the least twitch or touch of amusement to show even in their eyes. They sat there as if not a man in Port William had ever paid for anything without taking off his shoe.
When I had given the money and leaned down again to put on my shoe and overshoe, I heard Mr. Feltner say, “Yessir. All right.”
He went to get a piece of paper and wrote out a little contract, which we both signed, by which he agreed to sell and I to buy a property known as “the barbershop,” on the terms he had offered and “in consideration of $100 in hand paid.” He gave me the keys.
As soon as we left Mr. Feltner, Burley went his way, saying he imagined he would see me before long.
I carried my box down to the shop, let myself in, and took possession of my property by going first into one room and then the other and walking from window to window, looking out. And then I went into my backyard and spent a good while walking up and down and looking and stopping to think. I thought I would have a garden.
You can imagine, though, that becoming so quickly and surprisingly a propertied man ready to “settle down and take hold” required a long thought, and that I didn’t finish thinking it that day, or for many days afterward.
Dark was falling by the time I got myself up to Jasper Lathrop’s store and made another supper of cheese and crackers.
Why I didn’t think until too late of buying or borrowing a few sticks of wood or lumps of coal to burn that night in the stove, I don’t know. Up until then, my foresight ran more to saving what I already ha
d than to providing what I would need. But maybe I had already had too much to think about for one day.
Anyhow, I spent that night in the barber chair, wearing all the clothes I had and several sheets of a newspaper, and by daylight I was cold enough.
Burley Coulter and Mat Feltner proved good friends to me from the start. They didn’t just get me started and then leave me to fare the best I could. By their knowing where I could buy or borrow the things I needed, I soon had my shop and household put together and going. For the shop I had to purchase clippers and scissors and combs (I already owned a good straight razor, mug, brush, hone, and strop). I bought talcum powder and tonic and lotion, which looked very professional on my backbar, and two neckcloths and half a dozen towels. And Jasper Lathrop gave me a new cigar box that I used to collect my earnings and to keep my change-making money. For the room upstairs, I soon had a cot, a table, a chair, a little oil stove that I could cook on, some bedclothes, and a few dishes and cooking utensils. Most of that was used stuff that Burley found for me cheap, or that Mat and Margaret Feltner loaned or gave me.
I felt at home. For a long time I didn’t have any more to ask for. When I didn’t have customers or loafers to deal with, I spent my time cleaning and recleaning the place and fixing it up.
I learned people’s names. Some of my customers I remembered from my old life at Squires Landing, but I didn’t need to explain much or renew acquaintance. The town took care of that. In no more than two days the town and practically all the countryside knew that I had come and who I was and where I had got my start. And yet, with few exceptions, people were cautious, calling me “Mr. Cray” and waiting for me to reveal myself as I might do only by staying long enough. Which suited me. I knew, or was soon reminded, that most of them were not necessarily eager to know things by names that they did not already use. Until I read the deed, for example, I did not know that Barber Horsefield was in fact Peter A. Haussfeldt.
But I had been at work only a week or so when a man came in to whom I did need to explain myself. Sam Hanks.
He was my second customer that afternoon. The first was John T. McCallum, who was so fastidious that he liked a weekly haircut and so tight that he would drive from his farm down near Hargrave all the way up to Port William to save a dime.
John T. was in the chair when Sam Hanks, back from his morning run to the stockyards in Louisville, pushed open the door and came in, his pipe clenched in his teeth as if he expected to be picked up and swung by it.
He took a chair and he and John T. began a conversation, pretty much ignoring me. This I was already used to. The Port Williamites took me for granted, as I suppose they had taken for granted Barber Horsefield and all his predecessors. The growth of hair called forth the barbershop. The barbershop called forth the barber. I was there as expectably as the furniture and the stove, as the town itself and the river down at the foot of the hill.
John T. wanted to know about livestock prices, and Sam Hanks told him at some length. They spoke of last year’s lamb market, and of the prospects for this year’s. And then they got onto the subject of the flood, which had been costly for John T., much of whose farm lay in the river bottoms. The talk went the way I love it, so quiet and unhurried I could hear the dampened fire fluttering in the stove.
And then John T. said easily and philosophically, as if to conclude that part of the conversation: “Well, they say we won’t have such another flood for a long time to come.”
Sam Hanks did not move, and yet he seemed to spring upward onto a higher level of being, like a bird dog coming to a point. “They! They who?”
“Why, the experts!” John T. said, already offended, his voice becoming chirpy. “The ones that predicts such things!”
“Predict!” said Sam Hanks. “How do they know?”
“Because they know! They’re smart men. Not like me and you.”
“How,” said Sam Hanks, “do they know what’s not going to happen when the time it’s supposed to not happen in hasn’t come yet?”
“By being smarter than you and me both, and this fellow here throwed in.”
This was a generous acknowledgment of my presence, and I had to smile. I had finished his haircut but he was still sitting in the chair.
“I don’t believe in noooo prediction,” Sam Hanks said.
They then had a perfectly fierce argument on the issue of the general predictability of earthly phenomena. After maybe half an hour, it wore out way short of compromise, John T. contending that everything was predictable by the smarter people (who, if not yet smart enough, soon would be) and Sam Hanks that nothing was or ever would be predictable by anybody.
John T. finally let it go, shaking his head in what appeared to be pity. “Damned if I don’t believe you’d argue the world is flat.”
“It is!” said Sam Hanks without missing a beat. “Except Old Marster had to tilt it this way and that to drain the waters off.”
“I got to go, I got to go,” John T. chanted, finally descending from the chair. He paid me without looking at me, put on his coat and hat, and started out. “I got work to do and I can’t be long about it.”
Sam Hanks, betraying by no sign that he had been enjoying himself, waited until the door shut behind John T. and then knocked out his pipe on the leg of the stove, hung up his cap, climbed into the chair, and came to rest with a sigh. “Short,” he said.
The remainders of his and John T.’s rippit seemed still to be floating in the air like ashes or snowflakes. I was nearly done cutting his hair before I felt the quiet again and could think of what to say.
I said, “Mr. Hanks, I’m sure you remember that you did me a big favor a couple of years ago.”
He said, “I’m sure I don’t, young man.”
So I had to tell him the story of our ride into Lexington, of his good advice, and of my later discovery of the new five-dollar bill in my jacket pocket.
I was in the midst of confessing my lie and acknowledging my right identity—which he undoubtedly already knew—when he said, “Son, you’ve got the wrong man.”
He not only denied that he remembered what I remembered, he denied that he had hauled a load of hogs to Lexington that year. He didn’t remember when he ever had hauled a load of hogs to Lexington.
He handed me a dollar bill. I took a five from under my cigar box, where I had it waiting for him, and wrapped his change in it. He stripped the coins out of the bill with his thumb as if hulling peas and laid the bill down onto the backbar.
“Son,” he said, going out, “I already got five dollars.”
Part II
10
A Little Worter Dranking Party
One of the early signs of my acceptance into at least a part of Port William society was the following letter, folded once and stuck under the shop door in the dead of night:Come to a little worter dranking party Sat night at the Grandstand. Whatever you want to delute your worter with will be fine.
I did not then recognize the handwriting as that of my friend Burley Coulter. Had I done so, I might also have recognized at least one of the misspellings as the work of Burley’s conscientious sense of humor. “Worter,” as I would know later, was quoted from a famous letter-to-the-teacher written by Oma Wages on behalf of her daughter, who during her three years in the eighth grade had come to be known by the boys as “Topheavy”:Please let Bobra Sue be excuse when she akses. She cant hole her worter.
That Burley wrote anonymously, making no attempt to disguise either his hand or his manner, was a joke on anonymity and on himself, his way of laying by a little something to laugh about at a later time.
This was the spring of 1937. I received (or found) my invitation on the morning of a warm day just after the leaves had fairly opened. Early May, I suspect it was. At that time I had never been to the Grandstand, though, from overhearing, I knew where and approximately what it was. It was not, in fact, a grandstand at all. It was a spot in the woods on the very rim of the cut that let the road descend the valley si
de on its way downriver to Hargrave. “The Grandstand” was just the name of the spot. A number of the men and grown boys of the neighborhood went there for a certain freedom that the town did not publicly countenance. It was a place where water could be unguardedly diluted, or done without, where talk could proceed without fear of interruption by anybody who would mind. No preacher or teacher or woman or public official or anybody self-consciously respectable would be there. If you were there, your presence was taken to indicate that you would not mind. The primary sport at the Grandstand was the card game known as tonk, but dice also had been known to gallop there, and it was an ideal sitting place for foxhunters, for it looked and listened right into the river valley; you could hear a pack of running hounds for miles. Maybe two or three times a year, on good nights of spring or fall, a water-drinking party would be announced by grapevine, and on these occasions, beyond the usual pastimes, the featured event would be a supper of fried fish or wild game or hen soup. Emptied of the little society that gathered and dissolved there from time to time, the Grandstand was just another place in the woods. Nothing was there but trees and rocks and a burnt spot on the ground.
When I read the invitation I felt both flattered (a little honored, to tell the truth) and curious. At that time in Port William there would be a crowd in town every Saturday night, and I would be busy until late. It may have been ten o’clock on that particular night before I had shorn and shaved my way to the far side of the final customer and the last talkers had gone, still talking, out the door and up the street. I put on my cap and jacket then and turned off the light.
The crowd of shoppers and talkers had nearly all dispersed. The town was growing quiet. Jasper Lathrop was locking up his store. The night was clear, with a big moon. I could see my way along the road as well nearly as if it had been daylight. I could hear whippoorwills, and somewhere not too far off a mockingbird.