so The Good Shepherd, officially, was enclosed within itself. When we went out among the fleshpots of Canefield, as when we went anywhere, we went in groups carefully chaperoned. And outside influences were handpicked by Brother Whitespade. Remembering, as always, the free and casual comings and goings at Squires Landing, I wrote neighbor down in my tablet.
As a part of the general effort to protect us from outside influences, The Good Shepherd had its own barbershop—a chair and mirror and little backbar in a room in the basement of the boys’ dormitory. The barber, a friendly man named Clark, came in the afternoon two days a week, and so kept us boys respectably shorn. One of my jobs, after I reached the responsible age of twelve, was to be the barber’s assistant. I swept the floor and shined the mirror and kept things in order. And then, because I longed for knowledge, Barber Clark showed me how to care for the equipment. He taught me how to clean and oil the clippers, and how to hone and strop a razor. By little stages, as I got older and taller, he taught me to cut hair and even to give a shave, letting me practice on him, good and brave man that he was. I got so I was good at it and liked to do it.
Because The Good Shepherd tried so hard to be a world unto itself, the students, especially the older ones, naturally hungered for the world outside. Among the high-school boys, whose hunger and boldness were greatest, there were always escape artists who stuffed their beds and stole away at night to visit town girls, to buy cigarettes, to purchase such as they could afford of the wares of the bootleggers in the hollow below town. They would sometimes get caught, of course, and would get punished, and of course would try their luck again. Not everybody went in for this, but for the ones who did it was a sort of guerrilla warfare. They would not have been easy in their minds if there was something they could have got away with if they had not got away with it.
My own temptation was not to go into the town at night but to escape into the countryside in the daytime. It was a fine, lovely part of the world—excellent, rolling farmland, with old ashes and oaks in the pastures, divided by streams with trees along the banks and patches of woods along the steeper slopes of the valley sides. As long as the weather was cold, I stood confinement pretty well, but as soon as the weather warmed and the buds began to swell on the water maples, I would begin to itch and ache to get out. I wanted room. I wanted to follow paths or streambanks a while just to see where they would take me. And from the time I was about thirteen, there would be times—Saturday mornings or Sunday afternoons or between classes and supper—when I would just go.
Over the ridge beyond The Good Shepherd there was a sizable stream, Dowd’s Fork, that at one place ran by a big, shelving outcrop of limestone. Sometimes a whole band of us boys would disappear from official notice and go over there to swim. We would have two or three hours of outlawry: swimming, diving out of the overhanging trees, and then sitting around in our birthday suits, smoking cigars that we bought at a little general store by the railroad bridge.
But even more I liked to go by myself, to begin just with whatever whim or disgruntlement or longing got me started, and walk without reference to anything but my own interest or curiosity until it came time to turn back. If nobody was around, I looked into barns and corncribs. I followed paths and the courses of streams. If I got hot, I would take a swim. One cold, bright, windy March day I came upon an abandoned house where several farmhands had built a fire on the hearth and were loafing and talking, the ground being too wet to plow. They let me warm myself at their fire and were nice to me. Sometimes I would take a book and climb into a tree along Dowd’s Fork and read all afternoon. These excursions were worth whatever punishment I received if I got caught.
Sometimes, of course, I got caught. One fall afternoon, after the frosts had killed the summer foliage, I put a fishing line in my pocket and stole off toward Dowd’s Fork. I was almost out of sight when for some reason I looked back, and I saw Brother Whitespade standing, facing in my direction, at the back of the library. I immediately pitched myself onto the ground, hoping he couldn’t see that far, but thinking that, if he could, the dead weed stalks would hide me while I crawled into better cover. But when I raised my head to peep around, Brother Whitespade was coming straight toward me, wading through the weeds, raising his knees high. I put my head down and crawled faster, but when I looked again he was still coming straight toward me. And only then, and much too late, I realized that I was wearing (of all things!) a bright red sweater.
When I was about fourteen, I think it was, I joined a few of the nighttime escapades—maybe just to declare to myself whose side I was on. But that did not last, for at about the same time a more serious matter began to occupy me of a night. How it came about I am not quite sure, but I began to suspect that I might be called to preach. My suspicion may have been no more than fear, for with all my heart I disliked the idea of becoming a preacher. But for as long as I could remember, I had been hearing preachers tell in sermons how they had received “the call”; this was often the theme of Brother Whitespade and the many visiting preachers who spoke at The Good Shepherd. Not one of those men had ever suggested that a person could be “called” to anything but “full-time Christian service,” by which they meant either the ministry or “the mission field.” The finest thing they could imagine was that an orphan boy, having been rescued by the charity of the church, should repay his debt by accepting “the call.” What was so frightening to me about this call was that once it came to you, it was final; there was no arguing with it. You fell blind off your horse, and then you did what the call told you to do. I knew too well that when another Jonah had refused the call to preach he was permitted to change his mind in the belly of a great fish.
This possibility of being called began to keep me awake of a night. I had heard no voice, but probably because I was starting to respond at about that time to the distant calling of girls, I could not shake the notion that I was being called by something that I knew nothing about.
I knew the story of the boy Samuel, how he was called in the night by a voice speaking his name. I could imagine, so clearly that I could almost hear it, a voice calling out of the darkness: “J. Crow.” And then I thought maybe the voice had called, and that I had almost but not quite heard it. One night I got out of bed and went to the window. The sky over the treetops was full of stars. Whispering so as not to waken my roommate, I said, “Speak, Lord; for thy servant heareth.” And then, so help me, I heard the silence that stretched all the way from the ground underneath my window to the farthest stars, and the hair stood up on my head, and a shiver came into me that did not pass away for a long time.
Though I knew that actually I had heard no voice, I could not dismiss the possibility that it had spoken and I had failed to hear it because of some deficiency in me or something wrong that I had done. My fearful uncertainty lasted for months. As the siren song of girls became ever stronger in my mind, I wondered if maybe that was the trouble. Finally I reasoned that in dealing with God you had better give Him the benefit of the doubt. I decided that I had better accept the call that had not come, just in case it had come and I had missed it. This was in the late summer before my final year at The Good Shepherd. I went to Brother Whitespade and told him I was pretty sure that I had received the call.
I did not at all foresee the benefits that followed. It turned out that I was the first, in Brother Whitespade’s several years at The Good Shepherd, who had been even pretty sure of having received the call. By my declaration, without intending to at all, I set the stage for well-paying hypocrisy and self-deception. Brother Whitespade was delighted with me. I had fulfilled his fondest dream. The once-lost lamb now proposed to become a shepherd. All of a sudden, with me, he no longer kept up the appearance of displeased and distant authority that he used to protect himself from everybody who might try to take advantage of him. Now he showed himself to me as just a man who thought too well of himself but wanted to be kind, who was too sure of a lot of things but also a little lonely. He began to treat me almost as a friend.
For his sake and my own, I am ashamed to tell you this, or even to remember it. For the truth is that I had not changed very much, if any. I did not become a better student or a tamer one, or less troublesome or troubled, or less inclined to wander away through
