reputation with Brother Whitespade, and therefore with the other official people, that was a perfect camouflage for what I had been and continued to be. Once I had the reputation, so long as I continued to talk up to it, I did not have to live up to it.
I continued to hold my professed intention to become a preacher, and I did as well as I could all the special tasks that were now assigned to me because of my professed intention. One of these was to speak from time to time in chapel, which Brother Whitespade thought would be good practice for me. For my first talk—hypocrite and fool that I was—I took my text from I Samuel 3, the story of the young Samuel and the voice of God.
I will add, to be fair to myself, that there was in all this a speck of sincerity. By then I had heard the Bible read quite a lot and had read it some myself. I liked the stories of Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Ruth, King David, and Daniel. I was truly moved by the story of Jesus, and had read every verse of the Gospels for myself. I can’t say that all of those stories had made any noticeable change in me, but I had them in mind and sometimes I thought about them. And sometimes I imagined things about being a preacher that appealed to me. I thought that if I became a preacher, I would have learned a great deal during my education, and I would spend a lot of my time reading. I liked those thoughts, and also the thought that I would live in a nice town with shady streets and be well-loved and admired by my congregation.
But the thought that I liked most was that I would have a wife. In the spring of my second year of high school, a copper-haired girl named N. (for Nan) O‘Callahan and I had stepped into the shadow of the spirea bushes by the library and had given each other a kiss that was the strongest thing that had happened to me since Aunt Cordie died and I came to The Good Shepherd. It was as if the world, leaving me upright, had turned itself upside down above my head and poured over me rivers and oceans of warm water. After that, it was clear to me that if I became a preacher I was going to need a wife. And so I imagined a wife with red hair like Nan O’Callahan’s. When I began to imagine her, I ceased entirely to imagine the nice town and the church and the congregation and the reading of books. I imagined my wife and me coming home from the grocery store late in the afternoon, our arms loaded with sacks of groceries—for at The Good Shepherd we were always a little hungry. I imagined us sitting at our kitchen table, eating a big supper that always ended with a cherry pie like Aunt Cordie used to make, with sugar glazed on the strips of the top crust. And then I imagined us together in the parsonage bedroom, enacting scenes that could have been enacted nowhere in the world but in the imagination of a lonely, ignorant boy.
Thus confused and hopeful and self-deluded, I emerged from The Good Shepherd with a scholarship and a job waiting tables at a small denominational college in Pigeonville, about forty miles away.
And Nan O’Callahan? She was gone long before I was. Our kiss in the shadow of the spirea was, in fact, a farewell kiss. She was going away to live with some relatives she didn’t know, and she didn’t want to leave without a trace. She wanted to think that somebody would miss her. And so that kiss passed between us, that moment of my sudden immersion in her welcoming warmth, living moisture, and good smell.
“Remember me, J. Crow,” she said. She gave me no address, probably not knowing what her address would be, and I never saw her after she left. But how could I forget her?
6
Pigeonville
And so I became a “pre-ministerial student” at Pigeonville College, beginning a curriculum of courses designed to prepare me for the pulpit, and waiting tables three times a day in a girls’ dormitory, which set me enough at cross purposes even without all the questions I had ahead of me that I had not yet even thought of.
And for a while, though I believe I felt the influence of my unthought questions, I continued not to think of them. One reason was that I had to get over another big change. It took me a while to deal in my mind with the knowledge that my life at The Good Shepherd had ended, that I would not go back, that I probably would not see again the people I had known there.
Now I had a new place and new people to learn about. All the circumstances and rules were new to me. I had more freedom now and I had to feel my way into it, see which barriers had fallen and which still were up. I had this feeling for freedom, you see, that I had carefully and quietly nourished for eight years at The Good Shepherd. I couldn’t be satisfied until I knew the boundaries and where the openings were, if any.
But at this school I not only learned what the rules were but even willingly kept them. As long as we did what was expected of us and kept the rules, we boys at least could come and go pretty much as we pleased. There was less reason to break rules because there were not so many of them, but also I didn’t want to be punished. I didn’t want to get crosswise with anybody who had authority to punish me; I had had enough of that at The Good Shepherd. I didn’t want ever again to stand in front of the desk of somebody who had more power than I had. If all that required was keeping a few rules that I didn’t much object to, then I would keep the rules.
Beyond that, I was more conscious than before that I was a beneficiary. I wanted to be worthy of my scholarship. If I came to look unworthy in other people’s eyes, I was afraid I would look unworthy in my own.
I worked harder in my classes at Pigeonville than I had at The Good Shepherd, but not a lot harder. I did the assignments and made tolerable grades, but I knew I could have done better. I was working against what I was now beginning to understand as a limitation of character. You can judge for yourself how much of a fault it was that I had what seemed an inborn dislike for doing anything that somebody else told me to do. And it wasn’t an ordinary dislike, either. There were lengths beyond which I just could not make myself go. When I reached this limit, the thought of approval or praise, let alone a better grade, did not even tempt me.
Pigeonville College had a much better library than The Good Shepherd, of course, and I spent a lot of my time there, reading in books and magazines. I’d had the idea, once, that if I could get the chance before I died I would read all the good books there were. Now I began to see that I wasn’t apt to make it. This disappointed me, for I really wanted to read them all. But it consoled me in a way too; I could see that if I got them all read and had no more surprises in that line, I would have been sorry.
For a while, anyhow, I had a pretty good life there at Pigeonville. I went to class and studied and read and waited my tables and did other odd jobs as they came up. The times were hard, but my tuition, room, and meals cost me nothing. And I never missed a chance to earn a little money. The word got around that I was a willing worker, and I did all kinds of hand-and-back jobs that earned me a dime here, a quarter there: mopped floors, washed windows, dug holes, mowed yards. I had never had any money of my own, or hardly enough to notice, and now it meant everything to me to have some. And once I made it, I kept it. Except for my clothes and books, I spent just nearly nothing. I would let the coins rattle in my pocket until I got enough to change into a bill, and then I would put the bill into my shoe, or poke it through a little hole in the lining of my jacket. I was as tight as a tick in those days, and would as soon have thrown my money away as trust it to a bank. You can bet I took care where I hung up my jacket or took off my shoes.
Here is the way I was in those days. My life just filled out into all the freedom it was allowed, like water seeking its level. My private life—my secret life, I might as well say, though really I had no secrets worth keeping—achieved length and breadth and height. After the first year, I asked for and was given a small single room, and in that way got shed of my roommate. I now had money that I had earned myself; I now had a few possessions that I had bought with my own money. These few things that were mine I cherished with a steady small exultation that was also mine. At night, shut in my little room with all my worldly possessions, I felt like a worm in an apple.
I
