me blind to the ground. But I know now that even then, in my hopelessness and sorrow, I began a motion of the heart toward my origins. Far from rising above them, I was longing to sink into them until I would know the fundamental things. I needed to know the original first chapter of the world. I had no past that I could go back to and no future that I could imagine, no family, no friends, and no plans. I was as free as a falling stone or a floating chip—freer, for I had no direction at all.
When classes took up again after Christmas, I made up my mind not to go back.
Skinner said, “I thought you was going to school.”
I said, “I reckon not.”
I had a customer, and Skinner was sitting in his chair, reading a newspaper somebody had left. When I said “I reckon not,” he lowered the paper and looked at me, waiting for me to explain. I didn’t explain.
Finally he said, “Mmmm-mnh! Verily, I’ll be damned if ever I seen anything like it.”
Maybe because not going back to my classes was in a way doing something, another image began moving in my mind. I could see myself getting out of Sam Hanks’s truck at the stockyards, and I could see him coming around to face me. When he hooked his two fingers into my jacket pocket, I could feel the pull. More than I ever had before, I felt ashamed of my lie and wanted to undo it. I thought for a while of sending the money back, care of the postmaster at Port William. And then, without deciding not to, I didn’t.
One morning in the latter part of January, in 1937, instead of going to the shop, I packed my belongings into the same box I had brought with me from Pigeonville, leaving out what wouldn’t fit in, and laid a full week’s rent along with my key on the table in my room. I walked out of town as easily and freely as one of the old beat-down gamblers who would show up and hang around the shop for a few weeks or months and then be gone. I thought of taking leave of Skinner Hawes and my old landlady—but what for? To be asked for an explanation that I didn’t have?
I headed westward, for Louisville. I knew that along the rivers the waters were rising.
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