that other water really “other,” or is it the same water always running, flowing always toward the gathering of all waters, and always rising and returning again, and again flowing? I knew this river first when I was a little boy, and I know it now when I am an old man once again living beside it—almost seventy years!—and always when I have watched it I have been entranced and mystified. What is it? Is it the worn trough of itself that is a feature of the land and is marked on maps, or is it the water flowing? Or is it the land itself that over time is shaped and reshaped by the flowing water, and is caught by no map?
The surface of the quieted river, as I thought in those old days at Squires Landing, as I think now, is like a window looking into another world that is like this one except that it is quiet. Its quietness makes it seem perfect. The ripples are like the slats of a blind or a shutter through which we see imperfectly what is perfect. Though that other world can be seen only momentarily, it looks everlasting. As the ripples become more agitated, the window darkens and the other world is hidden. As I did not know then but know now, the surface of the river is like a living soul, which is easy to disturb, is often disturbed, but, growing calm, shows what it was, is, and will be.
As close to the river and involved in its traffic as we were, you would think that sometime or other we would have traveled on it, but we never did. The world of travelers was another world to us, and it charmed us no end. We talked a great deal of what we had seen come and go on the boats. And there was the Princess, a showboat that would tie up at the landing once or twice a summer. The calliope would play, drawing the people down off the ridges and out of the hollows; there would be a night when we would all sit wide-eyed in the presence of a world entirely unlike our own; and then it would go cranking off upriver in the morning and our life would go on as before.
Though it verged on the world of flow and travel, Squires Landing was a world in place. We were too busy to go anywhere. Besides the landing and the store, we had to look after the farm and the garden and the many branches of Aunt Cordie’s housekeeping. Aunt Cordie was always surrounded by food that was growing or getting fat, or being gathered or canned or cured or dried or cooked. We ate very little from the store, which stocked mostly the things people couldn’t raise: salt and flour and New Orleans molasses in barrels, pepper, cloves, nutmeg, vanilla, coffee, cheese, cloth in bolts, hardware, coal, harness, and so on. And Uncle Othy bought eggs and cream and old hens and other produce that the housewives brought in when they came to buy.
As everywhere, people would come in to pass the time, whether they bought anything or not. When Uncle Othy had to be busy in his crop, Aunt Cordie and I went down and kept the store. When Aunt Cordie and I went wandering off to gather wild greens or berries, Uncle Othy kept an eye on the house. We really didn’t go much of anywhere except up to Port William to church on Sunday morning. We could easier have gone to Goforth Church, but that was Methodist. Port William, anyhow, was our town.
Our nearest neighbors were Put Woolfork and his family on the upriver side, and on the downriver side Arch and Ada Thripple and their grown daughters, Wanda and Bernice.
We hardly ever saw Put Woolfork’s womenfolk or children, but we saw Put every day. Aunt Cordie would say, “Now, that Put. He puts them all to work over there—I know he does—and then he comes over here to where he won’t even have to see them working. He’s got little enough sense to think he’s smart.”
And Uncle Othy would always answer, “I reckon I go to all the sweat and worry of keeping store just to provide Put Woolfork a place to set down.”
Put didn’t often buy anything. Neither he nor any of his family ever came to our house, and we never went over to theirs. “I see enough of him as ’tis,” Aunt Cordie said.
But we often walked across the hillside to the Thripples’ to sit till bedtime, or they walked over to sit with us. Aunt Cordie taught me to call them Aunt Ada and Uncle Arch, and I did. She also insisted that I call their daughters Miss Wanda and Miss Bernice, and I did that too, but only in Aunt Cordie’s presence.
The Thripples were good, industrious people like Aunt Cordie and Uncle Othy. They took care of themselves, were good neighbors, and I never heard them speak an envious word. Uncle Arch farmed about fifty acres, mostly hillside with a narrow strip of bottom. He stayed busy all the time, though he didn’t hurry much; he never had a lot to say, and was in most ways quiet. But he had one oddity that interested everybody and that nobody could account for. The old man was famous all over the Port William community for the noise he made working a team. Days would go by sometimes and we would hear not a whisper from over there, and then Uncle Arch would hitch up Dick and Bob and go to work, and then you could hear him all over the valley. He just ranted and rared.
And I remember this:
The only neighbors we had across the river—the only ones we ever saw—were an elderly black couple, Ben and Ellie Fewclothes. The story was that Uncle Ben had wandered into our part of the country from somewhere down south when he was a young man, with nothing of his own but the ragged clothes he was wearing. They called him Ben Fewclothes and perhaps because he needed a new one, he took the name. He and Aunt Ellie had a farm in the big bottom over there—about thirty acres or so, bordering on a slue. It was good land, and they made a pretty self-sufficient thing of it, the way all the farming people did then, or tried to. I called them Uncle Ben and Aunt Ellie. You might be thinking by now that I had a lot of aunts and uncles, but that was just the courtesy of those days; children were not allowed to go around first-naming older people.
Uncle Ben would come over occasionally, but not often. He didn’t fish much, at least not in the river, and didn’t own a boat. But Aunt Ellie was a regular customer at the store, and whenever she came over she and Aunt Cordie would sit down together and visit and talk a while. Aunt Ellie conducted herself very consciously as a lady—was precise and careful always in her manners and her speech. Every Saturday morning she would come down the dug steps in the bank with a basket of eggs, a bucket of cream, and sometimes two or three old hens with their legs tied. Without much raising her voice, she would call out, “Mister Dagget! Mister Dagget!” And Uncle Othy would go in the boat and set her over the river to do her weekly dealing. After I got big enough, one of my favorite duties was to go along to help.
When we got to the far side, I would step up into the bow of the johnboat, and while Uncle Othy held the boat steady against the bank I would help Aunt Ellie to step in and situate herself and her bucket and basket and whatever else she had brought. She would always say, “Well! Thank you, honey!” And then I would go back to my seat in the stern, and Uncle Othy would row us across. When we got to the landing on our side, I would go forward and help Aunt Ellie get ashore. And she would say again, “Well! Thank you, honey!”
We were bringing Aunt Ellie across one fine Saturday morning in June. The river was as still almost as glass; it was quiet all around, except for Uncle Arch Thripple who was up on his hillside plowing tobacco with old Dick. Uncle Arch was ripping as usual:
“Get up, Dick! Haw! Haw! Whoa! Get over haw! Get up! Gee, Dick, damn you to hell! Whooooa! Haw! Get up, Dick!”
And Aunt Ellie, perhaps unable to resist, looking neither at Uncle Othy nor at me but speaking in her precise way as if to the swallows flying over the water, said, “Seem like Mistah Thripple having trouble with his Dick this mo’ning!”
I caught it—I was old enough by then—and was about to laugh, but Uncle Othy looked quickly at me and said, “Sh!”
From start to finish, I was pretty much Aunt Cordie’s boy. When she spoke of me to other people, she always called me “my boy,” tenderly and proudly, for I was her helper. She was on in years and somewhat slowed, but she was seldom idle. We went steadily from one thing to another, from can see to can’t see, and then on by lamplight, and I helped her with everything: keeping up the fires, maintaining
