calling me “my boy,” and told me stories, and would sit with me by the hour after supper, playing Rook or Old Maid. We were, in a way, playmates.
And then toward the end of the next summer I saw her begin to fail. She got so she couldn’t remember things. And she would have to rest two or three times coming up from the store to the house.
One day, standing in the kitchen door, she called loudly, “Oh, Othy! Oh, Othy!”
I said, “Aunt Cordie, Uncle Othy ain’t here.”
And she said just as nicely, as if I had put her mind at rest, “Well, I reckon that’s why he don’t answer.”
Sometimes she would look at me with a worry in her eyes that I didn’t understand until later, and she would say, “I don’t know. Honey, I just don’t know.” She meant she didn’t know what would become of me after she was gone.
One evening when the wind blew up the river with the first cold edge of fall, she stopped to rest as we were coming up from the store. She turned and looked north, the way the wind was coming.
“It’s got a chill in it,” I said. “We’ll need a fire tonight.” I remember I was looking forward to the fire, the good warmth.
But she said, “Child, I just don’t know if I can endure another winter.”
I can see now that she had given up. She had searched inside herself, looking for some sign that she still desired to live, and had found none. She wanted to live for me, maybe, but not for herself.
One morning I woke up and realized that it was daylight already and I had heard not a sound. Though there was frost on the ground, I didn’t even wait to put on my shoes but just barefooted it over to the Thripples’.
Aunt Cordie had died in her sleep, an easy way to go. I am thankful.
I was a little past ten years old, and I was the survivor already of two stories completely ended.
4
The Good Shepherd
Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told. As almost any barber can testify, there is also more than needs to be told, and more than anybody wants to hear. The story of the next dozen years of my life could be made long, but I want to be careful to offer you only the proper handful—just enough to describe the course that carried me away from the Port William neighborhood and then twelve years later brought me back again to the proper end of my life, to the love of my life, Mattie Chatham.
Aunt Cordie, departing, left behind her the problem of me. What, as she had wondered, was going to become of me? I could not stay on at the landing by myself, though of course that is what I wanted to do. I remember arguing, to the forces of seniority and authority who had to decide what was to become of me, that staying on was what I could do, that I was well able to do so. But of course I was only a child trying to call back a lost world.
By then I had no living relative, or none who was known to me. The people around Squires Landing were poor, scratching a living from hillside patches as hard-worn as their clothes. The Thripples were old. And there are several good and pressing reasons why people are not eager to take in a ten-year-old boy they are no kin to. There was no Aunt Cordie to come to my rescue this time. I had used up my allotted supply of Aunt Cordies. There had been one, when I needed her the most, and that was all.
I don’t mean to say that one was not enough—one was enough and more—but only that there was no second. And so I went out of the hands of love, which certainly included charity as we know it, into the hands of charity as we know it, which included love only as it might.
I was sent away to a church orphanage called The Good Shepherd up in the central part of the state. It was a beautiful place, that orphanage. The superintendent’s home and office were in a fine old brick house set well back from the road in a lawn shaded by big trees. Behind it, scattered over a broad hilltop, were the dormitories, the dining hall, the school building, and the gymnasium. When I lit there, I felt so far away from home that I might as well have been in another world.
My first memory is of the long driveway sweeping up among the trees to the superintendent’s house. And then, immediately, I remember meeting face to face, across the top of a large desk, the superintendent himself, Brother Whitespade, one of the crossest of Christians, who said in a big, pretty voice, “Ah! This will be Mr. Crow.”
Brother Whitespade’s desk was as wide as a field. It was as wide maybe as an ocean. For a minute or two I didn’t think I could see across it. And then I could see Brother Whitespade over there, looking at me pointedly through a pair of steel-rimmed eyeglasses and smiling in a way that gave me no comfort. His stare was the most concentrated part of him. Otherwise he was a soft man with a smooth face, wavy hair, and a tight collar. But all that he was seemed to be gathered up in his eyes and pointed across that wide desk at me.
I knew all of a sudden that I was facing a man who was filled with power, and that I had no power, none. I could not have told you this then, for the knowledge did not come to me in words. It came into me as a hollow place that opened slowly and ached under my breastbone. I knew that I had come there by no thought of my own. I was a long way removed from any thought of my own. I had no thought.
I was who? A little somebody who could have been anybody, looking across that wide desk at Brother Whitespade. I knew that I could not even leave until he told me to go.
“Jonah Crow,” he said, looking at a paper on his desk. And then he looked back at me. “Mr. Crow, since I believe you have not yet found your way to Nineveh, I will call you J.”
And I saw him write in large, curving strokes my name as it was to be: “J. Crow.”
I remember waking up in my dormitory room the first several mornings, for maybe a minute or two not knowing where I was, and then knowing. I would recognize the chest of drawers, the two chairs, the table, the two iron cots, the other boy still asleep. And I would be filled with a strange objectless fear, as if in the twinkling of an eye I had been changed not only into another world but into another body. Shrunken by fear, I lay on my back and looked straight up at the ceiling, waiting for something to move.
When the wake-up bell sounded over the hilltop and the other boy stirred in his bed and this new world began to assemble itself in small motions and sounds, the fear left me. I would know then that I would make it until night, when again in the narrow cot in the dark room I would cover my head and, in despair of anything else to do, go immediately to sleep.
I thought at first that Brother Whitespade, by changing my name to J., had made me a special case. But I soon found out that all of us orphans—who were called “students”—were known by the initial letters of our first names along with our last names. My roommate, for example, was T. Warnick. If the institution had received a second Warnick by the name, say, of Thomas Robert, he would have to be called R. Warnick. If he had had no middle name, he would have been assigned an initial arbitrarily: N. Warnick or P. Warnick, whatever Brother Whitespade chose. The girls too all were named by the same method. We were thus not quite nameless, but also not quite named. The effect was curious. For a while anyhow, and for how long a while it would be hard to say, we all acted on the assumption that we were no longer the persons we had been—which for all practical purposes was the correct assumption. We became in some way faceless to ourselves and to one another. You would discover, for example, that E. Lawler’s original first name was
