Jayber Crow Read Online Free

breaking ice, sliding and grabbing and falling and getting up again, until finally, having given himself up for dead, he got solid ground under his feet.
    â€œSo, boys,” Emmet Edge said, “I very nearly was a goner, and my boat is gone for certain.”
    But the Thigpens—who had not had the wits scared out of them—said, well, maybe so, but they thought they at least ought to go back and have a look.
    So they all walked back across the bottom to the place on the now-unrecognizable shore where Emmet Edge thought he had left his boat.
    And there the boat was, sitting perfectly level atop a great heap of ice, just like the Ark on Mount Ararat. Not even a dish was broken. Emmet Edge hewed some proper steps into the hill of ice, moved back into his boat, and lived there while the spring warmth brought it gently down again onto the Thigpens’ last year’s cornfield, where it landed toward the end of May.
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    The Daggets kept the store at the landing and had a farm of a dozen or so acres—a shelf of bottomland and a scrap of hillside—on which they grew a little tobacco crop and a garden, and kept a horse, a milk cow, meat hogs, and flocks of chickens, turkeys, guineas, and geese. The life of that place had an amplitude I had not known before.
    Squires Landing was just below the mouth of Squires Branch, a steep small stream that dried up in summer but after a hard rain tumbled furiously down over its course of heaped and shifting rocks. The house stood well up the hillside, overlooking the confluence of branch and river. Behind it were the henhouse, smokehouse, coal shed, and privy. Tucked in under the slope, down near the branch, was a small barn, where Uncle
Othy housed his crop and sheltered his animals. The store stood on a narrow bench below the house and above the road. Below the road and the patch of bottom where the garden was, the river was always coming down and passing by and going on.
    The river moved me strangely, and I loved it from the day I first laid eyes on it. When Aunt Cordie made me stay inside because of the weather, I would stand at the window and look upstream and downstream and across. The river was a barrier and yet a connection. I felt, a long time before I knew, that the river had shaped the land. The whole country leaned toward the river. All the streams flowed to it. It flowed by, and yet it stayed. It brought things and carried them away. I did not know where it flowed from or to, but I knew that it flowed a great distance through the opening it had made. The current told me that.
    So did the boats. There were little landings like ours every few miles, and there was a fairly steady traffic of steam or gasoline packets that carried freight and passengers and livestock, and of towboats shoving barges loaded with coal or lumber. I remember the Hanover, the Revonah , the White Dove , the Richard Roe , the Falls City , and the Dot . The goods that Uncle Othy sold in his store all came by the river. The boats would whistle three times, pull in to shore, let down their plank, unload whatever cargo was directed to Squires Landing, load on whatever freight or creatures were outbound, and be gone quicker than you could believe, up or down. It was wonderful the way the river and the banks and the whole valley would be quiet, preoccupied with the lights and shadows and the regular business of a summer morning, and then you would hear that whistle, and all of a sudden there would be this commotion: the sound of a big engine, a bell ringing, shouts, blocks creaking as the plank was lowered, cattle bawling, pigs squealing, men cursing, the roustabouts chanting as they passed bags or boxes from hand to hand. I liked to watch them pen the fat hogs at the banktop and then force them across the gangplank onto the boat. You would hear some fancy language from the captain then, especially if a shoat got loose. Boat captains were the chief tyrants of the world in those days. They