Jayber Crow Read Online Free Page B

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