Jayber Crow Read Online Free PDF Page B

slide down into the river, and hauled it up again by a rope tied to the bail. Other wires led from the back porch to the privy, the coal pile, and the barn where he milked his cow and fed his hens and fattened his hog. When he got beyond the wires, he felt his way along with a stick. Sometimes he would feel his way clear down to the landing and spend half a day talking. When he got drunk, he said, he got around by falling: “I’ve surveyed the whole geography hereabouts in man-lengths.” He had been in the Spanish-American War, and had a pension. The neighbors, of course, helped him out, but he did pretty well on his own.
    He sent his list one day, as he usually did, by somebody coming down
to the landing. Uncle Othy boxed up his order, and that evening we took it up to him in the buggy. Dark Tom was in the kitchen, frying corn batter cakes on a griddle. Uncle Othy set the box down inside the door and then stood, leaning against the jamb, and talked a while with Dark Tom. I didn’t hear what they said because I was too taken up with what was happening there in the kitchen. It is another of those moments long past that is as present to my mind as if it is still happening.
    Dark Tom was frying the batter cakes one at a time, feeling at the edges with the spatula to tell when to turn them. When they were done, he laid them on a plate on the seat of a chair at the end of the stove. His black-and-brown-spotted foxhound, Old Ed, was sitting by the chair, and every time Dark Tom laid down a batter cake Old Ed promptly ate it, all in one bite, and then sat and licked his chops until Dark Tom laid down another batter cake. I should have said something, I suppose, but I didn’t think of it. At the time, and for years afterward, I thought that Old Ed was eating Dark Tom’s supper, taking advantage of his blindness, and that Dark Tom and Uncle Othy were too occupied by their talk to notice. Later it occurred to me to wonder if that was merely Dark Tom’s way of feeding his dog. It is a question with me still, and the answer has altogether disappeared from the world.
    That would have been in the summer of 1923. Though of course none of us knew it, Uncle Othy was then living the last of his days in this world. One afternoon Put Woolfork found him lying in the mud down on the riverbank, where he had gone to bail out his boat after a hard rain. Put hollered for us, and Aunt Cordie sent me running across the hill to the Thripples’. Put and the whole Thripple family helped us to get Uncle Othy up the hill to the house and into bed, and then stayed and watched with us. Uncle Othy died just a little while after dark.
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    And that left Aunt Cordie and me to keep things going there on the place and at the store. We were not, I believe, anyways near equal to the job. The neighbors, especially the Thripples, were always coming over to help us with something. Uncle Arch took over the crop on the halves, but that still left us a lot of work. And we missed Uncle Othy. We were always needing him to help with something or tell us something, but we missed him just for his own sake too. We needed to hear him say, “Hurry along
with them biscuits, Cordie, for I got things that needs a-seeing to,” or, “If you can’t do it, son, quit and get out of the way. Don’t send a boy to do a man’s work.”
    It was a time under a shadow, and yet I remember being happy, for I had responsibilities then, and I knew that I was useful. I took charge of the milking and the care of the animals, and at the store I had the hang of things better than Aunt Cordie did. I had been watching Uncle Othy for years, and I knew how much he stocked of this and that and how he arranged things. And since I had been going to school some, up at the mouth of Willow Run, I could keep track of the figures.
    I could see that Aunt Cordie was grieving, and yet she took care to be a good companion to me. She praised my work, calling me