Table of Contents
Chapter 1 - The Barber in Port William
Chapter 8 - The Gathering Waters
Chapter 9 - Barber Horsefield’s Successor
Chapter 10 - A Little Worter Dranking Party
Chapter 12 - The Gay Bird’s Heel
Chapter 13 - A Period of Darkness
Chapter 14 - For Better, for Wore
Chapter 15 - The Beautiful Shore
Chapter 16 - Rose of San Antone
Chapter 17 - Forsaking All Others
Chapter 20 - How It Held Together Partly
Chapter 21 - Don’t Send a Boy to Do a Man’s Work
Chapter 24 - A Passage of Family Life
Chapter 25 - A Period of Disintegration
Chapter 30 - The Keith Place in the Way of the World
The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself
Other Books About the Port William Membership
Andy Catlett Hannah Coulter The Memory of Old Jack Nathan Coulter A Place on Earth Remembering That Distant Land A World Lost
Virginia Berry 1907-1997 Requiescat in pace
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A publisher’s job is to provide a writer with encouragement, correction, amusement, and (of course) publication. For all of these things, and for kindness and friendship, I thank the people at Counterpoint Press: Heather McLeod, Trish Hoard, John McLeod, and Jack Shoemaker.
For typing my manuscript in various drafts, I thank Tanya and David Charlton and Tanya Berry. For reading the book and giving indispensable advice, I am indebted to the aforementioned two Tanyas, Ross Feld, Maurice Telleen, Don Wallis, and Donald Hall. Carole McCurdy copyedited the manuscript; I am grateful for her vigilance and her gift for marginal conversation.
NOTICE
Persons attempting to find a “text” in this book will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a “subtext” in it will be banished; persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct, or otherwise “understand” it will be exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
Magnanimous Despair alone Could show me so divine a thing ...
Part I
1
The Barber in Port William
I never put up a barber pole or a sign or even gave my shop a name. I didn’t have to. The building was already called “the barbershop.” That was its name because that had been its name for nobody knew how long. Port William had little written history Its history was its living memory of itself, which passed over the years like a moving beam of light. It had a beginning that