“He may be the elected governor of Kentucky, but he ain’t the elected governor of me.”
“And I reckon the elected president of the United States ain’t the president of you, either.”
“The Old Marster elected me president of myself.”
“What are you? Some kind of a communist or something?”
“I’m Sam Hanks and a grown man.”
On that morning in 1935 I had not yet heard Sam Hanks on the subject of his own independence, freedom, and dignity. But if he had proceeded to enlighten me I would not have been surprised, for you could see that he had his ways. Something about him told you that he was easily offended. And something about him made you feel that you would not like to be the one to do it.
He looked slantwise down at my box, and then looked me over again in a way that made me realize I didn’t look as neat as he did and my clothes weren’t as good. In the college I would have looked like a poor student. Out on the road with my box, as I all of a sudden knew, I looked like a bum.
He said, “You got folks there at Lexington, I reckon.” He was a true son of Port William, where, as Art Rowanberry used to say, people don’t have what you would call their own business.
“No,” I said.
He said, “Well, are you from around here somewheres, or are you from somewheres else?”
And then I lied: “We been living over about Bell’s Fork.”
“And now you’re hellbent for the big city.”
“I’m going to try it a lick or two and see what it’s like.”
“Well,” he said, “let me put it this way. What are you aiming to do when you get there?”
“Work,” I said.
“What at?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hunh!” he said. “Do you think the country nowdays is full of people out at night with lanterns, looking for boys to pay wages to?”
“No,” I said. But he was making me uneasy. I was beginning to feel silly, and needing to give myself the dignity at least of desperation. With an ease that startled me I lied again: “Well, Mam’s sick, and we’re living with Grandpap, and he ain’t able. So I reckon it’s up to me.”
“Are you the only boy?”
“I’m the only chick in the nest.”
“The only one!” he said. “Well, there comes a time when we got it to do. And when that time comes, my opinion, we ought to do it.”
“That’s right,” I said.
He took a little time then to revive the fire in his pipe, and then he said, “Fine country.”
“The finest,” I said. It was too. Even in that lean time there was good stock everywhere. The ewe flocks were just coming out onto the green wheat and barley fields with their young lambs.
We rode and looked a while, and then Sam Hanks said, “Do you know anybody in Lexington?”
“No, sir,” I said. “I don’t know anybody”
He took a slow, thoughtful draft on his pipe. “Now, where I’m going to is the stockyards,” he said. “But if I was you, I wouldn’t hang around there. You don’t want to be no drover in no damned stockyards. A young man like you needs a future.”
“Yessir,” I said. “I appreciate your advice.”
We were coming into Lexington then. He was dealing with the traffic and the lights. He had put the pipe in his pocket.
“Not bossing you,” he said, “but if I was you, which I know I ain’t, I’d go over about the trotting track. You being a country boy and all, you could make your way there, maybe.”
We got to the stockyards. He drove in, turned, and backed up to a chute.
When we got out we could hear the bawling and bleating and squealing in the yards, and the drovers shouting.
I raised my hand. I was going to call “Much obliged!” to Sam Hanks and go my way, but he was coming toward me around the front of the truck. He hooked me by a quick thrust of two fingers into a pocket of my jacket, as if to hold me while he spoke his mind. He pointed.
“The trotting track is yonder,” he said, raising his voice over the clamor of the yards. “You’ll find it. You won’t have any trouble. Good luck to you. There’s bastards in this world that would cut your throat for a quarter.”
And then I did say, “Much obliged,” and walked away in the direction he had pointed.
I was already several blocks away when I put my hand into my jacket pocket and felt paper. It was a new five-dollar bill that never had been folded but once.
And so the first money I made on my entrance into the great world was liar’s wages. It didn’t make me feel a bit better. But I didn’t go back. Sam Hanks had probably already unloaded and started home. I was stuck with my lie, and I was going to be stuck with it for some time to come.
Maybe because I was ashamed, I took Sam Hanks’s advice and headed for the trotting track. As he had said, it wasn’t hard to find. He may have been wrong about the future it offered, but I did like it better than the stockyards. At the trotting track the animals—which were mostly horses, with a dog or a goat or a pet rooster thrown in here and there—weren’t all crowded together into pens but lived one to a place in stalls that were roomy and dry and light and well bedded. In fact, the horses lived better than a lot of people, including some of the grooms and stable hands who took care of them. They were worth more money than a lot of people, and they had the best grain and hay and straw; they never wanted for shelter or medical care or new shoes, and they were attended to like kings and queens. The horses were royalty at the trotting track, and their needs came first.
The drivers and trainers, you could say, were the princes—or anyhow the best of them were. They amounted to something; they were the ones who knew, and when they spoke the others listened. Below them were the grooms and stable hands. The trotting track was an orderly little world, ordered by the force of one idea: the idea of a paramount trotting or pacing horse that would stride down to the wire, not just in front of every other horse in the race but in front of every other horse that ever had raced up to that time. Everybody in that world was set in motion by this one idea.
It seemed wrong to me that some horses should fare better than some people in that time when so many went without enough to eat or wear, or even without a tight roof over their heads. And yet I too for a time came under the spell of the idea of the supreme horse. And some of the actual horses were wonderful. They had speed and courage and spirit and beauty. I remember several that just to see them standing in their harness like lords of the world could send a chill over you from head to foot.
I’m sure that the “future” Sam Hanks spoke of was there for some. And maybe, if I had been destined to it or called to it strongly enough, it might have been there for me. But my future, as it turned out, proved to be elsewhere. I hadn’t even glimpsed it yet. I had imagined no future. Who she was who would have my heart to own I had not imagined.
With Sam Hanks’s five-dollar bill added to the several others that made my savings, I had a pretty good little nest egg, for the times, and I protected it like the Holy Grail. Nobody needed to tell me that the world I was in now was not the world of the college, where I’d had my scholarship and a sure job and, you might say, connections. The world I was in now could fix a man mighty quick to where he would need more than I had saved just to keep living. Suppose I got sick or broke a bone. So I made a law for myself that I wouldn’t spend a cent of my savings unless I absolutely had to, but would live on present earnings only.
It was far from easy. There were plenty of people who needed