Jayber Crow. Wendell Berry

my mind not to go back.

      Skinner said, “I thought you was going to school.”

      I said, “I reckon not.”

      I had a customer, and Skinner was sitting in his chair, reading a newspaper somebody had left. When I said “I reckon not,” he lowered the paper and looked at me, waiting for me to explain. I didn’t explain.

      Finally he said, “Mmmm-mnh! Verily, I’ll be damned if ever I seen anything like it.”

      Maybe because not going back to my classes was in a way doing something, another image began moving in my mind. I could see myself getting out of Sam Hanks’s truck at the stockyards, and I could see him coming around to face me. When he hooked his two fingers into my jacket pocket, I could feel the pull. More than I ever had before, I felt ashamed of my lie and wanted to undo it. I thought for a while of sending the money back, care of the postmaster at Port William. And then, without deciding not to, I didn’t.

      One morning in the latter part of January, in 1937, instead of going to the shop, I packed my belongings into the same box I had brought with me from Pigeonville, leaving out what wouldn’t fit in, and laid a full week’s rent along with my key on the table in my room. I walked out of town as easily and freely as one of the old beat-down gamblers who would show up and hang around the shop for a few weeks or months and then be gone. I thought of taking leave of Skinner Hawes and my old landlady—but what for? To be asked for an explanation that I didn’t have?

      I headed westward, for Louisville. I knew that along the rivers the waters were rising.