young my mother married a boy from somewhere across the river—“from off,” as we said. He came courting her afoot every Saturday night, walking six miles (so I’ve heard) to where he borrowed a johnboat opposite the mouth of Katy’s Branch, rowed across the river and up the creek to the first riffle, and then walked the rest of the way to the starveling little hillside farm above Goforth. The marriage was a have-to case. I was not thought of until too late, and this was something I seem to have known almost from birth. Around here it is hard for an interesting secret to stay a secret.
My father, whose given name was Luther, was by trade a blacksmith. His people could, or would, do nothing for him. My grandfather Quail, having only the one child, helped his new son-in-law to set up a little shop, with forge and anvil, across the road from Goforth Church, and to gather up some sticks of furniture for the house adjoining.
I have in memory only a few scattered pictures of my early lost life at Goforth. I remember sitting in my mother’s lap in the rocking chair beside the kitchen stove, and the sound of her voice singing in time to the beat of the rockers. I remember that in winter we lived mostly in the kitchen, for the kitchen was the only room with a stove. I remember my father’s shop, which I loved. I remember the plows and sleds that took shape there in the light of the open doorway. I remember my father bent over a horse’s hoof held between his knees. I remember the ringing of the anvil and the screech of hot metal in the slack tub. I remember walking from house to shop, holding my mother’s hand. I remember a hound named Stump and a horse named Joe and a cow named Bell. These and other things seem clear when they are off on the outer verges of my mind, but then, when I try to see them straight, they grow misty and fade away under the burden of questions. What did that kitchen actually look like? What was the song my mother sang as we rocked by the stove? I can remember my father’s stance and movements at his work, but I might as well never have seen his face. We lived, I know, a life with very little margin. We were not hungry or cold, but we had nothing to spare.
My first clear memories are of the terrible winter of 1917 and 1918. It was not terrible for me, at least not at first. For me, I suppose, life went on for a while as it always had. But I knew that the grown-ups thought it a terrible winter. There was, to start with, a war going on over across the sea—an idea as strange to me as if it had been going on over across the sky. I had no clear understanding of what a war was, but I knew that it killed people and that my elders feared it. I imagined people shooting one another in a darkness that covered everything.
And then snow fell until it was deep, and then it drifted and froze, and the cattle and horses wandered loose about the country, walking over the tops of the fences. The river froze and then a thaw came and it rained, and the river rose out of its banks. Great ice gorges formed that sheared off or uprooted the shore trees and wrecked steamboats and barges. People had never seen anything like that ice. No flood that they had known even resembled it. The ice groaned and ground and creaked. When it broke loose, nothing—nothing!—could stand against it. It crushed or tore loose and carried away everything it came to. It broke steel cables as if they were cobwebs. That was a legendary winter; nobody who lived through it ever forgot it. I have shorn many a whitened head that preserved inside it the memory of that winter as clear as yesterday.
And then that winter became terrible for me by more than hearsay, for both of my young parents fell ill and died only a few hours apart in late February of 1918. I don’t know how I learned that this had happened. It seemed to me that they just disappeared into the welter of that time: a war off somewhere in the dark world; a river of ice off somewhere, breaking trees and boats; sickness off somewhere, and then in the house; and then death there in the house, and everything changed. I remember a crowd of troubled people in the house. I remember crouching beside the woodbox behind the kitchen stove while several people offered to pick me up and comfort me, and I would not look up.
And then an old woman I knew as Aunt Cordie gathered me up without asking and sat down in the rocking chair and held me and let me cry. She had on a coarse black sweater over a black dress that reached to her shoetops and a black hat with little white and blue flowers on it there in the dead of winter. I can remember how she seemed to be trying to enclose me entirely in her arms.
“God love his heart!” she said. “Othy, we’re going to take him home.”
3
Squires Landing
And that was what they did. There really was nobody else to do it, but she treated me like a prize she had won. Uncle Othy too. They had had three children of their own, and all three had died as children. I suppose Aunt Cordie and Uncle Othy had a store of affection laid away that they now brought out and applied to me. Later I would know how blessed I had been.
Aunt Cordie had been born Cordelia Quail, my grandfather Quail’s sister. She married Otha Dagget, she liked to say, “because he could whistle so pretty” They lived where they had always lived: over on the river at Squires Landing, two miles and a little more from Goforth, and about four miles from Port William. I remember my life at Squires Landing from the first day.
By the time I came, the worst of that winter was over. The river was back in its banks and free of ice. But the shores that once had been lined with trees were now bare mud, except for here and there a broken stump, and here and there a big tree that had managed somehow to survive, though scarred and splintered by the ice. And in the bottoms were still great heaped-up jagged piles of ice that would not entirely melt away until summer. Where the ice gorge had passed, the shores of the river looked scoured and bitten and lifeless. Years later, when I saw pictures of the battlefields of World War I, I would be reminded of the Kentucky River valley in the late winter of 1918. But to me, then, that dead and shattered landscape looked only as it seemed it ought to look after the death of my parents and the loss of our old life at Goforth.
For a while after I came to Squires Landing, I would stay as close to Aunt Cordie as I could. I tried to keep her not just in sight but in reach. When she moved, I moved. “Be careful now, Cordie,” Uncle Othy would say. “Don’t tramp on the boy.”
And she herself told me once, “I was like an old hen with one pore forlorn little chick.”
I remember too how spring came, just when I thought it might stay winter forever, at first in little touches and strokes of green lighting up the bare mud like candle flames, and then it covered the whole place with a light pelt of shadowy grass blades and leaves. And I remember how, as the days and the winds passed over, the foliage shifted and sang.
I began to feel at home.
I will tell one story that was often told during that winter and spring. I heard it many times from several people, then and since, and I have thought of it many times.
There was a shantyboatman named Emmet Edge who had his boat tied up at the end of a big bottom upriver, where some of the Thigpens were living. The morning the ice gorge broke up, the Thigpens were in their stripping room with a good fire going, getting the tobacco ready for market. They heard somebody in a pair of gum boots—thwock! thwock! thwock!— coming as fast as he could step. There was a knock on the door, too loud, as if the knocker expected the ones inside to be asleep.
One of them slid back the latch, and old man Edge stepped in among them, not bothering to pull the door to behind him. His eyes were wide open and his face as white as his hair. At first he didn’t say anything but just stood looking at them as if he couldn’t decide they were real.
“Well,” one of them said, “what’s the matter, Mr. Emmet?”
And then he told his tale.
He had been expecting the ice to go, and had been awake most of two nights. The second night, he sat holding a pan in his hands between his knees, the way the old shantyboatmen used to do when the river was changing, so that if they went to sleep they would drop the pan and the clatter would wake them up. What he expected to do when the ice went, maybe he didn’t know himself.
And then it went. When he felt the boat heave, snapping its lines like sewing threads, he knew there wasn’t anything for him to do except get ashore, if he could.