After a minute somebody called from a window, “Who’s there?”
“It’s me. George Jackson, sir. I fell off the steamboat.”
“Bob, Tom, get your guns. George Jackson, do you know the Shepherdsons?”
“No, sir, I never heard of them.”
“Well, that may be true, or it may not. Now come forward slowly. If anybody is with you, let him stay back, or he’ll be shot. Push the door open yourself, just enough to get in.”
I took one slow step at a time and pushed the door open a little, and a little more, until somebody said, “That’s enough. Put your head in.” I did, but I thought they would shoot it off.
The candle was on the floor, and there they all were, looking at me. Three big men pointed their guns at me: the oldest was gray and about sixty, the other two thirty or more. There was a sweet old gray-haired lady too, and behind her two young women.
“Why, he isn’t a Shepherdson,” they said. And the old lady said, “The poor thing is as wet as he can be. Don’t you think he may be hungry?”
So she sent for food and called her youngest son, Buck, to give me some of his dry clothes. He came in rubbing his eyes with one hand and dragging a gun with the other. He looked about as old as me, thirteen or fourteen.
“Aren’t there any Shepherdsons around?” he asked. They said no, it was a false alarm. “Well,” he said, “if there had been some, I think I would have got one.”
They all laughed. “Never mind, Buck,” said the old man. “You’ll have chances enough, all in good time.”
Up in his room, Buck said, “How long are you going to stay here? You have to stay here forever. We can have lots of fun—there isn’t any school now.”
Downstairs they gave me cold cornbread, cold beef and buttermilk, and I have never had anything better. I told them that my family had lived on a little farm in southern Arkansas, and they all died or ran off, until there was nobody left but Pap and me. When Pap died too, I started up the river on a steamboat and fell off. So they said I could have a home there as long as I wanted.
I slept with Buck, and when I woke up in the morning, I had forgotten my name! I lay there for an hour trying to remember, and when Buck woke up, I said:
“Can you spell, Buck? I bet you can’t spell my name.”
“I bet you I can. G-e-o-r-g-e J-a-c-k-s-o-n. There now.”
“Well, you did it, but I didn’t think you could.”
I wrote it down secretly, because somebody might ask me to spell it next.
It was a very nice family, and a very nice house too, with a brass knob on the front door, like houses in town. On the walls hung pictures that a daughter of the family had made when she was only fifteen. Her name was Emmeline, and she was dead now. Her pictures were sadder than any I had ever seen: a woman in a black dress crying on a gravestone, a young lady crying over a dead bird. Everybody was sorry she died, because she had planned a lot more pictures. But with all her sad thoughts, I thought she was probably having a better time in the graveyard.
Her last picture showed a young woman standing on a bridge, ready to jump, looking up at the moon with tears on her face. She had two arms folded on her chest, two arms stretched out in front and two more reaching up to the moon. The idea was to see which pair looked best and then rub out the others, but Emmeline died before she could decide. The young woman had a sweet face, but with so many arms she looked too much like a spider, I thought.
Emmeline wrote poems too. Every time somebody died, she was there with a poem about them before they were cold. The neighbors joked that when someone died, the doctor came first, then Emmeline with a poem, and then the man who buried the body. She wrote one about a boy who fell down a well. It said they pulled him out and tried to get the water out of him, but it was too late.
Poor Emmeline wrote poems about all the dead people, and it didn’t seem right that nobody wrote one about her. So I tried to write a few lines myself, but I couldn’t make it work. They kept her room just as she had liked it, and nobody ever slept there. I liked all that family, the dead ones too, and I wasn’t going to let anything come between us.