Remembering

by Wendell Berry

  He felt his father watching him, worried about him, and he shied away.

  His mother gave him no chance to shy away. “Come sit here,” she said, reminding him for the first time of her mother.

  “Andy, I’m sorry for what’s happened. I can’t tell you how sorry. But you must learn something from it.”

  “Learn!”

  “What you don’t know, you’ll have to learn.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. But you must accept this as given to you to learn from, or it will hurt you worse than it already has.”

  He knew that she had missed nothing. He sat under her words with his head down as he had sat, when he was a boy, under a scolding. But she was not scolding.

  “Given!” he said.

  “You haven’t listened,” she said, reminding him again of his grandmother. “But don’t forget.”

  He had become a special case, and he knew what he thought of that. He raged, and he raged at his rage, and nothing that he had was what he wanted. He remained devoted to his lost hand, to his body as it had been, to his life as he had wanted it to be; he could not give them up. That he had lost them and they were gone did not persuade him. The fact had no power with him. The powerlessness of the fact made him lonely, and he held to his loneliness to protect his absurdity. But it was as though his soul had withdrawn from his life, refusing any longer to live in it.

  He was out of control. He is out of control. For months now he has not had the use of his best reasons. He is where he is, two thousand miles from home, where nobody knows where he is, in a room he has never seen before, because of a schedule that he made once and did not especially want to make when he made it. For months he has merely fallen from one day to another, with no more intention than any other creature or object that is falling, only seeing afterwards, too late, what his intention might have been, but by then fallen farther.

  And this fall of his involved or revealed or caused the fall of appearances. He no longer trusted the look or sound of anything. He no longer believed that anything was what it appeared to be. He began to ask what had been secretly meant or ignorantly meant or unconsciously meant. And once his trust had failed there was no limit to his distrust; he saw that the world of his distrust was bottomless and forever dark, it was his fall itself, but he could not stop it.

  He had long known that his quarrels with Flora proceeded along a line of complaints that they were, in fact, not about — or this had been true of their quarrels in the old days, before he had given his hand to the machine. Then their quarrels, as he knew or would know sooner or later in the course of them, were about duality: They were two longing to be one, or one dividing relentlessly into two. Their marriage seemed to live according to no logic at all, or none that he could see. It was the origin of the quarrel that divided them, and the selfsame quarrel, having consumed whatever fuel occasion may have offered it, would join them together again, and they met in an ease and joy that Andy knew they did not make, and that he at least did not deserve. It was as though grace and peace were bestowed on them out of the sanctity of marriage itself, which simply furnished them to one another, free and sufficient as rain to leaf. It was as if they were not making marriage but being made by it, and, while it held them, time and their lives flowed over them, like swift water over stones, rubbing them together, grinding off their edges, making them fit together, fit to be together, in the only way that fragments can be rejoined. And though Andy did not understand this, and though he suffered from it, he trusted it and rejoiced in it.

  And then his trust failed, because his trust in himself failed. He had no faith in himself, and he had no faith in her faith in him, or in his faith in her. Now their quarrels did not end their difference and bring them together, but were all one quarrel that had no end. It changed subjects, but it did not end. It was no longer about duality, but about division, an infinite cold space that opened between them. It fascinated him and held him, even as he feared and hated it. Always there was something that he burned to say about it.

  At times, in their quarreling, he knew he was crying out to her across that abyss, and he knew she heard him but would not pretend it was a call she could answer. Sometimes he knew he was crying for her to pity him for his dissatisfaction with her. He knew there was no door leading out from that. If he wanted to be free of it, he must stop it himself, and receive no congratulation from her for stopping it. He knew he was living the life history of a fraction, and that the fraction was growing smaller. He saw no help for it.

  “Do you know what you need?” she said to him one day.

  “What?”

  “Forgiveness. And I want to forgive you. All of us do. And you need more than ours. But you must forgive yourself.”

  She was crying, and he pitied her. And he knew she had told the truth, and it made him furious.

  He did not trust her to love him. He did not trust himself to trust her to love him.

  “You don’t love me.”

  He made her furious, and was glad of it, and was sorry he was glad.

  He could not win his quarrel with her and he could not quit it. Nothing in his life had ever so exhausted him. He would sit in the kitchen at night, after the children were asleep, and argue with her. All his effort would be to keep his anger and his distrust, the real subjects of the quarrel, in the dark or in disguise.

  She would meet his attacks bravely, hopelessly, often in tears. “It’s you you’re talking about. It’s not me. You’re mad at me because I can’t stop you from being mad at yourself.”

  He would change the line of his attack, returning to his little trove of complaints against her, and she would check him.

  “That’s true. But it’s not what you mean. You don’t trust me. Or yourself. You have no faith.”

  She was right, and he could not win. But he knew nevertheless how to wound her. He would perform another flanking movement and attack again. He was ingenious. He was never at a loss. The agility of his maneuvers surprised him, and he took a mean pleasure in them. He persisted toward a cessation and a peace that he could not achieve. And finally he mystified himself. At some point in the quarrel he would realize that he could not remember how it had started or how it had proceeded or what it was about, that he was lost in its mere presence. And through it all he felt inside him the small, hard knot of his guilt.

  Only exhaustion stopped him. Finally, worn and emptied by his hopeless anger and Flora’s hopeless resistance, he would have barely the strength to walk to bed. In bed, her back turned to him, he would lie awake. And then he would sleep, but only to dream a dream that would wake him and keep him awake in fear.

  He dreamed that it became necessary to set fire to his house, and he set it afire, only to realize, as the flames altogether enveloped it, that his family was inside.

  He dreamed that he was in a battle, about to throw a hand grenade. He hesitated, thinking of the humanity of those he meant to destroy, and the grenade exploded in his hand.

  He was walking up the creek road. A woman with snaky hair was standing on the roadside, looking down at the water. He meant to pass by her and not be seen. As he drew even with her, she turned and with her stony eyes looked him full in the face. At his outcry the room returned.

  “What?” Flora said.

  “Nothing.”

  He heard a heavy engine approaching. He ran around the house and stood beside Flora. A spotlight, surprisingly near, shone directly on them. He cried out, “Hey!” and woke.

  He picks up the hook where he left it on the floor, too strange to belong anywhere, incomplete in itself, helpless to complete any other thing, and begins putting it on. His hand fumbles at the fastenings. He labors under the balking impulse to use his right hand to install the hook on his right arm. Finally he is taken again by rage at the oddity of his handless arm and the hook and his incompetent left hand. He flings the hook into the waste basket, pleased by the sound of the heavy fall of it. “Lie there where you belong, you rattled
y bastard!”

  He goes into the bathroom and without turning on the light fills the basin with cold water and lifts it to his face, handful after handful, grateful for the coldness and wetness of it, and dries his face and hand. He feels in his shaving kit for his comb and combs his hair, and stands still again in the twilit little cubicle, waiting for a new intention to move him.

  He is coming near to the end of a long labor of self-exhaustion. He is almost empty now. The world is almost absent from him. It is as though he still stands, emptied and shaking, behind the rostrum in his last moments at the conference. The conference was about, and was meant to promote, the abstractions by which things and lives are transformed into money. It was meant, as if by some voiceless will within the speaking voices, to seize upon actual lives and cause them to disappear into something such as the Future of the American Food System. He is oppressed by all that has oppressed him for months, but now also by the memory of his voice and of all the other voices at the conference, abstraction welling up into them, a great black cloud of forgetfulness. Soon they would not remember who or where they were, their dear homeland drawn up into the Future of the American Food System to be seen no more, forever destroyed by schemes, by numbers, by deadly means, all its springs poisoned. For years Andy has been moved by the possibility of acting in opposition to this, but he does not feel it now. It has gone away. He feels himself strangely fixed, cut off, unable to want either to stand or to move.

  And yet there is a memory flickering in the stump of his arm, and it is not that of the clasp of the hooks’ fastenings. It is the imprint of the thumb and fingers of a man’s hand, hard, forthright, and friendly.

  When his first crop of alfalfa was ready to harvest in mid May, they came to help him — Nathan and Danny and Jack, and Martin and Arthur Rowanberry. Or, rather, they came and harvested his hay, he helping them, and doing it poorly enough in his own opinion, with embarrassment, half resenting their charitable presumption, embarrassing them by his self-apology.

  Nathan, who ran the crew — because Andy was useless to do it, and somebody had to do it — mainly ignored him, except to give him orders in the form of polite questions: “Don’t you think it’ll do to go up this afternoon?” “What about you running the rake?”

  When they were finished, Andy, speaking as he knew out of the worst of his character, said, “I don’t know how to thank you. I don’t know how I can ever repay you.”

  And speaking out of the best of his, Nathan said, “Help us.” So saying, he looked straight at Andy, grinned, took hold of his right forearm, and gave just a little tug.

  That was in another world. That memory in the flesh of his arm could not be stranger if it were some spirit’s parting touch that he had borne with him into the womb.

  The incident gave him no ease. It placed an expectation on him that he could not refuse and did not want. He did go to help them, but only as a nuisance, he felt, to them and to himself. He had little belief that they needed him or that he could help them. And, faced with his uncertainty, they seemed not to know what to ask of him. Except, that is, for Nathan. Nathan ignored him as he was, and treated him as if he were a stranger who required an extraordinary nicety of manners, speaking to him almost exclusively in polite questions. How would he feel about doing this? Would he mind doing that?

  And all of this was characteristic of Nathan, who had known a war that was his country’s and his time’s, and who had made a peace that was his own. He entirely lacked the strenuous dissatisfactions with self and circumstance and other people that had been so much a part of the bond between Andy and Elton. He was Andy’s third cousin on Andy’s father’s side, and he was, in a fashion, the son-in-law of Andy’s mother’s father, Mat Feltner. He was a good, quiet man, as if he were Mat’s blood son as well as the husband of his onetime daughter-in-law. There was an accuracy of generosity in Nathan that Andy wondered at, and no nonsense. He said little and spoke well. And Andy began to live in a kind of fear of him. That clamp of Nathan’s hand, by which Nathan had meant to include him, excluded him. Because he could not answer it, it lived upon his flesh like a burn, the brand of his exile.

  As though Nathan is standing beside him now in the little dark room, Andy turns away. He begins to dress, avoiding the mirror now, fearfully, as if, looking in, he might see himself with the head of a toad. He does not think, but only feels. He does not think of the origin of the pain he feels, or of the anger hollow and dry in his heart.

  And now, dressing, he hurries to get out. He has begun to hear again the night noises of the city. He has known the city since his first travels, nearly twenty years ago, and he feels it around him now, standing stepped and graceful on its heights, and around it the always arriving sea, the sea and the sky reaching westward, past the land’s edge, out of sight.

  He darkens the room and goes out into the dim hallway and the interior quiet of the building, away from the street sounds. The long hall is carpeted, and he goes silently past the shut doors of rooms where people are sleeping or absent, who would know which? There is an almost palpable unwaking around him as he goes past the blank doors, intent upon his own silence, as though, his presence known to nobody, he is not there himself.

  At the elevator he stops and looks at the button saying “Down.” But he does not push it. He does not want to hear the jolt of machinery as the elevator begins to rise, or the long groan of its rising, or the jolt of its stopping, the doors clanking open. He does not want to enter that little box and see it close upon him and be carried passively downward in it.

  He goes on along the corridor and lets himself out into the stairwell. He has made no noise, but now his steps echo around him as he descends the rightward turning stairs, five floors, to the lobby, where the carpet silences them again.

  The lobby is deserted. The empty chairs sit in conversational groups of two or three, their cushions dented. There is no one behind the desk. The clock over the desk says twenty after four.

  What have I done with the time?

  Remembering as if far back, he knows what he did with it. He stood up there in the room like a graven image of himself, telling over the catalogue of his complaints. There is a country inside him where his complaints live and do their work, where they invite him to come, offering their enticements and tidbits, the self-justifications of anger, the self-justifications of self-humiliation, the coddled griefs.

  When he looks at the clock again, it is almost four-thirty. This is happening to my soul. This is a part of the life history of my soul. Outside in the street a car passes, stops for the light at the corner, its engine idling, and then turns and goes on. He must go. He must get outside. He is filled suddenly with panic, as though the doors have begun to grow rapidly smaller.

  3. Remembering

  In the street the wind comes fresh against him, smelling a little of the sea. He stands outside the hotel entrance, the street all his own for the moment. Off in the distance he can hear a siren baying, and then another joining it. A taxi eases up to the intersection nearby, waits for the light, and eases on. Two or three blocks away a garbage compressor utters a loud yawn followed by something like a swallow. And underneath the noises there is a silence as of the sleep of almost everybody, and beside or within the silence a low mechanical hum.

  A frail-looking woman passes by, drunk and walking unsteadily but with an attempt anyway at dignity, holding her jacket closed at the throat as if she is cold. Watching her, he feels his silence. An unknown world would have to be crossed for him to speak to her. And yet something in him for which he has no word cries out toward her, for the world between them fails in their silence, who are alone and heavy laden and without rest. This is the history of souls. This is the earthly history of immortal souls. He begins to walk slowly past the deserted entries, the darkened windows. A truck passes, shifting into a lower gear as the grade steepens. Somewhere there is an outcry, a man’s voice, distressed and urgent, unintelligible. A car engine starts. The garbage truck again ra
ises its wail.

  Other night walkers appear, meet him and pass and go on, or go by on the cross streets. They are far between, alone. He can hear their steps, each one, echoing in the spaces around him. It is the time of night, he thinks, when the dying die — O greens, and fields, and trees, farewell, farewell! — and the dead lie stillest in their graves, when the dying who are not yet to die begin again to live.

  A man overtakes and passes him, carrying a lunch box, walking fast. He meets a woman with long blonde hair, dressed in leotards, spike heels, and a zebra-striped cloth coat. He sees a couple crossing an intersection ahead of him, young and beautiful, their arms around each other, going home. He imagines them risen from their fallen clothes like resurrected souls, stepping toward each other open-armed.

  The city at night, he thinks, is like the forest at night, when most creatures have no need to stay awake, but some do, and that is well, for the place itself must never sleep. Some must carry wakefulness through the sleep of others.

  He is walking northward, along Mason, toward Aquatic Park. He wants to reach the city’s edge. He longs for the verge and immensity of the continent’s meeting with the sea. Stopping now and then to listen and to turn and look down into the street behind him, he climbs slowly up the steepening hill. It is shadowy and dim between the streetlights; above him, above the building tops, the sky is dark, its still spaces measured out by stars and the dwindling moon. He pauses by a tiny garden behind a wall, dusky and still amid the buildings; it contains a few dark shrubs and flowers whose pale blossoms seem to float in the shadows. A bird is singing there, and another somewhere toward the top of the hill. The dawn must be beginning now; there must be a little paling in the eastern sky, invisible yet within the city’s bright horizon. But at the next cross street, looking eastward across the bay, he sees a cloud with just the first suggestion of daylight touching its underside.