Remembering

by Wendell Berry

  “Say, good brother, could you, like, spare me a buck for a light lunch?”

  “Hold on, now,” Andy says. “Isn’t this the same day it was this morning when I gave you six dollars?”

  “Ah!” the man says. “Indeed!” He steps back a pace and makes the low bow of a cavalier, sweeping the pavement with the edge of his hand. “Pass, friend.”

  “Thanks, friend,” Andy says. He hurries on.

  The city encloses him now, the bay out of sight behind him. The streets are all astir, thousands of directions and purposes shifting and turning, meeting and passing, each making its way in the midst of the rest, colliding, turning aside, failing, succeeding, so that a man without a direction would be lost there and carried away. Ahead of him, up Columbus Avenue, the Transamerica Pyramid points up into an empty sky, so blue it makes his eyes ache.

  He is hurrying. He is walking up Columbus Avenue on his way to Port William, Kentucky, but he is moving too in the pattern of a succession of such returns. He is thinking of his father.

  Wheeler is on a train in the mountains west of Charlottesville, thinking of his father. It is a late evening in early summer. The sun is down, its light still in the sky. Wheeler’s valise is in the rack overhead, his small trunk in the baggage car. Tomorrow morning he will get home. Marce will be at the station to meet him. Ordinarily he would come in the buggy, but tomorrow, because of the trunk, he will have the team and wagon. Wheeler is thinking of his father, and of tomorrow when they will ride together on the spring seat of the wagon through the tree-shaded lanes, looking at the country and at the light sliding over the sleek hides of the mules — five miles from the station at Smallwood, through the sweet gap that Wheeler feels opened around him now between his past and his future, and then they will be home, and his mother will have dinner ready. His thoughts force Wheeler suddenly to breathe deeply as if to make room for his heart to beat. He has the whole night ahead of him. Later, he will go to the dining car for supper, and afterwards sleep, if he can sleep. Sleep will shorten the time.

  Andy has tried before this to imagine his father as a young man. And now, without any effort or even forethought of Andy’s, his father has appeared to him: a young man, eight years younger than he would be at Andy’s birth, sixteen years younger than Andy is now, his face pleasant, lighted by humor, and yet his mouth and jaw are already firmed by a resolution that will be familiar to anyone who will know him later, and in his eyes there is already the shadow of effort and hard thought.

  Wheeler was an apt and ambitious student who, after college, had been invited by the about-to-be-elected congressman from his district, Forrest Franklin, to go to Washington with him as his secretary. Wheeler accepted, on the condition that he would be permitted to attend law school as well. Mr. Franklin agreed to that, perhaps supposing that Wheeler would soon find the double load too much and would quit law school. Wheeler did not quit either one, and he did well at both.

  By the time Wheeler’s graduation was in sight, Mr. Franklin, who had become his friend, undertook to help him find employment. Mr. Franklin assumed, along with virtually every teacher Wheeler had ever had, that Wheeler’s destiny was to be that of thousands of gifted country boys since the dawn of the republic, and before: college and then a profession and then a job in the city. This was the path of victory, already trodden out and plain. But Wheeler, to Mr. Franklin’s great surprise, hesitated and put off. And one day Mr. Franklin called him in. The job in question was one with a large packing house in Chicago.

  “Wheeler, you’re an able young man. You’ve got the world in front of you. You can grow and develop and go to the top. You can be something your folks never imagined. You’ve got the ability to do it, Wheeler. And nobody will be prouder or delight more in your success than I will.”

  Mr. Franklin put both feet on the floor and leaned forward. He propped his right forefinger on Wheeler’s knee.

  “Wheeler. Listen. Don’t, damn it, throw this opportunity away.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Franklin,” Wheeler said, “I understand. I’ll think about it.”

  He did think about it. He sat down at his desk and he thought. He thought of his mother and father who had skimped and denied themselves to send him to school. He asked himself what they had imagined he might become or do as an educated man, and he knew that they had imagined him only as he was, a bright boy and then a bright young man, deserving, they thought, of such help as they could give; for their help they wanted only his honest thanks, and they did not ask even for that. He knew that he could become what they had never imagined, and what he had never imagined himself. And he asked finally, thinking of them, but of himself too, “Do I want to spend my life looking out a window onto tarred roofs, or do I want to see good pastures, and the cattle coming to the spring in the evening to drink?”

  Elation filling him, he answered, “I want to see good pastures and cattle coming to the spring in the evening to drink.” For suddenly he did imagine what he could be. He saw it all. A man with a law degree did not have to go to Chicago to practice. He could practice wherever in the whole nation there was a courthouse. He could practice in Hargrave. He could be with his own.

  He got up then and went back to Mr. Franklin’s office. “Mr. Franklin,” he said, “I’m going home.”

  And Mr. Franklin said, “WHAT?”

  Andy knows how firmly ruled and how unendingly fascinated his father has been by that imagining of cattle on good grass. It was a vision, finally, given the terrain and nature of their place, of a community well founded and long lasting. Wheeler held himself answerable to that, he still holds himself answerable to it, and in choosing it he gave it to his children as a possible choice.

  “It can inspire you, Andy,” he said. “It can keep you awake at night. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got a manure fork in your hand or a library in your head, or both — you can love it all your life.”

  “Look,” he says, for he has brought Andy where he has brought him many times before, to the grove of walnuts around the spring, and the cattle are coming to drink. The cattle crowd in to the little stone basin, hardly bigger than a washtub, that has never been dry, even in the terrible drouth of 1930; they drink in great slow swallows, their breath riffling the surface of the water, and then drift back out under the trees. Andy and Wheeler can hear the grass tearing as they graze.

  “If that won’t move a man, what will move him? It’s like a woman. It’ll keep you awake at night.”

  Andy is old enough to be told that loving a place is like loving a woman, but Wheeler does not trust him yet to know what he is seeing. He trusts it to come to him later, if he can get it into his mind.

  “Look,” he says. And as if to summon Andy’s mind back from wherever it may be wandering, for Andy’s mind can always be supposed to be wandering, Wheeler takes hold of his shoulder and grips it hard. “Look. See what it is, and you’ll always remember.”

  What manner of wonder is this flesh that can carry in it for thirty years a vision that other flesh has carried, oh, forever, and handed down by touch?

  Andy would like to know, for he is walking up Powell Street alone with the print of his father’s hard-fingered, urgent hand as palpably on his shoulder as if the hand itself were still there. He is going past store-fronts lined with fish, vegetables, and herbs, roasted ducks hanging by their necks in windows. He is hurrying among all the other hurriers, on his way to Port William.

  Where is Port William? If he asked, who would know? But he knows.

  He reaches the hotel and enters the lobby. It is all alight now with ordinary day. People are coming and going, standing around, sitting and talking. Reflected light from the passing traffic quivers and darts on the walls.

  His room, once he has drawn the curtains back, is filled with ordinary daylight too, no longer the place of nightmare. His suffering of the night and early morning now has given way to a suffering of haste, distance, and mortality. He must get back before chance or death prevents him. He fee
ls his frailty amid the stone and metal of the world crashing and roaring around him. He is praying to live until he can get home. To get there, he must pass a thousand ways to die. He has no time to waste. He bathes quickly, and shaves and combs his hair, looking at himself, it seems to him, for the first time in almost a year — a smaller, older, plainer man than he was before.

  He puts on fresh underwear and shirt, and repacks his things into his suitcase. And then he thinks of the hook, tempted at first to leave it.

  No. Get it. It is only a tool.

  It is not a hand. It is not a substitute for a hand. It is a tool, only a tool. His hand is gone. Sometime, somewhere behind him, his hand has left him. It has died, and is at peace.

  5. A Place Known and Dreamed

  He pays his bill and goes out to wait on the curb for the airport limousine. He puts his bag between his feet and leans against a signpost as near the corner as he can get and yet be out of the way of the crowd. He is still now, gathered together, ready to go, and the city continues its coming and going around him.

  He is a man fated to be charmed by cities. They frighten him and threaten to break his heart, but they charm him too. He came to them too late not to be charmed by them. The great cities that he has been to have exhilarated him by the mere thought of the abundance that is in them, not needing to be sent for.

  Years ago, he resigned himself to living in cities. That was what his education was for, as his teachers all advised and he believed. Its purpose was to get him away from home, out of the country, to someplace where he could live up to his abilities. He needed an education, and the purpose of an education was to take him away.

  He did not want to go, and he grieved at night over his forthcoming long and distant absence. But no one he met at the university offered him reprieve. He could amount to something, maybe; all he needed was an education, and a little polish.

  “For Christ’s sake, Catlett,” one of his professors told him in his freshman year, “try to take on a little polish while you’re at it. You don’t have to go through the world alarmed because other people don’t have cowshit on their shoes.”

  As it turned out, he did not take a very high polish. Polishing him was like polishing a clod of his native yellow clay; as soon as he began to shine, the whole glaze would flake off, leaving the job to be begun again.

  After graduation he married, and went to San Francisco, where he worked as a journalist, a very minor journalist, covering minor rural and agricultural events. He learned a little of the way the agricultural world wagged, and, perhaps because he was so far from home and from what his father would have told him if he had asked, he assumed that the way it wagged was the way it was supposed to wag: that bigger was better and biggest was best; that people coming into a place to use it need ask only what they wanted, not what was there; that whatever in humanity or nature failed before the advance of this mechanical ambition deserved to fail; and that the answers were in the universities and the corporate and government offices, not in the land or the people. He was capable, in those days, of forgetting all that his own people had been. He loved them, he thought, but he had gone beyond them as the world had. He was a long way, then, from his father’s ideal of good pasture, and from all that his old friend Elton Penn was and stood for and meant.

  After three years in San Francisco, he went to Chicago to work for his university classmate and friend, Tommy Netherbough, who had become an editor of Scientific Farming. Tommy was from Indiana, a farmer’s son, who openly despised what he called the “dungship” of his servitude, as a boy, to his father’s antiquated methods. There were differences of attitude and affection between Tommy and Andy, but they lay dormant under Andy’s assumption that Tommy was fundamentally right, and that his way was the way of the world. Tommy was a hard worker and he knew his business. As a student, he had known what he wanted to do, and once he was out in the world he began to do it, and to do well at it. Now, as an editor, he was better than ever. Andy liked him. They worked together for five years, and they got along. And then in the early spring of 1964 they had an argument that put them on opposite sides and changed Andy’s life.

  Andy went to Ohio to interview a farmer named Bill Meikelberger, who was to be featured in the magazine as that year’s Premier Farmer. Meikelberger had caught Tommy Netherbough’s eye because, like all the Premier Farmers before him, he was, as Tommy liked to put it, “one of the leaders of the shock troops of the scientific revolution in agriculture.”

  And Meikelberger was, in fact, out in front of almost everybody. He was a man, clearly, of exceptional intelligence, energy, and courage. He lived in the rich, broad land south of Columbus, where he farmed the two thousand acres he had acquired by patiently buying out his neighbors in the years since his graduation from the college of agriculture at Ohio State. He was the fulfillment of the dreams of his more progressive professors. On all the two thousand acres there was not a fence, not an animal, not a woodlot, not a tree, not a garden. The whole place was planted in corn, right up to the walls of the two or three unused barns that were still standing. Meikelberger owned a herd of machines. His grain bins covered acres. He had an office like a bank president’s. The office was a carpeted room at the back of the house, expensively and tastefully furnished, as was the rest of the house, as far as Andy saw it. It was a brick ranch house with ten rooms and a garage, each room a page from House Beautiful, and it was deserted.

  When Andy and Meikelberger had toured the farm and were going to the house for coffee, Meikelberger apologized for the absence of his wife.

  “I’m sorry, too,” Andy said. “Is she away on a trip?”

  “She’s in town at work.”

  “Oh, I see,” Andy said, looking at Meikelberger.

  “Every little bit helps,” Meikelberger said.

  There were only the two of them at home now. One of their children was a doctor in Seattle, one was in law school, one was married to a company executive in Moline.

  The kitchen was large, modern, equipped with every available appliance, shiny, comfortable, and clean. Andy sat at the table while Meikelberger made coffee.

  “Some kitchen,” Andy said.

  “Well, we don’t use it much,” Meikelberger said. “Helen went to work in town when our youngest child started school. With that and keeping the books here, she stays plenty busy. And I’m busy all the time. We don’t do much housekeeping. We eat in town, mostly.”

  Andy sat with his notebook on the table in front of him, watching Meikelberger, and liking him, though Meikelberger was troubling him too. He kept making a few notes, knowing that he was not understanding everything yet.

  Meikelberger was a heavy-shouldered, balding man, with a worried, humorous face. Andy had expected him to be proud of his farm, and he obviously was. He had recited readily, and with some pleasure, all the facts and figures Andy had asked for. But he also supplied, apparently with as much pleasure, a good many personal facts that were plainer and tawdrier than his production statistics.

  Meikelberger poured their coffee and sat down. “There have been some changes here since my grandfather’s time,” he said. “He and my grandmother settled here on eighty acres, would you believe that? They raised six children. We tore down the old house to build this one. Helen couldn’t stand it, and I saw what she meant. It was a barn.”

  And then, as if to see what Andy would think, he turned to the glass doors, which opened onto the small backyard, and, pointing, showed Andy the layout of the old farmstead: cellar and smokehouse, henhouse and garden, crib and granary, barn lot and barn, all now disappeared.

  “They’d be amazed if they could see this, wouldn’t they?” Meikelberger waved his hand at the outside, where the little lawn became, without transition, a cornfield. “They’d think they were in another world.”

  “I guess they would,” Andy said.

  Meikelberger finished his coffee, pushed back his cup, and inserted a large white tablet into his mouth, something that Andy had s
een him do earlier.

  “Are you sick, Mr. Meikelberger?”

  “Ulcer acting up.”

  “I’m sorry. What’s the cause of that?”

  Again Meikelberger grinned. “You can’t farm like this without having it on your mind.”

  “I’m sure you do have a lot to think about.”

  “Well, I’ve got hired help to keep track of, and machinery to keep running, and creditors to deal with, and so forth.”

  “You have creditors?”

  “Hell yes! You know it as well as I do. Debt is a permanent part of an operation like this. Getting out of debt is just another old idea you have to junk. I’ll never be out of debt. I never intend to be.”

  “I guess that’s bound to keep your mind busy. But it sounds like your stomach would like some time off occasionally.”

  “You can’t let your damned stomach get in your way. If you’re going to get ahead, you’ve got to pay the price. You’re going to need a few pills occasionally, like for your stomach, and sometimes to go to sleep. You’re going to need a drugstore just like you’re going to need a bank.”

  Andy did not learn anything from Meikelberger that surprised him, but he had not expected Meikelberger’s frankness. He drove away with a notebook full of figures, and many quotations and observations written in his private language of abbreviations, and some things in his mind that he would have trouble writing down in the language of Scientific Farming. The obstacle that now lay in his way was his realization, which Meikelberger himself had left him no room to avoid, that there was nothing, simply nothing at all, that Meikelberger allowed to stand in his way: not a neighbor or a tree or even his own body. Meikelberger’s ambition had made common cause with a technical power that proposed no limit to itself, that was, in fact, destroying Meikelberger, as it had already destroyed nearly all that was natural or human around him.