Watch With Me

by Wendell Berry

  praise for

  Watch with Me

  “Wendell Berry writes with a good husbandman’s care and economy . . . His stories are filled with gentle humor.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “[Berry is] the master of earthy country living seen through the eyes of laconic farmers. Berry makes his stories shine with meaning and warmth.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “This charming collection examines the lives of Tol and Miss Minnie on their Kentucky farm from 1908 to 1941. Despite its universal appeal, this book is distinctly Southern, rich with delightful colloquialisms and the mores and attitudes of rural folk of that time. Some stories are framed . . . underscor[ing] the fact that storytelling and the past are integral to Southern society . . . Every reader deserves the opportunity to meet Tol and Miss Minnie.”

  —Library Journal

  “These seven stories relate incidents in the life of a very good man, Ptolemy—‘Tol’—Proudfoot, towering final scion of a line of Kentucky farmers loved for their gentleness, intelligence, and gregariousness and their sense of and love for their place and work in the world . . . Their diction is as chaste as a Bible story’s; they express a biblical reverence for life and community, yet they’re funny, too, and so beautiful.”

  —Booklist

  “The local nature of their canny, comic tonalities, the old-timey subtitle, and the fact that all the action takes place before 1942 might lead browsers to take these Berry stories as merely quaint. That would be a mistake. In fact, like Isaac Bashevis Singer, Berry has been expanding by contraction, husbanding by close focus—in Berry’s case, on the familiar demesne of Port William, Ky . . . The long title story, which closes the collection, is a masterpiece . . . The tale clarifies Berry’s direction, as he moves way beyond nostalgia toward an immersion in other lives that expresses itself as a sense of intimate apartness—a willingness to follow his characters, but not necessarily to change them. Poetry nestled inside prose: startlingly and classically moving.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  other fiction by wendell berry

  A Place in Time

  Andy Catlett

  That Distant Land

  Hannah Coulter

  Jayber Crow

  A World Lost

  Fidelity

  Remembering

  The Wild Birds

  The Memory of Old Jack

  A Place on Earth

  Nathan Coulter

  Watch with Me

  Copyright © 1994 by Wendell Berry

  First Counterpoint edition: 2018

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,

  and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination

  or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events

  is unintended and entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-61902-831-9

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  is available.

  Cover designed by Nicole Caputo

  Book designed by Wah-Ming Chang

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  For Jane and Morgan Perry

  Contents

  Part I

  1. A Consent—1908

  2. A Half-Pint of Old Darling—1920

  3. The Lost Bet—1929

  4. Nearly to the Fair—1932

  5. The Solemn Boy—1934

  6. Turn Back the Bed—1941

  Part II

  7. Watch with Me—1916

  Author’s Note

  For help with these stories I am grateful to Donald Hall, Don Wallis, Jack Shoemaker, Nancy Palmer Jones, and Tanya Berry.

  All of these stories except for the title story first appeared in The Draft Horse Journal, to the editors of which I am grateful for that and for much besides. “A Consent” was published as a chapbook by my friends at Larkspur Press, Monterey, Kentucky. “The Lost Bet” was published as a chapbook entitled How Ptolemy Proudfoot Lost a Bet by Dim Gray Bar Press, New York.

  1

  a consent

  For my friends at Monterey

  (1908)

  Ptolemy Proudfoot was nothing if not a farmer. His work was farming, his study and passion were farming, his pleasures and his social life occurred in the intervals between farm jobs and in the jobs themselves. He was not an ambitious farmer—he did not propose to own a large acreage or to become rich—but merely a good and a gifted one. By the time he was twenty-five, he had managed, in spite of the hard times of the 1890s, to make a down payment on the little farm that he husbanded and improved all his life. It was a farm of ninety-eight acres, and Tol never longed even for the two more that would have made it a hundred.

  Of pleasures and social life, he had a plenty. The Proudfoots were a large, exuberant clan of large people, though by my time Tol was the last one of them in the Port William neighborhood, and Tol was childless. The Proudfoots were not, if they could help it, solitary workers. They swapped work among themselves and with their neighbors, and their workdays involved a mighty dinner at noontime, much talk and laughter, and much incidental sport.

  As an after-dinner amusement and aid to digestion, the Proudfoot big boys and young men would often outline a square or a circle on the ground, and get into it and wrestle. Everybody wrestled with everybody, for the object was to see who would be the last one in the ring. The manpower involved might better have been rated as horsepower, and great feats of strength were accomplished. Now and again great physical damage was accomplished, as when, for example, one Proudfoot would endeavor to throw another Proudfoot out of the ring through the trunk of a large tree. Sometimes, after failing to make headway through a tree trunk or barn door, a Proudfoot would lie very still on the ground for several minutes before he could get up. Sometimes, one Proudfoot or another would be unable to go back to work in the afternoon. These contests would be accompanied by much grunting, and by more laughter, as the Proudfoots were hard to anger. For a Proudfoot boy to become big enough and brave enough finally to set foot in that ring was a rite of passage. For a Proudfoot to stand alone in that ring—as Tol did finally, and then often did—was to know a kind of triumph and a kind of glory. Tol was big even for a Proudfoot, and the others could seldom take him off his feet. He tumbled them out, ass over elbows, one by one, in a manner more workmanly than violent, laughing all the time.

  Tol was overabundant in both size and strength. And perhaps because animate creatures tended to get out of his way, he paid not much attention to himself. He damaged his clothes just by being in them, as though surprising them by an assortment of stresses and strains for which they had not been adequately prepared. The people around Port William respected Tol as a farmer; they loved to tell and retell and hear and hear again the tales of his great strength; they were amused by the looks of him, by his good humor, and by his outsized fumblings and foibles. But never, for a long time, would any of them have suspected that his great bulk might embody tender feelings.

  But Tol did embody tender feelings, and very powerful tender feelings they were. F
or Tol, through many years, had maintained somewhere about the center of himself a most noble and humble and never-mentioned admiration for Miss Minnie Quinch. Miss Minnie was as small and quick as Tol was big and lumbering. Like him, she was a Port Williamite. She had taught for many years at Goforth School, grades one through eight, which served the neighborhood of Katy’s Branch and Cotman Ridge in which Tol’s farm lay. When she was hardly more than a girl, Miss Minnie had gone away to a teacher’s college and prepared herself to teach by learning many cunning methods that she never afterward used. For Miss Minnie loved children and she loved books, and she taught merely by introducing the one to the other. When she had trouble with one of the rougher big boys, she went straight to that boy’s father and required that measures be taken. And measures usually were taken, so surprisingly direct and demanding was that lady’s gaze.

  For as many years as Miss Minnie had taught at Goforth School, Tol had admired her from a distance, and without ever looking directly at her when she might have been about to look directly at him. He thought she was the finest, prettiest, nicest little woman he had ever seen. He praised her to himself by saying, “She’s just a pocket-size pretty little thing.” But he was sure that she would never want to be around a big, rough, unschooled fellow like himself.

  Miss Minnie did, from time to time, look directly at Tol, but not ever when he might have been about to look directly at her. More than once she thought rather wistfully that so large and strong a man as Tol ought to be some woman’s knight and protector. She was, in fact, somewhat concerned about him, for he was thirty-six, well past the age when men usually got married. That she herself was thirty-four and unmarried was something she also thought from time to time, but always in a different thought. She kept her concern about Tol limited very strictly to concern, for she was conscious of being a small person unable even to hope to arrest the gaze of so splendid a man.

  For years, because of mutual avoidance of each other’s direct gaze, their paths did not cross. Although they met and passed, they did not do so in a way that required more than a polite nod, which they both accomplished with a seriousness amounting almost to solemnity. And then one morning in Port William, Tol came out of Beater Chatham’s store directly face-to-face with Miss Minnie, who was coming in, and who smiled at him before she could think and said, “Well, good morning, Mr. Proudfoot!”

  Tol’s mouth opened, but nothing came out of it. Nothing at all. This was unusual, for Tol, when he felt like it, was a talkative man. He kept walking because he was already walking, but for several yards he got along without any assistance from his faculties. Sight and sense did not return to him until he had walked with some force into the tailgate of his wagon.

  All the rest of that day he went about his work in a somewhat visionary state, saying to himself, and to the surprise of his horses and his dog, “Good morning, mam!” and “How do you do, Miss Minnie?” Once he even brought himself to say, bowing slightly and removing his hat, “And a good morning to you, little lady.”

  And soon, as if they had at last come into each other’s orbit, they met face-to-face again. It was a fine fall afternoon, and Tol happened to be driving down past Goforth School, slowing his team, of course, so as not to disturb the concentration of the scholars inside. Miss Minnie was standing by the pump in front of the schoolhouse, her figure making a neat blue silhouette against the dingy weatherboarding.

  Again she smiled at him. She said, “How do you do, Mr. Proudfoot?”

  And Tol startled at the sound of her voice as if he had not seen her there at all. He could not remember one of the pleasantries he had invented to say to her. He looked intently into the sky ahead of him and said quickly as if he had received a threat, “Why, howdy!”

  The conversation thus established was a poor thing, Tol knew, so far as his own participation in it went, but it was something to go on. It gave him hope. And now I want to tell you how this courtship, conducted for so long in secret in Tol’s mind alone, became public. This is the story of Miss Minnie’s first consent, the beginning of their story together, which is one of the dear possessions of the history of Port William.

  That fall, Miss Minnie and her students had worked hard in preparation for the annual Harvest Festival at the school. The Harvest Festival was Miss Minnie’s occasion; she had thought it up herself. It might have been a Halloween party, except that Halloween in that vicinity got enough out of hand as it was without some public function to bring all the boys together in one place. And so she had thought of the Harvest Festival, which always took place two weeks before Halloween. It was a popular social event, consisting of much visiting, a display of the students’ work, recitations by the students, an auction of pies and cakes to raise money for books and supplies, and abundant refreshments provided by the mothers of the students.

  Ptolemy Proudfoot had never been to the Harvest Festival. He had no children, he told himself, and so did not belong there. But in fact he had always longed to go, had always been afraid to intrude himself without excuse into Miss Minnie’s world, and had always, as a result, spent an unhappy night at home. But this year, now that he and Miss Minnie were in a manner of becoming friends, he determined that he would go.

  Tol had got along as bachelors must. He had even become a fair cook. From the outside, his house was one of the prettiest and best kept in the neighborhood. It was a small house with steep, gingerbreaded gables, and it stood under two white oaks in the bend of the road, just before it turned down into the Katy’s Branch valley where Goforth School was. Tol kept the house painted and the yard neat, and he liked to turn in off the road and say to himself, “Well, now, I wonder who lives in such a nice place!” But what he had thought up to do to the inside of the house was not a great deal above what he had thought up to do to the inside of his barn. Like the barn, the house was clean and orderly, but when he went into it, it did not seem to be expecting him, as it did after Miss Minnie came to live there.

  On the day of the festival, Tol cut and shocked corn all day, but he thought all day of the festival, too, and he quit early. He did his chores, fixed his supper and ate it, and then, just as he had planned in great detail to do, he began to get ready. He brought his Sunday clothes to the kitchen and laid them out on a chair. He hunted up his Sunday shoes and polished them. He set a large washtub on the floor in front of the stove, dipped hot water into it from the water well at the end of the stove, cooled the hot water with water from the water bucket on the shelf by the door, put soap and washrag and towel on the floor beside the tub. And then he undressed and sat in the tub with his feet outside it on the floor, and scrubbed himself thoroughly from top to toe. He dried himself and put on his pants. Gazing into the mirror over the little wash table by the back door, he shaved so carefully that he cut himself in several places. He put on his shirt, and after several tries buttoned the collar. He put on his tie, tying a knot in it that would have broken the neck of a lesser man and that left even him so nearly strangled that he supposed he must look extremely handsome. He wet his hair and combed it so that when it dried it stuck up stiffly in the air as Proudfoot hair was inclined to do. He put on his suspenders, his gleaming shoes, and his Sunday hat. And then he sat in a chair and sweated and rubbed his hands together until it was time to hitch old Ike to the buggy and drive down to the school.

  Before he got to the schoolhouse, he could hear voices, an uninterrupted babble like the sound of Katy’s Branch in the spring, and then he could see a glow. When he got to the bottom of the hill and saw, among the trunks of the big walnuts and water maples and sycamores that stood there, the schoolhouse windows gleaming and the school yard strung with paper lanterns, lighting the bare-worn ground and throwing the shadows of the trees out in all directions like the spokes of a wheel, he said, “Whoa, Ike.” The light around the old schoolhouse and within it seemed to him a radiance that emanated from the person of Miss Minnie herself. And Tol’s big heart quaked within him. He h
ad to sit there in the road behind his stopped horse and think a good while before he could decide not to go on by, pretending to have an errand elsewhere.

  Now that he had stopped, it became quiet where he was; he could hear the crickets singing, and he was aware of Willow Hole on Katy’s Branch, in the enclosure of trees beyond the school, carrying on its accustomed business in the dark. As he sat and thought—thought hard about nothing that he could fix in a thought—Tol slid his fingers up beneath his hat from time to time and scratched, and then jerked the hat down firmly onto his head again, and each time he did this he rotated the front of his hat a little further toward his right ear. Presently the sound of another buggy coming down the hill behind him recalled him to himself; he clucked to Ike and drove on, and found a hitching place among the other buggies and the wagons and the saddled horses at the edge of the school yard.

  There was a perimeter of voices out on the very edge of the light, where the boys had started a game of tag, unwilling to come nearer the schoolhouse than they had to. Near the building the men were gathered in groups, smoking or chewing, talking, as they always talked, of crops, livestock, weather, work, prices, hunting, and fishing, in that year and the years before.

  Tol, usually a sociable man, had nothing to say. He did not dare to say anything. He went past the men, merely nodding in response to their greetings, and since he did not want to talk and so could not stop, and was headed in that direction, he went on into the schoolhouse, and immediately he realized his mistake. For there were only women and girls in there, and not a single man. Beyond the boys’ voices out on the edge of the dark and the men’s voices in the school yard was this bright, warm nucleus of women’s voices, and of women themselves and of women’s eyes turned to see who had burst through the door with so much force.

  Many a one of those women remembered the way Tol looked when he came in that night. After all his waiting and anxiety, his clothes were damp and wrinkled, his shirttail was out, there was horse manure on one of his shoes. His hat sat athwart his head as though left there by somebody else. When, recognizing the multiflorous female presence he was in, he snatched his hat off, his hair stuck up and out and every which way. He came in wide-eyed, purposeful, and alarmed. He looked as if only his suspenders were holding him back—as if, had it not been for that restraint upon his shoulders, he might have charged straight across the room and out through the back wall.