Watch With Me

by Wendell Berry

  Aunt Belle was still running, too. She was light on her feet for a big woman, and when Lester dodged she turned back quick as a turkey hen. The pack of boys was in the way, so Lester couldn’t run on past the porch steps; without intending to, they headed him, and Aunt Belle and Uncle O.R. drove him up onto the porch and through the front door. The women had all come out of the kitchen into the hall, and Uncle George Washington and Uncle Will were starting out of the living room. Lester took the only open route—up the stairs.

  Aunt Belle had cut in ahead of Uncle O.R., and she started up, too. She had her skirts bundled in front of her like a load of laundry, and she was going as fast as Lester.

  He got to the top of the stairs and ran into the room over the living room, flinging the door behind him. But Aunt Belle was right there and caught it before it slammed. When Aunt Belle and Uncle O.R. and the rest of the boys went into the room there was nobody in sight, but they could hear the sound of breathing under the bed. And through the cracks between the floorboards they could hear Uncle Fowler snoring by the fire down in the living room.

  Aunt Belle got down on her hands and knees and looked under.

  “Uh huh!” she said. “Young mister, I been a-laying for you.”

  She crawled partway under, caught Lester by the foot, and dragged him out spread-eagled, turning over a chamber pot that had been left unemptied under the edge of the bed.

  The boys got downstairs again in time to see the golden shower spend its last drops upon the head and shoulders of Old Ant’ny, who sat unmoving as before, looking straight ahead, as though he had foreseen it all years ago and was resigned.

  “Lor-dee!” Uncle O.R. said.

  It was getting dark now. There was a lamp burning in the room, and you could no longer see out the windows. There was a moment that seemed to be the moment before anything else could happen.

  And then Old Ant’ny’s hat brim jerked upward just a fraction of an inch. “Maw, turn back the bed. These folks want to be gettin’ on home.”

  Little snorts of laughter had been leaking out of Tol for some time, and now he let himself laugh. It was a good laugh, broad and free and loud, including all of us as generously as the shade we sat in, and not only those of us who were living, but Old Ant’ny and Maw Proudfoot and Uncle O.R. and Uncle Fowler and Aunt Belle and Lester and the rest whose bodies lay in their darkness nearby.

  And I will never forget the ones who were still alive that day and how they looked: old Tol with his hands at rest in his lap, laughing until tears ran down his face, and the others around him laughing with him. It was Tol’s benediction, as I grew to know, on that expectancy of good and surprising things that had kept Lester’s eyes, and Tol’s, too, wide open for so long.

  And years later my grandmother would tell me that down among the women, hearing Tol laugh, Miss Minnie had smiled the prim, matronly smile with which she delighted in him. “Mr. Proudfoot,” she said. “Mr. Proudfoot is amused.”

  7

  watch with me

  (1916)

  One of the vital organs of Ptolemy Proudfoot’s farm was a small square building called simply “the shop.” Here Tol worked, according to necessity, as a blacksmith, farrier, carpenter, and mender of harness and shoes. The shop contained a forge with a cranking bellows and an anvil resting on an oak block. A workbench, with a stout vise attached, ran along one wall under three small windows. Tools and spare parts and usable scraps lay on the bench or stood propped in corners or hung from nails. On good days when they could be left open, large double doors at the front end admitted a fine flow of light.

  On days when the weather prevented work outdoors, Tol would go to the shop and putter, or he would go there and sit and think. But he puttered and thought to advantage, for he earned more than he spent and sold more than he bought. He would be in the shop in the fall and winter more than in the spring and summer. In the spring and summer it was a good place to set a hen, and a couple of boxes for that purpose were fastened to the wall at the end of the workbench nearest the front doors.

  Tol and his wife, Miss Minnie, and their neighbors killed hogs as soon as the nights became dependably cold in the fall. They wintered on backbone and spareribs and sausage and souse, with a shoulder or ham now and then. By spring they would begin to be a little tired of pork; fried chicken began to be easy to imagine. That was when Miss Minnie would begin to save eggs and watch for her hens to start setting. She liked to put several hens on eggs, in the henhouse and in the shop, just as soon as the weather began to warm up.

  On the morning when this story begins, the chickens of that year were nearly all hatched. There was only one red hen still hovering sixteen eggs in one of the boxes in the shop. It was a fine morning early in August, dewy and bright; the Katy’s Branch valley was still covered with a shining cloud of fog. It was 1916 and a new kind of world was in the making on the battlefields of France, but you could not have told it, standing on Cotman Ridge with that dazzling cloud lying over Goforth in the valley, and the woods and the ridgetops looking as clear and clean as Resurrection Morning. Birds were singing. And Tol could hear roosters crowing, it seemed to him, all the way to Port William.

  He had just stepped out after breakfast. It was later than usual, because the day had begun crosswise. When he had called his milk cows, they had not come. He had walked in the weak dawn-light down into the woods along the branch, where he found a water gap torn out by a recent freshet. From there he tracked the three cows down the wooded slopes halfway to Goforth before he found them and started them home. He drove them through the rent in the fence, wired it back with his hands well enough to hold until he could return with proper tools and more wire, and went on up the hill to chain them in their places in the barn.

  And then when he was milking the third cow—a light-colored Jersey by the name of Blanche of whom he was particularly fond—she solemnly raised her right hind foot, plastered with manure, and set it down again in the half-filled bucket of milk.

  Though he was a large, physically exuberant man who had been a wrestler famous all the way to Hargrave in his younger days, Tol was not a man of violence. But once he got Blanche’s foot out of the bucket, he had to sit there on his stool a good while before he could rid himself of the thought of joyful revenge. On the one hand, he sympathized with the cow. He thought he knew how she felt. It would be exasperating, after finding a hole in the fence and escaping into the wide world, to be driven home again, chained to a stanchion, and required to yield one’s milk into a bucket. On the other hand, Tol’s sense of justice was outraged. He had raised the cow lovingly from a calf; he had sheltered and fed and doctored her; he had loved and petted and pampered her—and now just look how she had treated him! He leaned his head back into her flank and began to milk again.

  “Blanche,” he said, “I ought to knock you in the head.” He milked on in silence, his anger ebbing away. “But I don’t reckon I will.”

  He stripped her dry, poured the bucket of ruined milk into the hog trough, turned the cows back into the pasture, and went to the house for breakfast, carrying one empty milk bucket and one full one.

  “Did you have trouble with the cows?” Miss Minnie asked. She set Tol’s breakfast before him and started straining the milk.

  Tol told her.

  “Why, the old hussy!” Miss Minnie said. “I’ll bet you wanted to knock her in the head. Did you?”

  “Not this time,” Tol said. And that made him laugh, for he thought he was at the end of the story, but he was not at the end of it yet.

  The day had begun so contrarily that when Tol went by the shop to see about the setting hen on his way to the barn, he was not much surprised to hear her squawking in extreme dismay before he opened the door. When he opened the door he saw what the fuss was about. A big snake had climbed the locust tree next to the shop, crawled out along a limb and under the eave of the building, and was now descending al
ong a crossbrace toward the hen’s nest. The snake was the kind known as a cowsucker, and it was big enough to swallow every egg in the nest. Tol was not particularly afraid of snakes, though he preferred not to walk up on one by surprise, nor did he hate them. He rather liked to have them around to catch mice, and now and then he would capture one to put in his corncrib. All the same, he did not welcome them into his hens’ nests.

  “You got to change your mind, boy,” he said to the snake, who was now looking at him with its head erect, flickering its tongue. “You going to have to take your business elsewhere.”

  Tol thought at first that he would just catch the snake by the end of the tail and buy its goodwill by letting it catch mice a while in the corncrib. But a cow-sucker is a grouchy kind of snake, much inclined to stand on its rights, and when Tol reached out for its tail, the snake contracted into loops and threatened to bite Tol’s hand. There is no danger of being poisoned by a cow-sucker’s bite, but when one threatens to bite you, you are very much inclined to draw back in a hurry whatever you have stuck out, and you are inclined to take the gesture as an insult.

  Tol was a man slow to anger, but when the snake made as if to strike his hand, his mental state reverted to the moment, by no means long enough ago, when the cow had put her foot in the bucket.

  “Well,” he said to the snake, “if you don’t need killing, then Hell ain’t hot.”

  Tol was thoroughly mad by then, and also anxious for the hen and her nest of eggs. On her account, he wanted to get rid of the snake with the least possible commotion and in the biggest possible hurry.

  So he ran back to the house and put a shell into the chamber of the old ten-gauge shotgun that he had inherited from his father. It was a hard-shooting, single-barreled weapon that Tol’s father had called Old Fetcher, “for it was a sure way to send for fresh meat.”

  When he got back to the shop, Tol flung the door open for light, stood back so as to minimize disturbance to the hen, leveled the long, rusty barrel point-blank at the snake’s head, and fired—only to see the snake, with maddening dignity and aplomb, slowly depart by way of the hole that Old Fetcher had blasted through the wall.

  Tol fully appreciated how funny that was, but he had no trouble in postponing his laughter. The hen, for one thing, was off the nest now and raising Cain, as if Tol and not the snake were the chief threat to her peace of mind.

  “Get back on that nest and shut up,” Tol said.

  He picked up a stick and ran around to the side of the building, but the snake, after the manner of its kind, was nowhere to be seen. And so Tol patched the hole he had made in the wall, and chinked up the place under the eave where he thought the snake had come in. He shooed the offended hen back into the shop and shut the door.

  “Be quiet, now,” he said. “You’re going to live.”

  He went back to the house, got another shell for the gun, reloaded it, and propped it against the shop door. If that snake showed itself again, it was going to become an ex-criminal in a hurry.

  Tol went to the garden then, unhooked his hoe from the fence, sharpened it, and began cleaning out a row of late cabbages.

  Steady work quiets the mind. Tol began to feel that he had got the day off to a straight start at last. He had nearly finished the cabbage row when he saw Sam Hanks’s truck come in and stop in front of the barn.

  Sam got out and came strolling into the garden. He wanted to borrow Tol’s posthole-digging tools so he could set a clothesline post for his mother.

  Sam was Miss Minnie’s favorite nephew, the only son of her only sister and Warren Hanks, a hardworking but somehow luckless tenant farmer. Sam had not followed in his father’s footsteps. “He loves a damned wheel,” his father had said, and Sam earned a modest living for himself and his now-widowed mother by hauling livestock and other things in his truck. He owned plenty of mechanic’s tools, but when he needed something to dig with, he came to Tol.

  For that matter, Sam was apt to show up at Tol’s and Miss Minnie’s pretty often, even when he didn’t want to borrow something. He returned his aunt’s affection, and he liked Tol. Moreover, he enjoyed Tol. When Sam came walking into the garden that morning, Tol looked completely in character. He stood amid the rows of his garden, which he kept with an almost perfect attention to detail. And in the midst of that neatness and order, Tol could have been a scarecrow, albeit an unusually big one. He wore an utterly shapeless old straw hat. And he had now been long enough beyond the reach and influence of Miss Minnie that part of his shirttail was out, one of his cuffs was unbuttoned, and his left shoe was untied. Tol’s clothes always looked as if they were making a strenuous and perhaps hopeless effort just to stay somewhere in his vicinity.

  “Well,” Sam Hanks said to him, “looks like I been elected to put up a clothesline. Don’t reckon I could borrow your diggers and all.”

  “Why, sure,” Tol said. “They’re yonder in the shop. Watch, now, when you go in and don’t get snakebit.”

  Tol then told Sam what had happened. But he just said he had let the snake get away from him; he didn’t tell about shooting the hole in the wall. He wanted to save that for when he could laugh about it. He was a man who had been mistreated by a cow and a snake all in the same morning, and he felt sore and aggrieved.

  But while he was still commenting to Sam on the cowsucker’s extreme ill humor, he saw his neighbor, Thacker Hample, coming over the ridge, and then another trouble returned to his mind.

  Thacker Hample belonged to a large family locally noted for the fact that from one generation to another not a one of them had worked quite right. Their commonest flaw was poor vision. When he could find them or somebody found them for him, Thacker wore glasses with lenses as thick as shoe soles. Walter Cotman said that if Nightlife’s nose had been a quarter of an inch longer, he would have been illiterate—but that was Walter Cotman. They called Thacker Nightlife on the theory that he could not tell daylight from dark, and therefore was liable to conduct his nightlife in the daytime. The name had a certain sexual glamour that appealed to Thacker Hample himself. When he had occasion to call himself by name, he usually called himself Nightlife—though he didn’t ordinarily say much of anything to anybody.

  But Nightlife was incomplete, too, in some other way. There were times when spells came on him, when he would be sad and angry and confused and maybe dangerous, and nobody could help him. And sometimes he would have to be sent away to the asylum where, Uncle Otha Dagget said, they would file him down and reset his teeth.

  When he was quiet, he was quieter than anybody, and Nightlife had been quiet for a long time. But then the week came for the annual revival at Goforth Church, and unbeknownst to anybody but himself Nightlife decided that on the third night he himself would be the preacher, and he spent most of the preceding night getting ready. He made up a sermon and a prayer or two, and picked out some appropriate hymns. And on the night before Tol’s trouble with the cow and the snake, Nightlife presented himself to the regular preacher and the visiting preacher and told them that he was going to preach the evening’s sermon. In his sermon, as Tol and the others would understand later, Nightlife wanted to tell what it was like to be himself. That was what he knew, and what he had to say. It had to come out because at that time anyhow, it was all he had in him.

  It would have been better if the two preachers had just said all right. But they, who well knew that they knew neither the day nor the hour of the coming of the Son of man, were in fact not prepared for anything unscheduled. They told Nightlife that the evening’s service would have to proceed as planned. And that was when Nightlife’s time of quietness came to an end and, as the eyewitnesses all agreed, he throwed a reg’lar fit.

  He flung his Bible down at the feet of the horrified young preachers. He threw his arms wide apart, laughed a loud contemptuous laugh, and asked them whose church they thought it was. They thought it was their church, he said, but he reckoned they j
ust might be a little bit mistaken: it was Jesus’s church. And when Jesus came back, He would fork the likes of them into Hell as quick as look at them, and he, Nightlife, would at that time enjoy hearing them sing a different tune. He laughed again and bestowed upon them several epithets not normally used in church.

  And so that evening’s service did not, after all, proceed as planned. By a sort of general and unspoken deference, Tol Proudfoot, who was certainly the biggest of them and was probably the kindest, was elected to deal with Nightlife Hample. While the others stood around and listened and then, tiring, began to drift away, Tol talked to Nightlife, whose anger had begun to subside into confusions of sorrow, regret, and self-pity. No clever persuasion was involved. With his big hand resting on Nightlife’s shoulder or his knee, Tol told him that everybody liked him and didn’t hold anything against him and thought he was a good fellow and wanted him to go home now and get a good night’s sleep. Tol told him all that over and over again, and finally Nightlife allowed his old mother to lead him home.

  But nobody, least of all Tol, thought it would end there. Tol figured that having dealt with Nightlife once, he would have to deal with him again. And so when he saw Nightlife flinging himself over the ridgetop and down toward the barn, he wasn’t surprised, though he certainly was sorry.

  “Trouble comes in bunches,” he said to Sam.

  From where Nightlife came over the ridge, he could look right into Tol’s garden, and he had on his glasses. That he saw Tol and Sam was obvious enough to them; he even seemed to have the idea of coming directly to where they were. But then when he crossed the road and entered Tol’s driveway, Nightlife appeared to lose his intention; perhaps he had wanted to talk with Tol alone, and Sam’s presence put him off. He wandered past the house into the barn lot. Now he was pretending, perhaps, that he did not know they were there and that he was just looking around to see if Tol was at home.

  “You looking for me?” Tol called. “Here I am.”