A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership

by Wendell Berry

  It was a day, one of several, I’m glad I won’t have to live again. Tom was too much a boy yet to get in front where he wanted to be but too much a man to stay and be licked. He had to get out from under his daddy’s feet and onto his own. And so he bundled his clothes and went away. Afterwards, because the old ones were so grieved, me too, Nathan too, the house was like a house where somebody had died.

  Because he didn’t need much and asked little, Tom found a place right away with an old couple by the name of Whitlow over on the other side of the county, far enough away to be separate from us. I knew he would do all right, and he did. He knew how to work; and the use of his head, that was already coming to him, came fast once he got out on his own. He began to make a name for himself: a good boy, a good hand.

  When we had found out where he was, Nathan and I would catch a ride on a rainy day or a Sunday and go over to see him, or we’d see him occasionally in town. After he got his feet under him and was feeling sure of himself, he would come over on a Sunday afternoon now and again to see his grandma and grandpa. In all our minds, he had come into a life of his own that wasn’t any longer part of ours. To the old ones, who had given up their ownership of him by then and their right to expect things from him, every one of those visits was a lovely gift, and they made over him and honored him as a guest.

  He stayed at the Whitlows’ through the crop year of 1940. Mr. Whitlow died that summer. After the place was sold and Mrs. Whitlow settled in town, Tom struck a deal with Ernest Russet from up about Sycamore. Ernest and Naomi Russet were good people, we had known them a long time, and they had a good farm. Going there was a step up in the world for Tom. He soon found favor with the Russets, which not everybody could have done, and before long, having no children of their own, they’d made practically a son of him.

  After Tom had been with them a while, the Russets invited us to come for Sunday dinner. Jarrat wouldn’t go, of course, but Nathan and I did. The Russets’ preacher, Brother Milby, and his wife were there too, a spunky couple. I took a great liking to Mrs. Milby. It was a good dinner and we had a good time. Ernest Russet was the right man for Tom, no mistake about that. He was a fine farmer. The right young man could learn plenty from him.

  By the time he went to the Russets, Tom was probably as near to the right young man as the country had in it. He had got his growth and filled out, and confidence had come into his eyes. He was a joy to look at.

  One Sunday afternoon after the weather was warm and the spring work well started, he paid us a visit. Grandpa had died the summer before, so now it was just Grandma and Nathan and me still at home, and it was a sadder place. But we were glad to see Tom and to be together; we sat out on the porch and talked a long time.

  Tom got up finally as if to start his hitchhike back to the Russets’, and so I wasn’t quite ready when he said he thought he’d go over to see his dad.

  That fell into me with sort of a jolt. I hadn’t been invited, but I said, “Well, I’ll go with you.”

  So we went. We crossed the hollow, and clattered up onto the back porch, and Tom knocked on the kitchen door. Jarrat must have been in the kitchen, for it wasn’t but seconds until there he was, his left hand still on the door knob and a surprised look on his face. Myself, I wasn’t surprised yet, but I was expecting to be. I could feel my hair trying to rise up under my hat. I took a glance at Tom’s face, and he was grinning at Jarrat. My hair relaxed and laid down peacefully again when Tom stuck out his hand. It was a big hand he stuck out, bigger than mine, bigger than Jarrat’s. Jarrat looked down at that hand like it was an unusual thing to see on the end of a man’s arm. He looked up at Tom again and grinned back. And then he reached out and took Tom’s hand and shook it.

  So they made it all right. And so when the war broke out and Tom was called to the army and had to go, he could come and say freely a proper good-bye to his dad.

  It wasn’t long after Tom got drafted until Nathan turned eighteen, and damned if he didn’t go volunteer. I was surprised, but I ought not to’ve been. Nathan probably could have got deferred, since his brother was already gone and farmers were needed at home, and I reckon I was counting on that. But he had reasons to go, too, that were plain enough.

  Nathan and Jarrat never came to an actual fight. Nathan, I think, had Tom’s example in mind, and he didn’t want to follow it. He was quieter turned than Tom, less apt to give offense. But Jarrat was hard for his boys to get along with. He just naturally took up too much of the room they needed to grow in. He was the man in the lead, the man going away while everybody else was still coming. His way was the right way, which in fact it pret’ near always was, but he didn’t have the patience of a henhawk.

  “Let’s go!” he’d say. If you were at it with him and you hesitated a minute: “Let’s go! Let’s go!”

  When we were young and he would say that, I’d say back to him,

  “Les Go’s dead and his wife’s a widder.

  You be right good and you might get her.”

  But nobody was going to say that back to him anymore, not me, much less Nathan.

  After Jarrat’s fight with Tom, I would now and again try to put in a word for Nathan. “Why don’t you let him alone? Give him a little head room. Give him time to be ready.”

  And Jarrat would say, “Be ready, hell! Let him be started.”

  It didn’t take much of that, I knew, to be a plenty. When Nathan came back from the war his own man, Jarrat did get out of his way, and they could work together, but for the time being Nathan needed to be gone. Of course he got a bellyful of bossing in the army, but it at least didn’t come from his dad. He also had a brotherly feeling that he ought to go where Tom had gone. Grandma was dead by then. There was nothing holding him. So I reckon he went because he thought he had to, but I didn’t want him to. For one thing, it would leave us short-handed. For another, I would miss him. For another, I was afraid.

  As it turned out, Nathan never saw Tom again. They kept Nathan on this side till nearly the end of the war, but they gave Tom some training and taught him to drive a bulldozer and shipped him straight on across the waters into the fight. He was killed the next year. I know a few little details of how it happened, but they don’t matter.

  It came about, anyhow, that in just a couple of years the old house was emptied of everybody but me. It took me a while to get used to being there by myself. When I would go in to fix my dinner or at night, there wouldn’t be a sound. I could hear the quiet. And however quiet I tried to be, it seemed to me I rattled. I didn’t like the quiet, for it made me sad, and so did the little noises I made in it. For a while I couldn’t hardly bring myself to trap the mice, I so needed to have something stirring there besides me. All my life I’ve hunted and fished alone, even worked alone. I never minded being by myself outdoors. But to be alone in the house, a place you might say is used to talk and the sounds of somebody stirring about in it all day, that was lonesome. As I reckon Jarrat must have found out a long time ago and, like himself, just left himself alone to get used to it. I’ve been, all in all, a lucky man, for the time would be again when the old house would be full of people, but that was long a-coming. For a while there it was just Jarrat and me living alone together, he in his house on one side of the hollow, me in mine on the other. I could see his house from my house, and he could see mine from his. But we didn’t meet in either house, his or mine. We met in a barn or a field, wherever the day’s work was going to start. When quitting time came we went our ways separately home. Of course by living apart we were keeping two houses more or less alive, and maybe there was some good in that.

  The difference between us was that I wasn’t at home all the time. When the work would let up, or on Saturday evenings and Sundays, for I just flat refused to work late on Saturday or much at all on Sunday, I’d be off to what passed with me for social life or to the woods or the river. But Jarrat was at home every day. Every day. He never went as far as Port William except to buy something he needed.

 
; If you work about every day with somebody you’ve worked with all your life, you’d be surprised how little you need to talk. Oh, we swapped work with various ones—Big Ellis, the Rowanberrys, and others—and that made for some sociable times along, and there would be good talk then. But when it was just Jarrat and me, we would sometimes work without talking a whole day, or maybe two together. And so when he got the government’s letter about Tom, he didn’t say but two words. We were working here at my place. After dinner, when he walked into the barn, carrying the letter in his hand, he said, “Sit down.”

  I sat down. He handed me the letter, and it felt heavy in my hands as a stone. After I read it—“killed in action”—and handed it back, the whole damned English language just flew away in the air like a flock of blackbirds.

  For a long time neither one of us moved. The daily sounds of the world went on, sparrows in the barn lot, somebody’s bull way off, the wind in the eaves, but around us was this awful, awful silence that didn’t have one word in it.

  I looked at Jarrat finally. He was standing there blind as a statue. He had Tom’s life all inside him now, as once it had been all inside Lettie. Now it was complete. Now it was finished.

  And then, for the first and last time I said it to him, I said, “Let’s go.” The day’s work was only half finished. Having nothing else we could do, we finished it.

  * * *

  What gets you is the knowledge, and it sometimes can fall on you in a clap, that the dead are gone absolutely from this world. As has been said around here over and over again, you are not going to see them here anymore, ever. Whatever was done or said before is done or said for good. Any questions you think of that you ought to’ve asked while you had a chance are never going to be answered. The dead know, and you don’t.

  And yet their absence puts them with you in a way they never were before. You even maybe know them better than you did before. They stay with you, and in a way you go with them. They don’t live on in your heart, but your heart knows them. As your heart gets bigger on the inside, the world gets bigger on the outside. If the dead had been alive only in this world, you would forget them, looks like, as soon as they die. But you remember them, because they always were living in the other, bigger world while they lived in this little one, and this one and the other one are the same. You can’t see this with your eyes looking straight ahead. It’s with your side vision, so to speak, that you see it. The longer I live, and the better acquainted I am among the dead, the better I see it. I am telling what I know.

  It’s our separatedness and our grief that break the world in two. Back when Tom got killed and the word came, I had never thought of such things. That time would have been hard enough, even if I had thought of them. Because I hadn’t, it was harder.

  That night after supper I lit the lantern and walked over to Jarrat’s and sat with him in the kitchen until bedtime. I wasn’t invited. I was a volunteer, I reckon, like Nathan. If it had been just me and I needed company, which I did, I could have walked to town and sat with the talkers in the pool room or the barber shop. But except that I would go to sit with him, Jarrat would have sat there in his sorrow entirely by himself and stared at the wall or the floor. I anyhow denied him that.

  I went back every night for a long time. There was nothing else to do. There wasn’t a body to be spoken over and buried to bring people together, and to give Tom’s life a proper conclusion in Port William. His body was never going to be in Port William again. It was buried in some passed-over battlefield in Italy, somewhere none of us had ever been and would never go. The word was passed around, of course. People were sorry, and they told us. The neighbor women brought food, as they do. But mainly there was just the grieving, and mainly nobody here to do it but Jarrat and me.

  There was a woman lived here, just out the road, a good many years ago. She married a man quite a bit older—well, he was an old man, you just as well say—and things went along and they had a little boy. In four or five years the old man died. After that, you can imagine, the little boy was all in all to his mother. He was her little man of the house, as she called him, and in fact he was the world to her. And then, when he wasn’t but nine or ten years old, the boy took awfully sick one winter, and he died, and we buried him out there on the hill at Port William beside his old daddy.

  We knew that the woman was grieved to death, as we say, and everybody did for her as they could. What we didn’t know was that she really was grieving herself to death. It’s maybe a little hard to believe that people can die of grief, but they do.

  After she died, the place had to be sold. I went out there with Big Ellis and several others to set the place to rights and get the tools and the household stuff set out for the auction. When we got to the room that had been the little boy’s, it was like opening a grave. It had been kept just the way it was when he died, except she had gathered up and put there everything she’d found that reminded her of him: all his play pretties, every broom handle he rode for a stick horse, every rock or feather or string she knew he had played with. I still remember the dread we felt just going into that room, let alone moving the things, or throwing them away. Some of them we had to throw away.

  I understood her then. I understood her better after Tom was dead. When a young man your heart knows and loves is all of a sudden gone, never to come back, the whole place reminds you of him everywhere you look. You dread to touch anything for fear of changing it. You fear the time you know is bound to come, when the look of the place will be changed entirely, and if the dead came back they would hardly know it, or not recognize it at all.

  Even so, this place is not a keepsake just to look at and remember. You can’t stop just because you’re carrying a load of grief and would like to stop, or don’t care if you go on or not. Jarrat nor I either didn’t stop. This world was still asking things of us that we had to give.

  It was maybe the animals most of all that kept us going, the good animals we depended on, that depended on us: our work mules, the cattle, the sheep, the hogs, even the chickens. They were a help to us because they didn’t know our grief but just quietly lived on, suffering what they suffered, enjoying what they enjoyed, day by day. We took care of them, we did what had to be done, we went on.

  Not a Tear (1945)

  Dick Watson was my grandfather Catlett’s farm hand, and he was my friend. When he died, I did not go to his funeral. I was in school. It occurred to nobody that I should have gone, but I should have. I wish I had.

  My father and Grandpa Catlett did go to the funeral and so I know about it. Maybe other white people were there too, about that I don’t know. But it is important to know that at least two were there. This would have been the fall of 1945, and so everybody there belonged to the old division of the races we came to call “segregation.” They had been born in it, had lived in it, partly at least had been made as they were by it. And yet that formal and legal division, applied after all to people who were neighbors, made within itself exceptions to itself. And so they came together, the white with the black, in duty to Dick Watson, at one in loss and in sorrow.

  “Well, sir, it was perfect, Andy. It was just right,” my father said to comfort me, for he knew I was grieving. “That preacher was splendid.”

  From time to time he recited parts of the sermon to me as he remembered it, for he could not forget, and I have not forgot. I will try to line it out as the preacher sounded it. “It was not a speech,” my father said. “It was a song.”

  Standing above the open coffin in which Dick’s body lay in his Sunday clothes in its stillness and Aunt Sarah Jane who sat in the black dress of her sorrow nearby, the preacher gestured broadly with his opened hands, all the while looking at the people, as if to see if they knew already what he was going to say. He said:

  This ain’t him.

  He ain’t here.

  This ain’t no more our brother,

  our beloved. For he

  ain’t here. Where he is

  all is well
.

  All is well with Dick Watson.

  All is well.

  He has come to a door

  to a mansion

  didn’t have to knock

  to get in. He had heard

  that voice.

  He has heard, O Lord,

  thy voice.

  “Brother Watson, come in.

  Well done.

  Well done, thou good

  and faithful servant.

  Well done. Enter

  into the joy of thy Lord.”

  “Something like that,” my father said. “For one man can’t do it by himself. He has got to have help. He has got to have inspiration, and help too from the other people.”

  The sermon took a while. The people took up the preacher’s phrases and sang them back to him. They called out to him to encourage him:

  “Amen!”

  “Yes!”

  “Amen!”

  They shouted to him to go ahead, to preach it, for he had it right.

  At first some of the people were crying, and Grandpa cried with them. And then, as the voice of the preacher called them, a sense of triumph grew among them, and the tone shifted. Heaven and earth drew together. The preacher said:

  Blessèd!

  Blessèd are the poor

  in spirit, for theirs

  is the kingdom of heaven.

  Blessèd!

  Blessèd are they that mourn,

  for they shall be comforted.

  Children,

  don’t cry no more.

  Sister Sarah Jane,

  don’t cry no more.

  Our brother,

  where he is,

  he don’t hear no crying.

  For his burden is lifted.

  For freedom

  has come to him

  and rest.

  For where he is

  ain’t no crying there.

  Not a sigh.

  Not a tear.

  The preacher stood then with his hands again opened. A beautiful voice sang back from among the people: “Nooo, not a tear.” The other agreeing voices quieted and fell away. While the preacher regarded the people with his hands still lifted, my father said, an immense quiet came upon them, and the freedom of Dick Watson in that moment was present to them all.