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

by Wendell Berry

  When he has eaten all the biscuits and again pumped himself a drink, he goes into the barn, taking great care with the lantern. It is a feed barn, an old one well kept up, with a hayloft, a small corn crib, four horse stalls, and a large pen for feeding cattle. The cattle have been sold, or moved nearer home where maybe, so far into the winter, there is more hay. Everywhere are the signs and traces of a good farmer, somebody who knows what he is doing and likes doing it.

  Along one wall of the cattle pen there is a manger with two-by-four stanchions. It still has hay in it, fairly fresh, still fragrant. The dogs, knowing Burley, lie down under the manger and curl up. Burley extinguishes the lantern. He stands to let the dark complete itself, and then, feeling his way, he climbs between two stanchions into the manger. Before he has completed the deep nest he has in his mind, he is already sleeping.

  A New Day (1949)

  For Mary and Stan Flitner

  Elton Penn thought Sunday was a good idea, not that he was apt to be found in church. Like many farmers, he knew he lived in the presence of mystery and of wonders, and he responded with his version of reverence, but he was not a churchman. He liked the idea of Sunday because six days of work, the way he went at it, were about enough for anybody. He was glad of a good excuse to rest on the seventh day. There were Sundays when, as they said around Port William, “the ox was in the ditch,” and Elton would have to work, but that could put thirteen hard days in a row. It pleased him to be able to stop on Sunday. “Six days ought to be enough,” I often heard him say, “and they are enough.”

  His problem was that he couldn’t rest at home. When he tried to sit and be still—or, worse, attempted just to wander around—at home, pretty soon he would see some job that needed to be done, and first thing he knew he would be doing it. Elton had a weakness, you might say, for work. Unlike some people born and brought up to the work of farming, Elton loved it. When he saw work that needed doing, he wanted to be the one who did it. With him there was never much time between thinking of it and starting in to do it.

  To rest he needed to go someplace else. There were various places he would go. Sometimes he would even go to Port William to sit with the loafers, and that way he learned many things of interest. But loafing in town, maybe because some of the loafers loafed faithfully every day, would begin to seem to him less restful than merely idle, and he would become dissatisfied. The resting place that most suited him was Arthur and Martin Rowanberry’s place down at the lower end of the Sand Ripple valley below Port William.

  Not so long after the war had ended and Art had made it home, both of the elder Rowanberrys had died. In the early spring of 1946, Mr. Early Rowanberry died in the night, having worked all day the day before. A little more than a year later, Miss Stella, to whom nothing had seemed quite right after Mr. Early’s departure, followed him out of this world. With the parents gone, Art and Mart had stayed on in the old house, sharing the housework and batching it out together tolerably well.

  And now it was 1949, and the bachelors’ household down at the Rowanberry place had become an established thing, taken for granted in Port William. Mart, the younger brother by five years, enjoyed going places, and he had a longtime girlfriend, Oma Settle from down by Hargrave, but nobody expected him to get married.

  His brother was in some ways his opposite. Art Rowanberry was born in 1905. He had been an old soldier, an “old man” among the boys with whom he had fought the war. When he had at last got out of Bastogne, his travels, as far as he was concerned, were over. He traveled on, under orders, to the wound that took him out of the war and nearly out of the world. When he was strong enough again, he traveled home. And that pretty much was that. He had seen by then as much of the world as he wanted to see, except for the stretch of country between Bird’s Branch and Katy’s Branch, and from Port William and Goforth to the river, which was home to him far more than the great nation he had fought for. After he came back from the war and the government was finished with him except for taxes, he would go to Port William or Hargrave if he had to, but for pleasure he stayed home.

  What the two brothers had in common was the boundary of land—arable ridges and creek bottom, wooded slopes and hollows—that Columbus Festus Rowanberry, their grandfather’s grandfather, had received for his service in the War of Independence. They had the place, and the ways of it, that they were born to. They had the farming of it, which they thought of as work. And they had the free hunting and gathering from it and the fishing from the river, about as strenuous as work but which they thought of as rest.

  They were good men, the Rowanberrys, work-hardened from earliest boyhood, good at their work, and well-furnished with knowledge of their place and neighborhood. Like Elton, they honored Sundays by their rest, which included various pleasures. Their rest had about it always the sense of having been earned, and so it was in their rest that Elton too could rest. With them he loved to sit and talk, inside by the stove in cold weather, out on the porch overlooking the creek valley if the weather was fine, allowing the time to go by without wishing it would go faster or slower, or even thinking of it.

  On many a Sunday morning, I sat with the three of them and sometimes with Jayber Crow too on that porch, watching the light change over the little valley and listening to their talk. Because I was by far the youngest, I mostly listened. Though I was not present for the events I am going to tell about, I know about them from listening, lately and long ago.

  As the winter was ending in that year of 1949, early on a rainy Sunday morning, Elton left the old Beechum place on the Bird’s Branch road, where he was then living as a tenant, and headed down to the Rowanberry place. For weeks he had been kept close to home, seeing his ewes through lambing. Now it was March, and he had entered a sort of between-times. The last of his tobacco crop of the year before had been sold. The last of the lambs had been born. As soon as the weather permitted, the plowing and the other work of the new crop year would have to begin. It had not begun yet, but he had ahead of him the drying ground, the coming warmth, the growing light, and the relentless prompting of several things needing to be done at once. After the work was started, the various jobs fallen more or less into order, he would feel better. The thought of all of it awaiting him, unbegun, had set his teeth on edge. Or so he put it to himself. And so, leaving their old car for his wife, Mary, to drive to church, he got into his even older truck and drove out the lane.

  He drove slowly, deliberately slowly, as if by doing so he could force himself to think slowly. It helped a little. He drove out the Bird’s Branch road to the blacktop, went through Port William, and just beyond the town turned down the Sand Ripple road. The lane into the Rowanberry place forded the creek a couple of hundred yards from the house, but backwater from the rising river was standing deep over the ford. The creek was now crossable only by a swinging footbridge: two steel cables with split-locust joists wired between them, a narrow row of planks nailed to the joists, two number-nine wires for banisters. Elton pulled the truck out of the lane, killed the engine, and got out into the big silence and the chill of the morning. He crossed the creek on the lurching footbridge, walked up the slope to the house and around to the back. He stepped into the small enclosed back porch with its stack of firewood, a variety of outdoor clothing on a row of hooks, a lantern hanging from a nail, and a two-gallon coal oil can with a spout. He knocked twice on the kitchen door.

  “Hang on,” Art Rowanberry called from inside.

  “It’s just me,” Elton said, letting himself in to keep Art from having to get up. He shut the door carefully behind him. “Morning,” he said.

  “Come in, come in!” Art said. “Take a chair. Good to see you back down on the creek.”

  Art was sitting tilted back in a straight chair by one of the kitchen windows with the Sears, Roebuck catalog opened across his lap. There was a fire in the stove, and the room was dry and warm.

  “You about to make an order?”

  “Well,” Art said, “I was reading
up on the price of socks. I’ve just got started on mine when the heels and toes are gone. But I’m down to some now ain’t nothing but tops.”

  Elton unbuttoned his jacket and stood by the stove with his hands over it a moment, soaking up the warmth.

  “It’s a fine morning out, if you like a rainy morning,” Art said.

  “I don’t mind a rainy morning,” Elton said. “But a week of dry weather wouldn’t hurt a thing.”

  “No. It wouldn’t hurt,” Art said.

  Elton pulled a chair away from the table and sat down.

  Art said, “I allowed you’d be playing basketball.”

  “No, I reckon not,” Elton said, puzzled but passing it off. “Where’s Mart?”

  “Playing basketball.”

  “Basketball!” Elton said. He was grinning now at the thought of Mart playing basketball. “What’s he doing playing basketball?”

  “Oh, a bunch of ’em been getting together Sunday mornings and playing basketball in Hackett Dunham’s barn loft. Hackett and his boys, Spence Gidwell and Tomtit, Pascal, Burley—a bunch of ’em, I don’t know who all. Some of ’em play, and some of ’em watch.”

  “And Mart plays?” To Elton’s knowledge, neither of the Rowanberry brothers had ever played basketball, at least not until now. And now Mart was thirty-nine years old. It was a late start.

  “Oh, I reckon Mart’s took back to running with the boys.”

  Of the two brothers, Elton liked best to work with Mart. He knew what to expect of Mart, they were tuned up pretty much alike. But Art interested him the most. Art did not say everything he thought, and he did a lot of thinking. He had been through a lot and had a lot to think about.

  Elton said, “How come you’re not down there playing with them?”

  “Well, everybody needs something he don’t have to do. It appears like basketball has got along well enough so far without me.”

  Elton passed a little more time with Art to hear how things were going with him and Mart and their dogs and other animals. And then he got up and rebuttoned his jacket. “Maybe I’ll go see what they’re up to.” He had in fact grown intensely curious about the events in Hackett Dunham’s barn.

  “Oh, I imagine they’ll be needing you down there,” Art said. “Come back when you can stay longer.” He said this in perfect good humor, but all the same, as Elton well knew, he loved the quiet and would be happy for the morning to continue as he had started it.

  Hackett Dunham’s farm lay below the mouth of Bird’s Branch, in the angle between the creek and the river. It was a sizeable place, lying on both sides of the river road, containing some good high bottomland that never flooded, and rising up the valley side across the grassed lower slopes to the wooded bluffs along the rim. Hackett was a trader in livestock, which gave him a peculiar status in the community. People liked him. He was an affable, humorous man, never at a loss for a comeback. And yet people’s liking for him shaded off into uneasiness and sometimes into a low-grade fear. It was understood that in any trade he was likely to know more than the man he was trading with. They had to assume that he was trading in his own interest and to his own advantage, which was fair enough—why else would he be trading? —but it was a little intimidating too, a little scary. He was there to be traded with, he performed a needed service, so far as could be figured out he was not dishonest. And yet a trade with him was apt to leave an aftertaste of self-doubt.

  There was, for instance, a famous conversation between Burley Coulter and Big Ellis:

  “Where’d you get them cows, Big?”

  “Hackett Dunham.”

  “Well, did you get ’em worth the money?”

  “Well, I don’t think I got as good a deal as I believe I did.”

  To cap off his standing in the Port William neighborhood, Hackett Dunham was a serious and successful participant in horse-pulling contests, in Kentucky and neighboring states. A part of his trade, a very lucrative part of it too, was in horses suitable, by strength and character, for the contests. It was known locally that his reputation was wide and better than moderately high. Along with their wariness of him, people around were proud of him. He had won championships.

  Though Hackett was older than Elton by four or five years, by then, in Elton’s twenty-ninth year, the two of them were long past the sort of worry that Hackett so often caused. They were cousins. Their mothers were sisters, and in the maternal line back at least to the granddam there had been a quick practical intelligence that Hackett and Elton knew in themselves and recognized in each other. Neither of them, certainly, found the other in any way to be feared.

  When he got to the Dunham place, Elton turned into the lane that went back past the house to Hackett’s big feed barn that was partitioned into box stalls and tie stalls for horses and gated pens for other animals. There were several vehicles parked in the barn lot, one of them being Mart Rowanberry’s old car. Another, of about the same prewar vintage but worse used, Elton recognized as Big Ellis’s. And so Big’s neighbor, Burley Coulter, was probably in attendance also.

  Elton switched the engine off, and then, sure enough, he could hear a ball bouncing, loud voices, and a rush of many feet, sounds that could be coming from nowhere but the loft of the barn.

  He sat, listening, a moment. And then he got out of his truck, went into the barn through the wide-open front doorway, and stepped into a tackroom full of harness and other equipment. From there he went up a set of stairs into the loft.

  There was a bunch of them up there, just as Art had said, some playing, some watching. By that time of the year the loft was maybe two-thirds empty of hay. At its front end, the end away from the hay rick, was a netless iron hoop and a backboard, well made and well braced. By the look of it, Elton thought, it was a product of the blacksmith shop up at town. Hackett no doubt had had it made for his boys, June and Billy, and for Tomtit, son of Spence Gidwell who lived on the place, sharecropping and working by the day. The Dunham and Gidwell boys, and probably J. L. Safely’s boys too, had been playing ball up there. And that, Elton guessed, was the way the Sunday games had started. The watchers were sitting on bales of hay along the sides of the loft.

  Among them, sitting alone near the opening in the floor that Elton had come up through, was old Mr. Milt Wright, by far the unlikeliest presence in that time and place. Mr. Wright was one of the last of the generation that grew up after the Civil War. He was Hackett’s wife’s grandfather—“an old remnant man,” he called himself—who had come to shelter with her and Hackett in his final days. He sat with his cane leaning back against his breast, his hands resting as idly on the crook of it as a pair of gloves on a clothesline. He wore what would prove to be the last thing he would ever buy: a too-large, misbuttoned army surplus overcoat that he now wore almost all year round, for his blood had got thin and he was cold all the time. The coat, Hackett would say in a mood compounded of affection and amusement, “looked like the whole damned war had been fought in it.” He wore a felt hat with a punched-up crown that, before its decrepitude, might have belonged to Hackett. A stain of ambeer descended from one corner of his mouth. Hackett had known him a long time, could remember when he was strong and capable, when you could imagine him young, one of the better horsemen of his own day whose experience and judgment, as Hackett knew, were still useful. Now he had grown too old to notice himself. “He’s the daddy of us all,” Hackett would say in a mood part indulgence, part respect, and part mockery too sometimes of the old man’s habit of speaking as a ghost: “Ay God, I’ve done outlived my time. Ain’t nar’ a man living I knowed when I was a boy.”

  Elton leaned to offer his hand to the old man, whom he liked and enjoyed listening to. But if Mr. Wright was looking at the players he was not seeing them. He was not seeing anything until Elton laid a hand on his shoulder and was recognized.

  “Ab Penn’s boy! Ay God, how are you, son?”

  They shook hands. Elton greeted with a wave and a nod the several others in the row of watchers, and sat do
wn between Burley Coulter and Big Ellis who, pleased to see him, scooted apart to make him room.

  It seemed that everybody who wanted to play was playing, a full dozen by Elton’s count. But it took him a while to determine who was on which side, since there was only the one goal and the players all were in work clothes. The only readily visible difference among the players was that on both teams the boys were wearing the rubber-soled shoes that they called “tennis shoes,” though none of them had ever so much as seen a game of tennis, but the men all were wearing their work shoes. A considerable part of the interest of the game was the men’s efforts to start and stop and stay upright in those shoes on boards that had been polished by the hay shoved across them for fifty years. Also the boys, who had been playing basketball at school all winter, were in practice, young and agile and comparatively fast, whereas the men were out of practice or had never played before, and were comparatively slow and awkward in addition to being poorly shod.

  Among the players, sure enough, were Mart Rowanberry and his brother-in-law Pascal Sowers, whose wife was Sudie, the lone sister of the Rowanberry brothers. Pascal who, like Mart, had been innocent of basketball until the past two or three Sundays, was playing clumsily and hard, and in the process finding, as usual, much to say. Mart, who had once been truly capable at baseball, was playing earnestly, alert and careful, going at play about as he went at work. But when he dribbled he bounced the ball as high as his waist, watching it to keep it from getting away, so that invariably it was stolen by one of the boys. And so when he got the ball Mart got rid of it again as soon as he could.

  Elton had been there only a little while, watching and talking with Burley and Big Ellis, when somebody threw a wild pass. The ball came flying straight to Elton, he caught it, stood up, shot at the goal, and, for a wonder, made the shot.

  A little later I am going to tell of something Elton did that was truly wonderful and altogether to his credit. But the goal he made, his first and last that Sunday morning, was a pure piece of luck, as Elton himself knew, though he claimed full credit for it. It was a fine accident, and it stopped the game.