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

by Wendell Berry

  But Mike knew well that his deliverer was my father. He might spend a lot of time idling about in town or playing with children, but he was a dog with a high vocation, and he knew what it was. He knew too that my father fully shared it. Mike loved us all in the honorable and admirable way of a dog, but his love for my father was too dedicated to be adequately described as doglike. He regarded his partnership with my father as the business of his life, as it was also his overtopping joy.

  My father was a man of passions. I don’t think he did much of anything except passionately. When he was removed from his passions, as in some public or social situations, he would be quiet, remote, uncomfortable, and unhappy. I think he was sometimes constrained by a sense of the disproportion between the force of his thoughts and the demands of polite conversation. He loved serious talk and the sort of conversation that is incited by pleasure. He loved hilarity. But he had little to offer in the way of small talk, and he always seemed to me to be uncomfortable or embarrassed when it was required of him.

  He was passionate about the law. He loved its argumentative logic, its principles and methods, its discriminating language. He was capable of working at it ardently for long hours. His sentences, written or spoken, whatever the circumstances, were concise, exact, grammatically correct, and powerful in their syntax. He did not speak without thinking, and he meant what he said.

  He used such sentences when instructing and reprimanding us children. We were not always on his mind, I am sure, but when we were he applied himself to fatherhood as he did to everything else. When we were sick or troubled he could be as tender and sympathetic as our mother. At other times, disgruntled or fearing for us as his knowledge of the world prompted him to do, he could be peremptory, demanding, impatient, and in various ways intimidating. I was always trying to keep some secret from him, and he had an uncanny way of knowing your secrets. He had a way of knowing your thoughts, and this came from sympathy. It could only have come from sympathy, but it took me a long time to know that.

  I have always been a slow thinker, and he was fast. He could add, subtract, and figure averages in his head with remarkable speed. He would count a flock of sheep like this: one, five, seven, twelve, sixteen, nineteen, twenty-four . . . One day when he had done this and arrived promptly at the correct number, a hundred and fifty or so, he turned and looked at me for my number. I was still counting. “Honey,” he said with instant exasperation, “are you counting by twos?” That was exactly what I was doing, and in my slowness I had started over two or three times.

  He was as passionate about farming as about the law. He could not voluntarily have quit farming any more than he could voluntarily have quit breathing. He spent great love and excitement in buying rundown farms, stopping the washes, restoring the pastures, renewing the fences, buildings, and other improvements. He performed this process of regeneration seven times in his life, eventually selling six of the farms, but he kept one, and in addition he kept and improved over many years the home place where he was born and raised. He hired out most of the work, of course, but he worked himself too, and he watched and instructed indefatigably. He would drive out to see to things in the morning before he went to the office, and again after he left the office in the afternoon. He took days off to devote to farming. He would be out looking at things, salting his cattle and sheep, walking or driving his car through the fields, every Sunday afternoon. In the days before tractors he would be on hand to take the lines when there were young mules to break. He did the dehorning, castrating, and other veterinary jobs. All the time he could spare from his law practice he gave to the farms. Because of his work for an agricultural cooperative, he would frequently have to make a trip to Washington or some other distant place. Sometimes, returning from one of those trips in the middle of the night, he would go to the home place or one of the other farms and drive through the fields before going home to bed.

  Of farming, he told me, “It’s like a woman. It’ll keep you awake at night.” He loved everything about it. He loved the look and feel and smell of the land and the shape of it underfoot. He loved the light on it and the weather over it. He loved the economics of it. As characteristic of him as anything else were pages of yellow legal pads covered with columns of numbers written in ink in his swift hand, where he figured the outgoes and the incomes of his farming, or drew the designs of farm buildings to be built or rebuilt.

  When he went to the farms, he would often take Mike with him. He would hurry home from the office, change his clothes, and hurry out again. Going to his car, he would raise the trunk lid. “Here, Mike! Get in!” And Mike would leap into the trunk and lie down. My father would close the trunk, leaving the latch unengaged so Mike would have air.

  If there were farm jobs to be done, Mike would just go along, running free in the open country, hunting on his own. If it was hunting season, my father might bring along his shotgun in its tattered canvas case. The gun was a pump-action Remington twenty-gauge, for in those days my father had excellent eyes and he was a good shot.

  In those days too the tall coarse grass known as fescue had not yet been introduced here. That grass and the coming of rotary mowing machines have made the good old bobwhite a rare bird in this country now. The improved pastures in Mike’s time were in bluegrass, and a lot of fields would be weedy in the fall. There was plenty of good bird cover and as a result plenty of birds. My father would know where the coveys were, and he and Mike would go to seek them out.

  And here they came into their glory, and here I need to imagine them and see them again in my mind’s eye, now that I am getting old and have come to understand my father far better than I did when I was young. For right at the heart of his passions for his family, for the law, and for farming, all consequential passions with practical aims and ends, was this other passion for bird hunting with a good dog, which had no practical end but was the enactment of his great love of country, of life, of his own life, for their own sake.

  When he stepped out in his eager long strides, with Mike let loose in front of him, he was walking free on the undivided and priceless world itself. And Mike went out from him in a motion fluid and swift and strong, less running than flying, and he would find the birds.

  Once he had learned his trade, I think Mike was a nearly perfect dog, giving a satisfaction that was nearly complete. I never heard my father complain of him. He understood that little pump gun in my father’s hands as if it were a book of instructions, and he did what he was supposed to do.

  He was remarkable in another way. He would retrieve, and to reward him my father started feeding him the heads of the birds when he brought them back. Before long, Mike got the idea. From then on, he ate the head of the downed bird where he found it and brought back the headless carcass.

  From time to time during my father’s life as a bird hunter, which had its summit during Mike’s life, he would go somewhere down south on a hunting trip, usually with one other hunter. I know about these trips only from a handful of stories, all of which had to do in one way or another with the prowess of my father’s great dog.

  In Hargrave we lived across the street from Dr. Gib Holston who was the town’s only professed atheist. He had the further distinctions of a glass eye and a reputation for violence. Once, in the days of his youth, a man had insulted him, and Dr. Holston had killed the offender by shooting him from a train window. Most of our fellow citizens who used profanity might properly have been said to cuss, for they used it thoughtlessly as a sort of rhetoric of emphasis, but Dr. Holston cursed, with blasphemy aforethought and with the intention of offending anyone inclined to be offended. He was a small man, not much above five feet tall, but strongly built and without fat to the end of his days. He thought of himself as outrageous, and so of course he was, and he enjoyed his bad reputation. He was a strange neighbor for my good mother, a woman of vigilant faith, who obliged him by finding him on all points as outrageous as he wished to be. She, with conscientious good manners, and my father, with a cere
moniousness always slightly tainted with satire, called him “Dr. Holston.” The rest of us called him “Doc” or, when we wished to distinguish him from other doctors, “Dr. Gib.”

  Doc, then, was one of my father’s clients, which sometimes required them to make a little business trip together, and at least once they went together on a hunting trip. Why my father would have put up with him to that extent I am not sure. Perhaps, as a man of my grandparents’ generation, Doc knew and remembered things that my father was interested in hearing; he always liked his older clients and enjoyed listening to them. But mostly, I believe, he put up with Doc because Doc amused him. It amused him that when they went somewhere together, Doc insisted on sitting by himself in the back seat of the car. It amused him to see in the rearview mirror that when Doc dozed off, sitting back there bolt upright by himself, his glass eye stayed open. Once, when my father advised him that a neighbor of ours, an aristocratic and haughty old lady, Mrs. J. Robert La Vere, had been “dropped” in a certain town that they visited, Doc said, “God damn her, I wish she had dropped on through!” That amused my father as if it had been the gift of divine charity itself and he was therefore obliged to be fully amused. The one story that came of their hunting together is about my father’s amusement.

  They had come to their hunting place, uncased and loaded their guns, and turned Mike loose. The place was rich in birds and Mike soon began finding them, working beautifully in cooperation with my father, as he always did, and my father was shooting well as he always did. But this story begins with my father’s growing awareness and worry that Doc was not shooting well.

  There is a good possibility, in my opinion, that Doc by then was not capable of shooting well. His one eye could not have been very clear. I have been on hunts with him myself, and I never saw him hit anything. He had bought a twelve-gauge Browning automatic, which he pointed hither and yon without regard to the company. You had to watch him. I think he bought that gun because he couldn’t see well enough to shoot well. It was an expensive gun, which counted with him, and that it was automatic impressed him inordinately. He had the primitive technological faith that such a weapon simply could not help compensating for his deficiency. He had paid a lot of money for this marvelous gun that would enact his mere wish to hit the birds as they rose. If you can’t shoot well, you must shoot a lot. And so when he heard the birds rise, he merely pointed the gun in their direction and emptied it: Boomboomboom! And of course he was missing.

  And of course he was eventually furious. He vented his fury by stomping about and cursing roundly everything in sight. He called upon God, in whom he did not believe, to damn the innocent birds who were flying too fast and scattering too widely to be easily shot, and his expensive shotgun that was guilty only of missing what it had not been aimed at, and the cover that was too brushy, and the landscape that was too ridgy and broken, and the day that was too cloudy. My father, who instantly appreciated the absurdity of Doc’s cosmic wrath, took the liberty of laughing. He then, being a reasonable man, recognized the tactlessness of his laughter, which doubled his amusement, and he laughed more. Doc thereupon included my father in his condemnation, and then, to perfect his vengeance, he included Mike who, off in the distance, was again beautifully quartering the ground. This so fulfilled my father with amusement that he was no longer able to stand. As we used to say here, his tickle-box had turned completely over. He subsided onto the ground and lay there on his back among the weeds, laughing, in danger, he said, of wetting his pants. He was pretty certain too that Doc was going to shoot him and he was duly afraid, which somehow amused him even more, and he could not stop laughing.

  How they leveled that situation out and recovered from it, I don’t know. But they did, and my father, to his further great amusement, survived.

  * * *

  In the general course of my father’s life, I suppose Doc was a digression, an indulgence perhaps, certainly a fascination of a sort, and a source of stories. His friendship with Billy Finn was another matter. Between the two of them was a deep affection that lasted all their lives. On my father’s side, I know, this affection was weighted by an abiding compassion. Billy Finn was a sweet man who sometimes drank to excess, and perhaps for sufficient reason. He had suffered much in his marriage to an unappeasable woman, “Mizriz Fannie Frankle Finn” as my father enjoyed calling her behind her back. To the unhappy marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Finn had been added the death in battle, early in World War II, of their son, their only child. The shadow of shared grief, cast over the marriage, had made it maybe even more permanent than its vows. Mr. Finn was bound to Mrs. Finn by his pity for her suffering, so like his own, he suffering in addition, as she made sure, his inability to pity her enough. Life for Mr. Finn, especially after the death of his son, was pretty much an uphill trudge. I think his friendship with my father was a necessary solace to him to the end of his life, near which he said to a member of the clergy visiting him in the nursing home: “Hell, preacher? You can’t tell me nothing about Hell. I’ve lived with a damned Frankle for forty-nine years!”

  When my father would go away on one of his bird-hunting trips, his companion almost invariably would be Mr. Finn. Mr. Finn loved bird dogs, and he always had one or two. The dogs always were guaranteed to be good ones, and nearly always they disappointed him. He was not a good hand with a dog, perhaps because he had experienced too much frustration and disappointment in other things. He was impatient with his dogs, fussed at them too much, frightened them, confused them, and hollered at them. He was a noisy hunter, his utterances tending to be both excessive and obsessive, and this added substantially to my father’s fund of amusement and of stories, but also to his fund of sorrow, for Billy Finn was a sad man, and my father was never forgetful of that.

  On one of their hunting trips down south, as a companion to Mike, Mr. Finn took a lovely pointer bitch he called Gladys, a dog on the smallish side, delicately made, extremely sensitive and shy—precisely the wrong kind of dog for him.

  When the dogs were released, Mike sniffed the wind and sprang into his work. Gladys, more aware of the strangeness of the new terrain than of its promise, hung back.

  “Go on, Gladys!” Mr. Finn said. But instead of ranging ahead with Mike, Gladys followed Mr. Finn, intimidated still by the new country, embarrassed by her timidity, knowing what was expected of her, and already fearful of Mr. Finn’s judgment.

  “Gladys!” he said. “Go on!”

  And then, raising his voice and pointing forward, he said, “Damn you, Gladys, go on! Go on!”

  That of course ended any possibility that Gladys was going to hunt, for after that she needed to be forgiven. She stuck even closer to Mr. Finn, fawning whenever he looked at her, hoping for forgiveness. And of course, in his humiliation, it never occurred to him to forgive her.

  They hunted through the morning, Mr. Finn alternately apologizing for Gladys and berating her. His embarrassment about his dog eventually caused my father to become embarrassed about his dog. For in spite of Mr. Finn’s relentless fuming and muttering, they were having a fairly successful hunt. Mike was soaring through the cover in grand style and coming to point with rigorous exactitude. And the better it was, the worse it was. The better Mike performed, the more disgrace piled upon poor Gladys, the more embarrassed Mr. Finn became, and the more he fumed and muttered, the more my father was punished by the excellence of Mike.

  “Oh, Lord, it was awful,” my father would say later, laughing at the memory of his anguished amusement and his failure to think of anything at all to say.

  And it got worse.

  Sometime early in the afternoon Mr. Finn’s suffering grew greater than he could bear. He turned upon Gladys, who was still following him, and said half crying, “Gladys, damn you to Hell! I raised you from a pup, I’ve sheltered you, I’ve fed you, I’ve loved you like a child, and now you’ve let me down, you thankless bitch!” He then aimed a murderous kick at her, which she easily evaded and fled from him until she was out of sight.
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br />   My father would gladly have ended the day there and then if he could have thought of a painless or even a polite way to do it. But he could think of no way. They hunted on.

  But now Mr. Finn was the one who needed forgiveness, and Gladys did not return to forgive him. He began to suffer the torments of the guilty and unforgiven, of shame for himself and fear for his dog. He began to imagine all the bad things that might happen to her, unprotected as she was and in a strange country. She might remain lost forever. She might get caught in somebody’s steel trap. Some lousy bastard might find her wandering and steal her. She would be hungry and cold.

  My father, being guilty of nothing except the good work of his own dog, was somewhat calmer. He thought Gladys would not go far and would be all right, and he sought to reassure his friend. But Mr. Finn could not be comforted. From his earlier mutterings of imprecation he changed now to mutterings of self-reproach and worry.

  As evening came on, they completed their long circle back to the car, and Gladys still was nowhere in sight. Mr. Finn had been calling her for the last mile or so. For a long time they waited while Mr. Finn called and called, his voice sounding more pleading, anxious, and forlorn as the day darkened. They were tired and they were getting cold.

  Nearby, there was a culvert that let a small stream pass under the road. The culvert was dry at that time of year, and it would be a shelter.

  “Billy,” my father said, “lay your coat in that culvert. It’s not going to rain. She’ll find it and sleep there. We’ll come back in the morning and get her.”