Fidelity

by Wendell Berry

  “Serve what?”

  “Why, all the many things that are above it. Love.”

  Danny stood in the grave as he filled it, tamping the dirt in. The day in its sounding brightness stood around him. He kept to the rhythm he had established at the beginning, stopping only one more time to go to the spring for a drink. Though he sweated at his work, the day was comfortable, the suggestion of autumn palpably in the air, and he made good time.

  As he filled the grave and thus slowly rose out of it, he felt again that the living man, Burley Coulter, was near him, watching and visible, except where he looked. The intimation of Burley’s presence was constantly with him, at once troubling and consoling; in its newness, it kept him close to tears. It was as though he were being watched by a shy bird that remained, with uncanny foreknowledge, just beyond the edge of vision, whichever way he looked.

  When the grave was filled, he spread and leveled the surplus dirt. He gathered leaves and scattered them over the dirt and brushed over them lightly with a leafy branch. From twenty feet, only a practiced and expectant eye would have noticed the disturbance. After the dewfall or frost of one night, it would be harder to see. After the leaves fell, there would be no trace.

  He carried his tools down to the barn, folded the pot and skillet and the piece of jowl and the cornmeal into his hunting coat, making a bundle that he could sling over his shoulder as before. Again using a leafy branch, he brushed out his tracks in the dust of the barn floor. He sprinkled dust and then water over the ashes of his fire. When his departure was fully prepared, he brought water from the spring and sat down and ate quickly the rest of the food he had prepared at breakfast.

  By the time he left, the place had again resumed its quiet, and he walked away without disturbing it.

  The absence of his truck startled Danny when he got back to where he had left it, but he stood still only for a moment before he imagined what had happened. If the wrong people had found the truck, they would have come on up the branch and found him and Burley. The right person could only have been Nathan, who would have known where the key was hidden and who would have taken the truck to the nearest unlikely place where he could put it out of sight. And so Danny shouldered his tools and his bundle again and went to the road.

  The road was not much traveled. Only one car passed, and Danny avoided it by stepping in among the tall horseweeds that grew between the roadside and the creek. When he came to the lane that branched off under the big sycamore, he turned without hesitation into it, knowing he was right when he got to the first muddy patch where Nathan had scuffed out the tire tracks. And yet he smiled when he stepped through the door of the old barn and saw his truck. He laid his tools in with the other fencing tools in the back, and then, opening the passenger door to toss in his bundle, he saw Nathan’s green shirt lying on the seat. He smiled again and took off the blue shirt he was wearing and put the green one on. He thought of burning the blue shirt, but he did not want to burn it. It was a good shirt. A derelict washing machine was leaning against the wall of the barn just inside the upper doorway, and he tossed the shirt into it. He would come back for it in a few days.

  When he got home and went into the kitchen, he found Lyda’s note on the table.

  “We are all at Henry’s and Wheeler’s office,” she had written. “Henry says for you to come, too, if you get back.” And then she had crossed out the last phrase and added, “ I reckon you are back.”

  Wheeler talked at ease, leaning back in his chair, his fingers laced over his vest, telling stories of the influence of the medical industry upon the local economy. He spoke with care, forming his sentences as if he were writing them down and looking at Kyle Bode all the time, with the apparent intent to instruct him.

  “And so it has become possible,” Wheeler said, “for one of our people to spend a long life accumulating a few thousand dollars by the hardest kind of work, only to have it entirely taken away by two or three hours in an operating room and a week or two in a hospital.”

  Listening, the detective became more and more anxious to regain control at least of his own participation in whatever it was that was going on. But he was finding the conversation difficult to interrupt not only because of the peculiar force that Wheeler’s look and words put into it but because he did not much want to interrupt it. There was a kind of charm in the old man’s earnest wish that the young man should be instructed. And when the young man did from time to time break into the conversation, it was to ask a question relative only to the old man’s talk—questions that the young man, to his consternation, actually wanted to know the old man’s answer to.

  Finally the conversation was interrupted by Wheeler himself. “I believe we have some people here whom you’ll want to see. They are Burley’s close kin and close friends, the people who know him best. Come and meet them.”

  Kyle Bode had not been able to see where he was going for some time, and now suddenly he did see, and he saw that they had seen where he was going all along and had got there ahead of him. His mind digressed into relief that he was assigned to this case alone, that none of his colleagues could see his confusion. Conscientiously—though surely not conscientiously enough—he had sought the order that the facts of the case would make. And not only had he failed so far to achieve that clear and explainable order but he had been tempted over and over again into the weakness of self-justification. Worse than that, he had been tempted over and over again to leave, with Wheeler, the small, clear world of the law and its explanations and to enter the larger, darker world not ordered by human reasons or subject to them, in which he sensed obscurely that something might live that he, too, might be glad to have alive.

  Standing with his right arm outstretched and then with his hand spread hospitably on Kyle Bode’s back, Wheeler gathered him toward the door, which he opened onto a room now full of people, all of whom fell silent and looked expectantly at the detective as though he might have been a long-awaited guest of honor.

  Guided still by Wheeler’s hand on his back, Kyle Bode turned toward the desk to the left of the stairway door, at which sat a smiling woman who held a stenographer’s pad and pencil on her lap.

  “This is Detective Kyle Bode, ladies and gentlemen,” Wheeler said. “Mr. Bode, this is Julia Vye, our secretary.”

  Julia extended her hand to Kyle Bode, who shook it cordially.

  Wheeler pressed him on to the left. “This is Sarah Catlett, Henry’s wife.

  “This is my wife, Bess.

  “This is Mary Penn.

  “This is Art Rowanberry.

  “This is his brother, Mart.

  “This is Jack Penn, Jack Beechum Penn.

  “This is Flora Catlett, my other daughter-in-law.

  “This is my son, Andy.

  “You know Henry.

  “This is Lyda Branch, Danny’s wife.

  “This is Hannah Coulter.

  “And this is Hannah’s husband, Nathan.”

  One by one, they silently held out their hands to Kyle Bode, who silently shook them.

  He and Wheeler had come almost all the way around the room. There was a single chair against the wall to the left of the door to Wheeler’s office. Wheeler offered this chair, with a gesture, to Kyle Bode, who thanked him and sat down. Wheeler then seated himself in the chair between Julia Vye’s desk and the stair door.

  “Mr. Bode,” Wheeler said. “All of us here are relatives or friends of Burley Coulter.”

  The secretary, Kyle Bode noticed, now began to write in shorthand on her pad. It was noon and past, and he had learned nothing that he could tell to any superior or any reporter who might ask.

  “Nathan,” Wheeler went on, “is Burley’s nephew.”

  “Nephew?” Kyle Bode said, turning to Nathan, who looked back at him with a look that was utterly direct and impenetrable.

  “That’s right.”

  “I assume you know him well.”

  “I’ve known him for
fifty-three years.”

  “You’ve been neighbors that long?”

  “I was raised by his parents and by him. We’ve been neighbors ever since, except for a while back there in the forties when I was away.”

  “You were in the service?”

  “Yes.”

  The detective coughed. “Mr. Coulter, my job, I guess, is to find your uncle. Do you know where he is? Or where Danny Branch is?”

  The eyes that confronted him did not look down, nor did they change. And there was no apparent animosity in the reply: “I couldn’t rightly say I do.”

  “Now them two was a pair,” Mart Rowanberry said, as though he were not interrupting but merely contributing to the conversation. “There’s been a many a time when nobody knew where them two was.”

  “I see. And why was that?”

  “They’re hunters!” Art Rowanberry said, a little impatiently, in the tone of one explaining the obvious. “They’d be off somewheres in the woods.”

  “A many a time,” Mart said, “he has called me out after bedtime to go with him, and I would get up and go. A many a time.”

  “You are friends, then, you and Mr. Coulter?”

  “We been friends, you might as well say, all along. Course, now, he’s older than I am. Fifteen years or so, wouldn’t it be, Andy?”

  The Catlett by the name of Andy nodded, and Lyda said, “Yes.”

  And then she said, “You knew him all your life, and then finally he didn’t know you, did he, Mart?”

  “He didn’t know you?” said Kyle Bode.

  “Well, sir,” Mart said, “I come up on him and Danny and Nathan while they was fencing. Burley was asleep, propped up against the end post. I shook him a little, and he looked up. He says, ‘Howdy, old bud.’ I seen he was bewildered. I says, ‘You don’t know me, do you?’ He says, ‘I know I ought to, but I don’t.’ I says, ‘Well, if you was to hear old Bet open up on a track, who’d you say it was?’ And he says, ‘Why, hello, Mart!’ ”

  There was a moment then in which nobody spoke, as if everybody there was seeing what Mart had told.

  Kyle Bode waited for that moment to pass, and then he said, “This Bet you spoke of”—he knew he was a fool, but he wanted to know—“was she a dog?” It was not his conversation he was in; he could hardly think by what right he was in it.

  “She was a blue tick mostly,” Mart said. “A light, sort of cloudy-colored dog, with black ears and a white tip to her tail. And a good one.” He paused, perhaps seeing the dog again. “I bought her from Braymer Hardy over yonder by Goforth. But I expect,” he said, smiling at Kyle Bode, “that was before your time.” And then, as if conscious of having strayed from the subject, he said, “But, now, Burley Coulter. They never come no finer than Burley Coulter.”

  Another small silence followed, in which everybody assented to Mart’s tribute.

  “Burley Coulter,” Wheeler said, “was born in 1895. He was the son of Dave and Zelma Coulter. He had one older brother, Jarrat, who died in the July of 1967.

  “Burley attended the Goforth School as long as he could be kept there—not long enough for him to finish the eighth grade, which he thought might have taken him forever. His fame at Willow Hole was not for scholarship but for being able to fight as well on the bottom as on the top.”

  Wheeler spoke at first to Kyle Bode. And then he looked down at his hands and thought a minute. When he spoke again, he spoke to and for them all.

  “He was wild, Burley was, as a young fellow. For me, he had all the charm of an older boy who was fine looking and wild and friendly to a younger cousin. I loved him and would have followed him anywhere. Though he was wild, he didn’t steal or lie or misrepresent himself.

  “He never was a gambler. Once I said to him, ‘Burley, I know you’ve drunk and fought and laid out at night in the woods. How come you’ve never gambled?’ And he said, ‘No son of a bitch is going to snap his fingers and pick up my money.’ I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘Because I never got it by snapping my fingers.’

  “His wildness was in his refusal, or his inability, to live within other people’s expectations. He would be hunting sometimes when his daddy wanted him at work. He would dance all night and neglect to sober up before he came home.

  “He was called into the army during the First World War. By then he was past twenty and long past being a boy, and he had his limits. He hit an officer for calling him a stupid, briar-jumping Kentucky bastard. He might have suffered any one of those insults, if given singly. But he felt that, given all together, they paid off any obligation he had to the officer, and he hit him. He hit him, as he said, ‘thoroughly.’ I asked him, ‘How thoroughly?’ And he said, ‘Thoroughly enough.’ They locked him up a while for that.

  “He was acting, by then, as a man of conscious principle. He didn’t believe that anybody had the right, by birth or appointment, to lord it over anybody else.

  “He broke his mother’s heart, as she would sometimes say—as a young man of that kind is apt to do. But when she was old and only the two of them were left at home, he was devoted to her and took dutiful care of her, and she learned to depend on him.

  “Though he never gave up his love of roaming about, he had become a different man from the one he started out to be. I’m not sure when that change began. Maybe it was when Nathan and Tom started following him around when they were little boys, after their mother died. And then, when Danny came along, Burley took his proper part in raising him. He took care of his mother until she died. He was a good and loyal partner to his brother. He was a true friend to all his friends.

  “He was too late, as he thought and said, in acknowledging Danny as his son. But he did acknowledge him, and made him his heir, and brought him and Lyda home with him to live. And so at last he fully honored his should-have-been marriage to Kate Helen.

  “He and I had our differences. Sometimes they came to words, and when they did I always learned something from him—a hard lesson sometimes, but good to know—because he knew himself and he told the truth.

  “He was sometimes, but never much in a public way, a fiddler. And he was always a singer. His head was full of scraps and bits of songs that he sang out at work to say how he felt or to make himself feel better. Some of them, I think, he made up himself.

  “From some morning a long time ago, I remember standing beside a field where Burley was plowing with a team of mules and hearing his voice all of a sudden lift up into the quiet:

  Ain’t going to be much longer, boys,

  Ain’t going to be much longer.

  Soon it will be dinnertime

  And we will feed our hunger.

  And he had another song he sometimes sang up in the afternoon, when the day had got long and he was getting tired:

  Look down that row;

  See how far we’ve got to go.

  It’s a long time to sundown, boys,

  Long time to sundown.

  “What was best in him, maybe, was the pleasure he took in pleasurable things. We’ll not forget his laughter. He was hunting once for two or three days. When he got home he was half starved, and it was the middle of the night. Rather than disturb the house, he went to the smokehouse and sliced part of a cured bacon with his pocketknife and ate it as it was. He said, ‘I relished it.’ He looked at the world and found it good.

  “ ‘I’ve never learned anything until I had to,’ he often said, and so confessed himself a man like other men. But he learned what he had to, and he changed, and so he made himself exceptional.

  “He was, I will say, a faithful man.”

  It was a lonely gathering for Henry Catlett. He was riding as an humble passenger in a vehicle that he ought to have been guiding—that would not be guided if he did not guide it—and yet he had no better idea than the others where it might be going.

  So far, he thought, he had done pretty well. He had gathered all parties to the case—except, of course, for the principals—here u
nder his eye for the time being. How long he would need to keep them here or how long the various ones of them would stay, he did not know. He knew that Lyda had left a note for Danny where he would see it when he came home, telling him to join them here. But when Danny might come home, Henry did not know. Nobody, anyhow, had said anything about eating dinner, though it was past noon, and he was grateful for that.

  Either he would be able to keep them there long enough, or he would not. Either Danny would show up, or he would not—wearing, or not wearing, that very regrettable blue shirt. At moments, as in a bad dream, he had wondered what it would portend if Danny showed up with fresh earth caked on his shoes. He wondered what concatenation of circumstances and lucky guesses might give Detective Bode some purchase on his case. It occurred to Henry to wish that Danny had given somebody a little notice of what he was going to do. But if Danny had been the kind of man to give such notice, he would not have done what he had done. It did not occur to Henry to regret that Danny had done what he had done.

  As Wheeler spoke, his auditors sat looking at him, or down at their hands, or at the floor. From time to time, tears shone in the eyes of one or another of them. But no tear fell, no hand was lifted, no sound was uttered. And Henry was grateful to them all—grateful to his father, who was presuming on his seniority to keep them there; grateful to the others for their disciplined and decorous silence.

  Out the corner of his eye, Henry could see his brother, Andy, slouched in his chair in the corner and watching also. Henry would have given a lot for a few minutes of talk with Andy. They would not need to say much.

  Henry would have liked, too, to know what Lyda thought, and Hannah and Nathan. But though he sat in the same room with them, he was divided from them as by a wide river. All he could do was wait and watch.

  And without looking directly at him, he watched Kyle Bode, partly with amusement. The detective’s questions to Nathan and to Mart and now his attention to Wheeler so obviously exceeded his professional interest in the case that something like a grin occurred in Henry’s mind, though his face remained solemn.