A Place on Earth

by Wendell Berry

  It's a taxing kinship that Mat has with Roger Merchant. It has been, if not one of the difficulties, at least one of the perplexities of his life, both obligation and nuisance. With something like regularity, over the years, Roger has presumed both to need Mat and to find him useless. When Roger's summons goes out to Mat and the old lawyer, they go. Usually Mat gets there first. And usually he waits, stopping his car at the roadside below the house, until the lawyer arrives. And then they walk together up the slope and around the house where Roger will be waiting for them-on the porch in good weather, in the cluttered kitchen in bad. Roger greets them ceremoniously and solemnly, shakes their hands, offers them chairs, stands until they are seated, and seats himself. The order of business never changes.

  At the beginning Roger defines and analyzes his problem in his prim, deliberate voice, in language so excessively grammatical and discriminating that Mat and the lawyer sometimes leave after two or three hours without any certain idea what is the matter. The problems vary from urgent to trivial without producing any change at all in the length of his deliberation or the tone of his voice. Once he wanted them to ponder "carefully, gentlemen, if you will be so kind, the perfectly alarming proliferation of mice in the corncrib." Once he was wondering "if the wild honey could not be extracted from the cornices of the house to some profit."

  After he has stated the problem, Roger asks Mat what he would advise. And Mat, knowing that it can come to nothing, explains what he would do if he were Roger. And then Roger turns to the lawyer and asks him what he would do, and the lawyer invariably agrees with Mat.

  Roger listens to each of them, attentive, nodding, polite. And then he leans back and, touching the tips of his fingers together, delivers a long discourse on what he, himself, Roger Merchant personally, considers to be "good fawming in the present case." This can go on for the better part of an hour, supported by no practical sense, no knowledge, no experience. At the end of this spiel it is normally discovered that the lawyer has footed quietly across from Mat's plan to Roger's. Mat is outvoted; Roger is delighted by the reception of his idea; the old lawyer is pulling his ear and looking at his eyebrows.

  The Farm in the Valley

  From Roger's front porch the view down into the creek valley takes in a tract of his land that is in itself a little farm. The house and its clutch of outbuildings stand on a low shelf of the hill on the far side of the valley. A little down the creek from the house, and a good deal nearer the floor of the valley, stand a large barn and corncrib and stripping room. Even from that distance, the buildings and the fields look better kept than any of the rest of the Merchant land.

  And if you were to step off Roger's porch and walk down the hill to the front of the tobacco barn where Gideon Crop is standing now, you would see that the apparent good order of the valley farm is no illusion of distance. On closer look you would see that the extent of this orderliness, though it is real, is not large; the hillside that rises behind the buildings was worn out and given up long ago, and now is covered with thicket; the place is poorly fenced where it is fenced at all, and the buildings are old and rundown. You will guess that the place must have declined unimaginably from what it was when Griffith Merchant was a young man.

  But what is left of it has been well cared for. The fields in the bottoms along both sides of the creek show the signs of having been regularly mowed and sensibly cultivated. Here and there on the old buildings a loose board has been nailed back in place with new nails. Hinges and latches are in good shape. In the sheds and outbuildings things are put away neatly on their shelves and hooks. In the barn the farming tools have been properly greased and stored for the winter; the dirt of the floor is swept clean. A sizable area to one side of the driveway has been partitioned off, whitewashed on the inside, and stanchioned for five milk cows. At opposite sides of the upper doorway there are stalls for a team of mules. On up the inclining path along the face of the slope, standing under an enormous white oak, there is a small building that has apparently at some time been rescued from collapse, pulled back, straightened, rebraced, and made into a toolshed. There is evidence everywherearound the other buildings, the house, the garden-of the presence of a strong, frugal intelligence, the sort of mind that can make do, not meagerly but skillfully and adequately, with scraps.

  To Gideon Crop, standing in front of the barn in weather that has been wet for days, the clouds so low now that they snag and unravel against the wooded bluffs on each side of the valley, it seems that he is still just barely ahead of his circumstances. He is thirty-seven years old, and in the years of his manhood he has held tight, and come out finally a little ahead of where he was when he began. Not much, but a noticeable little. That is how he is able to see it in his good moods. In the bad weather of his mind it can seem to him just as undeniable that the settled account of these years shows him falling behind. There is the money in the bank, all right, more by some few hundred dollars than there was when his father died. But what about the years? He has seen more good years and days than he will see again. His time of limitless energy and limitless hope is gone, and there is nothing yet to show beyond that hopeful column of figures in the bankbook and in his mind, growing, he is afraid, too slowly. His life seems to him to have become a kind of race to see whether those figures will grow to their power before he has exhausted his own.

  From his father Gideon Crop inherited three things: a little bank account in the name of "John Crop and Son," an ambition to own the farm they have lived on, and Roger Merchant.

  "Gideon," John Crop would say, "don't let anybody tell you it ain't hell to do good work for another man who don't care if you do it or not. Who, by God, don't know if you do it or not.

  "But, boy," he would go on, "have good ways about you. First thing, don't leave anything behind you that you wouldn't claim. Second thing, we don't want to buy a place we've ruint ourselves."

  After the tobacco was sold in the winter Gideon was seventeen, John Crop made his only attempt to buy the farm from Roger. He had managed to save more money than he was ever to have at one time again. The morning after he had sold his tobacco he wrote his bank balance on a piece of paper and put it in his pocket and walked up the hill.

  John Crop's savings would barely have made a down payment, if that. From his encounter with Roger that day he learned that if he'd had the full value in cash he still would not have had enough. Roger looked on the place as an heirloom. He would not sell. Beyond a half-dozen perfunctory courtesies, he would not talk.

  Gideon, standing at the woodpile where he had been sent to work when they finished breakfast, saw his father turn out of the creek road and start back along the lane across the bottom, and stopped and watched him, leaning on the handle of the axe. John Crop came picking his way carefully over the thawing mud, and passed in front of the house and on down the incline toward the barn. When he went by Gideon he smiled and kept walking.

  "Honey," he said, "that axe handle ain't made to lean on."

  Flood

  At ground-breaking time, the spring of 1932, John Crop was dead and buried, the Depression was on, and Gideon Crop's name was signed to the new contract in the office of Roger's lawyer.

  Gideon had not forgot, and never has yet forgot, the silence his father kept when once or twice a year Roger and the lawyer would drive down to the valley farm. It would usually be in the middle of the day-as Gideon remembers it, it is the noon of a fair day in the summer; they have finished their dinner and are resting on the front porch-and Roger and the lawyer would drive in and stop in the road below the house and blow the horn. And John Crop would walk down to the car and stoop to the window. He nodded and spoke in answer to their questions, saying no more than necessary, volunteering nothing. Gideon, watching from the porch, knew that his father spoke out of the silence a man must keep when all abundance and order in his sight are to his credit but not in his possession.

  In John Crop's pride and silence Gideon continued. He had the gifts of quiet endurance, of
tolerance of rough work and poor tools, of makeshift, of neatness in patched clothes, of thrift.

  He has seen the last year's tobacco crop through the market at a good earning, and is ready to begin preparations for the next, waiting only for the weather to break and the ground to dry. Today he has made the rounds of the buildings, cleaning and straightening and putting away. Since noon he has given a fresh coat of whitewash to the milking stall, and the afternoon is only half gone. The wet weather, the rising backwater, the delay of ground-breaking are worries, but the knowledge that for the time he has done all that is possible to do is deeply pleasant to him. It is a rare time in any year when he can permit himself to say that he is caught up.

  He goes to the little toolshed under the oak tree, brings out a five-gallon bucket, which he upends against the face of the building, and sits down. From there he can see perhaps half a mile of the little valley, from the big woods in the slue hollows above the mouth of the creek to where the creek bottom narrows at the upper end and turns out of sight. Up the creek, among the trunks of leafless sycamores, he can see his and Ida's little girl Annie sitting midway of the swinging footbridge, wearing a red coat. A brown and white feist named Speck is lying on the footplank beside her. She appears to be talking to it-playing something, he supposes, but who can tell about a child? Since the rain quit shortly after noon she has been outside with the dog, keeping to the good footing along the road and the stepping-stones of the paths as Ida warned her to do. Gideon has watched her, amused by her simple companionship with the dog, pleased to see her out of the house after being so much shut in. And for the last half hour he has watched the building up of a heavy rainstorm over Port William and the upland to the north and west.

  But for days now he has been used to rain, even used to the reflection that he and the whole countryside are losing by it, and so the storm up there does not break his peace. He is looking at the fields in the bottoms in front of him. Empty of the last year's growth, awaiting the new season's crops, they seem to him to have the same serenity that he feels in himself, the same poised free rest between one time and another. Above the edge of the woods that cuts off his view downstream he can see where the flood has broken over the creek banks, and the brown flat of the backwater has begun to fan out a little over the bottom.

  He takes off his boots and straightens his socks and pant legs and puts the boots back on. And then he stands and, unbuttoning his work jacket and loosening his pants, carefully straightens and tucks in the tail of his shirt. He sits down again and makes and lights a cigarette. Behind him, up on the hillside, his milk cows have started down through the thickets toward the barn; he can hear the faint ringing of their bells. And from half a dozen places comes the sound of water running through the rockchoked notches of the slopes.

  And then he hears another sound, way off, like the hard whispering of the approach of a strong wind. By the time he has thought what it is, he can hear the bushes breaking under the weight and force of the water. He is on his feet now, running along the slope in front of the house toward the bridge. As he runs his mind knots in accusation against himself for not knowing sooner what he knows now.

  `Annie! Come up here!"

  He sees the girl look at him, turn and look back up the creek, and with what seems to him a weighted slowness stand and take two steps toward the near end of the bridge. Strangely-he will think of this a thousand times before he dies-she does not cry out. She just gets up and starts toward him with the slowness of the sun moving.

  The wall of water bursts into sight among the trees, the full sound of it opening on Gideon like an unexpected explosion, though he knew it was coming. And he stops running and stands still. As if in those few running steps he left behind all that was comprehensible, Gideon stands there useless, stripped of all but vision-the unbelievable taking place before his eyes without bothering to become believable.

  It hits the bridge. The cables and footboard tear loose at the near end, flinging the girl and the dog up and outward and then down.

  And now Gideon is standing at the edge of a turbulent swift river as wide as the floor of the valley, the fields he was looking at a few seconds ago no longer there. The muddy water sucking around his boots, he is still looking up at the grove of trees, though he is already failing to know exactly how the bridge looked.

  He stands there another minute, the water drawing nearly to the tops of his boots, hunting with his eyes over the wide surface of the water, the miracle he is looking for instantly clear in his mind. That red coat bright against the water. And then his mind bears up the remembrance of the two of them as they were moments ago, absorbed in their pleasure, balanced in the path of doom, and still free of it. He should have known.

  Running again, he goes back up the slant of the ground toward the toolshed. As he goes he notices that the shoreline now strikes almost exactly midway of the length of the barn, the lower end of which has been slapped clean off its foundation as if its timbers had been so many straws. The water slides over his cropland, silent, muddy, a quarter of a mile wide, keeping pace with him as he runs beside it; its flowing seems already established, beyond thought of beginning or end. Even a serenity seems to be in it now, and to brood over the face of it.

  At the toolshed he throws open the doors and goes in. Resting upside down on a pair of carpenter's trestles in the center of the floor is a small johnboat. He takes hold of the length of chain fastened to a ring on the bow-end and drags the boat forward off the trestles and out the door. Lifting the boat at the middle, his hands under the gunwale and then the bottom, he turns it over and over, rolling it down toward the edge of the water. He works in great haste. He is not deterred by his instinctive knowledge of the futility of what he is about to do. He works, maybe, simply in obedience to a determination that he must not stay still-as if to act now, even though it is too late, is the just consequence of his failure to act in time.

  Leaving the boat balanced on the shoreline, he runs back to the shop and brings a set of oars, shoving the boat out and leaping into it. As he straightens up he sees Ida, bareheaded and bare-armed, running down toward him from the house, calling out to him: "Gideon, where is she? Where's Annie?" the weeping breaking suddenly up into the sound of her voice; she knows as well as he does where Annie is. Looking at her, moving away from her, he feels torn from her as he feels torn from Annie. More than that, with all the force of self-hate, he feels ashamed before her. He does not answer.

  Before he can balance himself and turn and sit down and set the oars into the locks, he is already a good way past the barn; the house and Ida are out of sight. Thinking to combat somehow the power that has bereft him, he sees now, he has only abandoned himself to it. There grows in Gideon an awareness of the size of the thing that has taken him, the hurtling muddy current, carrying the trash of slope and woods, riding over his known place. He can smell it. He has failed again to consider what he has known all his life. The hope or the sham of saving his child is now replaced by the attempt to save himself.

  The current is sweeping him rapidly down toward the woods. By the time he has straightened the boat he has already covered half the distance, and is caught in a strong current at about the middle of the valley. The boat is heavy and squarecut, dangerously clumsy in such water. Seeing that he cannot make shore this side of the woods, he turns the boat around, so that he is facing the direction of the current, pushing the oars rather than pulling. And now, working the boat as well as he can toward the right-hand shore, he gives his main effort to guiding.

  Holding the boat straight with the current, he plunges forward into the woods, his speed appearing suddenly to quicken as the treetops heighten and come over him. He crashes through the thicket growth at the margin and breaks in among the big trees, the current hurling and sucking among the trunks. Problems, obstacles, dangers go out of sight before he can move in answer to them. He notices only that he seems to be carried ahead unobstructed for a remarkable length of time. And then one of the for
ward corners of the boat strikes a tree. He sees it happening, braces himself, takes the jar, and more feels than sees the boat hesitate, and turn, and continue turning as the current reclaims it and carries it forward again. Now Gideon thinks only of getting the oars out of the locks and into the bottom of the boat. Trunks and branches bear down, turn, go by. And then a limb strikes him and sprawls him backwards. He lies perfectly still, his eyes open, the calves of his legs resting across the seat. He does not move-because he cannot or because he does not want to, he does not know which. He expects that at any second the boat will strike crossways of a tree and be broken or rolled under. But he knows these things strangely now, without caring.

  More quickly than he would have imagined, the sky clears of branches and the forward motion of the boat seems to be subsiding. He feels building in him the unearned exhilaration of a man alive by luck, who has gone by one of his deaths. Instantly he is on the seat and rowing again, straining for the shore. Having failed in fighting for his life while it was in danger, he will now fight for it when there is no need to. And suddenly he seems to have reached some apex of absurdity. He sees all that has happened to him stripped of reason or cause. He has been beaten by a power larger than he can imagine, much less understand, and now he comes out alive, not even by his own will, much less his own power. He rows strongly across an eddy at the creek mouth, and drives the bow-end of the boat onto the shore.

  He steps out onto the mud and instinctively draws the chain out after him and stoops to tie the boat to a tree. He built the boat himself, and his pride clings to it. But this thought of his own doing immediately drives into him the memory of Annie's two steps along the bridge; and in repugnance and pain he flings the chain back into the boat, shoves it off the shore with his foot, and leaves it for the current to take.

  He has come undone. The reality of what has happened begins to seem doubtful to him. He cannot be certain even of where he is in the joining of the two valleys, which are changed beyond recognition. He turns and begins running heavily through the sodden mud of a cornfield, which dips out of sight under the water at his right hand.