A Place on Earth

by Wendell Berry

  Where Are You?

  It takes him a good hour and a half, in spite of his hurry, to get back, circling the in-reachings of the backwater.

  Not long before dusk he steps around the upper corner of the barn, past his cows waiting to be milked-seeing them, regretting his neglect of them, forgetting them almost in the same thought-and stops below the oak tree where he started. His own tracks there seem to him unbelievably fresh. He stands, looking down at them. The darkening water flows high and quiet through the grove where the bridge used to swing.

  He turns and starts up toward the toolshed. His direction and even his hurry are the same as when he went up to get the oars. His sense of this similarity is so powerful that for a moment he feels caught and confused, as if the first time was a dream, or he is dreaming now. But this time he turns toward the house. He goes through the gate and up the slope of the yard and around to the back porch.

  Hearing his footsteps on the porch, Ida comes out of the kitchen. She has thrown around her shoulders an old jacket of his that she wears to do her chores.

  "She's dead, ain't she, Gideon? She's drowned."

  Her voice breaks on the last words. But she remains dry-eyed and erect, and continues to face him.

  His own voice is even and steady, but he hears himself speak as though he is another person standing a few feet away.

  "Hush now, Ida. You go on back in the house now."

  It is the gently commanding tone of a parent speaking to a child, and to his surprise she minds him.

  But when he has taken the lantern down and filled it at the coal-oil barrel behind the smokehouse, Ida comes back out, not wearing the coat this time, her bare arms folded against the chill.

  "Gideon, don't you want to eat? I'll have supper ready before long."

  Her voice seems to him now to have the stillness and solemnity of voices in the presence of death. He sees, through the door she has left standing half open behind her, that the meal is on the stove, and he is touched. But he cannot eat now. Again when he speaks he does not know what his voice will sound like, and again, almost without any attempt on his part to control it, it reveals no feeling except kindness.

  "No, Ida. No, I don't want anything right now, sweet."

  He runs down the slope of the yard, the lantern swinging and rattling in his hand. He has not heard the kitchen door close. He believes that Ida is still standing in the open door as he left her, unable for the moment to turn and face the meal that nobody will eat. But he cannot go back. He does not stop.

  The rain has started again. He does not know when it began. The water is beading on his hat brim. It is raining steadily on all the darkening countryside.

  Before long it is dark. For a while there is a grey mirage of twilight, which shifts and tilts over the surface of the water. And then that goes. The surface of the water becomes soft, absorbent, drawing the darkness into it, fusing with the air at some indeterminable distance from the shore.

  He does not light the lantern, unable to bear the confinement of his vision. And he gives up the attempt to hurry. In daylight his compulsion was to run, as though if Annie were still alive, she would most likely be somewhere ahead of him. But in the dark his impulse is to go slowly and quietly, listening, afraid now that she is alive within his hearing and that he will go by without hearing her. He will save the lantern for when he needs it.

  Before he has walked an hour he is wet to the waist, his matches sodden and useless in his pocket. The lantern swings in his hand, lifeless.

  The difficulty of the going is enormous, the ground sloping, slick, and uneven. Feeling his way ahead, tensed against the darkness and his failure by now to have any idea where he is, he falls repeatedly. A number of times he slips down feet first into the water, clawing the mud with his free hand, and then has to crawl up the slope on all fours and take off his boots to pour the water out.

  But difficulty and misery do not stop him. Again he knows with a furious concentration what he wants, what he is waiting for. In the dark the thought of the sound of Annie's voice is clear to him. Now and then he believes he hears her, and he stops and answers:

  `Annie, where are you, honey? Holler loud!"

  And then the valley is silent. His own silence seems to grow large around him, and he hears the rain falling.

  He has lost all sense of time and distance. He walks in a dimensionless landscape of which the only characteristic is that each successive footstep proves it solid-of which the only landmarks are the sounds of water flowing, of rain falling.

  His mind seems to have broken in two. His judgment tells him, as it has been telling him all along, that Annie is dead, that there is almost no chance that he will even find her body. But with another less controllable, more urgent part of his mind, which seems not to understand or even to hear the voice of his judgment, he fixes on the thought of the sound of Annie's voice calling to him over the water. And though he can hardly bear the smallness and loneliness of his voice he does not stop calling to her-at times calling in answer only to the silence, only because silence may mean anything.

  He flounders through the fringe of briars and sumac at the lower edge of the woods and steps out into a cornfield. His boots are immediately clubbed with mud, but he feels lightened and goes more erect now that he is free of the woods. He goes on until the rain slackens and he sees house lights along the top of a ridge way off to his left, and he knows that he has turned out of the creek valley and come upstream along the river maybe half a mile. He turns, cursing the water and the darkness and himself, and starts back.

  But now he makes no attempt at all to follow the edge of the water. Guessing at everything, with the fury of a man who has nothing to lose but time and is losing that, he turns away from the river at an angle that he estimates will take him back to the creekwater below the edge of the woods. He is running now, plunging through the darkness with as much abandon as if it were daylight, running into corn shocks and bushes and fences, cursing the darkness and everything in it, telling it to do its Goddamnedest and be God-damned.

  Sooner than he expected and without even the forethought of stopping, he cleaves like a diver into the briars at the rim of the woods, tan gling his feet and throwing him forward-and like a diver he turns at the bottom of his fall, and makes his way out into the open again. He stands still, listening. Not hearing the water, he runs again, and before he has gone a hundred steps plunges in shoulder-deep, feeling, as his forward momentum decreases, the current begin to take him. He lunges, grabs to his left, and finds branches.

  He goes up onto the mud and sits down and drains his boots.

  He is shaking hard now from head to foot, though, blunted with fatigue as he is, he cannot determine the location of his misery, does not know if it is in his mind or in his body. Sitting on the mud, he can hear himself moaning at the end of every breath, and an old knowledge out of childhood tells him that he is trying not to cry. His clothes feel so heavy he cannot imagine that he will get up again.

  But even while his mind frets at their weight, he is already getting up and starting into the woods. For a good many steps he cannot be sure whether he is still sitting down, dreaming of going, or going, dreaming of sitting down. With surprise he finds that the lantern is still hanging in the crook of his elbow.

  He gropes and stumbles among the trees, no longer finding his way by conscious effort, repeatedly surprised, when his mind strays back to him, to find the water's edge still beside him. But now his body begins to quit on him-to balk, flinching from the punishment he is putting it toand it takes him several seconds or several minutes, he does not know how long, to get it moving again.

  During one of these involuntary pauses, while he waits for his body to move on, the outward nightmare of that regionless darkness begins to be accompanied by another that is inward. He becomes aware of the bearing down of a question that must have been pursuing him all night. Without a boat or a light, what could he do to save Annie if she should, by whatever miracle it
might be, answer him? And he damns himself, with a willingness that startles him, for turning the boat loose, for having taken no precautions to keep the matches dry.

  Taking the matches out of his pocket, he finds that the heads are either already gone, or that they crumble as soon as he touches them to see if they are there. But he continues to take the dead sticks out of his pocket one at a time and to stand them upright inside the sweatband of his hat. It is as though his mind, which like his body has begun to work apart from his will, is gambling that absurdity will be more bearable than reasonableness. He corrects the alignment of the matchsticks, making it a good job, and puts his hat back on. Off his head, the hat has become cold. His legs wait to walk forward until it has grown warm and familiarfeeling again.

  Now all his stops are tortured by imaginings, the actuality of which he can neither prove nor disprove until his body lurches forward again into the unchanged darkness. He seems to hear Annie calling to him, and he stops and sits down and calls back to her, assuring and encouraging, through the night, afraid that if he goes out of the sound of her voice for help he will never find her again. And when morning comes she is not there; there is no longer any answer to his calling.

  Hearing her, he swims out to her, to help her hold on until morning. But the current is too strong. He feels himself carried away from her, her voice becoming fainter and fainter behind him.

  He risks leaving her to find a boat. He goes, telling her to hold on and trust him, for he will surely come back and he will bring a boat. And he goes, his mind plunging like a man running to all the places he might find a boat. He finds one and comes back-to discover, in the daylight, that he has no idea where he was when he heard her calling, much less where she was.

  `Annie! Oh, Annie! Holler loud, sweet baby!"

  Now the sound of his voice calling her name makes him cry.

  His grief is no longer that of a grown man, but that of a child lost in the dark. And in his abjection and misery his desire still knows the sound of her voice answering him:

  "Here I am!"

  To his longing for it, her voice has become stronger, superior to his own, assuring and calm.

  "Here I am!"

  As if at those words the flood of darkness and water would be cleft by a light like the sun shining on snow, new heaven and earth.

  Coming to Rest

  He does not know how long he has been standing still when he becomes aware of a heavy grey light in the sky. He is divided from the open, he sees, only by a thin scarf of the woods. The rain has stopped, and there is no wind. The silence has grown perfect around him. Through the screen of bare branches, divided from him still by several hundred yards of water, he begins to make out the lurching outlines of the big barn. He feels growing in him, as simply as the growth of daylight, the intention to go home and sleep.

  But his body's weight seems too great to move. He falls back into his stupor, oblivious as a tree among trees.

  He is aware next of a flock of mallards feeding on the open water ahead of him. He believes that their flying down must have alerted him, and that his attention has been coming toward them slowly for some time, for they are settled now and calmly feeding, remote from the flurry of their arrival, scattered-forty or fifty of them-over the water. He is so close to them that in the grey, slowly strengthening light he can see not just the bold coloring of the drakes, but also the subtler patterning on the backs and wings of the nearer hen birds. He feels let into the depth of intimacy-the peacefulness of wild things among themselves. Their peacefulness stretches among them, holding them at rest on the shining surface of the water.

  And so another knowledge seems to have reached him after a long approach: the water is standing still. The sound and movement of it have stopped-he wonders how long ago. A good way out a light, steady wind has begun to riffle the surface. And that is all. The debris of its violence has come to rest on it. The valley floor is covered no longer by a river but by a lake. The rise of the creek has been met by a rise in the river that has backed it and held it still.

  The day, again, is heavily overcast, the clouds dragging low over the rim of the little valley. He reaches home, he judges, by sunup or a little after. All the way he has been hurried by the thought of his bed. But now as he comes abreast of the toolshed he turns out of the path, as if he understands, and has all along, that on this day he can bear anything better than comfort. He closes the door behind him and hangs up the lantern. He finds matches, shavings, kindling, and builds a fire in the forge, cranking the bellows until the brittle flame stands still and high, raking bits of coke into it as it burns stronger. As the room warms he sheds his wet clothes, and spreads them to dry. Hanging bundled from the rafters are several hundred-foot lengths of the light canvas used to cover the beds of tobacco plants in the spring. Now, having cleared a place on the workbench to lie down, he takes down one of these lengths of canvas, wraps himself in it, and sleeps.

  A Vigil

  When he wakes he sees that a meal has been set out for him, kept warming on the coals. His wet clothes are gone, except for the hat and boots, and folded on the bench near him there is a change of dry ones. It must have been Ida who awakened him, shutting the door as she went out. Through the windows above the bench he can see the milk cows straying up away from the barn through the bushes on the hillside, and the two sows feeding busily at their trough. So she has done the morning chores. He knows that she did them last night too, after he was gone. He puts on the dry clothes, and eats hurriedly, standing at the bench before the windows. It has begun to rain again, though now it is hardly a rain at all but a steady drizzle; the sound of it striking the tin roof is only a whisper. Under it the surface of the water has turned softly opaque. He can no longer see the far shore. There is no trace of a doubt in him about what he is going to do, though at the same time there is no trace of a conviction of the usefulness of doing anything. He puts on his jacket and hat. The hat is still wet, heavy, stiff-feeling, and cold. The feel of it recalls to him his last night's toil, the quick-grown familiarity of his ordeal. His vigil mends over the short interval of his sleep; it is as though he has never stopped. This time before going out he takes a burlap sack and capes it over his shoulders, pinning it at his throat with a nail. He opens the door to the sound of water dripping off the eaves and the branches of the oak-and to the sound, faint and sharp through the drizzle, of the church bell ringing at Port William.

  In the step that carries him into the weather there is already established the pace that in three-quarters of an hour brings him out of the woods on the hillside above the house of a fisherman, his nearest neighbor on the upriver side of the creek mouth. Once he is clear of the trees he stops for the first time in his walk and studies his whereabouts, measuring in every direction the difference the flood has made. Here the slant of the hill drops from the lower edge of the woods to the top of the river bank, unbroken except for a tapering shelf of bottom just wide enough to provide a bed for the road, now under water. From the front porch of the house a row of stepping-stones goes down the slope and disappears into the flood. At the edge of the water below the house he can see two boats, the smaller one of which he recognizes as belonging to a doctor in Hargrave who uses it in the winter for duck hunting.

  When he starts forward again, he goes toward the boats, letting the slant of the hill lengthen and hasten his stride. He has no thought of going to the house to ask for help. Help to do what? How would he bear to tell what it is that he no longer needs help for?

  As he steps over into the doctor's boat, he sees from the litter of sticks and dead leaves along the shore that the river is still rising. And then pushing hard on the oars, he feels the boat free itself. He pulls strongly, threading his way among the treetops, breaking out then into the open river. And now, finally, he looks back at the house. No one is in sight.

  He sets the boat into the current, staying just outside the channel to keep his oars clear of the drift. His old anxiety of haste has come on him
again and he continues to row hard, the blades of his oars driving him on ahead of the current. Approaching the creek mouth, he eases over into the dead water, and then enters the narrower valley, crossing the road a little upstream of the bridge.

  All day he can see no more than a hundred yards in any direction. He rides on the detached floe of his vision, which has for edge now the brushy or muddy rim of one shore and now that of the other-which contains, besides himself and the boat, now and again the top of a bush or a tree drifting aimlessly out of the mist and back into it. And in all that day he does not call once; in all the hours of his moving over the face of the water he does not hear himself speak.

  The flood crests toward the middle of the week. The rain slacks and stops. The weather clears. As he continues his watching over it, the water slowly gives way beneath him, yielding the land back to the light. And on the seventh morning-Saturday again, though he has lost all track of the days-when he wakens and looks out the window of the toolshed, he sees that the flood has withdrawn below the edge of the woods. Behind it the valley lies free of it, the mud streaked with the red sunlight of the early morning.

  And he goes. He goes, it seems to him, through the opening at the end of his life as it was. To stay, now that the end has come, would be to plant and reap in the very earth of his ruin.

  It seems to him that he has already been on his way for days, so that when he does step through the shed door, leaving it open behind him, he has not even the feeling of departure.

  The Keeping of the Place

  When the water came down Ida did not hear it. She was sitting beside the window in the kitchen with a pile of mending on her lap and pies for Sunday dinner in the oven. And she had the radio on. That Saturday, and the day before too, she had kept the radio on most of the day, waiting for the weather reports that were coming out of Louisville every half hour or so.