A Place on Earth

by Wendell Berry

  "I can't tell you, Ida. It ain't to be talked about."

  "Can you remember the last time you shaved?"

  They cross the bottom and climb the slope to the house and go around to the back and into the kitchen. Ida pulls a chair away from the table and places it near the stove as though Gideon might be cold.

  "Sit down in that," she says.

  And he does, obediently, watching her as she begins stirring around him. She makes the old room jolt and clatter as if all its uses have been roused in it at once. She shakes the ashes out of the stove, and pokes the fire, and puts in fresh wood. She scoots the teakettle over the fire, and fills another kettle and puts it on, and fills the coffee pot and puts it on. She goes out and brings in a fresh bucket of water. She sets him a place at the table. She fills a large wash pan with hot water and sets it steaming on the floor at his feet.

  "Wash," she says. She puts the soap down by the wash pan, brings him a wash rag, hangs a clean towel on the back of his chair. "Get them filthy clothes off. And them old shoes." She gathers up his shoes and his shirt as he takes them off. As she stands there watching him, waiting, he hesitates. His hands seem to grow clumsy at the buckle of his belt, and then stop altogether. He looks out the window, and down at his feet, and at last, with great effort, at her.

  "Ida," he says, "I ain't bothered any women while I been gone."

  For the first time since they met at the bridge, she smiles at him.

  "Well, ain't you something! I reckon you must be feeling pretty both- erish by now"

  "I reckon I am."

  "That don't surprise me."

  For many seconds they look at each other.

  He takes off the rest of his clothes. She gathers them up with the rest and flings them through the door onto the back porch. She brings back clean clothes for him, and lays them on the edge of the table within his reach. She brings shoes for him. And then she busies herself at the stove.

  When he has washed and put on pants and shoes, she says to him: "Shave. Get them whiskers off."

  He does, and puts on the clean shirt, and combs his wet hair. He comes to the table as she is taking his breakfast from the stove. She looks at him.

  "Well, well, it is you. Sit down. Eat."

  Into the Woods

  As seems bound to happen now and again, in spite of Mat's watchfulness against it, one of his young cows got with calf late. Uncertain of the breeding time, he has been watching her for a week. This morning when he went to count the cattle she was not in the bunch. He knew what that meant, but other obligations were pressing him, and after walking the length of the high backbone of the pasture he gave up the hunt until later.

  It is not until the afternoon that he can come back. He leaves his truck at the pasture gate, and this time, instead of walking the high ground as he did in the morning, he turns along the fence and follows it down toward the woods. It is a brilliant day, the air warm and still. In spite of his worry about her, the job of searching for the cow is suited to his mood and to the weather, and he is happy in having it to do.

  The leaves on the branches, and falling, and on the ground, are so golden that going in under the trees is to enter not the shade but a doubled sunlight. Though there is no wind, the leaves fall steadily, flashing in the air, with a constant pattering against trunks and branches and the ground.

  Mat considers his course, and goes down to where the bluff steepens, and turns again, following the contour of the slope. He might, he knows, be wrong by ten feet or a hundred. If he is, he will have to come back at a different level-and go again at yet another, if he is wrong again. He feels too stiff in the knees to zigzag up and down the bluff, and so there is nothing to do but choose a line and follow it. He takes his time, picking his way with care, keeping close watch on the woods above and below.

  And it happens that within half an hour he comes upon the cow grazing among the thicket growth over a little patch of ground that not too many years ago was cleared and cropped. He quickly sees that she has calved, and he approaches cautiously, not wanting to scare her off for fear he will not then be able to find the calf. But he does not go many feet before he is seen, and he stops. He can tell by the set of her head that she is alarmed, preparing to run.

  "Sook," he says quietly. "Sook, cow"

  At that she does run, head and tail up, crashing into the undergrowth at the edge of the clearing and out into the woods.

  "You crazy bitch!"

  She is out there in the woods, walking away from him now, bawling. Mat goes on into the clearing and, again more quickly than he expected, finds the calf curled up in some long grass in a patch of sumac. It lies perfectly still, obeying like its mother an instinct still wild in it. For the moment it is wild, and Mat is aware of that wildness, and aware of himself there, about to be the first man it will see, about to cross yet another time the gap between his kind and its.

  "Here you are," he says to it, to be saying something before he touches it. "Your old lying mammy said you weren't, but I knew."

  He has come up beside it and leaned over it. And now he slips his hands under its belly and raises it to its feet. It stands up, pretty wobbly, but all right-a bull calf, well marked, big enough. "Well," he says.

  Leaving it spraddled on its weak legs, he goes back into the woods. As soon as he is gone the cow, having circled around, comes anxiously back into the clearing, and goes straight to the calf. Mat sits down with his back against a tree, and watches, pleased with them and with himself.

  After nuzzling the calf briefly as she came up to it, the cow has paid him no more attention. She stands over it, head and ears up, watching Mat. Her whole aspect has changed from when he saw her a day ago. Instead of the complacency of a domestic animal, she now has the alertness of a deer. After standing shakily for some time on its spraddled legs, the calf more or less collapses into the grass, but though her whole body is tense with awareness of it she never looks at it. She has not moved at all. And Mat himself has not moved. Into the tensely quieted space between them the yellow leaves fall.

  Finally Mat gets up and turns away. But instead of starting back the way he came, now that he has done what he came to do, he goes on into the woods. He has got ahead of his plans. There is nothing else that he intended to do today. He is going on now for the pleasure of the going. Since leaving the cow and the calf, he has continued to make an effort to be quiet. He picks his way with care, walking slowly along the flatter ground above the bluff. Now and then to his left there is an opening among the treetops and he can see down out of the woods to the river and the fields in the bottoms, and those openings keep him aware of being on a height and on a verge.

  The age of the woods varies with the lay of the ground. On some of the gentler slopes the trees are young, and in these places there are neat piles of rock, showing that once, where trees are now, there were crops, and the rocks were picked up out of the furrows and carried to the edges of the field and put down. Those steep fields did not last long. Mat believes or imagines he worked in these places as a boy. He knows he is bound to have worked in some of them, but it is hard now to be exact about which ones. The character they took from human use is gone from them. The trees have wholly claimed them. The piled rocks, covered with lichens and moss, have grown natural again.

  He comes to where a stream has cut its way into the hill. The ground tilts sharply as the bluffs turn in to the crease of the ravine, and here the woods is old. In the face of the bluff on the far side of the ravine there is a sort of amphitheater, its floor, relatively flat, affording a gathering place for a stand of great beeches, whose silver trunks branch into the gold masses of their leaves. Their brilliance, as Mat comes around the hill's shoulder, stops him for a moment before he crosses over and goes in under them.

  He sits at the foot of one of the big trees at the edge of the grove, leaning back against the trunk. He faces the way the stream falls, the stream passing below him and to his left, the grove of beeches extending back into its e
nclosure to his right. In front of him there is an opening through which he can see a part of a bend in the river-within the bend of the water the bend of the trees along the bank, within the bend of the trees straight rows of corn shocks in a field. Around him the woods is free of undergrowth, and the tree trunks rise cleanly up into the foliage. There is a little water running in the stream, so that here, in addition to the sound of the leaves falling, there is the steady trickling and splashing that the water makes coming down over the rocks. Mat sits with his back against the tree, his hat on the ground beside him, sorting out and examining one by one all the aspects and attractions of the place. It is one of those places that, many times in his life, he has thought would be a good place to rest, and now to be resting there makes him happy.

  Below, across the stream, there is a place where the slope gentles. And as he looks down there, Mat begins to see, scattered among the big trees, the familiar cairns of rocks. They mean that that place too was once cleared and broken and planted in crops. The trees on it are much older than he is. The work that was done there was done long before his time, and no doubt before his father's-the axe-work and the burning, and the jumper plows breaking for the first time the black leaf-mold. And before that the big trees standing without age or history, whose silence and whose shaking in the wind Mat imagines now, shivering as he does.

  And afterwards, now, the trees rise on the slope again. And the dead who made that clearing are as forgotten as the forest they destroyed. As he sits looking at the heaped rocks, guessing the little he is able to guess about them, there comes to Mat the sense of a lost and dead past, a past perfect, without even the force of a memory. And though he resisted the thought, fearing it would sadden him, it does not sadden him. There in the presence of the woods, in the sounds of the water and the leaves falling, he does not feel the loss of what is past.

  He feels the great restfulness of that place, its casual perfect order. It is the restfulness of a place where the merest or the most improbable accident is made a necessity and a part of a design, where death can only give into life. And Mat feels the difference between that restful order and his own constant struggle to maintain and regulate his clearings. Although the meanings of those clearings and his devotion to them remain firm in his mind, he knows without sorrow that they will end, the order he has made and kept in them will be overthrown, the effortless order of wilderness will return.

  The leaves brightly falling around him, Mat comes into the presence of the place. It lies clearly and simply before him, radiant as though a light in the ground has become visible. He has come into a wakefulness as quiet as a sleep.