The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

  And so when I came out of the house one morning after breakfast and found Braymer Hardy sitting in his pickup truck in front of my barn, I wasn’t expecting any news. Braymer was an old friend of my father’s; he was curious to see what Flora and I would do with the long-abandoned Harford Place that we had bought and were fixing up, and sometimes he visited. His way was not to go to the door and knock. He just drove in and stopped his old truck at the barn and sat looking around until somebody showed up.

  “Well, you ain’t much of a Catlett,” he said, in perfect good humor. “Marce Catlett would have been out and gone two hours ago.”

  “I do my chores before breakfast,” I said, embarrassed by the lack of evidence. My grandfather Catlett would, in fact, have been out and gone two hours ago.

  “But,” Braymer said in an explanatory tone, as if talking to himself, “I reckon your daddy is a late sleeper, being as he’s an office man. But that Wheeler was always a shotgun once he got out,” he went on, clearly implying, and still in excellent humor, that the family line had reached its nadir in me. “But maybe you’re a right smart occupied of a night, I don’t know.” He raked a large cud of tobacco out of his cheek with his forefinger and spat.

  He looked around with the air of a man completing an inspection, which is exactly what he was doing. “Well, it looks like you’re making a little headway. You got it looking some better. Here,” he said, pawing among a litter of paper, tools, and other odds and ends on top of the dashboard and then on the seat beside him, “I brought you something.” He eventually forceped forth an old newspaper page folded into a tight rectangle the size of a wallet and handed it through the truck window. “You ought to have it. It ain’t no good to me. The madam, you know, is hell for an antique. She bought an old desk at a sale, and that was in one of the drawers.”

  I unfolded the paper and read the headline: BEN FELTNER, FRIEND TO ALL, SHOT DEAD IN PORT WILLIAM.

  “Ben Feltner was your great-granddaddy.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “I remember him. They never made ’em no finer. The last man on earth you’d a thought would get shot.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “Thad Coulter was a good kind of feller, too, far as that goes. I don’t reckon he was the kind you’d a thought would shoot somebody, either.”

  He pushed his hat back and scratched his forehead. “One of them things,” he said. “They happen.”

  He scratched his head some more and propped his wrist on top of the steering wheel, letting the hand dangle. “Tell you,” he said, “there ain’t a way in this world to know what a human creature is going to do next. I loaned a feller five hundred dollars once. He was a good feller, too, wasn’t a thing wrong with him far as I knew, I liked him. And dogged if he didn’t kill himself fore it was a week.”

  “Killed himself?” I said.

  “Killed himself,” Braymer said. He meditated a moment, looking off at his memory of the fellow and wiggling two of the fingers that hung over the steering wheel. “Don’t you know,” he said, “not wishing him no bad luck, but I wished he’d a done it a week or two sooner.”

  I laughed.

  “Well,” he said, “I know you want to be at work. I’ll get out of your way.”

  I said, “Don’t be in a hurry,” but he was starting the truck and didn’t hear me. I called, “Thanks!” as he backed around. He raised his hand, not looking at me, and drove away, steering with both hands, with large deliberate motions, as if the truck were the size of a towboat.

  There was an upturned feed bucket just inside the barn door. I sat down on it and unfolded the paper again. It was the front page of the Hargrave Weekly Express, flimsy and yellow, nearly illegible in some of the creases. It told how, on a Saturday morning in the July of 1912, Ben Feltner, who so far as was known had had no enemies, had been killed by a single shot to the head from a .22 caliber revolver. His assailant, Thad Coulter, had said, upon turning himself in to the sheriff at Hargrave soon after the incident, “I’ve killed the best friend I ever had.” It was not a long article. It told about the interment of Ben Feltner and named his survivors. It told nothing that I did not know, and I knew little more than it told. I knew that Thad Coulter had killed himself in jail, shortly after the murder. And I knew that he was my grandfather Catlett’s first cousin.

  I had learned that much, not from anyone’s attempt, ever, to tell me the story, but from bits and pieces dropped out of conversations among my elders, in and out of the family. Once, for instance, I heard my mother say to my father that she had always been troubled by the thought of Thad Coulter’s lonely anguish as he prepared to kill himself in the Hargrave jail. I had learned what I knew, the bare outline of the event, without asking questions, both fearing the pain that I knew surrounded the story and honoring the silence that surrounded the pain.

  But sitting in the barn that morning, looking at the old page opened on my knees, I saw how incomplete the story was as the article told it and as I knew it. And seeing it so, I felt incomplete myself. I suddenly wanted to go and see my grand­father. I did not intend to question him. I had never heard him speak so much as a word about his father’s death, and I could not have imagined breaking his silence. I only wanted to be in his presence, as if in his presence I could somehow enter into the presence of an agony that I knew had shaped us all.

  With the paper folded again in my shirt pocket, I drove to Port William and turned in under the old maples beside the house. When I let myself in, the house was quiet, and I went as quietly as I could to my grandfather’s room, thinking he might be asleep. But he was awake, his fingers laced together on top of the bedclothes. He had seen me drive in and was watching the door when I entered the room.

  “Morning,” I said.

  He said, “Morning, son,” and lifted one of his hands.

  “How’re you feeling?”

  “Still feeling.”

  I sat down in the rocker by the bed and told him, in Braymer’s words, the story of the too-late suicide.

  My grandfather laughed. “I expect that grieved Braymer.”

  “Is Braymer pretty tight?” I asked, knowing he was.

  “I wouldn’t say ‘tight,’ but he’d know the history of every dollar he ever made. Braymer’s done a lot of hard work.”

  My grandmother had heard us talking, and now she called me. “Oh, Andy!”

  “I’ll be back,” I said, and went to see what she wanted.

  She was sitting in the small bedroom by the kitchen where she had always done her sewing and where she slept now that my grandfather was ill. She was sitting by the window in the small cane-bottomed rocking chair that was her favorite. Her hands were lying on her lap and she was not rocking. I knew that her arthritis was hurting her; otherwise, at that time of day, she would have been busy at something. She had medicine for the arthritis, but it made her feel unlike herself; up to a certain point of endurability, she preferred the pain. She sat still and let the pain go its way and occupied her mind with thoughts. Or that is what she said she did. I believed, and I was as sure as if she had told me, that when she sat alone that way, hurting or not, she was praying. Though I never heard her pray aloud in my life, it seems to me now that I can reproduce in my mind the very voice of her prayers.

  She had called me in to find out things, which was her way. I sat down on the stool in front of her and submitted to examination. She wanted to know what Flora was doing, and what the children were doing, and when I had seen my mother, and what she had been doing. She asked exacting questions that called for much detail in the answers, watching me intently to see that I withheld nothing. She did not tolerate secrets, even the most considerate ones. She had learned that we sometimes omitted or rearranged facts to keep her from worrying, but her objection to that was both principled and passionate. If we were worried, she wanted to worry with us; it was her place, she said.

  After a while, she quit asking questions but continued to look at me. And then she said, “You’
re thinking about something you’re not saying. What is it? Tell Granny.”

  She had said that to me many times in the thirty years I had known her. By then, I thought it was funny. But if I was no longer intimidated, I was still compelled. In thirty years I had never been able to deceive her when she was looking straight at me. I could have lied, but she would have known it and then would have supposed that somebody was sick. I laughed and handed her the paper out of my pocket.

  “Braymer Hardy brought that to me this morning.”

  She unfolded it, read a little of the article but not all, and folded it back up. Her hands lay quiet in her lap again, and she looked out the window, though obviously not seeing what was out there that morning. Another morning had come to her, and she was seeing it again through the interval of fifty-three years.

  “It’s a wonder,” she said, “that Mat didn’t kill Thad Coulter that morning.”

  I said, “Granddad?”

  And then she told me the story. She told it quietly, looking through the window into that July morning in 1912. Her hands lay in her lap and never moved. The only effect her telling had on her was a glistening that appeared from time to time in her eyes. She told the story well, giving many details. She had a good memory, and she had lived many years with her mother-in-law, who also had a good one. I have the impression that they, but not my grandfather, had pondered together over the event many times. She spoke as if she were seeing it all happen, even the parts of it that she had in fact not seen.

  “If it hadn’t been for Jack Beechum, Mat would have killed him,” my grandmother said.

  That was the point. Or it was one of the points—­the one, perhaps, that she most wanted me to see. But it was not the beginning of the story. Adam and Eve and then Cain and Abel began it, as my grandmother depended on me to know. Even in Thad Coulter’s part of the story, the beginning was some years earlier than the July of 1912.

  Abner Coulter, Thad’s only son, had hired himself out to a grocer in Hargrave. After a few years, when he had (in his own estimation) learned the trade, he undertook to go into business for himself in competition with his former employer. He rented a building right on the courthouse square. He was enabled to do this by a sizable sum of money borrowed from the Hargrave bank on a note secured by a mortgage on his father’s farm.

  And here Thad’s character enters into the story. For Thad not only secured his son’s note with the farm that was all he had in the world and that he had only recently finished paying for, but he further committed himself by bragging in Port William of his son’s new status as a merchant in the county seat.

  “Thad Coulter was not a bad man,” my grandmother said. “I believed then, and I believe now, that he was not a bad man. But we are all as little children. Some know it and some don’t.”

  She looked at me to see if I was one who knew it, and I nodded, but I was thirty then and did not know it yet.

  “He was as a little child,” she said, “and he was in serious trouble.”

  He had in effect given his life and its entire effort as hostage to the possibility that Abner, his only son, could be made a merchant in a better place than Port William.

  Before two years were out, Abner repaid his father’s confidence by converting many small private fritterings and derelictions into an undisguisable public failure and thereupon by riding off to somewhere unknown on the back of a bay gelding borrowed ostensibly for an overnight trip to Port William. And so Thad’s fate was passed from the reckless care of his son to the small mercy of the law. Without more help than he could confidently expect, he was going to lose his farm. Even with help, he was going to have to pay for it again, and he was close to sixty years old.

  As he rode home from his interview with the Hargrave banker, in which the writing on the wall had been made plain to him, he was gouging his heel urgently into his mule’s flank. Since he had got up out of the chair in the banker’s office, he had been full of a desire as compelling as thirst to get home, to get low to the ground, as if to prevent himself from falling off the world. For the country that he had known all his life and had depended on, at least in dry weather, to be solid and steady underfoot had suddenly risen under him like a wave.

  Needing help as he did, he could not at first bring himself to ask for it. Instead, he spent most of two days propped against a post in his barn, drinking heavily and talking aloud to himself about betrayal, ruin, the cold-heartedness of the Hargrave bankers, and the poor doings of damned fools, meaning both Abner and himself. And he recalled, with shocks of bitterness that only the whiskey could assuage, his confident words in Port William about Abner and his prospects.

  “I worked for it, and I come to own it,” he said over and over again. “Now them will own it that never worked for it. And him that stood on it to mount up into the world done run to perdition without a patch, damn him, to cover his ass or a rag to hide his face.”

  When his wife and daughter begged him to come into the house, he said that a man without the sense to keep a house did not deserve to be in one. He said he would shelter with the dogs and hogs, where he belonged.

  The logical source of help was Ben Feltner. Ben had helped Thad to buy his farm—­had signed his note and stood behind him. Ben was his friend, and friendship mattered to Ben; it may have mattered to him above all. But Thad did not go to Ben until after his second night in the barn. He walked to Ben’s house in Port William early in the morning, drunk and unsteady, his mind tattered and raw from repeated plunges through the thorns and thistles of his ruin.

  Ben was astonished by the look of him. Thad had always been a man who used himself hard, and he had grown gaunt and stooped, his mouth slowly caving in as he lost his teeth. But that morning he was also soiled, sagging, unshaved and uncombed, his eyes bloodshot and glary. But Ben said, “Come in, Thad. Come in and sit down.” And he took him by the arm, led him in to a chair, and sat down facing him.

  “They got me, Ben,” Thad said, the flesh twitching around his eyes. “They done got me to where I can’t get loose.” His eyes glazed by tears that never fell, he made as much sense of his calamity as he was able to make: “A poor man don’t stand no show.” And then, his mind lurching on, unable to stop, he fell to cursing, first Abner, and then the Hargrave bank, and then the ways of the world that afforded no show to a poor man.

  Ben listened to it all, sitting with his elbow on the chair arm and his forefinger pointed against his cheek. Thad’s language and his ranting in that place would not have been excusable had he been sober. But insofar as Thad was drunk, Ben was patient. He listened attentively, his eyes on Thad’s face, except that from time to time he looked down at his beard as if to give Thad an opportunity to see that he should stop.

  Finally Ben stopped him. “Thad, I’ll tell you what. I don’t believe I can talk with you anymore this morning. Go home, now, and get sober and come back. And then we’ll see.”

  Thad did not have to take Ben’s words as an insult. But in his circumstances and condition, it was perhaps inevitable that he would. That Ben was his friend made the offense worse—­far worse. In refusing to talk to him as he was, Ben, it seemed to Thad, had exiled him from friendship and so withdrawn the last vestige of a possibility that he might find anywhere a redemption for himself, much less for his forfeited land. For Thad was not able then to distinguish between himself as he was and himself as he might be sober. He saw himself already as a proven fool, fit only for the company of dogs and hogs. If he could have accepted this judgment of himself, then his story would at least have been different and would perhaps have been better. But while he felt the force and truth of his own judgment, he raged against it. He had fled to Ben, hoping that somehow, by some means that he could not imagine, Ben could release him from the solitary cage of his self-condemnation. And now Ben had shut the door.

  Thad’s whole face began to twitch and his hands to move aimlessly, as if his body were being manipulated from the inside by some intention that he could not cont
rol. Patches of white appeared under his whiskers. He said, “I cuss you to your damned face, Ben Feltner, for I have come to you with my hat in my hand and you have spit in it. You have throwed in your lot with them sons of bitches against me.”

  At that Ben reached his limit. Yet even then he did not become angry. He was a large, unfearful man, and his self-defense had something of merriment in it. He stood up. “Now, Thad, my friend,” he said, “you must go.” And he helped him to the door. He did not do so violently or with an excess of force. But though he was seventy-two years old, Ben was still in hearty strength, and he helped Thad to the door in such a way that Thad had no choice but to go.

  But Thad did not go home. He stayed, hovering about the front of the house, for an hour or more.

  “It seemed like hours and hours that he stayed out there,” my grandmother said. She and my great-grandmother, Nancy, and old Aunt Cass, the cook, had overheard the conversation between Ben and Thad, or had overheard at least Thad’s part of it, and afterward they watched him from the windows, for his fury had left an influence. The house was filled with a quiet that seemed to remember with sorrow the quiet that had been in it before Thad had come.

  The morning was bright and still, and it was getting hot, but Thad seemed unable to distinguish between sun and shade. There had got to be something fluttery or mothlike about him now, so erratic and unsteady and unceasing were his movements. He was talking to himself, nodding or shaking his head, his hands making sudden strange motions without apparent reference to whatever he might have been saying. Now and again he started resolutely toward the house and then swerved away.

  All the while the women watched. To my grandmother, remembering, it seemed that they were surrounded by signs that had not yet revealed their significance. Aunt Cass told her after­ward, “I dreamed of the dark, Miss Margaret, all full of the sound of crying, and I knowed it was something bad.” And it seemed to my grandmother, as she remembered, that she too had felt the house and town and the bright day itself all enclosed in that dreamed darkness full of the sounds of crying.