The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

  Finally, looking out to where the road from upriver came over the rise into town, they saw a team and wagon coming. Presently they recognized Thad Coulter’s team, a pair of mare mules, one black and the other once gray and now faded to white. They were driven by Thad’s daughter, wearing a sunbonnet, a sun-bleached blue cotton dress, and an apron.

  “It’s Martha Elizabeth,” Nancy said.

  And Aunt Cass said, “Poor child.”

  “Well,” Nancy said, relieved, “she’ll take him home.”

  When Martha Elizabeth came to where Thad was, she stopped the mules and got down. So far as they could see from the house, she did not plead with him. She did not say anything at all. She took hold of him, turned him toward the wagon, and led him to it. She held onto him as he climbed unsteadily up into the wagon and sat down on the spring seat, and then, gathering her skirts in one hand, she climbed up and sat beside him. And all the while she was gentle with him. After­ward and always, my grandmother remembered how gentle Martha Elizabeth had been with him.

  Martha Elizabeth turned the team around, and the Feltner women watched the wagon with its troubled burden go slowly away.

  Ben, who had meant to go to the field where his hands were at work, did not leave the house as long as Thad was waiting about outside. He saw no point in antagonizing Thad when he did not have to, and so he sat down with a newspaper.

  When he knew that Thad was gone and had had time to be out of sight, Ben got up and put on his hat and went out. He was worried about the state both of Thad’s economy and of his mind. He thought he might find some of the other Coulters in town. He didn’t know that he would, but it was Saturday, and he probably would.

  The Feltner house stood, as it still does, in the overlap of the northeast corner of the town and the southwest corner of Ben’s farm, which spread away from the house and farmstead over the ridges and hollows and down the side of the valley to the river. There was a farmstead at each of the town’s four corners. There was, as there still is, only the one road, which climbed out of the river valley, crossed a mile of ridge, passed through the town, and, after staying on the ridge another half mile or so, went back down into the valley again. For most of its extent, at that time, it was little more than a wagon track. Most of the goods that reached the Port William merchants still came to Dawes Landing by steamboat and then up the hill by team and wagon. The town itself consisted of perhaps two dozen houses, a church, a blacksmith shop, a bank, a barber shop, a doctor’s office, a hotel, two saloons, and four stores that sold a variety of merchandise from groceries to dry goods to hardware to harness. The road that passed through town was there only as a casual and hardly foreseen result of the comings and goings of the inhabitants. An extemporaneous town government had from time to time caused a few loads of creek rock to be hauled and knapped and spread over it, and the townspeople had flung their ashes into it, but that was all.

  Though the houses and shops had been connected for some time by telephone lines carried overhead on peeled and whitewashed locust poles, there was as yet not an automobile in the town. There were times in any year still when Port William could not have been reached by an automobile that was not accompanied by a team of mules to pull it across the creeks and out of the mud holes.

  Except for the telephone lines, the town, as it looked to Ben Feltner on that July morning seventy-eight years ago, might have been unchanged for many more years than it had existed. It looked older than its history. And yet in Port William, as every­where else, it was already the second decade of the twentieth century. And in some of the people of the town and the community surrounding it, one of the characteristic diseases of the twentieth century was making its way: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were someplace else. This disease had entered into Thad Coulter and into Abner. In Thad it was fast coming to crisis. If Port William could not save him, then surely there was another place that could. But Thad could not just leave, as Abner had; Port William had been too much his life for that. And he was held also by his friendship for Ben Feltner, and for himself as a man whom Ben Feltner had ­befriended—­a friendship that Ben Feltner seemed now to have repudiated and made hateful. Port William was a stumbling block to Thad, and he must rid himself of it somehow.

  Ben, innocent of the disease that afflicted his friend yet mortally implicated in it and not knowing it, made his way down into the town, looking about in order to gauge its mood, for Port William had its moods, and they needed watching. More energy was generated in the community than the work of the community could consume, and the surplus energy often went into fighting. There had been cuttings and shootings enough. But usually the fighting was more primitive, and the combatants simply threw whatever projectiles came to hand: corncobs, snowballs, green walnuts, or rocks. In the previous winter, a young Coulter by the name of Burley had claimed that he had had an eye blackened by a frozen horse turd thrown, so far as he could determine, by a Power of the Air. But the place that morning was quiet. Most of the crops had been laid by and many of the farmers were already in town, feeling at ease and inclined to rest now that their annual battle with the weeds had ended. They were sitting on benches and kegs or squatting on their heels under the shade trees in front of the stores, or standing in pairs or small groups among the hitched horses along the sides of the road. Ben passed among them, greeting them and pausing to talk, enjoying himself, and all the while on the lookout for one or another of the Coulters.

  Martha Elizabeth was Thad’s youngest, the last at home. She had, he thought, the levelest head of any of his children and was the best. Assuming the authority that his partiality granted her, she had at fifteen taken charge of the household, supplanting her mother, who was sickly, and her three older sisters, who had married and gone. At seventeen, she was responsible beyond her years. She was a tall, raw-boned girl, with large hands and feet, a red complexion, and hair so red that, in the sun, it appeared to be on fire.

  “Everybody loved Martha Elizabeth,” my grandmother said. “She was as good as gold.”

  To Thad it was a relief to obey her, to climb into the wagon under the pressure of her hand on his arm and to sit beside her as she drove the team homeward through the rising heat of the morning. Her concern for him gave him shelter. Holding to the back of the seat, he kept himself upright and, for the moment, rested in being with her.

  But when they turned off the ridge onto the narrower road that led down into the little valley called Cattle Pen and came in sight of their place, she could no longer shelter him. It had long been, to Thad’s eye, a pretty farm—­a hundred or so acres of slope and ridge on the west side of the valley, the lower, gentler slopes divided from the ridge land by a ledgy bluff that was wooded, the log house and other buildings occupying a shelf above the creek bottom. Through all his years of paying for it, he had aspired toward it as toward a Promised Land. To have it, he had worked hard and long and deprived himself, and Rachel, his wife, had deprived herself. He had worked alone more often than not. Abner, as he grew able, had helped, as the girls had, also. But Abner had been reserved for something better. Abner was smart—­too smart, as Thad and Rachel agreed, without ever much talking about it, to spend his life farming a hillside. Something would have to be done to start him on his way to something better, a Promised Land yet more distant.

  Although he had thought the farm not good enough for Abner, Thad was divided in his mind; for himself he loved it. It was what he had transformed his life into. And now, even in the morning light, it lay under the shadow of his failure, and he could not bear to look at it. It was his life, and he was no longer in it. Somebody else, some other thing that did not even know it, stood ready to take possession of it. He was ashamed in its presence. To look directly at it would be like looking Martha Elizabeth full in the eyes, which he could not do either. And his shame raged in him.

  When she stopped in the lot in front of the barn and helped him down, he started unhitching the team. But she took hold of his a
rm and drew him away gently toward the house.

  “Come on, now,” she said. “You’ve got to have you something to eat and some rest.”

  But he jerked away from her. “Go see to your mammy!”

  “No,” she said. “Come on.” And she attempted again to move him toward the house.

  He pushed her away, and she fell. He could have cut off his hand for so misusing her, and yet his rage at himself included her. He reached into the wagon box and took out a short hickory stock with a braid of rawhide knotted to it. He shook it at her.

  “Get up,” he said. “Get yonder to that house ’fore I wear you out.”

  He had never spoken to her in such a way, had never imagined himself doing so. He hated what he had done, and he could not undo it.

  The heat of the day had established itself now. There was not a breeze anywhere, not a breath. A still haze filled the valley and redoubled the light. Within that blinding glare he occupied a darkness that was loud with accusing cries.

  Martha Elizabeth stood at the kitchen door a moment, looking back at him, and then she went inside. Thad turned back to the team then, unhitched them, did up the lines, and led the mules to their stalls in the barn. He moved as if dreaming through these familiar motions that had now estranged themselves from him. The closer he had come to home, the more the force of his failure had gathered there to exclude him.

  And it was Ben Feltner who had barred the door and left him without a friend. Ben Feltner, who owed nothing, had turned his back on his friend, who now owed everything.

  He said aloud, “Yes, I’ll come back sober, God damn you to Hell!”

  He lifted the jug out of the white mule’s manger, pulled the cob from its mouth, and drank. When he lowered it, it was empty. It had lasted him three days, and now it was empty. He cocked his wrist and broke the jug against an upright.

  “Well, that does for you, old holler-head.”

  He stood, letting the whiskey seek its level in him, and felt himself slowly come into purpose; now he had his anger full and clear. Now he was summoned by an almost visible joy.

  He went to the house, drank from the water bucket on the back porch, and stepped through the kitchen door. Rachel and Martha Elizabeth were standing together by the cookstove, facing him.

  “Thad, honey, I done fixed dinner,” Rachel said. “Set down and eat.”

  He opened the stairway door, stepped up, and took down his pistol from the little shelf over the door frame.

  “No, now,” Martha Elizabeth said. “Put that away. You ain’t got a use in this world for that.”

  “Don’t contrary me,” Thad said. “Don’t you say another damned word.”

  He put the pistol in his hip pocket with the barrel sticking up and turned to the door.

  “Wait, Thad,” Rachel said. “Eat a little before you go.” But she was already so far behind him that he hardly heard her.

  He walked to the barn, steadying himself by every upright thing he came to, so that he proceeded by a series of handholds on doorjamb and porch post and gatepost and tree. He could no longer see the place but walked in a shifting aisle of blinding light through a cloud of darkness. Behind him now was almost nothing. And ahead of him was the singular joy to which his heart now beat in answer.

  He went into the white mule’s stall, unbuckled hame strap and bellyband, and shoved the harness off her back, letting it fall. He unbuckled the collar and let it fall. Again his rage swelled within him, seeming to tighten the skin of his throat, as though his body might fail to contain it, for he had never before in his life allowed a mule’s harness to touch the ground if he could help it. But he was not in his life now, and his rage pleased him.

  He hooked his finger in the bit ring and led the mule to the drinking trough by the well in front of the barn. The trough was half an oak barrel, nearly full of water. The mule wanted to drink, but he jerked her head up and drew her forward until she stood beside the trough. The shorn stubble of her mane under his hand, he stepped up onto the rim. Springing, he cast himself across the mule’s back, straddled her, and sat upright as darkness swung around him. He jerked hard at the left rein.

  “Get up, Beck,” he said.

  The mule was as principled as a martyr. She would have died before she would have trotted a step, and yet he urged her forward with his heel. Even as the hind feet of the mule lifted from their tracks, the thought of Martha Elizabeth formed itself within the world’s ruin. She seemed to rise up out of its shambles, like a ghost or an influence. She would follow him. He needed to hurry.

  On the fringe of the Saturday bustle in front of the business houses, Ben met Early Rowanberry and his little boy, Arthur. Early was carrying a big sack, and Art a small one. They had started out not long after breakfast; from the log house on the ridgetop where the Rowanberrys had settled before Kentucky was a state, they had gone down the hill, forded the creek known as Sand Ripple, and then walked up the Shade Branch hollow through the Feltner Place and on to town. Early had done his buying and a little talking, had bought a penny’s worth of candy for Art, and now they were starting the long walk back. Ben knew that they had made the trip on foot to spare their mules, though the sacks would weigh sorely on their shoulders before they made it home.

  “Well, Early,” Ben said, “you’ve got a good hand with you today, I see.”

  “He’s tol’ble good company, Ben, and he packs a little load,” Early said.

  Ben liked all the Rowanberrys, who had been good neighbors to him all his life, and Early was a better-than-average Rowanberry—­a quiet man with a steady gaze and a sort of local fame for his endurance at hard work.

  Ben then offered his hand to Art, who shyly held out his own. Ben said, “My boy, are you going to grow up to be a wheelhorse like your pap?” and Art answered without hesitation, “Yes, sir.”

  “Ah, that’s right,” Ben said. And he placed his hand on the boy’s unladen shoulder.

  The two Rowanberrys then resumed their homeward journey, and Ben walked on down the edge of the dusty road into town.

  Ben was in no hurry. He had his mission in mind and was somewhat anxious about it, but he gave it its due place in the order of things. Thad’s difficulty was not simple; whatever it was possible to do for him could not be done in a hurry. Ben passed slowly through the talk of the place and time, partaking of it. He liked the way the neighborhood gathered into itself on such days. Now and then, in the midst of the more casual conversation, a little trade talk would rouse up over a milk cow or a pocketknife or a saddle or a horse or mule. Or there would be a joke or a story or a bit of news, uprisings of the town’s interest in itself that would pass through it and die away like scurries of wind. It was close to noon. It was hot even in the shade now, and the smells of horse sweat and horse manure had grown strong. On the benches and kegs along the storefronts, pocketknives were busy. Profound meditations were coming to bear upon long scrolls of cedar or poplar curling backward over thumbs and wrists and piling over shoetops.

  Somebody said, “Well, I can see the heat waves a-rising.”

  Somebody else said, “Ain’t nobody but a lazy man can see them heat waves.”

  And then Ben saw Thad’s cousin, Dave Coulter, and Dave’s son, Burley, coming out of one of the stores, Dave with a sack of flour on his shoulder and Burley with a sack of meal on his. Except for his boyish face and grin, Burley was a grown man. He was seventeen, a square-handed, muscular fellow already known for the funny things he said, though his elders knew of them only by hearsay. He and his father turned down the street toward their wagon, and Ben followed them.

  When they had hunched the sacks off their shoulders into the wagon, Ben said, “Dave?”

  Dave turned to him and stuck out his hand. “Why, howdy, Ben.”

  “How are you, Dave?”

  “’Bout all right, I reckon.”

  “And how are you, Burley?”

  Dave turned to his boy to see that he would answer properly; Burley, grinning, said, “Do
ing about all right, thank you, sir,” and Dave turned back to Ben.

  “Had to lay in a little belly timber,” he said, “’gainst we run plumb out. And the boy here, he wanted to come see the sights.”

  “Well, my boy,” Ben said, “have you learned anything worth­while?”

  Burley grinned again, gave a quick nod, and said, “Yessir.”

  “Oh, hit’s an educational place,” Dave said. “We hung into one of them educational conversations yonder in the store. That’s why we ain’t hardly going to make it home by dinnertime.”

  “Well, I won’t hold you up for long,” Ben said. And he told Dave as much as he had understood of Thad’s trouble. They were leaning against the wagon box, facing away from the road. Burley, who had gone to untie the mules, was still standing at their heads.

  “Well,” Dave said, “hit’s been norated around that Abner weren’t doing just the way he ought to. Tell you the truth, I been juberous about that loan proposition ever since Thad put his name to it. Put his whole foothold in that damned boy’s pocket is what he done. And now you say it’s all gone up the spout.”

  “He’s in a serious fix, no question about it.”

  “Well, is there anything a feller can do for him?”

  “Well, there’s one thing for certain. He was drunk when he came to see me. He was cussing and raring. If you, or some of you, could get him sober, it would help. And then we could see if we can help him out of his scrape.”

  “Talking rough, was he?”

  “Rough enough.”

  “I’m sorry, Ben. Thad don’t often drink, but when he does he drinks like the Lord appointed him to get rid of it all.”

  Somebody cried, “Look out!”

  They turned to see Thad and the white mule almost abreast of them. Thad was holding the pistol.

  “They said he just looked awful,” my grandmother said. “He looked like death warmed over.”