The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

  But she did think, “It would be a shame to waste it,” and the thought put her in a quandary. For if she did not want to throw the whiskey away, neither did she want to put it back under the seat to be carried home and drunk by her wayward husband, from the mystery of whose being this bottle had emerged.

  And now Miss Minnie’s mind revolved in a curious metamorphosis from the great virtue of thriftiness to the much smaller virtue of romantic self-sacrifice. Her anger and disappointment at Tol as she now had discovered him to be only increased her love for him as she had thought him to be—­and as he might, in fact, become, if only she could save him from his addiction to the evil drug that she at that moment held in her hand. For such a man as he might be, she felt, she would do anything. She had read much of loyalties given and sacrifices made by the wives of drinking men. In her love for Tol, she had at times already wished to be capable of some legendary fidelity or sacrifice to make her worthy of her happiness in him. And by how much now was this wish magnified by her thought of Tol fallen and redeemed! “Oh,” she thought, “I will do it! I will say to the world I did it without hesitation.” She shifted as she might have shifted if she had wanted to look at something interesting off to the right-hand side of the road.

  She broke the paper seal and twisted out the cork. She put her nose carefully over the opening and sniffed the vile fumes. “Awful!” she thought. And the thought of its awfulness made her sacrifice more pleasing to her. She tilted the bottle and drew forth bravely half a mouthful and swallowed it.

  It was fire itself in her throat. If she had looked quickly enough, she thought, she would have seen a short orange flame protruding from her nose. Though she sternly suppressed the impulse to cough, there was no refusing the tears that filled her eyes.

  But then as the fiery swallow descended into her stomach, a most pleasing warmth, a warmth at once calming and invigorating, began to radiate from it. For a few minutes she bestowed upon this warmth the meditation that it seemed to require, and then she tried another swallow, a more wholehearted one. The effect this time was less harsh, because less surprising, and the radiance even warmer and more reassuring than before. She felt strangely ennobled by the third, as if the rewards of her sacrifice were already accruing to her. The radiance within her had begun to gleam also in a sort of nimbus around her. If the devil made sin attractive, then she would have to admit that he had done a splendid job with Old Darling.

  She sat half turned away from Tol, and leaning back so that she sat also a little behind him. He was still departed in his thoughts, no more aware of what she was doing than were the occupants of the occasional buggies and wagons that they met.

  Miss Minnie sipped from time to time as they drove along, finding her sacrifice not nearly so difficult as she had expected. In fact, she was amazed at how quickly she was getting rid of the repulsive contents of the bottle. It occurred to her that perhaps she should drink more slowly, for soon there would be none left.

  Suddenly she experienced a motion that recalled her to her school days when she had swung in swings and ridden on seesaws. But the likeness was only approximate, for Redbird, the buggy, the road, and indeed the whole landscape had just executed a motion not quite like any she had ever known.

  “Whoo!” said Miss Minnie.

  Tol had been humming along, figuring and refiguring how much he might get for his crop in view of the various speculations and surmises he had heard in town. When Miss Minnie said “Whoo!” it was news to him. “What?” he said.

  “Do that again,” she said. “Oh! Whoo!”

  He said, “What?”

  “Old Darling,” she said. “Whoo!”

  “Mam?” Tol Proudfoot said.

  And then he saw the bottle in her hand. For a moment he thought he was going to laugh, and then he thought he wasn’t. “Oh, Lordy!” he said. “Oh, Lordy Lord! Oh, Lord!”

  Now as they went around a curve in the road they met another couple in a buggy. Miss Minnie leaned forward and called out to them momentously the name of Gallagher. “A vote for Gallagher,” she cried, “is a vote for the little man!”

  “Come up, Redbird,” said Tol Proudfoot.

  But as luck would have it, speeding up only brought them more quickly face-to-face with the next buggy coming down the road.

  “Gallagher!” cried Miss Minnie. “A fair shake for the little man is a fair shake for the little woman!”

  “Miss Minnie,” Tol said, “I believe you’ve had about all you need of that.”

  He held out his hand for the bottle, and was surprised to see, when she handed it to him, how little was left.

  “Take it, then!” she said. “Drunkard!”

  “Drunkard?” he said, and then put out his hand again to steady her, for she was attempting to stand up, the better to point her finger at him. “No, mam. I’m not no drunkard. You know better.”

  “Then what,” Miss Minnie said, pointing to the incontrovertible evidence, “were you doing with that?”

  “Lambs,” Tol said.

  “You get little lambs drunk,” Miss Minnie declared. “Oh, my dear man, you are the limit.”

  “For when they’re born on the cold nights,” Tol said. “Sometimes it’ll help the weak ones live.”

  “Ha!” said Miss Minnie.

  Tol said no more. Miss Minnie spoke only to urge Gallagher upon the people they met—­though, fortunately, they met only a few.

  By the time they went through Port William, she had ceased to call out, but she was saying in a rather loud voice and to nobody in particular that though she was not sure, she was sure the Gallagher boy had never taken a drink in his life—­and though she was not sure, she was sure that he at least understood that now that women had the vote, there would be no more liquor drinking in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Her voice quivered patriotically.

  When they drove in beside the house at last, and Redbird gladly stopped in front of the buggy shed, Tol stepped down and turned to help Miss Minnie, who stood, somewhat grandly spurning his offer, and fell directly into his arms.

  Tol carried her to the house, helped her to remove her hat and coat and to lie down on the sofa in the living room. He covered her with the afghan, built up the fire, and returned to the barn to do his chores.

  The house was dark when he came back in. Miss Minnie was lying quietly on the sofa with her forearm resting across her brow. Tol tiptoed in and sat down.

  After a little while, Miss Minnie said, “Was it really just for the lambs?”

  Tol said, “Yessum.”

  And then Miss Minnie’s crying jag began. Regrets flew at her from all sides, and she wept and wept. Of all her sorrows the worst was for her suspicion of Tol. But she mourned also, for his sake and her own, the public display that she had made of herself. “I surely am the degradedest woman who ever lived,” she said. “I have shamed myself, and most of all you.”

  Tol sat beside her for a long time in the dark, patting her with his big hand and saying, “Naw, now. Naw, now. You didn’t do no such of a thing.”

  It was, as Miss Minnie would later say, a lovely time.

  When at last she grew quiet and sleepy, Tol helped her to bed and waited beside her until her breath came in little snores. And then he went down to the kitchen and cooked himself a good big supper, for it had been a hard day.

  This was, oddly, a tale that Miss Minnie enjoyed telling. “It was my only binge,” she would say, giggling a little. And she liked especially to quote herself: “I surely am the degradedest woman who ever lived.”

  She said, “Mr. Proudfoot was horrified. But after it was over, he just had to rear back and laugh. Oh, he was a man of splendid qualities!”

  The Lost Bet (1929)

  AFTER PTOLEMY PROUDFOOT and Miss Minnie bought their Model A and partly quit using their buggy, they got around in the neighborhood more than they used to. But only a little more. Tol was never the master of the Model A that he was of a horse; if the car increased by a little bi
t the frequency of their going about, it increased their range almost not at all—­except once, which is another story. For Tol and Miss Minnie, the Model A was an experiment—­the only one they ever made—­and it did not completely replace their horse and buggy, which Tol kept and continued to use for shorter trips until his death. He liked horses better than he liked the Model A, and he drove them better, too.

  Before and after the advent of the Model A, Tol and Miss Minnie lived their lives almost entirely within a radius of about six miles. They cleaned up after dinner every Saturday and drove to Port William to take their cream and eggs, and to buy the few things they needed that they did not grow or make for themselves. All their business never took more than an hour, but they made an afternoon of it, visiting and talking with every­body else who had come in for the same purposes, and always getting back home in plenty of time to milk and feed.

  On Sunday morning they went down the hill to the Goforth church, usually going back again for the evening services. And once a month Miss Minnie attended the all-day meeting of the Missionary Society. And that was most of their going, except when they went to a wedding or a funeral or to a neighbor’s house to visit or help with the work.

  And except for an occasional trip, which Tol sometimes made alone, to Hargrave or to the stockyards in Louisville. He sold his tobacco at Hargrave, where there was also a small stockyard. But Tol was a pretty shrewd businessman, and when he had enough stock to justify the haulage—­as when he shipped his lambs in June, and his finished steers in ­November—­he liked to try the market at the Bourbon Stockyards in Louisville. The prices were noticeably better there than at Hargrave, but that was not all the reason. The rest of it was that Tol enjoyed making the trip with Sam Hanks, the trucker who hauled the stock. And Sam Hanks found it necessary to admit that he enjoyed making the trip with Tol. Sam Hanks was Miss Minnie’s favorite nephew, a lean, seldom-speaking man, who might go all day and not speak ten words, just doing his work and watching and being amused. He was a little amused at whatever happened—­at least in his younger days. His major amusements were baseball and Tol. Over the years he collected a lot of stories about Tol, and he liked to tell them.

  Tol would be up long before daylight on the appointed day, getting the steers or the lambs penned and ready to load. And then he would feed and milk and eat breakfast and clean up, so as to be ready when, maybe still before daylight, Sam’s truck would rattle up the driveway past the house into the barn lot, and back up to the loading chute.

  Tol was a fellow who was neat as a pin in all his work, but who was to about the same degree careless of his own appearance. His little farm was almost as clean and orderly as Miss Minnie’s kitchen, which was immaculate. When he drove his team to the field they were as well groomed and harnessed as if he were driving them to town. And he used a plow or a mowing machine as precisely as some people use a comb. But he wore his clothes, as Sam Hanks said, the way a hog wears mud.

  When he left the house to load his stock, he would be as clean and neat as Miss Minnie’s repeated instructions and inspections could make him. He would be washed and shaved and combed, dressed in his best everyday clothes, which would be spotless, as stiff with starch as if made of tin. By the time the stock were loaded, all the creases would be crisscrossed with wrinkles; there would be mud and manure on his shoes and britches and maybe on his shirt; he would have a loose cuff or suspender; after much head scratching, his cap or hat would be on crooked and some stray swatch of hair would be hanging in his eyes or sticking out over one ear.

  After they got to the stockyards and got unloaded, Tol followed a procedure that in its general outlines never varied. And Sam always went along in a state of alert expectancy, because in its details it was never twice the same. Say it was in the fall. They would go back through the yards to where Tol’s steers were penned, and lean against the gate to wait for the buyers to come around. But it wasn’t just the buyers, Sam knew, that Tol was waiting for. Tol always had good steers—­good in their individual quality, uniform as a lot, and well finished, showing a lot of bloom—­and he liked to hear them praised. And so he stood there, leaning proprietarily against the gate, watching the drovers and the commission men and the farmers go by. And when one of them stopped to look into the pen at Tol’s cattle, Tol would look at him in such a way that the fellow nearly always asked, “Those your steers?”

  And Tol would say, “Yes sir!” as if it ought to have been obvious.

  And then the fellow would say something like “Mighty nice” or “Well, they’re the right kind.”

  And Tol would say, “Yessir!” in a way that showed he knew the fellow had made pretty much of an understatement—­which sometimes caused the fellow to try to say something even better and more intelligent about the cattle, and sometimes did not.

  If it did not, Tol would turn the conversation to the subject of the fellow himself—­what his name was, where he was from, whom he had married, how his family was, how much rain he’d had, how his crops had turned off, and so on. Tol loved that kind of visiting, and he talked to everybody he met whether the body in question wanted to be talked to or not. Sam followed these conversations with as much interest as he followed baseball. The thing was that Tol mostly liked everybody, and because he liked them he was genuinely interested in everything about them, and he pumped information out of them, Sam figured, that would be news to their wives. Tol never forgot them or anything he learned about them, and he was always glad to see them when he met them again. He had got acquainted with a lot of people in this way. But Sam knew that on these trips, because they were his adventures, Tol much preferred strangers to acquaintances.

  When the cattle were sold and the talking was finished, they went to the office for their checks. Except for the few times when Tol thought his stock had been graded too low, Sam never heard him complain about the size of his check. He appeared to accept it simply as the necessary completion of a business in which he had ceased to have any live interest the moment the cattle ceased to belong to him.

  And then Tol would invite Sam to be his guest at a certain saloon where, if it was fall, they would eat fried oysters, which Tol loved. The meal lasted an hour or two. They stood at the bar and ate, and Tol talked to whatever stranger happened to be standing next to him. Now, for Sam, the quality of the interest changed, for here Tol was less likely to be talking to a farmer and more likely to be talking to some city fellow who would not appreciate a stranger’s interest in his personal affairs. Sam had seen Tol get into some pretty tough spots. He was never sure that Tol ever realized that he was in a tough spot when he was in one; and Tol always got out of whatever tough spot he was in, and he never got out of it either by fighting or by shutting up. It was better than baseball, when Sam could maintain his detachment; when he couldn’t, it was worse.

  After the oysters, Tol would always have something or other he wanted to buy that he couldn’t buy closer to home. And even if it wasn’t but one thing, shopping for it would take exactly all the rest of the time they had.

  The time I am going to tell you about, Tol was looking for navy beans. He and Miss Minnie always grew a big garden and put up most of the stuff they needed, but something they never tried to grow was navy beans. And so one of Tol’s regular fall chores was to buy a two-bushel bag of them, which was usually enough to see them through the winter—­some to keep and some to give away, according to the first rule of the Proudfoot household.

  This year, Tol had found no navy beans in Port William and none in Hargrave. And so he made them the business of his and Sam’s annual cattle-selling trip to Louisville. Sam followed him through the Haymarket, a couple of steps behind, picking his teeth, watching Tol with the patient interest with which a man already satisfied awaits further satisfaction.

  Navy beans were scarce in Louisville, too, it turned out, for Tol visited all the likely places he knew without luck, and then they worked their way out into strange territory.

  They finally w
ent into a store that was not the sort of feed-and-seed establishment usually patronized by farmers, but a grocery store obviously set up to cater to the city trade—­and, by the look of it, prosperous. There was a long wall of shelves full of canned goods, and a long counter in front of that, and in front of that a long row of wire baskets of fresh produce: potatoes, turnips, parsnips, eggs, cabbages, apples, and pears. In the back there were three fellows in suits—­drummers, Sam thought—­standing by a big iron stove, for it was cold that day. And behind the counter, talking to them, was a dapper fellow with a round face and round eyeglasses, his hair parted in the middle, garters on his sleeves, and a cigar in his mouth.

  When Tol walked in with Sam behind him, the drummers and the clerk quit talking and looked. And they kept on looking. By that time, Sam said, Tol had been beyond the reach and influence of Miss Minnie long enough to look unusual. He looked as tall and wide as the door. He wore a sheepskin coat, unbuttoned, that flared out at the back and sides, giving the impression of great forward momentum. Half his shirttail was out. The bill of his next-best winter cap hovered between his right eye and his right ear. His britches legs were stuffed into the top of a pair of gum boots plastered with manure. He had bought a big sack of hard candy as a gift for Miss Minnie, and the twisted neck of the sack now stuck out as though he carried a setting goose in his pocket.

  The three drummers and the proprietor looked at Tol. They watched him come back through the store, and then the drummers looked at each other and grinned. The proprietor watched Tol until he stopped and faced him across the counter.