A heavy dew had fallen, covering the trees and bushes along the sides of the road, and the sun glittered on the wet leaves. The mules were skittish and Daddy leaned back against the lines. They set their heads high and pranced sideways.
“I’ll cure you of that nonsense when I get a load behind you,” Daddy told them.
Uncle Burley stood up, slack-kneed against the jolt of the wagon, and rolled a cigarette, singing,
“Down along the woodland, through the hills and by the shore,
“You can hear the rattle, the rumble and the roar . . .”
After he rolled the cigarette he lit it and sat down again, dangling his feet over the edge of the hay frame.
Grandpa sat beside us, watching the land open in front of the wagon and close behind it, his eyes on it as if it had some movement that only he knew about and could see. The land was what he knew, and it comforted him to look at it. Since he’d been too old to work we’d noticed that he spent more and more of his time watching it, forgetting what was going on around him. Now and then he turned away from it to speak to us of his death, as if hearing himself talk about it could make it real, and turned back to his watching again to be comforted. His hands held the cane across his lap, the skin brown and thin over the knuckles and blue veins.
When we pulled into the hayfield Gander was already there with his team hitched to the rake. “It’s too wet,” he called to us when we stopped. “We’ll have to wait for the dew to dry off.”
He and Daddy walked across the field together, picking up wisps of hay and twisting them in their hands to test the moisture. After they came back we sat on the wagon and talked. Once in a while Gander or Daddy got up to see if the hay had dried, but it was past ten o’clock before we could begin work.
Gander drove the rake, putting the hay in windrows. And Daddy and Uncle Burley and I followed him with pitchforks, shocking it. We sweated; the wind blew dust and chaff into our faces and down our necks, and it stuck to the sweat and stung. Now and then we’d see a meadowlark fly up and whistle—a clear cool sound, like water—and drop back into the stubble.
Before long Uncle Burley began to sing. He’d gather a fork load of hay and as he lifted it onto the shock sing, “Ohhhhhhh, ‘down along the woodland . . .’ ” And as he strained at the fork again: “Ohhhhhhh, ‘through the hills and by the shore . . .’ ”
“You must be happy,” Daddy said.
“I was thinking about the good old days,” Uncle Burley said, “when I was a teamster for Barnum and Bailey’s circus. You didn’t know about that, did you?”
“Never heard of it before,” Daddy said.
Uncle Burley had invented the story about driving a team for Barnum and Bailey to tell to Brother and me when we were little, and all of us had heard it a hundred times. But when the work got hard he’d usually tell it again to make us laugh, and because he enjoyed hearing it himself. He said he’d driven a team of eight black horses with silver harness and red plumes on their bridles. His team had drawn the calliope at the head of all the parades, and it had been a glorious sight. He told about the girl bareback riders on their white horses and the tightrope walkers and the trapeze men and the lion tamers. Finally he got fired, he said, because he whipped one of the elephants singlehanded in a fair fight. He tied the elephant’s trunk to his tail and ran him around in a circle until he passed out from dizziness. Barnum and Bailey told him that he was the best teamster they’d ever had, but they just couldn’t stand for him mistreating their elephants.
Daddy said he supposed it must make Uncle Burley awfully sad at times to have such fine memories of his past.
Uncle Burley shook his head. “I tell you, back in those days when I had three flunkies to polish my black boots and brush my red forked-tail coat, I never would have believed that I’d end up here, sweating on the handle of a pitchfork. It’s enough to make a grown man cry.”
While we worked Grandpa sat in the shade at the edge of the field, nodding off to sleep, and waking up to carry us a fresh jug of water when we needed one.
“Look at him sleep,” Uncle Burley said. “He’s living the good life, ain’t he? When I get that old I want somebody to wake me up every once in a while just so I can go back to sleep again.”
“I reckon so,” Daddy said.
“I reckon so. Sleep and fish. That’s all I’ll do. I’ll switch back and forth from maple shade to sycamore shade. And when it’s chilly I’ll sleep in the sun.”
Gander called dinnertime. We fed and watered the teams and went to the house. Gander filled the washpans with water and we washed our hands, then sat at the kitchen table while Mandy Loyd brought the food to us. She was young enough to have been Gander’s daughter—slender and well made, and always smiling though she never talked much when we were there. It seemed strange to me that she could have married anybody as old and ugly and one-eyed as Gander. And he must have wondered about it too, because he was jealous of her and he kept her at home most of the time. It made him uncomfortable to have other men in his house; when we ate dinner with him he always clammed up, and nobody ever felt free to joke or laugh. We ate without talking except to ask for the food, feeling as uncomfortable as Gander, and hurrying to finish the meal. Only Grandpa felt free enough to compliment Mandy on her cooking. And she smiled and thanked him.
We went back to work, and Grandpa sat in the shade again, and slept, and woke up to bring us water.
“I wish he’d stay awake,” Uncle Burley said. “It makes the shade look too cool and good when I see him sleeping in it.”
In the middle of the afternoon when Grandpa was bringing the jug from the well we saw him stagger a little. He steadied himself with the cane and came on; but when he handed the jug to us and Daddy asked him if he was all right he said he’d had a dizzy spell. He looked pale, and it would be a long time before we could quit for the day, so Daddy told me to walk home with him.
He told Grandpa that Uncle Burley had broken the handle out of his pitchfork and he was sending me to get another one. “Do you want to go along with Nathan? You’ll feel better when you get home and rest a while.”
Grandpa said he’d go with me, and we started up the hill, stopping every couple of hundred yards for him to rest. Once when we stopped he said, “An old man’s not worth a damn. He might as well be knocked in the head.”
He rested, and we went on again. He climbed the hill almost as fast as a young man, ashamed that I had to wait on him, until the tiredness caught up with him and he had to stop to rest.
When we came up out of the woods, the bottom spread out below us, and I could look back into Gander’s hayfield where they were loading one of the wagons. From that distance the three men looked like dolls, but I could tell them apart: Daddy on top of the load, taking the hay as they pitched it to him, placing it and tramping on it; Gander leaning backward against the weight of his loaded fork, his head tilted, favoring the good eye; Uncle Burley making the whole thing into as much of a joke as the heat and strain of the work would allow, the joke ready in the set of his shoulders and in the way he walked from one shock to another as the wagon moved across the field. On the other side of the river the hills were blue, as if the sky came down in front of them.
When we got to Grandpa’s spring we stopped to drink.
The water of the spring came from a notch in the rock just under the brow of the hill, and the land sloped steeply around it. The grove of oaks that stood there made the hollow a kind of room where it was always shady and cool in summer, filled with the sound of water running.
Grandpa sat on a ledge of the rock, and I dipped the drinking cup full of water and carried it to him. He drank, then held the cup in his hands, looking at the spring.
“That’s a good vein of water,” he said. “Nobody ever knew it to go dry.”
I thought of the spring running there all the time, while the Indians hunted the country and while our people came and took the land and cleared it; and still running while Grandpa’s grandfathe
r and his father got old and died. And running while Grandpa drank its water and waited his turn. When I thought of it that way I knew I was waiting my turn too. But that didn’t seem real. It was too far away to think about. And I saw how it would have been unreal to Grandpa for so long, and how it must have grieved him when it had finally come close enough to be known.
Grandpa had owned his land and worked on it and taken his pride from it for so long that we knew him, and he knew himself, in the same way that we knew the spring. His life couldn’t be divided from the days he’d spent at work in his fields. Daddy had told us we didn’t know what the country would look like without him at work in the middle of it; and that was as true of Grandpa as it was of Daddy. We wouldn’t recognize the country when he was dead.
After he rested we started toward the house again. We got to the top of the slope above the spring, and Grandpa stopped, holding the cane off the ground, his mouth open, staring off in the direction of the house.
“What’s the matter?” I asked him.
Then he fell. He hit the ground limp, and the wind caught his hat and rolled it down the hill.
I straightened him out and knelt beside him, rubbing his hands and speaking to him. But I couldn’t bring him to. The wind whistled through the grass, and the sky was hot and blue, too quiet and lonely to let him die.
I called his name, but he didn’t stir. I picked him up in my arms and I carried him home.
Down in the Valley Where the Green Grass Grows (1930)
YOU WOULD think a fellow whose paunch was bigger than his ass would take the precaution of underdrawers. Or suspenders. Or bib overalls. Big Ellis didn’t, of course. He never thought of precautions until too late. After it was too late he could always tell you what the right precaution would have been if only he had thought of it. “Burley,” he would say, “I see the point. I’ve got my sights dead on it.” But he saw it going away, from behind. And so when he was a young man, and had grown to his full girth, his pants as a rule were either half on or he was holding them with one hand to keep them from falling off.
Big was late getting married. Marriage was a precaution he didn’t think of until his mother died and left him alone to cook and housekeep for himself. And then he really began to hear the call of matrimony.
He was quite a dancer in his young days. You would think at first it was the funniest thing you ever saw. The fiddle music would carry him clean out of his head, and there he would be, swinging his partner like she didn’t weigh anything, with his hair in his eyes, his shirttail half out, sweating like a horse, his pants creeping down, and that one hand from time to time jerking them back up. But if you paid attention to him, you would soon see that he really was a dancer. He was a smooth mover, a big man but light on his feet. His feet had ways of going about their business as if he himself didn’t know what they were up to. They were answering the music, you see, and not just the caller. He could really step it off. He could cut a shine.
He did all right in his socializing until he got his eye set on a girl, and then he would get shy and awkward and tongue-tied. He would figure then that he needed to get her cornered in some clever and mannerly way that would be beyond his abilities. And he would come up with some of the damnedest, longest-way-around schemes such as nobody ever thought of before and were always well worth knowing about. He edged up to a girl one time at the Fourth of July and said, “I know a girl’s about the prettiest thing ever I looked at,” and was struck dumb when she said, “Who?” He wrote one a love letter in his outrageous pencil-writing and signed it “A Friend.” He brought one a live big catfish and held it out to her like it was gold-plated, and never offered so much as to skin it. Those times, I have to say, he was not very serious. What he had in his mind then was sport. As you might call it.
When he began to shine up to Annie May Cordle with the honorable intention of marrying her if she would have him, he outdid himself for judgment. She was about as near the right match for him as he could have found. But he went about the business as perfectly hind-end-foremost as you would have expected. For a while he just hung around her every time he got a chance, looking as big-eyed and solemn as a dying calf. If she looked at him or said anything to him, he turned red and grinned with more teeth than a handsaw and hitched up his pants with both hands.
After he got his crop sold that winter, Big did what he usually would do. He took it in his head to trade off the team of mules he already had, maybe adding a few dollars to boot, for a better team. He always thought he got “a good deal” on “a better team,” and that was why he never in his life owned a team that was better than passable. In fact he was too big-hearted and generous, especially if he’d had a drink or two, to be any account at all as a trader. Somebody always took his old team and his money, and he wound up with a team just a teensy bit better or worse than what he had before. And so of course he was always wanting to trade.
By springtime sure enough he had his new team, a rabbity pair of three-year-old red mules, not above fifteen hands. Dick and Buck. They sort of matched, and he was proud of them, though they were not hardly what you would call well broke.
The weather got warm. We needed rain, and then we got a showery day that was about what the doctor ordered and made us feel good. The next day it faired up. The ground being too wet to work and the day fine, I walked over to Big’s to see what I could put him up to. He was a good one to wander about with on such a day. He was a good companion, always ready for whatever you needed him for. I thought we might drop down to the river and fish a while, maybe.
But when I got to his place he was hitching his new team to the sled. He was going to take a bunch of broken tools to the blacksmith shop in town to get them fixed. It was never any trouble at Big’s to find broken tools, which wasn’t because he worked all that hard. He just used things hard, or he used them for purposes they weren’t meant for. He treated wood the same as steel. He had piled onto the sled a plow with a broken handle, a hoe with a broken handle, a grubbing hoe with no handle, a broken doubletree, and other such, too big a load to take in his old car.
“Why don’t you use the wagon?” I said.
“Oh,” he said. “I forgot. Here. Hold the lines a minute.”
He went into the wagon shed and came back rolling a wagon wheel with two broken spokes.
So there was nothing for it but the sled, which wasn’t the best vehicle on a gravel road, and with no tongue, behind a team the least bit touchous. And especially that little Buck mule, if I had pegged him right, was just waiting for a good reason to demonstrate his speed. He was the reason Big asked me to hold the lines while he went to get the wagon wheel.
Big had left himself a place to stand in amongst the load. I made myself a place and turned up a five-gallon bucket to sit on. Big told the mules to come up, gave the lines a little flip, and we started off with pretty much of a jerk.
When we hit the gravel, which we would be on all the way to town, you could see that both mules became deeply concerned. They got into a little jiggling trot and backed their ears so as not to miss anything that might be gaining on them. And the runners did screech and batter something awful. But Big was stout enough to hold them and two more like them, if his old lines and bridles held together. Just looking at the back of him, I could see how pleased he was with his team, showing spirit the way they were. And they matched, you know. To some people, and Big was one, a bad team that matches is better than a good team that don’t.
So we went stepping pretty lively into Port William. I unloaded the sled at the blacksmith shop while Big kept hold of the lines. And then we started back. There was no chance of loafing a while in town, for the mules couldn’t be trusted to stand tied. One backfire from somebody’s automobile and they might’ve disappeared off like two mosquitoes.
But when we got to the mouth of our lane, Big drove right on by. I saw then what he had on his mind. His real business for that morning wasn’t to take a bunch of broken tools to town. He was going on out
by the Cordles’ place. If Annie May was where she could see, she was going to have the benefit of a look at that well-matched, high-spirited team of mules, and of old Big standing there holding the lines, calm as George Washington, everything under control.
The trouble was, by the time we were closing in on the Cordles’, after the extra mile or so, the mules had lost their fine edge. They had worn down to a civilized manner of doing business. They were walking along, nodding their heads and letting their ears wag like a seasoned team. Looked like they both together didn’t have an ounce of drama left in ’em, and the large impression Big was wanting to make had fallen by the wayside.
So without making a sudden motion I got on my knees and skimmed up a rock about the size of a pocket watch and settled back onto my bucket.
Big, among other things, was a lucky creature. For when we came in sight of the Cordles’ house down in the pretty little swale where their farm was, there was Annie May, sure enough, looking sweet as a rose, right out on the front porch. She was churning, working the dasher up and down at a steady gait. She looked patient, gazing off at the sky. Maybe the butter was slow to come and she had been at it a while.
I was wanting to help Big all I could, of course. I waited until I was sure Annie May had seen us coming, until we could almost hear the dasher chugging in the churn, and then I shied that little rock almost under the Buck mule’s tail where he felt it the most.
He lost no time in taking offense. He clamped his tail down and humped up in the back, which notified the Dick mule that the end of the world was at hand. They shot off both at once like their tails were afire.
I swear I had no idea I was going to need a handhold as quick as I did. Just as I was starting backwards off of my bucket, I grabbed a double handful of Big’s pants, and down they came.
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 31