When the next year came, they began at the beginning, and though the times had not improved, they improved themselves. They bought a few hens and a rooster from Josie Braymer. They bought a second cow. They put in a garden. They bought two shoats to raise for meat. Mary learned to preserve the food they would need for winter. When the cows freshened, she learned to milk. She took a small bucket of cream and a few eggs to Port William every Saturday night and used the money she made to buy groceries and to pay on their debts.
Slowly she learned to imagine where she was. The ridge named for Walter Cotman’s family is a long one, curving out toward the river between the two creek valleys of Willow Run and Katie’s Branch. As it comes near to the river valley it gets narrower, its sides steeper and more deeply incised by hollows. When Elton and Mary Penn were making their beginning there, the uplands were divided into many farms, few of which contained as much as a hundred acres. The hollows, the steeper hillsides, the bluffs along the sides of the two creek valleys were covered with thicket or woods. From where the hawks saw it, the ridge would have seemed a long, irregular promontory reaching out into a sea of trees. And it bore on its back crisscrossings of other trees along the stone or rail or wire fences, trees in thickets and groves, trees in the houseyards. And on rises of ground or tucked into folds were the gray, paintless buildings of the farmsteads, connected to one another by lanes and paths. Now she thought of herself as belonging there, not just because of her marriage to Elton but also because of the economy that the two of them had made around themselves and with their neighbors. She had learned to think of herself as living and working at the center of a wonderful provisioning: the kitchen and garden, hog pen and smokehouse, henhouse and cellar of her own household; the little commerce of giving and taking that spoked out along the paths connecting her household to the others; the two creeks in their valleys on either side; and all this at the heart of the weather and the world.
On a bright, still day in the late fall, after all the leaves were down, she had stood on the highest point and had seen the six smokes of the six houses rising straight up into the wide downfalling light. She knew which smoke came from which house. It was like watching the rising up of prayers or some less acknowledged communication between Earth and Heaven. She could not say to herself how it made her feel.
She loved her jars of vegetables and preserves on the cellar shelves, and the potato bin beneath, the cured hams and shoulders and bacons hanging in the smokehouse, the two hens already brooding their clutches of marked eggs, the egg basket and the cream bucket slowly filling, week after week. But today these things seemed precious and far away, as if remembered from another world or another life. Her sickness made things seem arbitrary and awry. Nothing had to be the way it was. As easily as she could see the house as it was, she could imagine it empty, windowless, the tin roof blowing away, the chimneys crumbling, the cellar caved in, weeds in the yard. She could imagine Elton and herself gone, and the rest of them—Hardy, Hample, Cotman, and Quail—gone too.
Elton could spend an hour telling her—and himself—how Walter Cotman went about his work. Elton was a man in love with farming, and she could see him picking his way into it with his understanding. He wanted to know the best ways of doing things. He wanted to see how a way of doing came out of a way of thinking and a way of living. He was interested in the ways people talked and wore their clothes.
The Hamples were another of his studies. Jonah Hample and his young ones were almost useless as farmers because, as Elton maintained, they could not see all the way to the ground. They did not own a car because they could not see well enough to drive—“They need to drive something with eyes,” Elton said—and yet they were all born mechanics. They could fix anything. While Daisy Hample stood on the porch clucking about the weeds in their crops, Jonah and his boys and sometimes his girls, too, would be busy with some machine that somebody had brought for them to fix. The Hample children went about the neighborhood in a drove, pushing a fairly usable old bicycle that they loved but could not ride.
Elton watched Braymer, too. Unlike his brother and Walter Cotman, Braymer liked to know what was going on in the world. Like the rest of them, Braymer had no cash to spare, but he liked to think about what he would do with money if he had it. He liked knowing where something could be bought for a good price. He liked to hear what somebody had done to make a little money and then to think about it and tell the others about it while they worked. “Braymer would be a trader if he had a chance,” Elton told Mary. “He’d like to try a little of this and a little of that, and see how he did with it. Walter and Tom like what they’ve got.”
“And you don’t like what you’ve got,” Mary said.
He grinned big at her, as he always did when she read his mind. “I like some of it,” he said.
At the end of the summer, when she and Elton were beginning their first tobacco harvest in the neighborhood, Tom Hardy said to Elton, “Now, Josie Braymer can outcut us all, Elton. If she gets ahead of you, just don’t pay it any mind.”
“Tom,” Elton said, “I’m going to leave here now and go to the other end of this row. If Josie Braymer’s there when I get there, I’m going home.”
When he got there Josie Braymer was not there, and neither were any of the men. It was not that he did not want to be bested by a woman; he did not want to be bested by anybody. One thing Mary would never have to do was wonder which way he was. She knew he would rather die than be beaten. It was maybe not the best way to be, she thought, but it was the way he was, and she loved him. It was both a trouble and a comfort to her to know that he would always require the most of himself. And he was beautiful, the way he moved in his work. It stirred her.
She could feel ambition constantly pressing in him. He could do more than he had done, and he was always looking for the way. He was like an axman at work in a tangled thicket, cutting and cutting at the brush and the vines and the low limbs, trying to make room for a full swing. For this year he had rented corn ground from Josie Tom’s mother down by Goforth, two miles away. When he went down with his team to work, he would have to take his dinner. It would mean more work for them both, but he was desperate for room to exert himself. They were poor as the times, they saw more obstacles than openings, and yet she believed without doubt that Elton was on his way.
It was not his ambition—his constant, tireless, often exhilarated preoccupation with work—that troubled her. She could stay with him in that. She had learned that she could do, and do well and gladly enough, whatever she would have to do. She had no fear. What troubled her were the dark and mostly silent angers that often settled upon him and estranged him from everything. At those times, she knew, he doubted himself, and he suffered and raged in his doubt. He may have been born with this doubt in him, she sometimes imagined; it was as though his soul were like a little moon that would be dark at times and bright at others. But she knew also that her parents’ rejection had cost him dearly. Even as he defied them to matter to him, they held a power over him that he could not shake off. In his inability to forgive them, he consented to this power, and their rejection stood by him and measured him day by day. Her parents’ pride was social, belonging, even in its extremity, to their kind and time. But Elton’s pride was merely creaturely, albeit that of an extraordinary creature; it was a creature’s naked claim on the right to respect itself, a claim that no creature’s life, of itself, could invariably support. At times he seemed to her a man in the light in daily struggle with a man in the dark, and sometimes the man in the dark had the upper hand.
Elton never felt that any mistake was affordable; he and Mary were living within margins that were too narrow. He required perfection of himself. When he failed, he was like the sun in a cloud, alone and burning, furious in his doubt, furious at her because she trusted in him though he doubted. How could she dare to love him, who did not love himself? And then, sometimes accountably, sometimes not, the cloud would move away, and he would light up e
verything around him. His own force and intelligence would be clear within him then; he would be skillful and joyful, passionate in his love of order, funny and tender.
At his best, Elton was a man in love—with her but not just with her. He was in love too with the world, with their place in the world, with that scanty farm, with his own life, with farming. At those times she lived in his love as in a spacious house.
Walter Cotman always spoke of Mary as Elton’s “better half.” In spite of his sulks and silences, she would not go so far as “better.” That she was his half, she had no doubt at all. He needed her. At times she knew with a joyous ache that she completed him, just as she knew with the same joy that she needed him and he completed her. How beautiful a thing it was, she thought, to be a half, to be completed by such another half! When had there ever been such a yearning of halves toward each other, such a longing, even in quarrels, to be whole? And sometimes they would be whole. Their wholeness came upon them as a rush of light, around them and within them, so that she felt they must be shining in the dark.
But now that wholeness was not imaginable; she felt herself a part without counterpart, a mere fragment of something unknown, dark and broken off. The fire had burned low in the stove. Though she still wore her coat, she was chilled again and shaking. For a long time, perhaps, she had been thinking of nothing, and now misery alerted her again to the room. The wind ranted and sucked at the house’s corners. She could hear its billows and shocks, as if somebody off in the distance were shaking a great rug. She felt, not a draft, but the whole atmosphere of the room moving coldly against her. She went into the other room, but the fire there also needed building up. She could not bring herself to do it. She was shaking, she ached, she could think only of lying down. Standing near the stove, she undressed, put on her nightgown again, and got into the bed.
She lay chattering and shivering while the bedclothes warmed around her. It seemed to her that a time might come when sickness would be a great blessing, for she truly did not care if she died. She thought of Elton, caught up in the day’s wind, who could not even look at her and see that she was sick. If she had not been too miserable, she would have cried. But then her thoughts began to slip away, like dishes sliding along a table pitched as steeply as a roof. She went to sleep.
When she woke, the room was warm. A teakettle on the heating stove was muttering and steaming. Though the wind was still blowing hard, the room was full of sunlight. The lamp on the narrow mantel shelf behind the stove was filled and clean, its chimney gleaming, and so was the one on the stand by the bed. Josie Tom was sitting in the rocker by the window, sunlight flowing in on the unfinished long embroidery she had draped over her lap. She was bowed over her work, filling in with her needle and a length of yellow thread the bright corolla of a jonquil—or “Easter lily,” as she would have called it. She was humming the tune of an old hymn, something she often did while she was working, apparently without awareness that she was doing it. Her voice was resonant, low, and quiet, barely audible, as if it were coming out of the air and she, too, were merely listening to it. The yellow flower was nearly complete.
And so Mary knew all the story of her day. Elton, going by Josie Tom’s in the half-light, had stopped and called.
She could hear his voice, raised to carry through the wind: “Mrs. Hardy, Mary’s sick, and I have to go over to Walter’s to plow.”
So he had known. He had thought of her. He had told Josie Tom.
Feeling herself looked at, Josie Tom raised her head and smiled. “Well, are you awake? Are you all right?”
“Oh, I’m wonderful,” Mary said. And she slept again.
Turn Back the Bed (1941)
TO SOME, it seemed that Ptolemy Proudfoot didn’t laugh like a Christian. He laughed too loud and too long, and his merriment seemed a little too self-sufficient—as if, had there been enough funny stories and enough breath to laugh at them with, he might not need to go to Heaven.
What tickled him as much as anything were his own stories about his grandfather, Mark Anthony Proudfoot, known as Ant’ny and later, of course, as Old Ant’ny. Old Ant’ny was, you might say, the Tol Proudfoot of his generation, with a few differences, the main one being that whereas Tol was childless, Old Ant’ny sired a nation of Proudfoots. Once his progeny had grown up and acquired in-laws and produced scions of their own, they seemed as numerous as the sand that is upon the seashore.
The great events of Tol’s boyhood were the family gatherings that took place three or four times a year at Old Ant’ny’s place above Goforth in the Katy’s Branch valley. By that time Ant’ny was in his old age. He had always been a big man, and now, with less activity and no loss of appetite, he had grown immense. He sat at these meetings, as massive and permanent-seeming almost as the old log house itself, holding a cane in his hand, seldom stirring from the chair that one of his sons had constructed for him out of poplar two-by-fours. He sat erect and mostly in silence, looking straight ahead, his white beard reaching down to his fourth shirt button. Now and then he would say something in a rolling deep voice that whoever was in the room would stop and listen to. And now and then he would reach out with his cane and hook a passing grandson or great-grandson, whose name and the name of whose parents he would demand to know. But for the most part he sat in silence, his patriarchal influence extending to a radius of about six feet, while round him the fruit of his loins revolved, battering floor and walls, like a storm.
Old Ant’ny was a provider, and he did provide. He saw to it that twelve hogs were slaughtered for his own use every fall—and twenty-four hams and twenty-four shoulders and twenty-four middlings were hung in his smokehouse. And his wife, Maw Proudfoot, kept a flock of turkeys and a flock of geese and a flock of guineas, and her henhouse was as populous as a county seat. And long after he was “too old to farm,” Old Ant’ny grew a garden as big as some people’s crop. He picked and dug and fetched, and Maw Proudfoot canned and preserved and pickled and cured as if they had an army to feed—which they more or less did, for there were not only the announced family gatherings but always somebody or some few happening by, and always somebody to give something to.
The Proudfoot family gatherings were famous. As feasts, as collections and concentrations of good things, they were unequaled. Especially in summer there was nothing like them, for then there would be old ham and fried chicken and gravy, and two or three kinds of fish, and hot biscuits and three kinds of cornbread, and potatoes and beans and roasting ears and carrots and beets and onions, and corn pudding and corn creamed and fried, and cabbage boiled and scalloped, and tomatoes stewed and sliced, and fresh cucumbers soaked in vinegar, and three or four kinds of pickles, and if it was late enough in the summer there would be watermelons and muskmelons, and there would be pies and cakes and cobblers and dumplings, and milk and coffee by the gallon. And there would be, too, half a dozen or so gallon or half-gallon stone jugs making their way from one adult male to another as surreptitious as moles. For in those days the Proudfoot homeplace, with its broad cornfields in the creek bottom, was famous also for the excellence of its whiskey.
So of course these affairs were numerously attended. When the word went out to family and in-laws it was bound to be overheard, and people came in whose veins Proudfoot blood ran extremely thin, if at all. And there would be babble and uproar all day, for every door stood open, and the old house was not ceiled; the upstairs floorboards were simply nailed to the naked joists, leaving cracks that you could not only hear through but in places see through. Whatever happened anywhere could be heard everywhere.
The storm of feet and voices would continue unabated from not long after sunup until after sundown when the voice of Old Ant’ny would rise abruptly over the multitude: “Well, Maw, turn back the bed. These folks want to be gettin’ on home.” And then, as if at the bidding of some Heavenly sign, the family sorted itself into its branches. Children and shoes and hats were found, identified, and claimed; horses were hitched; and the tribes o
f the children of Old Ant’ny Proudfoot set out in their various directions in the twilight.
In himself and in his life, Tol Proudfoot had come a considerable way from the frontier independence and uproariousness of Old Ant’ny’s household. He was a gentler, a more modest, perhaps a smarter man than his grandfather. And he had submitted, at least somewhat, to the quieting and ordering influence of Miss Minnie. But there was something in Tol, in his spirit as well as in his memory, that hung back there in the time of those great family feasts, which had been a godsend to every boy, at least, who ever attended one.
By the time I came to know him, Tol was well along in years. He had become an elder of the community, and had recognized his memories, the good ones anyhow, as gifts, to himself and to the rest of us. His stories of Old Ant’ny and the high old family times were much in demand, not just because they were good to listen to in their own right, but because certain people enjoyed hearing—and watching—Tol laugh at them. Once he got tickled enough, you could never tell what would happen. He had broken the backs off half a dozen chairs, rearing back in them to laugh. Once, at an ice cream supper, he fell backward onto a table full of cakes.
My grandparents took me to a picnic one Sunday at the Goforth church where Tol and Miss Minnie went. After the morning service, the women spread the food out on tables under the big old oak trees in the churchyard, and then we gathered around and sang “Blessed Be the Tie That Binds,” and the minister gave thanks for the food, and we ate together, some finding places at the tables, some sitting in the shade of the trees, holding their plates on their laps.
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 40