As it would happen, I grew up with a prejudice in favor of what I learned from the two of them. Like my grandfather Catlett, I needed land to hold on to, even if only just a little farm, marginal and rough, here in our home country. And I have needed to do the work that such a place requires. I have held to the land and kept at the work, and the work has kept me reminded of those two old men whose ways I learned when I was a boy. I knew Grandpa only when he was old; I recognize him in myself now that I am old. And when I bend to my work now and feel the protest in my back and hips, I think, “Dick!”
Part Two
NOW AS, looking back, I see myself standing with my grip in my hand, watching the wagon pull away toward the lot gate and the barns and sheds beyond, the little fluster of snow having sped away over the horizon, I feel again the wind’s suddenly surrounding chill, and I know that I once huddled between Dick and Grandpa in the joy of trust and warmth.
The unobstructed wind bit my face and fingers, rattling everything loose, and I ran, wagging the grip, around the back of the house, up the two steps into the screened back porch, letting the door bang behind me, and then through the kitchen door into the dimmer indoor light. I set down my grip and said, “Whoo! It’s windy out!”
My grandmother turned from the stove and hurried over to hug me.
“Oh lord, child, you’re frozen to death!” she said, feeling the cold in my clothes.
Suddenly hurrying, she snatched off my gloves and chafed my hands between both of hers. She flung down one of my hands and with the other led me over close to the stove. She shoved two new sticks of wood into the firebox and opened the draft, whereupon the fire fairly bellowed with exuberance, and I caught a fragrant whiff of the fresh locust wood starting to burn. She dragged a chair out from the table, made me sit down, took off my toboggan, attempted to make my hair lie down, and then began unbuttoning my mackinaw, interfering with my efforts to do the same. Her manner was utterly proprietary, as if I were perhaps a dog or a doll. It was a performance that somewhat embarrassed me, even when none of my friends was around to see it, though now, from a distance of so many years, I watch with amusement, and also with gratitude.
“Take those overshoes off,” she said, “so your feet can get warm.”
When I was too slow in taking them off she yanked them off herself and put them under the stove.
“Are you hungry?” she asked and, without giving me time to answer, thrust a cold biscuit into each of my hands.
And then, as I knew she was going to do, she swooped upon me again and felt of my arms and legs to see if I was getting warm, discovering in the process that I was still the skinny boy I had always been.
“You don’t have enough fat on you for a frying-size chicken,” she said. “You’d have to stand twice in the same place to make a shadow.”
But then, satisfied at last that I was getting warm, and that in spite of my skinniness I was all right and likely to survive, Grandma fitted herself back into her morning’s work. She sat down and resumed peeling potatoes for dinner. She picked up the potatoes one at a time from an old wash pan on a chair facing hers, peeling them rapidly, letting the peelings drop all in one piece onto a newspaper spread open in her lap, and placed the peeled potatoes in a stewpot of water on the table beside her. While she worked I was content to sit in the warmth and watch, pleased that just the two of us were there.
I loved that old kitchen with its rude furnishings, and I love the memory of it. Just inside the door I had come in there was a washstand with a water bucket and dipper, a wash pan, and a soap dish. The towel hanging above it from a nail in the door facing was half a flour sack, hemmed up, with a worked buttonhole in each end so that when one end got dirty the clean end could then be used. There was a large iron cooking stove, a cabinet with shelves, a large table bearing many coats of paint and a green-and-white-checkered oilcloth, and eight matching chairs, also deeply encrusted with paint. Four of the chairs were at the table, the others placed conveniently elsewhere. There were two large bins, one for flour, one for stove wood. They were painted like the table and chairs, and a boy could slide down their slanting tops. From a nail in the blistered wainscoting behind the stove hung a turkey wing broom that was used to sweep up ashes and such. Close by would be a gallon paint bucket of coal oil with corncobs soaking in it, to make quick work of starting a fire in the morning. The linoleum carpet was footworn and wet-mopped until it was black and tattery at the edges.
My father, who was anxious that Grandma should have help with her housework now that she was old, was always hiring somebody, some woman, white or black, to come and live in the room over the kitchen and help Grandma, but those women never lasted long. Grandma had her inviolable ways and opinions, and she could not keep herself at peace for very long with anybody. Her antipathies, like her affections, readily mounted to flood stage and flowed with a strong current. But she was full of memories and stories too, that went back to the Civil War and before. I loved to be with her when she was at peace and talkative, and I loved to watch her cook.
Rural electrification was on its way, I suppose, for it would soon arrive, but it had not arrived yet. On the back porch there was a large icebox that, when ice was available, preserved leftovers and cooled the milk in the summer. That and the battery-powered radio and the telephone were the only modern devices in the house. Its old economy of the farm household was still intact. The supply lines ran to the kitchen from the henhouse and garden, cellar and smokehouse, cropland and pasture. On the kitchen table were two quart jars of green beans, a quart jar of applesauce, and a pint jar of what I knew to be the wild black raspberries that abounded in the thickets and woods edges of that time. I thought, “Pie!”
“Are you going to make a pie?” I asked.
“Hmh!” she said. “Maybe. Would you like to have a pie?”
And I said, with my best manners, “Yes, mam.”
She was soon done with the potatoes. She shut the draft on the stove, taming the fire, changed the water on the potatoes, clapped a lid onto the pot, and set it on the stove to boil. She got out another pot, emptied the beans into it, added salt, some pepper, and a fine piece of fat pork. She was talking at large, commenting on her work, telling what she had learned from relatives’ letters and Christmas cards and from listening in on the party line. I was up and following her around by then, to make sure I got the benefit of everything.
She washed her hands at the washstand by the back door and dried them. I followed her into the cool pantry and watched as she measured out flour and lard and the other ingredients and began making the dough for a pie crust. She rolled out the dough to the right thickness, pressed it into a pie pan, and, holding the pan on the fingertips of her left hand, passed a knife around its edge to carve off the surplus dough.
As it would happen, the two of us would be standing in the same place in the same way on a late afternoon in the coming July, she making, I believe, a pie and I watching, after we had been told that my Uncle Andrew, my father’s older brother, her firstborn son, had been shot and before we learned that he was dead. And now in my mind this earlier memory seems invested somehow with foreknowledge of the later one. While Dorie Catlett was making her grandson a pie on that day near the end of 1943, granting him the pleasure of watching her make it and then of eating it, they were coming to grief, as she had come before but he had not.
As she went about her preparations for dinner, she was commenting to herself, with grunts of determination or approval, on her progress. I knew even then that it was a wonder to see her at her work, and I know it more completely now. Her kitchen would be counted a poor thing by modern standards. There was of course no electrical equipment at all. The cooking utensils, excepting the invincible iron skillet and griddle, were chipped or dented or patched. The kitchen knives were worn lean with sharpening. Everything was signed with the wear of a lifetime or more. She was a fine cook. She did not do much in the way of exact measurement. She seasoned to taste. She mixed by expe
rience and to the right consistency. The dough for a pie crust or biscuits, for instance, had to be neither too flabby nor too stiff; it was right when it felt right. She did not own a cookbook or a written recipe.
Meanwhile, she had prepared the raspberries, adding flour and sugar to the juice and heating it in a saucepan. Now she poured berries and juice into the dough-lined pan. She balled up the surplus dough, worked it briskly with her hands on the broken marble dresser top that she used for such work, sprinkled flour over it, rolled it flat, and then she sliced it rapidly into strips, which she laid in a beautiful lattice over the filling. As a final touch she sprinkled over the top a thin layer of sugar that in the heat of the oven would turn crisp and brown. And then she slid the pie into the oven.
She was being extravagant with the sugar for my sake, as I was more or less aware, and as I took for granted. But knowledge grows with age, and gratitude grows with knowledge. Now I am as grateful to her as I should have been then, and I am troubled with love for her, knowing how she was wrung all her life between her cherished resentments and her fierce affections. A peculiar sorrow hovered about her, and not only for the inevitable losses and griefs of her years; it came also from her settled conviction of the tendency of things to be unsatisfactory, to fail to live up to expectation, to fall short. She was haunted, I think, by the suspicion of a comedown always lurking behind the best appearances. I wonder now if she had ever read Paradise Lost. That poem, with its cosmos of Heaven and Hell and Paradise and the Fallen World, was a presence felt by most of her generation, if only by way of preachers who had read it. Whether or not she had read it for herself, the lostness of Paradise was the prime fact of her world, and she felt it keenly.
Once the pie was out of the way, she went ahead and made biscuit dough, flattened it with her rolling pin, cut out the biscuits, and laid them into the pans ready for the oven when the time would come.
She had cooked breakfast, strained the morning milk, made the beds, set the house to rights, washed the breakfast dishes, and cleaned up the kitchen before I got there. Now she let me help her, and we carried the crocks of morning milk from the back porch down into the cellar, and brought the crocks of last night’s milk up from the cellar to the kitchen for skimming.
I enjoyed watching her skim the milk and so I stayed until she had passed the skimmer over the crocks, with a lovely discrimination gathering the thick yellow cream off the white milk, and then I said, “Well, I’m going to the barn.”
“Oh,” she said, “don’t go back into the cold. Stay here with Grandma where it’s warm.”
“It’ll be warm in the stripping room,” I said. “That’s where I’m going.”
She laughed her laugh of resignation. “Well, if you’re bound to go, go,” she said. “Go to the mailbox before you come back and bring the mail.”
“I will,” I said. “I will I will I will.”
I put on my overshoes, mackinaw, toboggan, and gloves, and went out. It was a little past the middle of the morning, but it was still cold, close to freezing, and the wind was still blowing. To face the weather again after the warm kitchen required a moment of courage, but I was soon glad to be out in the big daylight, looking around. I went into the barn lot and past the woodpile, and Grandma’s dog, old Ring, came out to meet me from the feed barn where he had been holed up. I spoke to him and gave him a pat or two and went on into the barn to see what was going on there. Except for Beck and Catherine, all the stock had been turned out. The place felt deserted. In the quiet I could hear the two mules eating hay from their mangers. They were tied in their stalls, unbridled but still wearing their harness in case they would be needed.
From the feed barn, I went through the two gates of the loading chute lot into the small field in front of the tobacco barn. The two milk cows and a Hereford bull were in that field, and where they had stood in front of the barn to be out of the wind the ground was deeply tracked. A little snow had collected in the bottom of the tracks. The sliding doors of the barn were shut, but a broken board in one of them made a crack just wide enough for me to squeeze through. As soon as I was inside and out of the wind, I could hear voices I knew coming from the stripping room.
Along one side of the driveway there was a large “bulk” of unstripped tobacco, walled around with standing bundles of sorghum and covered with old rugs to keep the tobacco moist and handleable. On the other side next to the stripping room, which occupied one of the front corners of the barn, was the tobacco that had been stripped, graded, tied in “hands,” pressed, and laid into a second “bulk,” this one as carefully composed as a made bed. In the driveway itself was a hay wagon on which they were piling the stripped stalks to be hauled out and scattered.
The voices in the stripping room sound settled and quiet. I let myself stand and listen a minute to the voices and to the wind shoving and shuddering along the eaves of the barn. As I expected, the stripping room door was fastened on the inside. I pounded on it four times with my fist. The voices stopped and there were footsteps. The door opened, and there was Rufus Brightleaf beaming largely down at me with his toothless grin.
“Yaaah!” he said. “Come in here, fart blossom.” And I stepped into the warmth. He grinned at me until I grinned back, and then he said, “Ha-hahhh!” and gave me a big handshake. In his large, hard hand my own felt small and soft.
Jess Brightleaf said, “Hello, Andy,” and Dick Watson said, “Howdy, buddy.” The one known as Old Man Hawk neither turned to look at me nor spoke. Rufus fastened the door and went back to work.
They were standing at the bench under the row of north windows in an order I knew, first Rufus then Jess then Dick then Old Man Hawk, each man stripping the leaves that belonged to his grade and passing the stalks on to the next man, from Rufus finally to Old Man Hawk, who was stripping the least valuable grade known as “tips” and carrying the stripped stalks out to the wagon. Above each man’s section of the bench was hung a strip of pork fat on which from time to time he greased his hands to relieve the stickiness of the tobacco gum.
The Brightleafs were Grandpa’s tenants, growing his tobacco crop on the shares. They had come at the beginning of a rare time of good farm prices, and before it ended Jess Brightleaf and his family would save enough money to buy a farm of their own. The departure of the Brightleafs would be another of the changes that brought to an end what had seemed the stable old world of my childhood.
Jess Brightleaf was the master workman of that place and time. He held the honored title of “tobacco man,” and he was as meticulous in his work, as watchful of the work of the others, as difficult to please, as if he were practicing a fine art, which in fact he was.
Rufus, Jess’s brother, was a man perhaps equally capable but less mindful, less caring, for Rufus was a man prone, during any letup of work, to drink and stray. His wife, Miss Ida, whom he called “the Madam,” had been called upon for more in the way of patience than was good for her. He had a gift for amusing himself, and in the process amusing others, with an obscene repertory of tales, rhymes, and songs most certainly unfit for the ears of the Madam. To hear him you would have thought he had not a care in the world, but I knew that he did have. I knew that he and Miss Ida had had two daughters and a son, and that the son was dead. He had been killed by a falling tree when they were cutting sawlogs. Rufus had told me this (I must have asked him where was his son) when we were alone together the summer before, and he had not looked or sounded like himself when he told it. “Poor fellow,” he said. “Broke all to hell, and nothing we could do.” And perhaps it was because of that boy of his, dead, that Rufus had at times played with me as if he had been another child. I admired Jess and was in awe of him, but I loved Rufus.
Dick Watson was as I have said: cheerful and gentle and steady at his work. He would come to the stripping room after finishing his morning chores at the barn and at Grandpa’s house and at his own, and then he would leave early enough to finish his evening chores mostly before dark.
Old
Man Hawk worked on with nothing to say. He had a reputation for various acts of dishonesty and violence, a dangerous man, and he was the father of several young men with reputations as terrible as his own. He would work, he was available, and so, in that time of scarce help, he was there. Jess and Mrs. Brightleaf would house and feed and pay him until the work was done, and they would do it with a good-humored deference to necessity. It was his pride, when working, to acknowledge the existence of nothing but work. And yet it was clear to me that he passed his harsh judgment, his utter contempt in fact, upon other people by paying them no mind at all, as if a known chicken thief might regard the world from an exalted standpoint of indifference. His last name, officially, was Hackman, but, since Port William did not pronounce names it had not heard before, from the time of his appearance there from no known origin, he had been called “Hawkman”—“Hawk” to his face and, in his latter years, to his back, “Old Man Hawk.”
I was sorry to see him there, for I was afraid of him. One day Dick Watson had confided to me: “Buddy, don’t never let him hear you say ‘Hawk got a chicken and gone to the stack.’ He’ll kill you.” Because it was Dick who told me this, I believed it. And every time I had to be in his presence, the feeling would come over me that I was about to say “Hawk got a chicken and gone to the stack.” I feared him because of that, and also because of the look of him. In contrast to Jess’s face, which, at work, was contemplative, and Rufus’s, which was florid and as variable as a baby’s, and Dick’s, which was gentle and patient, Old Man Hawk’s was blank and hard and somehow pinched, as if it had been frostbitten or burnt.
Grandpa was sitting close to the stove on an upturned five-gallon bucket. He was too old to be much good for work anymore, but he needed to stay close to it. He turned a bucket up for me beside him. “Here, baby. Sit down and keep out of the way.”
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 50