“You want to see them stretch when they get up,” Grandpa said. “Then you know they’re feeling good. You know they’re all right.”
This was his requirement for sleep. Knowing that all was well at the barn, he could rest.
On the way back to the house we stood facing away from the wind and took our bedtime pee.
Back in the living room, Grandpa built up the fire for the night, and while I stood close to the stove to get warm again he let down his folding bed and set his chamber pot, his “chamber” as he called it, underneath in its accustomed place. It was bedtime, and he addressed himself to that occasion without any ceremony whatsoever. He stripped off his clothes down to his long underwear and shirt, laid down on his side beneath the covers, rested his head on his turned-back forearm, and closed his eyes. If President and Mrs. Roosevelt had been there, Grandma said, Grandpa would have done the same thing exactly. Long before daylight he would be up again, even if now, in his old age, it would be only to dress, renew the fire, and go to sleep again in his rocking chair.
Grandma blew out one of the lamps and picked up the other. We went through the shadows out into the cold front hall, up the stairs, and into the room over the living room. Grandma set the lamp on the washstand. I put down my grip and, standing over the register that let some heat come up from the stove, I began to take off my clothes.
That reminded Grandma and she said, “Did you brush your teeth, Andy?”
I said, “I don’t need to, I don’t reckon.”
We both knew that was a fib, but the pitcher on the washstand was empty and it was a long way to the kitchen, and so we both pretended that I didn’t need to.
I didn’t tell her that my pajamas were in my grip. The room was cold and it would be colder in the morning, and so I left on my shirt and long underwear, like Grandpa.
Grandma turned back the covers, I sank into the feather bed, and she covered me up, adding another quilt from the closet. I was so pressed upon from all sides that I didn’t think I could move.
Grandma said, “You’re snug as a bug in a rug.” She said, “Go to sleep, now.” And that reminded her of a scrap of eloquence she loved, and she repeated it: “Sleep is nature’s sweet restorer.” I was a long time learning that she was quoting from Edward Young’s Night Thoughts. But where had she learned it?
She kissed me goodnight then, picked up the lamp, and went out. She closed the door, perfecting the dark, and I heard her footsteps cross the hall.
We had made little enough of a stir all the evening, but now as we settled for the night the quiet of the empty rooms began to seep into the occupied ones. The old house clicked and ticked in the nighttime cold, and the wind, I thought, was trying to wrap all the way around the walls. In that house, especially in winter, you never forgot the weather. There was no insulation in those days, no double-glazed windows. Only the two rooms were heated. The others, except for hearth fires at special times, stayed cold. And you could hear the wind. My earliest dreams that I remember were dreams of the wind, dreamed in that house.
At first the bed was ice-cold. But I began, gradually and deliciously, to get warm. When I was fully warm, I slept.
I slept the sort of sleep that seems not to have happened. It seemed that I shut my eyes in the room unwalled by darkness and at one with the great night, and promptly opened them again to bright daylight, sunlight beyond the windows, and Grandpa’s forefinger prodding me through the covers. He was wearing his cap and his sheepskin coat.
“Wake up, baby,” he said in a tone of grief, for I was in violation of his fundamental law. “It’s daylight, and you laying there with the sun shining in your eyes!”
His accusation and the broad light did fill me with a sort of panic, for I had not meant to lose a minute of this day, and I had already lost what I knew he considered the best part of it.
All of a sudden I felt ashamed. I knew he was right. I threw off the covers and got up. As I stood over the register again, putting on my clothes, I heard him going down the stairs and back through the house. He had a determined, final way of walking, as if he were leaving his footprints in the floors. He made things rattle.
Dressing didn’t take me long. Grandma, I think, had not wanted me to be waked up, and she and Grandpa had exchanged some words on the matter. When I came into the kitchen Grandma was saying, “Yes, I reckon you would,” but he was already out the door.
Since I was up and there was no helping it, she set about my breakfast.
“Wash up,” she said. “It’ll be ready in a minute.”
It wasn’t long until I was eating fried eggs, a fried slice of the Christmas ham, hot biscuits and peach preserves, and a glass of milk that Grandma kept refilling before I had emptied it.
“Could I have one more egg and two more biscuits?”
“You can have all you want,” she said.
When I was finished, she struck a blow for civilization by making me brush my teeth. And then she made me go out to the privy, though I would have preferred constipation to that cold seat. And then she made me go through the motions of combing my hair.
As soon as I had met all her requirements, I went straight to the stripping room. The work was continuing as before, but Fred, who I had hoped would be there, was not. His mother must have needed him at home.
Who was there was Uncle Jack Beechum, my great-great-uncle on my mother’s side and Grandpa’s neighbor. Uncle Jack—or “Old Jack,” as he had come to call himself and as he was called—was four years older than Grandpa and would survive him by six years. But they were contemporaries, old friends, and they knew the same things. The presence of the two of them together had an influence on the room and made it quieter. While they talked, even Rufus Brightleaf listened and said not much. Uncle Jack was as tall as Grandpa, but whereas Grandpa was lean and hard-fleshed, Uncle Jack, though by no means fat, was stoutly built—“a draft horse of a man,” Grandpa called him. And whereas Grandpa’s voice was edged as though he spoke determinedly on his own authority, Uncle Jack’s voice came rumbling up out of his big chest as though he pronounced on behalf of a deliberative body. He had walked over that morning to learn how the work was going, which he had promptly seen for himself, and he lingered now to talk.
Uncle Jack was a widower, keeping house for himself in the manner of an old man not much interested in keeping house. Like Grandpa, he had become dependent on other people to keep his place going. Because he was not easily satisfied, he was never satisfied with the tenants who so far had come one year and, not satisfying, gone the next. Because he respected the Brightleafs, he wanted to know if they knew of anybody who was “the right kind.” The right kind, never plentiful, were scarcer than ever. Jess and Rufus could only say that they would be on the lookout.
Uncle Jack forsook his present worries, and the conversation, belonging then to him and Grandpa, took up the burden of times only they had known. They spoke of horses and mules and men and days. Now I can wish that I had stayed and listened and tried to remember. Now I can wish I had foreseen then what I would want to know now, and had asked the questions I now wish I had asked. What did their elders remember of the Civil War, and of the time before that? What did they tell about slavery? After the war, how were things rearranged between the races? Was the Klan active here? What did it do? Who was in it? What was it like here before the railroad came, or all-weather roads, when the only dependable transportation to and from Port William was by the river? What did they remember of the then still-standing ancient forests? How did they make it through the depression of the 1890s? The drouth of 1908? But a boy’s mind is different from an old man’s by precisely a lifetime. And so the talk of that day went out into that day’s air and light and the silence beyond, and the silence has kept it.
Grandpa and Uncle Jack were sitting on the only two five-gallon buckets in the room, leaving me no place to sit, or even stand, where I would be out of the way. If Jess Brightleaf had only given me some little bit of work to do, some way
of helping, I would gladly have paid him both my dollars. But it was not to be, and I knew it. And so I had nothing to do, no part in the talk, and no place to stand where I would not be told to move.
Pitching my voice low so as not to seem to interrupt my elders, I said, “Where’s Fred?”
“He went to shit and the hogs eat him,” said Rufus Brightleaf. It was not an unfriendly remark, but it did not encourage further conversation on my part.
Outside the sun was shining, and I went out.
The stripping room was the wrong place for me that day, but it has stayed luminous in my mind as it was then: a place of order, of fine work, of the fragrance of cured tobacco, of the beautiful browns of the graded leaves in the discriminate north light. And I can see its population of that morning as clearly as if I were still standing at the door, ready to leave: Jess Brightleaf, whose mind made the order and set the standard of the work, less by any word than by the mere force of his presence; Rufus Brightleaf palavering loosely of the sins and pleasures of the flesh but in fact caring and capable enough to satisfy even his brother; Dick Watson patiently doing as he needed to do; Old Man Hawk, who had the power of silence and of not caring; and the two old neighbors dreaming and talking of times long gone. And all around, beyond the happenstance of that quiet place, was the whole world at war, forgettable from moment to moment, but recallable at any instant by somebody’s naming of one of the absent or one of the dead.
In my memory all who were there, except for Old Man Hawk, seem now to be gathered into a love that is at once a boy’s and an aging man’s—and also, I think, into a love older and larger that is grieved, amused, grateful, and merciful. Only Old Man Hawk seems to belong to nobody’s love. He stood alone on his own small dignity that did not condescend even to work as well as he could have. He did not give a damn. He took what he wanted of what was available. He would in fact steal a chicken, and had done so. He would in fact kill a man, and had done so. The only reason he was not a liar was that he didn’t talk enough.
I went out and Rufus came after me, grinning, to see that I didn’t do what I had done before and was likely to do again.
“Andy, don’t fasten that damned door on the outside, now.”
I didn’t. As I left I heard him fasten it on the inside.
The day was bright and cold, the ground hard frozen. I went down the hill, crossing a swag, and a little ways up again to where Dick and Aunt Sarah Jane’s house sat at the corner of the woods. I let myself through the yard gate by the water maple Dick had planted, that was getting almost big enough to cast a useful shade, and went up to the door and knocked. Dick’s old foxhound, Waxy, had come out from under the house to be petted and now she waited with me at the door, though she would not be let in.
Aunt Sarah Jane greeted me, made me welcome, and asked me to take a chair, all with some ceremony. She was a woman of impeccable manners, in her fashion a lady of the old school. She was affable, talkative, always ready to cut loose with a big laugh, but with a reserve of dignity too that kept me conscious of my own manners. I never let her see the impudence I sometimes displayed to Grandma.
We sat in rocking chairs on either side of the drum stove. The house was warm and full of the morning sunlight. It was a small house, only two rooms, but tightly built, ceiled on the inside with tongue and groove. One of the rooms was the kitchen. The one we were sitting in was both bedroom and living room. This room, like the other, was crowded with furniture, including a quilting frame with a quilt on it. In spite of her arthritic hands and aging eyes, Aunt Sarah Jane was a seamstress and was always at work with needle and thimble, repairing or patching or making something useful and pretty.
She reckoned I had had a nice Christmas. She spoke of the birth of the baby Jesus with such immediacy of imagination that it might have happened only five nights ago in our own barn. She required me to tell her how I was and how all of my family were. And then she told me her news, nearly all of which had taken place within the radius of eyesight from her windows and yard, or within her mind. It concerned the doings of weather, animals, and people, and also several biblical characters, remembered people, and ghosts. All the creatures she knew, living and dead, natural and supernatural, were to her immediately present. Her mind was yeasty, full of knowledge, and always at work. Some of the things she knew would have seemed exceedingly doubtful to a skeptic, which I was not. The world, as she knew it, was not fenced around with facts or proofs or conventions of “objective truth.” She told of what she had seen. She had seen ghosts. She had seen the devil. She had seen people dancing in the street at the end of World War I with the Kaiser’s head on a pole. She had seen snakes of kinds, sizes, colors, and habits that astounded me, and would have astounded a herpetologist too.
For my part, I was then not so much superstitious as merely and totally gullible, able to believe without a grain of doubt anything whatever that was told me by anybody older than I was. And my imagination was capable of ratifying the wildest errors and my own most extravagant misunderstandings. When I was in the first grade, the doctor who served as the county’s “health officer” entered our classroom and announced that he had come to look for head lice. He then went up and down the rows of desks, parting the students’ hair with his fingers and looking. But I had misheard him; I thought he said he had come to look for headlights. And it seemed all at once credible and wonderful to me that some of us might have lights in the tops of our heads, hidden by our hair. Another time, I heard my father tell my mother at breakfast, “I heard wild geese flying over last night,” but I thought he said he had heard wild beasts flying over. I had a book of pictures of African animals, and my misunderstanding gave me a vision of winged zebras, giraffes, and lions flying over our house in the night. Their wings stroked the air with a stately motion, and their eyes were fixed upon the distance with a solemnity that seemed heroic and holy. They seemed perfectly believable to me, for I could see them. I can see them yet.
And so in those days my mind was perfectly compatible with Aunt Sarah Jane’s. Everything that was vivid and wondrously true to her was vivid and wondrously true to me. Everything she told me fell upon my consciousness like seeds upon fertile ground.
But not everything she told me came from the realm of wonder. She also spoke that day, as she often did, of the rights that her people had been promised but had never been given. She was my first preceptor in the matters of race and civil rights. Because I always listened attentively to her, everything she said struck in. She made me feel responsible, for I knew, as she required me to know, that I was a product of my culture; but I felt it vaguely, for I could not precisely locate in myself the cause of the injury. I had no ill will toward her or Dick, or in fact toward any of the black people I knew, and besides, if I were greatly to blame, why was she so nice to me?
Both the sense of responsibility and the perhaps necessary vagueness have stayed with me until now. Starting probably with those conversations so long ago with Aunt Sarah Jane, I have learned to understand the old structure of racism as a malevolent convention, the malevolence of which is hard to locate in the conscious intentions of most people. It was a circumstance that was mostly taken for granted. It was inexcusable, and yet we had the formidable excuse of being used to it. It was an injustice both accommodated and varyingly obscured not only by daily custom, but also by the exigencies and preoccupations of daily life. We left the issue alone, not exactly by ignoring it, but by observing an elaborate etiquette that permitted us to ignore it. White people who wished to think well of themselves did not use the language of racial insult in front of black people. But the problem for us white people, as we had finally to understand, was that we could not be selectively complicit. To be complicit at all, even thoughtlessly by custom, was to be complicit in the whole extent and reach of the injustice. It is hard for a customary indifference to unstick itself from the abominations to which it tacitly consents. But we were used to it. What is hardest to get used to maybe, once you are aware, is
the range of things humans are able to get used to. I was more used to this once than I am now.
Aunt Sarah Jane’s plain talk of racial injustice as she knew it, thereby introducing the fester of it into the conscience of a small boy, who knew it only as the accepted way and a mandatory etiquette, was by the measure of that time remarkable. To the extent that her talk was a discomfort and an instruction, it was a service. To the extent that it was interesting and a part of conversation, it was hospitality. Her conversation could sometimes be the wildest mixture of sense and what I still regret to call superstition. I listened to her with the keenest interest, sometimes with a kind of awe, and sometimes with a fearful eagerness, trying to penetrate even a little some mystery that she spoke of or from.
By her charity, good cheer, and love of company, it was eminently pleasant to sit with her in that warm room, mindful of the cold outside, mostly listening and asking questions while she followed her thoughts along their wandering paths, now and then renewing the bolus of snuff that she kept inside her lower lip, or making use of her “spit can.”
She sang me a song in which a young man, plowing corn, dreams of Saturday night:
Diddle-um, diddle-um, di-de-o,
Gon’ take Sal to the party-o.
Haw, Lige!
“But, Aunt Sarah Jane, who’s Lige?”
“Why honey, Lige was his mule!”
I would gladly go back to sit with her again. She too I loved.She too is a knot in the net that has gathered me up and kept me alive until now.
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 53