The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

  From Aunt Sarah Jane’s I went straight out to the mailbox and then to Grandma’s kitchen. I didn’t go by the stripping room even to see if Fred had come with his mother to bring dinner. The stripping room part of my visit seemed to be over, and I didn’t want to go back.

  Grandpa was already at the table when I came into the kitchen with the mail. We had another good dinner, pretty much like the one of the day before, ending with the rest of the raspberry pie. Afterwards, instead of going back outside, I stayed with Grandma. I helped her to do the dishes and tidy up the kitchen, and I brought in a fresh bucket of water from the well.

  When we got everything put to rights, we went into the living room. She took up her needlework. I read the funnies, and then returned to The Boy’s King Arthur. I opened it to the beginning. I looked at the words and I could hear my mother’s voice reading them, and so as I looked from word to word I too was reading them:

  And when the first mass was done there was seen in the churchyard, against the high altar, a great stone four-square, like to a marble stone, and in the midst thereof was an anvil of steel, a foot of height, and therein stuck a fair sword naked by the point, and letters of gold were written about the sword that said thus: Who so pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is right-wise king born of England.

  I didn’t know what a mass was, but it didn’t seem to matter much. I knew very well what an anvil was, but I couldn’t figure out the need for an anvil and a stone. I thought either one would have been plenty.

  But I was reading, and it was my mother’s voice that was sounding in my mind as I read. Since I had learned so far no respect for sequence, and anyhow we had already got well into the book, I skipped over to the quarrel between Sir Launcelot and Queen Guenever, and still my mother’s voice continued, and still I read:

  “Alas!” said Sir Bors, “that ever Sir Launcelot’s kin saw you. For now have ye lost the best knight of our blood, and he that was all our leader and our succor. And I dare say and make it good, that all kings, Christian nor heathen, may not find such a knight, for to speak of his nobleness and courtesy with his beauty and his gentleness. “Alas,” said Sir Bors, “what shall we do that be of his blood?”

  “Alas!” said Sir Ector de Maris.

  “Alas!” said Sir Lionel.

  When I was behaving myself and out of trouble more or less everywhere, my mother was a refuge to me. She understood the not always manifest quietness I had inside me that made me dislike gatherings and want to be alone. Even when it put her at her wit’s end, she understood it. She understood my times of introspection and silence, my susceptibility of being carried away by a book or a thought or something vividly seen in my mind. She encouraged my intermittent bookishness. She approved of what she called my “long thoughts.” She was often only amused at my weakness for drifting away from whatever I was supposed to be doing—­except when I was supposed to be doing my homework. When I drifted away—­mentally or (as I preferred) physically—­from that, I “drove her crazy” and made her wonder what was going to become of me. There were times when I sat helplessly not-thinking about my math while she stood over me as helplessly, and perhaps hopelessly too, with a shingle or a switch. At my best, I hope, I deserved her sympathy, for I greatly needed it and took shelter in it. She was, and her memory is, a comfort to me.

  Though the thought of him is a comfort to me now, my father then seemed to me an eminence, a distant height, even when he was holding me by the hand or in his lap. That he also was and would be a refuge I never doubted. But his love was proprietary, like Grandma’s; it was magisterial, fierce, and demanding. When he hugged me, he hugged me tight, with an urgency just short of violence, as if foreseeing the times when he would be unable to decide for me or protect me, as if it were an immediate, almost a maternal, grief to him that we were not one flesh. Whereas I was slow in my thoughts, dreamy, and clumsy, he was all concentrated energy and attention, competent, purposeful, efficient in act and speech. When I would be gaping at some vision or actual sight while the sheep I should have headed bolted and the others followed, he would say, “There you stand, Andy, looking out your mouth!” His hands were strong, capable, and utterly direct. When he would catch me using awkwardly a broom or a shovel, he would take hold of me and it and correct my stance and movements, as if under some irresistible compulsion to remold the too-watery clay of which I was made.

  And so on this solitary journey of mine, I was experiencing my absence from my father with a relish that I could not then have defined, and I was beginning to miss my mother and the sound of my mother’s voice a little more than I would have cared to admit.

  My mother I believe I knew fairly well from a fairly early age. Looking back, I love her simply as I knew her to be. And I wonder, too, at what she came to be as she grew older and the trials of motherhood and other early difficulties fell away from her. In her old age she seemed to me to become almost purely generous and wise. Unlike my father, for whom love was always involved with fear and exasperation and who felt personally affronted by any unremedied flaw, she accepted what she could not help and came finally to a quietness within herself that signified great faith, and no fear at all.

  But I had to grow and age into knowledge of my father, and I am afraid to say yet that I know him fairly well. Insofar as he was a critic of the people and places he loved, he was as much a visionary all his life as ever I was to be at any age—­though at the age of nine I could not have envisioned that. He bore the burden of his certainty that some things could be improved, and of his vision of how to improve them. And over and over again he suffered enormous frustration at his or anybody’s inability to make the needed correction.

  Both he and my mother were motivated by great love, but hers abounded quietly, and his was instant and ungraduated, always at full flow.

  One morning as I was watching him shave, I asked experimentally, “Daddy, what would you do if I died?”

  His reply was shocking, for it came while the sound of my voice seemed still in the air, and with a force of passion that I had not until then imagined: “I would cry my eyes out!”

  “Well, you’re a great one for a book,” my father’s mother said to me as we sat long ago by the stove in her living room. Like my father, she was rarely satisfied with things as they were. If I was reading, she recognized that as a good thing, but then she would be obliged to suspect that I might be reading too much, or the wrong kind of book, or that there might be something else I ought to be doing. For she too was a critic, though a companionable one when you were on her safe side.

  She called me back, it seemed, from far away, as it seems she can still call me back from so far in time. I looked up from the book and was happy to see that I was there with her.

  “You go upstairs and get your grip,” she said, “and put all your things in it. So you’ll be ready when your granddaddy comes to get you. He’ll be here before long.”

  I had forgotten about that. I was still a traveler. I was going to stay the next two nights with my mother’s parents, Granny and Granddaddy Feltner, in Port William. The happiness of traveling by myself came upon me again. There was more to look forward to.

  I brought down my grip, stuck my book in on top of my clothes, found my toothbrush and stuck it in. Except for putting on my wraps, I was ready.

  “I guess I’m ready,” I said.

  “Well, your old grandma hates to see you go,” Grandma said. “We’ll miss you when you’re gone.”

  That made me realize that I hated to go. I would miss them when I was gone. To make a journey, especially alone, always carries a metaphorical power, and I felt the sorrow of it pass over me. We come to a place we love, we meet loved ones there, and we go. The thought of leaving made me realize how much I liked being there with her. I looked around for something more to do, something she and I could do, before I would have to go.

  I took down from the top of Grandpa’s folding bed the pretty candy box filled with picture postcards and ph
otographs that were Grandma’s precious keepsakes. There weren’t many of either, of course. She had never owned a camera, and so the photographs all had been sent to her. And the people we were kin to did not often make trips from which they sent postcards. But all the pictures and cards had names and brought forth stories. This place had been home to kinfolk and others who had moved away, and who wrote back, trying to maintain a connection that over the years grew weaker. Grandma was a faithful keeper of their memories. We spoke then of the absent and the dead. Our talk took on the charm of distance and history almost like the stories of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. But this was our history and these were our people. Their names and stories and pictures had a worth to us that was timely and bodily and never to be put in a book.

  After a while we saw Granddaddy Feltner’s old green Plymouth turn in at the gate and come up the driveway and past the house. He would leave the car in the barn lot and come to the back door, and so I picked up my grip and we went out to the kitchen to meet him.

  I was still getting into my wraps when Grandma opened the kitchen door and Granddaddy came in smiling and asking if they had a boy there who needed a ride to Port William. He said the boy was a traveler by the name of Andy Catlett.

  I laughed and ran to hug him, and he said, “Hello, son.”

  He and Grandma exchanged greetings and a little news. And then, in spite of all I could do, Grandma buttoned up my mackinaw for me and pulled my toboggan well down over my ears. She hugged me and kissed me and said, “Come back soon,” as if I might never return.

  I said, “I’ll be back.”

  And then Granddaddy picked up my grip and took my hand, and we went out.

  Part Three

  GRANDDADDY FELTNER was younger by nineteen years than Grandpa Catlett, and this difference made other differences. Granddaddy owned a car and could drive it, and thus, unlike Grandpa, he had come consciously into the era of internal combustion. Though I was a conservative child, whose heart was given more finally than I knew to the creaturely world of Grandpa Catlett, it seemed perfectly normal to me also to be driving back along the ridges toward Port William with Granddaddy Feltner in his car. The car was older than I was, and the war would have to end before it could be replaced with a new one. Like the team and wagon, it seemed to belong to the world that I belonged to.

  And yet the world that I belonged to was already divided, as I have said, into two opposing worlds, the sun-powered world of horse and mule teams, and the petroleum-powered world of cars and trucks and tractors. As I look back into my memory, where hindsight now seems strangely mixed with fore­knowledge, I can see doom clearly written upon the older world, though I believe that the whole cost of that doom is still unpaid.

  Granddaddy’s old car would seem crude to us now in “the new millennium.” It was crude in comparison even to my father’s car, which was newer. But on that day, having returned to motor travel from my trip with Dick and Grandpa in the wagon, and after nearly two days of getting about on foot, I felt the car’s ease and speed. We were effortlessly and in just minutes covering a distance that had seemed long to me the morning before.

  And I noticed something else. The car was not only easier and faster than the team and wagon. It gave a new aspect and a new motion to the world. The wagon passed through the country at a speed that allowed your eyes to come to rest. Whatever you wanted to look at in the road ditch or the fencerow or the field beyond, your sight could dwell on and you could see it. But from the side window of Granddaddy’s car where I was looking out, the country seemed to be turning by like a great wheel. The rim of the wheel, at the roadside, was turning so fast that everything was a blur. To pick out a detail—­one fencepost, one rock, one tree trunk—­was impossible. The effort to do so made me feel cross-eyed and kind of sick. Farther away, the wheel turned more slowly and you could look at things, you could stop them in your eyes, but the smaller details were getting lost. Even farther away, as if near the wheel’s hub, things seemed hardly to be moving, but there were no details at all, just the vague blue ridges way off there as if in a different world. And that, as I now know, would be the new world, the “world of the future,” which to most people in it would be hazy and without detail, way off in the distance.

  By fortune of birth and history, I know the world of horses and mules that lived on a while into my time. I know also the world of the automobile, which excluded the older world by means of speed, comfort, and ease, and which oddly “made the world smaller” by increasing the distances between ourselves and the things we need. And like many others in this rational modern age, I have sat in airplanes going five hundred miles an hour and wished they would hurry up.

  Granddaddy would often carry on a little foolishness to amuse himself or me, but he was not a jabberer.

  When we started out, he said, “Hon, have you got everything you brought? You didn’t forget anything?”

  And I replied with my best manners, “No, sir.”

  And then, when we came into Port William: “Well, here we are. Home again.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Feltner house, where Uncle Virgil and my mother and Granddaddy too had been raised, stood both at the corner of the little town and at the corner of the farm that had been the Feltner home place time out of mind. The electric lines had come to Port William before I was born, and so Granny and Granddaddy’s house had electric lights. It also had bathrooms, and it had “central heating” from a big coal furnace in the basement. It was a brick house of ten rooms, built right on the street in the fashion of all the old town houses in our part of the country, though, unlike most, this one had a large front porch and an ample, tree-shaded yard on each side.

  Of all the houses I knew as a child, this one was the most welcoming, not because of its conveniences, which were unusual for the time and place, but because of the generosity of Granny and Granddaddy. I think it had always been a welcoming house. I know it had been so at least as far back as the time of Ben and Nancy Feltner, Granddaddy’s parents, long dead but known familiarly still, even to me, as Pa and Ma Feltner. Granny and Granddaddy seem to have inherited the welcoming along with the house. The house, you might say, had the habit of hospitality. In the time of my boyhood, Granny and Granddaddy were always “having company”: visiting preachers, relatives, friends of relatives, sometimes utter strangers who were friends of friends of relatives. This custom had survived, pretty well intact, from the time of bad roads when anybody who arrived at mealtime expected, and was expected, to eat, and anybody who came in the evening spent the night.

  And so when I came, I came as a grandson, more or less a member of the household, but I came also as company. Company in fact was already there when I came. Granny’s sister-in-law, Ora Finley, known to my mother and so to us children as “Auntie,” was there with her sister Lizzie Lord, who had been Granny’s best friend all their lives, and who, though no kin to us, was known to us as “Aunt Lizzie.” They had been there since Christmas Eve. Both were widows by then, both childless, and they were living together in Auntie’s house at Hargrave. Aunt Lizzie had been Auntie’s baby sister. She was still girlish, and had not altogether ceased to think of herself as a girl. Time and age and loss, I think, had remained surprising to her. She was a jolly companion to us children. Auntie, on the contrary, was strict, stoic, forthright, without a grain of nonsense, and she had a fine comic sense of the ridiculous. You would know in an instant that she was a woman who would put up only with so much, and you would not be eager to find out how much. Her own childlessness had freed her to assume certain responsibil­ities for the upbringing of my mother and Uncle Virgil. She was a lover of books, and she had encouraged that love in my mother and in me.

  And Hannah was there. She had lived there with Uncle Virgil after they married, and she would continue to live there, after Uncle Virgil’s death in the war and the birth of their daughter, until she married again in 1948.

  When Granddaddy took me in, like company,
through the front door, there they were, lined up in the hall like a welcoming committee: Granny and Auntie and Aunt Lizzie and Hannah.

  “Well, look who’s here!” Granny said, opening her arms. “Come here and hug your granny!”

  I went down the line, getting hugged and kissed and exclaimed over until I was as spoiled already as I would be when I got home and would overhear my mother saying to Granny on the telephone, “Oh, yes, I’m glad to have him back, even if you have spoiled him rotten.”

  When I got to Hannah she gave me a smile and a hug without saying anything, for she was not an exclaiming woman. And she put a kiss on my cheek that stayed there until she gave me another one just as good at bedtime that night.

  Though the Feltner house was far more modern in its appliances than that of my Catlett grandparents, the same household economy of home production and diligent thrift prevailed there also. Everything that the place could provide, it did provide, and in abundance. Like Grandma Catlett, Granny Feltner still made her own lye soap for the washing of dishes and clothes.

  I think often now of that old economy, which was essentially the same from a farm household that was fairly well-to-do, like that of Granny and Granddaddy Feltner, to the household of Dick Watson and Aunt Sarah Jane, which would be classified as poor. For many years now that way of living has been scorned, and over the last forty or fifty years it has nearly disappeared. Even so, there was nothing wrong with it. It was an economy directly founded on the land, on the power of the sun, on thrift and skill, and on the people’s competence to take care of themselves. They had become dependent, to some extent, on manufactured goods, but as long as they stayed on their farms and made use of the great knowledge that they possessed, they could have survived foreseeable calamities that their less resourceful descendants could not survive. Now that we have come to the end of the era of cheap petroleum, which fostered so great a forgetfulness, I see that we could have continued that thrifty old life fairly comfortably—­could even have improved it. Now we will have to return to it, or to a life necessarily as careful, and we will do so only uncomfortably and with much distress.