The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

  One day when he and I were helping Jake Branch set tobacco on a stumpy hillside, a terrific downpour came upon us. R.T. and Ester Purlin, two of Minnie’s children from her first marriage, and I were dropping the plants into previously marked rows, and the men were coming behind us, rapidly setting them in the rain-wet ground, all of us working barefoot to save our shoes. When the new hard shower suddenly began, we all ran to the shelter of the trees that grew along the hollow at the foot of the slope. Uncle Andrew and I stood beneath a sort of arbor made by a wild grapevine whose leaves had grown densely over the top of a small tree. For a while it was an almost perfect umbrella. And then, as the rain fell harder, the foliage began to leak. The day was chilly as well as wet, and Uncle Andrew was wearing a canvas hunting coat, which he now opened and spread like a hen’s wing. “Here, baby,” he said. I ducked under and he closed me in. For a long time I stood there, dark and dry in his warmth, in his mingled smell of sweat and pipe tobacco, while the rain fell hard around us and splattered on the ground at our feet.

  In the winter when nightfall came early, he would often stop by our house as he was going home. He would come in and sit down. My father would lay aside the evening paper, and they would talk quietly and companionably, going over the stages of work on the farms, saying what had been done and what needed doing. Uncle Andrew would have on his winter clothes: an old felt hat, corduroys, the tan canvas hunting coat, and under that a lined suede jacket with a zipper. He would not take off his outdoor clothes because he was on his way to supper and did not intend to stay long. I would climb into his lap and make myself comfortable. Perhaps I appeared to be listening, but what I was really doing was smelling. There was the smell of Uncle Andrew himself, which was a constant and always both comforting and exciting, but on those evenings his clothes gave off also the cold smells of barns and animals, hay and tobacco, ground grain, wood smoke. Those smells charmed me utterly and saddened me, for they told me what I had missed by being in school.

  “Take me with you in the morning,” I would say.

  And he would say, “Can’t do it, college.” Or, in another mood, he would give me a hug and a pat. “I wish I could, baby, but you got to go to school.”

  For children his term of endearment, which also was Grandpa’s, was “baby.” He called me that when he felt tender toward me, as he often did, nearly always when he was drinking but often too when he was not.

  He might have wanted a boy of his own, I sometimes thought, and maybe I was the kind of boy he wanted. At school I took to signing myself “Andrew Catlett, Jr.” Sometimes it seemed unfair to me that I was not his son. I wanted to be a man just like him.

  I liked his rough way of joking and carrying on. Often when I showed up at his apartment, he would say in his nasal slang, “Hello, bozo! Gimme five!” And we would do a big handshake.

  His term of emphatic agreement was “Yowza!” Or he would say, “Aw yeah!”—­pronounced as one word: “Aw’eah!”—­which was both affirmative and derisive. He could make one word perform lots of functions.

  Anybody dead and buried, especially any of Aunt Judith’s relatives, was “planted in the skull orchard.”

  Anybody licked or done in had been “nailed to the cross.”

  His threats to Henry and me, even when somewhat meant, were delivered with a burlesque of ferocity that made us laugh: “I’m going to stomp your bee-hind!” he would say. “I’m going to rap on your ding-dong! I’m going to cloud up and rain all over you! I’m going to get you down and work on you!”

  He would sometimes put on Henry’s or my straw hat, much too small for him, insert an old magnifying lens in his eye as a monocle, look at us, and say, “Redwood fer dittos, college!” What that meant I do not know; I don’t know even if those are the right words. That was what it sounded like. Wearing the “monocle” and tiny-looking hat, speaking sentences imitated, I suppose, from somebody he had run across somewhere away, he could transform himself, sometimes a little scarily, into somebody we had never seen before. Leering and mouthing, carrying on an outrageous blather of profanity and nonsense, he could make us laugh until we were lying on the floor, purged, exhausted, aching, and still laughing.

  We had a mongrel bull terrier bitch named Nosey that he did not especially care for. Somebody told us we ought to bob her tail. As we did with all out-of-the-way propositions, we laid this one before Uncle Andrew.

  “Uncle Andrew, do you know how to cut off Nosey’s tail?”

  “Why, hell yes!” he said, opening his pocketknife, “I’ll cut it off right behind her ears.”

  And then he mimed the whole procedure, whooping and making raspberries, laughing at himself, until it was funny even to us.

  Sometimes, for reasons unclear to us then, he would feel bad and need to sleep. In Jake Branch’s yard under the big white oak, or in the woods at the Bower Place, or on the shady side of one or another of the barns, he would open both doors of the car, stretch out on the front seat, and sleep an hour or two, or all afternoon. I would be utterly mystified and even offended. How could anybody sleep when there were so many things to do?

  Or Henry and I would bring Bubby Kentfield and Noah Burk and maybe two or three more around to the apartment on a Sunday afternoon and find him asleep on the couch.

  We would tramp into the room in a body, like a delegation, assuming that if he was not in a good mood, we could get him into one. We believed that there was strength in numbers.

  “Uncle Andrew, we was wondering if you’d take us swimming.”

  “Yeah, Uncle Andrew, we want to go to the quarry.”

  He would turn his head reluctantly and look at us. “Aw God, boys, you all don’t need to go swimming.”

  “Yes, we do. It’s hot.”

  “Well, go on then!”

  “Well, we need you to go with us.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Yes, we do. Mother said if you went, we could go.”

  “Suppose you drown.”

  “She thinks you won’t let us drown.”

  “The hell I won’t!”

  “Well, are you coming?”

  “Go on, now, damn it! Get out of here! Go do something else.”

  He would fold his hands and shut his eyes, the picture of hope defeated.

  Sometimes he would be quiet and sad-seeming. Always at those times he sang the same song:

  Missed the Saturday dance

  Heard they crowded the floor

  Couldn’t bear it without you

  Don’t get around much anymore.

  Was there, somewhere, a woman he missed, or was he mindful that he was getting older, or did he just like the song? He had a good voice, and he sang well.

  For fifty years and more I have been asking myself, What was he? What manner of a man? For I have never been sure. There are things that I remember, things that I have heard, and things that I am able (a little) to imagine. But what he was seems always to be disappearing a step or two beyond my thoughts.

  He was, for one thing, a man of extraordinary good looks. He had style, not as people of fashion have it (though he had the style of fashion when he wanted it), but as, for example, certain horses have it: a self-awareness so complete as to be almost perfectly unconscious, realized in acts rather than thoughts. He wore his clothes with that kind of style. He looked as good in work clothes, I thought, as he did dressed up. Clothes did not matter much to me, and yet I remember being proud to be with him when he was dressed up—­in a light summer suit, say, and a straw boater—­for I thought he looked better than anybody. He was a big man, six feet two inches tall and weighing a hundred and eighty pounds. He had a handsome, large-featured face with a certain fineness or sensitivity that suggested possibilities in him that he mainly ignored. His eyes, as Grandma loved to say, were “hazel,” and they were very expressive, as responsive to thought as to sight. He loved ribaldry, raillery, impudence. He spoke at times a kind of poetry of vulgarity.

  And yet there was something dark or t
roubled in him also, as though he foresaw his fate; I felt it even then. I have a memory of him with a certain set to his mouth and distance in his eyes, an expression of difficult acceptance, as if he were resigned to being himself, as if perhaps he saw what it would lead to. His silences, though never long, were sometimes solemn and preoccupied. When he was still in his twenties, his hair had begun to turn gray.

  For another thing, he was as wild, probably, as any human I have ever known. He was a man, I think, who was responsive mainly to impulses: desire, affection, amusement, self-abandon, sometimes anger.

  When he felt good, he would be laughing, joking, mocking, mimicking, singing, mouthing a whole repertory of subverbal noises. He would say—­and as Yeager Stump later told me, he would do—­anything he thought of. He would lounge, grinning, in his easy chair and talk outrageously, as if merely curious to hear what he might say.

  I was in the third grade when the teachers at our school asked the students to ask their fathers to volunteer to build some seesaws on the playground. Henry and I, knowing our father would not spare the time, brought the matter before Uncle Andrew.

  “Well, college,” he said, “I’ll take it under consideration. Tell all the women teachers to line up out by the road, and I’ll drive by and look ’em over. It might be I could give ’em a little lift.”

  He had, I am sure, no intention of helping with the seesaws; he never had been interested in a school. But Henry, who was in the second grade, dutifully relayed the message to his teacher. I remember well the difficulty of hearing Henry’s teacher repeat to my teacher Uncle Andrew’s instructions. As I perfectly understood, our teachers’ outrage was not necessarily contingent upon Henry’s indiscretion; Uncle Andrew would have delivered his suggestion in person if the circumstances had been different and it had occurred to him to do so.

  At times he seemed to be all energy, intolerant of restraint, unpredictable. His presence, for so small a boy as I was, was like that of some large male animal who might behave as expected one moment and the next do something completely unforeseen and astonishing.

  One morning we went to the Bower Place only to find Charlie Branch stalled for want of a mowing machine part. We started back to Hargrave to get the part, Uncle Andrew driving complacently along at the wartime speed limit, and I chinning the dashboard as usual. We got to a place where the road went down through a shallow cut with steep banks on both sides, and all of a sudden Chumpy and Grover Corvin stepped into the road in front of us. Chumpy and Grover were just big teenage boys then, but they were already known as outlaws and bullies; a lot of people were afraid of them. They wanted a ride, and by stepping into the road they meant to force Uncle Andrew to stop. What he did was clap the accelerator to the floor and drive straight at them. His response was as instantaneous and all-out as that of a kicking horse. He ran them out of the road and up the bank, cutting away at the last split second. We drove on as before. He did not say a word.

  Chapter 5

  WHILE UNCLE Andrew farmed and did whatever else he did, Aunt Judith and her mother busied themselves with the care and maintenance of the Hargrave upper crust. Aunt Judith’s mother had been born a Hargrave, a descendant of the Hargrave for whom the town was named, and so Aunt Judith was virtually a Hargrave herself. By blood she was only a quarter Hargrave, but by disposition and indoctrination she was 100 percent, as her mother expected and perhaps required. The two of them belonged to the tightly drawn little circle (almost a knot) of the female scions of the first families of ­Hargrave—­a complex cousinship that preserved and commended itself in an endless succession of afternoon bridge parties. At these functions everybody was “cud’n” somebody: Cud’n Anne, Cud’n Nancy, Cud’n Charlotte, Cud’n Phoebe, and so on. Theirs was an exclusive small enclosure that one could not enter or leave except by birth and death. My mother, for example, was excluded for the original sin of having been born in Port William—­an exclusion which I believe she understood as an escape.

  This feminine inner circle had of course a masculine outer circle to which Uncle Andrew pertained by marriage and in which he participated (being incapable of silence, let alone deference) by snorts, hoots, spoofs, jokes, and other blasphemies. He was particularly intrigued by the fervent cousinship of the little class that he had wedded, and he loved to enlarge it by addressing as “cud’n” or “cuz” any bootblack, barfly, yardman, panhandler, dishwasher, porter, or janitor he happened to encounter in the presence of his wife and mother-in-law. His favorite name for Aunt Judith was “Miss Judy-pooty,” but he also called her “Cud’n Pud’n.” Her mother he named “Miz Gotrocks” in mockery of her love of elaborate costume jewelry and big hats, and her little pair of pinch-nose glasses on a silver chain. But he also called her, as occasion required, “Cud’n Mothah” and “Momma-pie.” The latter name, because we children picked it up from him, was what everybody in our family came to call her.

  Aunt Judith, as I judge from a set of photographs that used to hang in Momma-pie’s bedroom, had been a pretty girl. She was an only child, raised by her divorced mother, who had been an only daughter. Aunt Judith and Momma-pie were a better matched pair than Aunt Judith and Uncle Andrew. Aunt Judith had grown up in the protective enclosure prescribed by Momma-pie’s status and character; Uncle Andrew had grown up in no enclosure that he could get out of. That the two of them married young and in error is plain fact. Why they got married—­or, rather, why Uncle Andrew married Aunt Judith—­is a question my father puzzled over in considerable exasperation for the rest of his life. He always reverted to the same theory: that Momma-pie had insidiously contrived it. A mantrap had been cunningly set and baited with the perhaps tempting virginity of Aunt Judith—­and Uncle Andrew, his mind diverted to other territory, had obliged by inserting his foot. Maybe so.

  Maybe so. If the theory was ever provable—­and my father had no proof—­the chance is long gone by now. But a story that Mary Penn told me, after I had grown up, suggests at least that Uncle Andrew was not an ecstatic bridegroom. One of Mary’s cousins, a schoolmate of Uncle Andrew’s, told her that on the night before his wedding Uncle Andrew got drunk and fell into a road ditch. His friends gathered around, trying to help him up.

  “Aw, boys,” he said, “just leave me be. When I think of what I’ve got to lay with tomorrow night, I’d just as soon lay here in this ditch.”

  He had seen his fate, and named it, and yet accepted it. Why?

  However their marriage began, whatever its explanation, their unlikenesses were profound. The second mystery of their union was set forth as follows by my mother: “Did your Aunt Judith have so many health problems because your Uncle Andrew drank and ran around with other women, or did your Uncle Andrew drink and run around with other women because your Aunt Judith had so many health problems?” The answer to that question too, assuming that anybody ever knew it, has been long in the grave.

  The question, anyhow, states their condition accurately enough. Aunt Judith did have a lot of health problems, some of which were very painful. Since no doctor ever found a cause or a remedy for most of them, it seems that the cause must have been in her mind, which is to say in her marriage. And perhaps also in her relationship to Momma-pie. My mother remembers that Aunt Judith never said anything without looking at Momma-pie to see if it was all right. But if Aunt Judith lived in some fear of Momma-pie, I am sure that she lived also in surprise, bewilderment, and dismay at Uncle Andrew, whom she nevertheless adored.

  Sometimes Uncle Andrew could be sympathetic and tender with Aunt Judith, sorry for her sufferings, worried about her, anxious to help her solve her problems. Sometimes, unable to meet her demands for attention or sympathy with the required response, he met them instead with derision. Sometimes, I imagine, he was contrite about his offenses against her and wished to do better. But as they both surely had learned beyond unlearning or pretense, the time would invariably come when, under the spell of an impulse, he would fling her away. He would fling her away as a flying swallow fling
s away its shadow.

  Aunt Judith always asked you for affection before you could give it. For that reason she always needed more affection than she got. She would drain the world of affection, and then, fearing that it had been given only because she had asked for it, she would have to ask for more.

  “Sugah,” she would say to whichever of us children had come in sight, “come here and kiss yo’ Aunt Judith!” And she was capable of issuing this invitation with the broad hint that, because of her frail health, the grave might claim her before we would have a chance to kiss her again. I am glad to remember that, in spite of everything, I felt a genuine affection for her, especially in the time before Uncle Andrew’s death—­before fate authenticated her predisposition to woe. In those days she could be a pleasant companion for a small boy, and I remember afternoons when we sat together while she read to me from the evening paper a reporter’s serialized account of the movement of a group of soldiers from training camp to troopship to battle. We both became deeply interested in those articles and looked forward to them. I remember how our reading fitted together our interest in the story of the soldiers, our sense of great history unfolding, and our mutual affection and pleasure. And yet when she turned toward me with her need, as sooner or later she always did, it was hard to provide a response satisfactory to either of us. It is hard to give the final kiss of this earthly life over and over again. Mostly I submitted silently to her hugs, kisses, and other attentions, profiting the best I could from that exotic smell of cigarette smoke and perfume that hung about her.