WIDOWHOOD GAVE new impetus to Aunt Judith’s role as a sufferer. In the eighteen years that remained to her, she needed more sympathy than ever, and now more than ever she was persistent in asking or hinting for it, and was more than ever unappeasable. It was as though every calamity that Momma-pie had forestalled or denied by her masks of superiority had fallen on Aunt Judith, who was as naked to them as a shorn lamb. Whatever her faults, Aunt Judith lacked her mother’s arrogance.
Yet as her afflictions grew she seemed to become increasingly self-concerned. Her sufferings finally were not at all conditioned by the understanding that others also suffered; she suffered in an almost pristine innocence, as if she were the world’s unique sufferer and the world waited curiously to hear of her pains. She was so prompt and extravagent in pitying herself that she drove away all competitors.
She called Grandma Catlett on every anniversary of Uncle Andrew’s birth and death, and on every other anniversary or holiday that reminded her of her loss and her suffering. She kept this up year after year, speaking of “our Andrew.” Grandma said that she was grateful for these attentions, but they cannot have been easy for her.
Nor was Aunt Judith an easy burden for my father, who, in Uncle Andrew’s absence, became her adviser and protector. He fulfilled his duties faithfully, but without, I think, ever having the satisfaction of feeling that she was satisfied.
When Momma-pie died, my father had the duty, among others, of taking Aunt Judith to the undertaker’s to pick out a coffin. He got me to go along, but both of us together were as unequal to the occasion as he would have been alone. We knew that Aunt Judith had been dependent on Momma-pie for many things. We knew that Momma-pie’s death would leave Aunt Judith much lonelier than before. But our sympathy was so much a surplus as to be hardly noticeable.
Handkerchief in hand, chin quivering, Aunt Judith said many times that she was going to be awfully lonely now. Many times she said she did not know what she was going to do. She gazed lingeringly into every one of the coffins, of which there was a roomful, and every one of them reminded her of her loss and renewed her grief. Every one of the coffins had something about it that Momma-pie would have liked, and at these reminders of Momma-pie’s tastes and preferences Aunt Judith’s voice would become a whisper and she would dab at her eyes. She was using her grief to invite sympathy, and in doing so falsified her grief, and in falsifying her grief made it impossible to sympathize with her. And she compounded the difficulty by the innocence of perfect self-deception; she had, I feel sure, no idea what she was doing. And what was one to say? I could find in myself not the least aptitude for the occasion. I longed to exchange places with the wallpaper or the rug. My father, having assured Aunt Judith that he would do all he could for her, had almost as little to say as I did. She placed and left us in our embarrassment as she would have seated us at a table.
For some years she worked as a typist in one of the offices in Hargrave. Later, she contracted glaucoma and became virtually blind. She made her way about the town then truly alone, avoided under cover of her blindness by people who could no longer bear her importunities for sympathy and her endless recitation of her ills.
My last clear, unshakable memory of her is from the summer of 1949, when I was fifteen. One afternoon as I was walking in front of the courthouse, I called out to one of my friends, and in the same instant looked across the street and saw Aunt Judith. She had recognized my voice, and she turned to stare sightlessly toward me. I did not want to go to her; I was just empty of the willingness to do so. I went on as I intended to go, pretending under her following blind gaze that it was not my voice that she had heard and that I was not myself.
For want of compassion—aware that I would inevitably fail to be compassionate enough, but also for want of enough compassion—I denied that I was who I was, and so made myself less than I was. This was my first conscious experience of a shame that was irremediable and hopeless—a shame, as I now suppose, that Uncle Andrew may have met in himself, in her presence, many a time.
This surely was the punishment that she dealt out, wittingly or not, willingly or not, to him and to the rest of us. And if at times in the past I could abandon her to the self-martyrdom of the self-absorbed, and though I see now better than then how impossible she was, still I am sorry. For I can no longer forget that loss and illness and trouble, however a person may exploit them, cannot be exploited without being suffered. Aunt Judith exploited them and suffered them, and suffered her exploitation of them. She suffered and she was alone.
And so she is inescapable. In my mind I will always see her standing there in the street, her head tilted stiffly up, hopelessly hoping for some earthly pity greater than her pity for herself.
Chapter 9
THE HOUSE that Uncle Andrew seemed most to be gone from was not, for me, the one where he had lived in rented rooms with Aunt Judith and Momma-pie. Nor was it my own house at Hargrave, or Jake and Minnie’s at the Crayton Place. Where I most often met his absence and was obliged to deal with it was at Grandma and Grandpa Catlett’s.
Grandpa had been born in an earlier house on that site, the last of five children, about a year before the end of the Civil War. That house burned when he was six, and the present house was built on the old foundation. In the second winter after Uncle Andrew’s death, Grandpa took sick, went to bed, and did not get up again.
All his life he had gone to the barn at bedtime to see to his animals and make sure that all was well. That winter, staying at night with Grandpa, my father went to the barn at bedtime and returned to say that all was well. “And then,” my father said, “he would be pleased.”
“The day after I die,” Grandpa told my father, “get up and go to work.” He died where he was born, in the same corner of the same room, though in a different house. And on a raw day in the late winter we carried him, dressed up, to Port William and left him there in the hill under the falling rain.
The year and a half and a little more between the day of Uncle Andrew’s death and the day of Grandpa’s funeral seems to me now to have been a time of ending, not just of lives but of a kind of life and a kind of world. I did not recognize that ending as consciously then as I do now, but I felt its shadow. Uncle Andrew had not belonged to the older life; though he had grown up in it, he had lived away from it. He belonged to the self-consciously larger life that came into being with the First World War, and that was now rapidly establishing itself by means of another war, industrial machinery, and electric wires. But though that new world was undeniably present on the roads, the life of our fields still depended on the bodily strength and skill of people and horses and mules. In the minds of my grandfather and Dick Watson, the Brightleafs, and the Branches, the fundamental realities and interests and pleasures were the same as they had been in the minds of the people who had worked in the same fields before the Civil War.
The first death after Uncle Andrew’s had been Dick Watson’s, and Dick, like my grandfather, belonged to that older world. That the two of them belonged also to two different and in some ways opposite races did not keep them from belonging in common to a kind of humanity. They were farming people. What distinguished them from ever-enlarging numbers of people in succeeding generations was that they had never thought of being anything else. This gave them a kind of integrity and a kind of concentration. They did their work with undivided minds, intent upon its demands and pleasures, reconciled to its hardships, not complaining, never believing that they might have been doing something better.
Dick and Aunt Sarah Jane’s two-room house at the edge of the woods, down the hill from the barns, was a part of the Home Place, but it was also a place unto itself, with its own garden and henhouse and woodpile. Aunt Sarah Jane did not work “out.” She kept house and gardened and cared for a small flock of chickens and foraged in the fields and woods and sewed and mended and read her Bible. In the mornings and the evenings and in odd times spared from the farmwork, Dick kept their house supplied with water
and milk, meat and firewood. I remember their pleasure in all the items of their small abundance: buckets of milk from Dick’s cow, cured joints and middlings from their hogs, vegetables from Aunt Sarah Jane’s garden, the herbs and greens and mushrooms she gathered on her walks.
In those years when I could not be with Uncle Andrew, I loved almost as much to be with Dick, though the two of them could hardly have been less alike. Dick was as gentle and quiet as Uncle Andrew was brash and uproarious. And whereas Uncle Andrew’s great aim in life was to “get out among ’em,” Dick, when I knew him, anyhow, was mostly content to stay put. With Uncle Andrew, you were always on a trajectory that was going to take you back to the road and on to someplace else. With Dick, when he wasn’t behind a team or on horseback, you traveled on foot, going not away but deeper in. Dick could sit still. He could sit on his rock doorstep after supper, smoke his pipe, and talk slowly and thoughtfully until bedtime. In my memories of Uncle Andrew, I am often behind him or off to the side, watching him, feeding my curiosity as to what manner of man he was. In my memories of Dick Watson, I am often beside him, holding his hand. From Dick I learned that the countryside was inhabited not just by things we ordinarily see but also by things we ordinarily do not see—such as foxes. That it was haunted by old memories I already knew.
Foxhunting with Dick, he on my grandfather’s mare and I on Beauty the pony, I first came into the presence of the countryside at night, and learned to think of it as the hunters knew it, and learned there were foxes abroad in it who knew it as no human ever would. There would be an occasional dog fox, Dick said, who would venture up almost to the yard fence to invite the hounds to run, and who, when the hounds accepted the challenge, knew how to baffle them by running in a creek or along the top of a rock fence. I had from Dick a vision of a brilliant fox running gaily through the dark over the ridges and along the hollows, followed by hounds in beautiful outcry, and this to me was a sort of doctrineless mystery and grace.
But what I remember most, and most gratefully, is Dick’s own presence, for he was a man fully present in the place and its yearly round of work that connected hayfield and grainfield and feed barn and hog lot, woods and woodpile and the wood box behind the kitchen stove, well and water trough. When the work was to be done, he was there to do it. He did it well and without haste; when it was done he took his ease and did not complain. Years later, when I was looking for the way home, his was one of the minds that guided me.
After he and then Grandpa were dead, the farm, in spite of my father’s long caring for it, lacked a coherence that it had had before. It needed not just attention and work but lives that made it a world and lived from it.
For several years after those deaths, I stayed with Grandma for months at a time. She started coming to Hargrave to spend the winters in a room at the Broadfield Hotel. And then on a Saturday morning in March or April, with spring bright in the air, Elton Penn would come with his truck, and we would load Grandma’s spool bed, her comfortable rocker, her clothes and linens, and take her home.
I would move in then to stay with her until she returned to town late the following fall. For me, this was freedom, more freedom probably than I was entitled to, but not more than I wanted and even needed. At Grandma’s, I was the man of the house. I had as my own room the little hallway behind Grandma’s bedroom, and I had, as it seemed to me, the whole country to range in, on foot or horseback, beyond sight or call of any grown-up. For grown-up company, when I wanted it, I had Grandma, and after 1945 Elton and Mary Penn on the Beechum Place, and Jess and Rufus Brightleaf and their wives. For a playmate, I had Fred Brightleaf. When my father took me or sent me to work for Jake Branch, I had the company of that large and various household. Hargrave, when I returned to it, took some getting used to. I decided to stay out of it if I could.
To get to school, I rode the bus or hitchhiked down to Hargrave in the morning and back again in the afternoon. I attended school by requirement only. I did not think of it when I was not in it. I did not establish a great reputation as a student.
Once Grandma and I had moved in, we revived the old house around us. I thought it a great adventure to build a fire again in the kitchen range and to help Grandma get together the makings of our first meal. On the colder mornings we would get up and hurry down to the kitchen to renew the fire. Charmed by the elemental pleasure of needing to be warm and then getting warm, I watched the day grow bright outside the windows while Grandma cooked our breakfast. As we ate, the sun came up beyond the still-living oak snag at the corner of the woods.
This was a homecoming for me as much as for Grandma. I had lived there with my parents during my first two years. I had come newborn to that house. It was the first house of my memory and consciousness. Sleeping there in my crib beside my parents’ bed, I had dreamed the sounds of the wind that drew its long breaths over the house at night. And I remembered waking there as if to a world entirely new, to see the sun shining on the wet grass and the white barns.
By the time I was born into it, the history of that place had become old. The sign of its age was much forgetfulness. Much had happened to us there that we did not remember. We had suffered and rejoiced there more than we knew. I acquired experiences there that never had happened to me at all. All my life I have recalled a sort of dream image of a man putting on his coat at the back door, speaking over his shoulder to a woman inside the house. A freed slave going away? One of our family going west? Or simply somebody going to the field? I cannot see his face; I do not know.
I had known, it seemed to me always, that when Grandpa was “just a little bit of a baby laying up yonder in the bed,” some soldiers had come at night and taken his father. They were a small band of Union horsemen who had come to “recruit” my great-grandfather, who would have been in his early forties at the time. They did this, I suppose, with a pleasant sense of justice, because he owned a few slaves and for that and other reasons would not have been sympathetic to their cause. Forcing him to mount behind one of them, they carried him to their encampment on the top of the next hill. Still in her nightgown and barefooted, my great-grandmother, Lizzie, followed them. By force of argument or character or both, she “made them give him back.” According to the story as I heard it, Lizzie “ran after them,” and so in my mind, as if from my own birth, I have had the image of that distraught and determined woman running up the dark road.
And I have had in mind always the fire that burned the old house when Grandpa was six. It is a pod of fierce light that opens greatly in the dark. In that light Grandpa is a small boy suddenly filled with terrible knowledge. He stands holding his saddle, his most precious possession, which he has retrieved from under his bed. They bring to him a small Negro girl, the cook’s daughter, a year younger than he. She is hysterical, wanting to run back into the burning house. And they tell him, “Hold her! Hold her tight!” And he holds her, while the grown-ups continue their effort to save things from the house, and then finally give up and watch it burn.
The new house had grown old too by the time I knew it, and had about it memories and reminders and intimations of unremembered things. The house itself was tall and finely outlined. Its high-ceilinged rooms, cool in summer, were lovely when filled with morning light. But its furnishings were meager and rather graceless. The best room, the parlor, in which we sat only on the most special occasions, contained an upright piano with a stool, a matching sofa and easy chair covered with rose and beige brocade, a glass-fronted bookcase, a small table, and two or three more chairs, not necessarily comfortable. The other rather formal room was the dining room, likewise seldom used. It was a north room, cool in summer, cold in winter, heated, like the parlor, only by a fireplace. I liked to go into that room for its strangeness and its cold smells of cloves and brown sugar.
The kitchen, living room, and three bedrooms upstairs—the rooms that were to varying degrees lived in—were furnished with not much of an eye for decoration or harmony. The furniture was inherited or haphazardly
bought or come by; nearly all of it was old and well worn, some of it damaged or much repaired. The rugs were threadbare in spots, and where the travel was heaviest the finish was worn off the kitchen linoleum. It was a house that for a long time had been occupied by people struggling to hold themselves in place, who had not had much time for comfort or the means for luxuries. I understood this only much later; then it was merely familiar. The house had had a telephone for a good many years and electricity for four or five, but nothing else had changed, and it seemed somehow surprised by these amenities. It still had no running water. We used the privy down in a corner of the backyard, and carried water in buckets from the well.
There were a few framed photographs on the living room wall—pictures of Uncle Andrew and my father, and of us children. There was also a small tintype of Grandpa when he was a young boy; his mother had had to whip him, he said, to make him sit still for it. Upstairs there were larger photographic portraits of Uncle Andrew and my father as children, and of my great-grandfathers Catlett and Wheeler. Grandma’s decorations consisted mainly of a few crocheted doilies and table scarves. Her yearning for nice things was revealed by her attachment to ornamented candy boxes with hinged lids; the few of these that she had received she kept and filled with photographs, letters, and the pretty greeting cards that came on holidays. The most beautiful thing in the house, I thought, was a sampler made by my mother. I read it often, fascinated by the close rhymes. It said:
HOURS FLY
FLOWERS DIE
NEW DAYS
NEW WAYS
PASS BY
LOVE STAYS
Between us, Grandma and I carried on the best we could the old kitchen economy of milk cow and hen flock and garden. I helped her care for the hens, and I did the milking and sometimes the churning.
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 67