The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

  It is the middle of the afternoon. The shadows have lengthened and become intricate over the banks of the pond. The steeple of the church points whitely up over the horizon of the field. He expects Virgil shortly.

  The yellow butterflies all fly up at once. They whirl and flurry in the air a moment and settle back onto the mud in a single movement like one small animal lying down.

  The cattle come down to drink, wading out shoulder deep in the water. They drink leisurely, pausing to lift their heads and look at him. Flies swarm over their red backs. Mat can smell the water, the sharp cool mud-smell of it stirred up from the bottom. The cattle wade out again, slowly, muzzles and bellies dripping, hooves sucking out of the deep mud, and climb the bank. He watches them graze into the field. He can hear the grass tearing. It is late in the afternoon.

  Virgil has not come. Mat suddenly is afraid. He calls, “Oh, Virgil!” but the sounds will not leave his mouth.

  A DEPARTURE

  He sits up, his throat tight with the unuttered sound of his voice. The suddenness of the movement makes him dizzy, and he sits motionless for a few minutes on the edge of the sofa, stiffened and weighted with sleep. He is still very near the dream, its colors and sounds continuing in his waking, his mind still caught in the abrupt fear that ended it. The house is quiet. He rubs his hands over his face, pushing his hair out of his eyes, and picks up his shoes and goes down the hall to the kitchen.

  When he comes through the door Margaret looks around and touches her lips with her finger.

  “Hannah still lying down?”

  “Yes.” Margaret turns back to her work. “This is going to be hard on her.”

  Mat walks over and stands beside Margaret, putting his arm around her. “On us too. But we can’t help it.”

  “Yes.”

  They stand without speaking for a minute. Then, “What’re you making?” Mat asks.

  “Some chocolate pies. Bess and Wheeler and the boys are going to be here for supper.”

  Mat smiles at her. “Well, I’m glad they’re coming for supper. And I’m glad we’re having pie.” He laughs. “And they’ll be glad too, I expect.”

  “The boys will.”

  He pulls a chair away from the table and sits down to put on his shoes.

  “You slept.”

  “A little.”

  Mat goes into the hall to get his hat and coat off the rack and comes into the kitchen again. “I’m going to town a while.”

  “All right.”

  He goes out and turns down the street ­towards the store. It is raining still, and he walks with his head bent.

  He is already in front of Jasper Lathrop’s store when he sees Nathan and Burley Coulter standing in the shelter of the little porch roof over the entrance to the drugstore. The soldier and his uncle stand there watching the rain fall onto the road. It will be some time yet before the bus comes, but they seem to have no intention of going into the drugstore to wait, as if now that Nathan’s departure has begun they will do nothing to interrupt it. Nathan’s brother Tom has been dead two years, killed in the war. As he looks at them, that death seems to Mat to be somehow implicit in their waiting.

  Pausing, his hand on the doorlatch, Mat speaks to them.

  They turn their heads. Burley raises his hand. “How are you, Mat?”

  “Hello, Mr. Feltner,” Nathan says.

  “Well, are you leaving, Nathan?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I wish you luck,” Mat says, and regrets the words, which seem to him to say both too much and not enough.

  They thank him. He opens the door and goes in.

  RAIN, RAIN

  The rain slackens, falls loosely and waveringly for a moment, and stops, but after a few minutes begins again suddenly and more heavily than before. It is only after this renewal, when the familiar rattle on the roof has steadied again in their hearing, that they become aware that the drip from the gutter never stopped.

  Jayber Crow looks up, frowning, at the top of one of the windows. “Why don’t you all fix that gutter?”

  “Did once,” Frank Lathrop says. “She sprung again.”

  “Why in the hell don’t you fix it?” Old Jack says.

  “It’s a weary old tune,” Jayber says. He speaks to nobody, the tone of objection gone out of his voice, as though nothing was said before.

  “If you ever owned a gutter it’d be leaking.”

  None of them replies. Old Jack’s most casual observation is apt to take the form of a final judgment—­which could be considered an insult if anybody wanted to take the trouble. They know better than to take the trouble. Though the old man is willing for his remark to be taken better than halfway as a joke, they know that he himself takes it more than half seriously. Jayber owns his barber shop, but it is a fact that he does not own a gutter. It is Old Jack’s theory that a man who owns a roof ought to own a gutter, and a cistern to conserve the water, and livestock to drink at the cistern.

  They hear the street door open, the slapping of rain against the wet pavement coming abruptly into the building, and then slam shut.

  “Who’s that?” Old Jack asks, speaking to Jayber again because he is still looking at him.

  “Burley, I imagine.”

  They sit with their heads turned, listening to the approach of Burley’s footsteps, the sounds distinct and clear in the hollowness of the larger room, as though he bears ­toward them his own portion of its emptiness.

  He stops in the doorway, leaning his shoulder against the jamb. He grins at them. The brim of his misshapen felt hat, weighted by the rain, bends over his eyes.

  “Gentlemen.”

  “Looks like rain,” Frank Lathrop says.

  Burley nods. “I look for it.”

  He shakes the water off his hat and leans there, creasing and smoothing the crown of it with his fingers, burlesquing his care. He watches their faces, prolonging his interruption of the game while he elaborates the joke of his concern for his hat.

  “Looks like a man who could afford a ten-dollar hat for a ten-cent head,” Jayber Crow says finally, “could afford an umbrella.”

  Burley stares at him, his face nearly expressionless, but with enough attention that it seems he shapes and completes the silence he allows to follow Jayber’s remark, as delicately as he now holds the perfected shape of his hat.

  “It looks like to me,” he says then, “a two-bit barber with no hair ought to be more respectful of heads.”

  He puts his hat on, nudging it a little ­toward the back of his head with his thumb, a gesture that seems both to finish the quiet and detach him from it.

  “Well, Burley,” Old Jack says, “is the boy gone?”

  “He’s gone.”

  Burley unbuttons his jacket and comes into the room. He shakes the ashes out of the stove and puts in a lump of coal, and spreads his hands to the warmth. He shivers. When his hands are warm, he turns his back to the stove.

  “Burley,” Mat says, “you might as well play.”

  They make room and Burley pulls up a chair.

  They play without talking—­two more hands, and into a third. Mat pushes his glasses up on his forehead, rubbing his eyes, and turns to look out the window.

  “Rain, rain.”

  “The river’ll be out of its banks,” Frank says.

  “Is now,” Burley says. “A little. It could get troublesome.”

  “Well, I’ve seen it rain,” Mat says, “and I’ve seen it get troublesome.”

  “You’ve seen it worse than it is now,” Old Jack says.

  “Several times.”

  “And if you don’t die you’ll see it worse.”

  “I expect.”

  Jayber plays, and Frank, and Burley.

  Old Jack draws and slaps down the ten of diamonds and rams his final card into the discard pile. He looks triumphantly from one of his opponents to another.

  He has played his ten of diamonds on Jayber’s seven, eight, and nine of hearts, but they choose not to n
otice his error, knowing what it would cost them to try to undo it. Once the old man has committed himself to a play, the rules, as far as he is concerned, no longer apply to it.

  I CAN DO IT BY MYSELF

  Old Jack is difficult. When the mood strikes him he can be magnificently difficult.

  For nine years after the death of his wife the old man stayed alone on his farm and kept house for himself. But then, because his health seemed to her to be failing, his daughter insisted that he come to Louisville to live with her. He refused. She insisted that he hire a housekeeper; a man his age ought not to be left alone, she said. He refused again, and this time put himself to pains to see that she retreated with her plans and opinions thoroughly dismantled.

  Finally, though, there was a partial surrender on Old Jack’s side. But it was none of her doing—­he saw to that. It was Mat Feltner’s son-in-law, Wheeler Catlett, who brought about the compromise: that Old Jack would come to live out the rest of his life in the hotel at Port William. Wheeler was Old Jack’s lawyer and, when they agreed, his friend. And in this undertaking he had also the advantage of not being the daughter.

  It was not that the old man had ceased to love his daughter. But her marriage to a prominent Louisville banker had long ago set her apart from his world and out of his reach. He saw that clearly at the time and admitted it unhesitatingly to himself, and so when she came to him with her invitation, well meant as he knew it was, he could see no reason to back off. And with perfect understanding of the consequences, for his daughter and for himself, he kept loyal to what he considered his own place in the world.

  But Old Jack admires candor, and Wheeler Catlett stated the proposition to him with candor: “Uncle Jack, you’re old. You could get sick. It won’t be any pleasure to you to die out here by yourself.”

  “I can do it by myself,” Old Jack said.

  From the tone of his voice Wheeler judged he would do it to prove it if he had to, and after that he let him alone.

  Old Jack held out another six months, to proclaim his independence and recover ownership of the decision, and then came to town. He arrived at the hotel ­toward the end of last October in Wheeler Catlett’s automobile, his clothes and shaving equipment packed in two five-gallon buckets that Wheeler afterwards carried back and set down on the well top in front of Old Jack’s barn.

  Mrs. Hendrick’s hotel, in the time of her departed husband, had subsisted on the patronage of a fellowship of traveling salesmen who came and went more or less regularly through the town. But by the time of Jack’s arrival it was a kind of boardinghouse, inhabited for the most part by Mrs. Hendrick and two other, much older, widows who turned out to be extravagantly unsatisfactory companions for Old Jack. And he, by nature or by calculation, proved just as unsuited to the conversational purposes of the three ladies. Aside from the fact that the presence of a man under their roof seemed a breach of respectability, Old Jack’s language assumed for them, in this unsteady social predicament, the nature of a direct assault on their virtue. His disregard makes a kind of bridge on which he tromps across the chasm of propriety that once supposedly protected them in the insular delicacy of their sex. He says very little that they can reply to without seeming to countenance a liberty as opprobrious as seduction. Their precautionary muteness in his presence has been further intensified by Mrs. Hendrick’s discovery that he urinates in the back yard every night before he goes to bed and the first thing every morning—­and by the knowledge, discreetly gossiped to them all, that the three of them are customarily referred to, by Jayber Crow and Burley Coulter among others, as “Old Jack’s harem.”

  Mrs. Hendrick has a face like an auger, an imitation of the corkscrew twist of hair at the back of her head. She had accustomed herself to widowhood more readily than she ever had to marriage; the memory of Mr. Hendrick she had stashed away neatly in the phrase “My blessed husband, God rest his soul.” And then Old Jack’s coming put a sudden end to the satisfactions and conveniences of her widowhood. Between the two of them a kind of second marriage took place, enforced by circumstance, consummated by Old Jack’s unreckoning invasions of her privacy. But in consideration of the advanced age of the offender and the dollars he pays her punctually on the first of every month, she has felt obliged to tolerate him, and does, with the comforting sense that her virtue somehow prevails.

  Old Jack made the card game in Jasper Lathrop’s vacant store his winter outpost. Except for the one afternoon a week when Wheeler Catlett drove him out to oversee the work on his farm, he sat by the fire in the little room, talking when he saw that the players’ interest in the game had flagged and they would listen to him, and talking at times when he knew none of them listened.

  That lasted until Jayber Crow got the idea to teach the old man the game.

  “Take a hand, Jack. We’ll show you how.”

  “Play,” Old Jack said, gesturing refusal with the cane. “I don’t know one from the other.”

  But they repeated the offer, and he finally agreed to let them try to teach him. “It’ll be uphill,” he told them.

  It was, Jayber Crow said, like pushing a loaded wagon uphill with a piece of string. But once they got him into it the old man stuck. He stuck, not from any love of the game, but because he immediately hated it. He hates the impersonality of it, he hates it for the chance involved in it, he hates the implacable rules of it, he hates it because it is a game. He plays as if it is his obligation to wipe the game from the face of creation. That they have been able to teach him no more than half the rules has preserved his bafflement. His opponents are constantly trounced by his anger, for their persistence in playing against him, for being able to play without anger, for having caught him in the game in the first place. They accept his anger with equanimity, and usually with amusement. They oppose him as honestly and gently as they can, out of sympathy—­realizing that the conflict has become necessary to him, one of the last staples of his life—­and out of respect.

  A VOICE FROM THE DISTANCE

  Jayber grins and pitches his cards onto the block. “He’s won. Let’s call it a day.”

  “You’re laying it on us, Uncle Jack,” Burley says.

  The old man picks up his cane and wrenches his chair around to face the windows. “Yes sir, it’s a wet time, Burley.”

  Frank Lathrop gathers the cards and shuffles them once, and places the deck in the center of the block. Mat relights his cigar.

  Their gestures deliberately and a little gravely establish the game’s conclusion.

  Frank nods ­toward the radio. “The news, Mat.”

  Mat reaches behind him and turns up the radio. They make way for the voice of the announcer as for a procession, their gathering broken as each of them moves his eyes away from it, staring out the windows or at the floor. This solemn hearing of the news, after so long a time, has become a kind of ceremony with them. All afternoon, while the game goes on, the radio hums and murmurs in its niche among the boxes on the desk top, like an idol come to life above its altar, a crude cyclopean head erected and drowsily alert on the room’s edge. Until one of them, noticing a new inflection in its voice, calls attention to it. And they hush for the precise voice of the announcer stating the facts of the war, continuing from the point at which it left off the hour before or the day before; the voice carefully objective, studiedly calm, a fact itself which remains whole and remote among the facts it utters. The words come to them unjudged, without lamentation or joy. Their quiet listening becomes an obedience, an homage. For a few minutes they let the war exist there in the room, calmly mouthing its deaths.

  “That’s that,” Frank Lathrop says. He shuts the damper on the stove and they leave the room. Old Jack leads the way down the row of counters to the street door. He walks rapidly, his pants bagging a little over the tops of his leather leggings, the dangling earflaps waving above his coat collar as though he flies as well as walks.

  A LITTLE SHIFT IN THE WIND

  When they step out on the sidewalk Frank Lath
rop pulls the door to and locks it.

  The sky is still clouded, but no longer darkly. The wind has shifted a little to the north, driving the clouds into the southeast. The wind is steady and deep; it seems to move the whole sky, holding the shapes of the clouds intact. The wind is colder now and they brace their shoulders against it, pulling their collars more snugly around their necks. Tomorrow, they hope, will be clear.

  Under the clouds the air is already clear; the light is hard and precise on the wet surfaces of the buildings and the street, and on the bare upstroking branches of the trees. Northward, beyond the edge of town, is the broad opening of the river valley, seeming abruptly nearer with the rain gone. The farthest barns and houses appear nearly and solidly rectangular.

  The road follows the river upstream and south from where it empties into the Ohio at Hargrave. For most of its distance it stays down in the floor of the valley, bending along the first steepenings of the hills, leaving the bottomlands intact between itself and the river. A couple of miles downstream from Port William it begins its one digression: it crosses a bridge at the mouth of a tributary valley, passes the sagging rusting coal tipple and shut store at the old town landing, turns away from the river, and climbs the bluff. It follows the backbones of ridges across the upland, goes through the town, and after another mile or so twists down the bluff into the valley again. From the sidewalk in front of the store they can see three-quarters of a mile of it—­marked, for most of that distance, by brushy fencerows on either side: an irregularity of the landscape, like a scar or seam where two halves of the country have been divided or joined. In places they can see the asphalt surface of the roadbed; in places it goes out of sight between embankments or clumps of young locusts. It dips into a hollow, and turns ­toward the town, becoming visible again as it passes the graveyard and the first straggling row of houses on the outskirts.