Mat and Andy come in and close the door. They cross the room to the stove, and Mat sits down on a nail keg in front of it. Andy wanders here and there in the shop, looking, but touching nothing; Ernest will not stand for meddling. After a minute or two Andy comes back and stands beside Mat at the stove. Ernest is working at the bench, carefully dressing the edge of a walnut board with a plane. He has not yet looked around at them. They watch him without talking, waiting for him to be done.
AN OLD WOUND
In the early summer of 1919, when Ernest came home at last from the war, both his parents were dead and the house sold. Port William had got used to his absence, and he came back changed.
His wound had been difficult, complicated at the beginning by infection, and the healing was painful and slow. After his discharge he had to spend the better part of a year in the hospital. His foot was finally made as well as it would ever be; but this, the end of the healing, was the hardest for him to accept—that to be “cured” meant only that he would remain crippled. The fragmented bones and tendons were spliced back; the irreparable mutilation was made to heal and live. There would be no reason, they told him, why he should not live a normal life. Adjustments would have to be made, of course.
Still, as he prepared to leave the hospital, learning, as though it was some ultimately unsolvable problem of mechanics, to piece out his loss with the crutches, he was aware that he had suffered a defeat. And he knew that this defeat was real and final, allowing for no recovery or revenge, permitting no illusion to mitigate its permanence. And it was from this defeat, more than from any place he had been, that he came back to Port William.
He came back with his mouth shut, permanently, on these realizations. There were two things that he could neither speak of nor forget: his defeat, and the implausibility of the fact that something so vast as a war had picked out and defeated so small a thing as one man, himself. The difficulty was that this was an implausible fact. He was getting ready to leave the hospital; he was going back to Port William, to begin whatever would have to be begun, and now he realized that these thoughts belonged to him as permanently as his wound. He would go back to town, then, this much changed, and nothing could ever be as it was.
But Mat, who came on the train to bring him home, made it easier than he had imagined. When Mat walked into the hospital that morning, he raised his hand in greeting.
“I’m half contraption,” Ernest said.
And Mat said, “Not hardly that much.”
He smiled; they shook hands. Mat picked up Ernest’s suitcase and led the way to the door. To Mat it seemed that they brought home, between them, the recovery of a time—an injury and vacancy in all their lives, healed over, like Ernest’s wound, but with diminished pain.
They got off the train in the early morning. The town of Hargrave had not begun to stir, and the valley lay under a fog that seemed to weight the quiet and to separate the town and themselves immediately from the rattling departure of the train.
After an hour’s driving over the rutted road, disappearing always a few yards ahead of them into the fog, they climbed out of the valley into the open daylight. From the top of the first ridge they could see Port William lying in the sun ahead of them, the white steeple of the church pointing up over the cluster of treetops and roofs. They drove along the ridge, the car chugging and jolting ahead of its plume of dust, dipping out of sight of the town, climbing the rise into it. The maples, in the perfect foliage of early June, dappled the road and the white house fronts with their shade. Flowers were in bloom in the yards and porch boxes. On an old millstone in a patch of sun a yellow cat sat licking itself. Behind them the fog, a white sunlit cloud, filled the valley to the brim.
The town had settled into the quiet of workday mornings. Mat turned the car into the driveway beside his house and stopped and shut the engine off. And the quiet came over them—a susurration of the wakefulness of the town, in which the noon meal was being prepared, the floors were being swept, time was unwinding in the kitchen clocks, the sun was climbing in the warm clear sky toward noon and solstice.
There were the smells of honeysuckle, of barns, of cooking, of hay curing, of horse dung warming and drying in the road. Mat, waking from death, would have known in an instant the place, the time of year, the time of day. Looking at the house, he saw Margaret walking toward them across the porch, smiling, though she saw and knew what he had brought.
In the fall of that year Ernest built his shop. He did most of the work alone, with help now and then from Mat and Joe Banion when they could spare the time. The shop became, in a way, a town project, not of work, but of interest and curiosity—and then surprise that Ernest could lift and carry and climb and, more alone than not, frame and wall up and roof a sizable building. But Ernest had quickly developed the judgment necessary to his lameness, which enabled him to estimate accurately what he could and could not do—and to do more, by a considerable sight, than most of the townspeople would have guessed before they saw him do it. In the town they renamed him Shamble. Though the thumping of the crutches went ahead of him, he held up his face, and there would be a direct straight look in his eyes.
It was understood from the first that Ernest would make his home with Mat and Margaret. He took the room over the kitchen in the back of the house, which had a separate entrance by the back stairs and the upper porch. After his carpenter’s trade had been established, he seemed to withdraw into the established certainties and clear limits of it. He perfected his shop, making its work spaces neat and convenient. He perfected his silence.
A PRETTY GOOD BOY
Ernest straightens up from his work and looks around.
“Hello, Mat. Who’s that you’ve got with you?”
“I don’t know who this fellow is. He just followed me in.”
Ernest blows the shavings out of the plane and lays it down on the bench. He takes the board out of the vise. Holding to the end of it with one hand, he runs his thumb down the edge of it, and then, drawing it to his eye, sights along it.
“I believe he’s a good boy, though. I think I’ll keep him.”
Ernest looks away from the board and, with the same squint in his eye, sights down at Andy.
“He looks like a pretty good boy.”
Andy laughs. “Uncle Ernest, Granny said to tell you to come home for supper before long. She’s made a pie for dessert.”
“Ho,” Mat says. “That’s who he is.”
Ernest nods his head. “I knew him as soon as I heard him say pie.”
FEEDING
When they go into the kitchen, supper is cooking. Margaret and Hannah and Bess Catlett are all sitting around the table, talking. Bess is holding her younger child, Henry, on her lap.
When he sees Mat coming to the door, Henry jumps down and runs across the kitchen to meet him.
“See what’s in my ear, Grandad.”
He cocks his head sideways, putting his ear into the proper position.
Mat slips the bar of candy out of his pocket, concealing it in his hand, and with a great show of effort fetches it out of the little boy’s ear, and hands it to him. Henry takes it and looks at it, his eyes big.
They all laugh. Mat walks over to the table. Bess takes his hand, and he leans down to kiss her.
He stands there a minute to talk with them. None of them speak, as they usually do at these times, of Virgil, and they are all conscious of the avoidance. Over all they say there is a tension of awareness that the day has become strange. Mat has understood from the moment he came in that Bess knows of the letter—that, soon after she came, Margaret found a time, out of the hearing of Hannah and the children, to tell her. He can all but hear the sound of her voice, deliberately firm, discovering, by instinctive goodness, the least painful words.
When Wheeler comes, he knows, they will have to tell him. And so it has begun, and will go on. He buttons his coat around him again, and, getting the milk buckets from the pantry, goes out.
&nbs
p; At the barn Joe Banion is already at work, watering the mules. The old Negro comes out of a stall, carrying a lead rein in his hand. The brim of his hat is turned down so that it nearly touches the turned-up collar of his mackinaw. The coat is too large for him, hanging nearly to his knees, the sleeves half covering his hands. His pant legs are stuffed into a pair of leather leggings, also a little large, which have been buckled and then tied top and bottom with pieces of twine. He is small and a little stooped, a little flinched against the chill. His face is that of a man who has learned long ago to do what is necessary: to work, to take pleasure as he finds it, to make do, to be quiet. His face does not show his age; his hands do. As early as Mat remembers anything he remembers Joe Banion.
Joe Banion shuts the stall door and slips the latch to. Turning then, and seeing Mat, he nods his head and smiles. He is thinking of the letter. He is thinking of Virgil, and is sorry.
For a moment, looking at Joe’s face, touched by the kindness in it, Mat would like to tell what he has on his mind, say what he is afraid of. But he does not name his fear even to himself, and he says nothing.
“It sure ain’t getting any warmer, Mr. Mat.”
“It’s not spring yet, Joe.” Mat speaks without thinking, and hears, almost with surprise, the casual tone of his voice.
“It’ll be before long,” Joe Banion is saying. “We’ll be sweating before long, I expect. Soon enough.”
Mat hangs the milk buckets up inside the door, takes a larger bucket to the crib, and fills it with ears of corn. He goes from stall to stall, down one side of the long driveway and up the other, dropping into the feed-boxes each mule’s ration for the night.
He puts the bucket back when he has emptied it, and climbs the ladder into the loft. He moves above the rows of stalls, forking hay down into the mangers. Below him he can hear the mules feeding, rattling the corn in their troughs.
He goes out the back door of the barn, through the lot gate, and up the long slope of the pasture to the sheep barn at the top of the ridge. The sod gives under his feet like sponge. Behind him his tracks are filled with water.
The flock of ewes, most of them with lambs now, grazes along slowly in the direction of the barn, picking here and there at the short grass. Seeing Mat on his way to feed them, they raise their heads, and come along more quickly. In this sudden forward movement of the flock, lambs get separated from their mothers, and the commotion increases. Mat goes into the barn and pulls the doors to behind him. In the dim light that comes in between the boards of the walls, the troughs and mangers stand end to end in a long rank down the center of the driveway. He makes two trips from the feed bin with buckets of grain, spreading it evenly in the bottoms of the troughs, and forks hay into the mangers. And then he covers the wet bedding with a layer of fresh straw. He looks over his work, again with satisfaction: the feeding and the night prepared, perfected.
He pushes the doors open and calls the sheep, standing back out of the way as they come in and crowd to the troughs. He stays there a while, looking over the field, making sure that none has been left out. He feels growing in him now, in spite of all, a familiar and precious calm. The flock is in the barn, well fed, safe from dogs and the cold, warmly bedded. They will be there safe until morning. If not today, on most of the winter days of his life this completeness has filled his mind.
The sun, almost down, breaks out of the overcast, throwing a warm orange light over the town and the house and the ridge where Mat is standing. Against the brightness of the clouds in the west, the town has become a silhouette. The naked branches webbing over the tops of the houses stand out clearly. The wall of the sheep barn is an intense glowing white. Everywhere the colors are stronger. The light picks out the smallest beginnings of green in the pasture. The damp left by the rain shines. Mat stands in the change of light as he has been standing all along, but changed. He knows he will not think of it as winter again; spring has become imaginable. He feels an elation, and then, in the same thought, sorrow that the first change has come beyond what has happened to them. Now they move again toward what will happen.
Chapter 3
THE LAST
A little less than a mile from town Burley Coulter turns off the blacktop into the gravel lane that goes back through the fields to his house and Jarrat’s. The lane runs somewhat windingly along the backbone of a ridge which points toward the opening of the river valley. To the sides of the ridge, though not so noticeably, lie the openings of the lesser valleys of Sand Ripple and Katy’s Branch. From so high Burley can see a lot of the country, in which the only sounds audible to him now are his own footsteps. He walks along carefully between the two depressed and puddled wheel tracks.
Toward its outer end the lane forks, as does the ridge, the left fork going to Jarrat’s house, the right to Burley’s. Here the two farms are divided by a hollow that becomes a deep ravine where the easy slopes of the upland steepen to the wooded bluffs above the river valley.
Since the death of his wife more than twenty years ago, Jarrat has lived alone, leaving his two sons to grow up in the other house, in the care of their grandparents and Burley. The boys lived too far away to know Jarrat as a father, near enough to know him as a taskmaster and judge. Jarrat has remained a good deal apart from the family, cooking and keeping house for himself.
Jarrat and Burley were born in the other house, the log house begun by their great-grandfather, completed by their grandfather, and weatherboarded by their father. Except for a reluctant trip to France in 1918, Burley has never left, and now the deaths and departures of the other members of the family have left him alone there. His father, Dave, died in 1940. And both the boys went away—Tom before the old man’s death, Nathan later—because of quarrels with Jarrat. It is not in Jarrat’s nature to indulge a small disagreement, and so his quarrels with his sons were the only real ones he had ever had with them, and the last ones. It is a severe manhood that Jarrat has, that feeds on its loneliness, and will be governed by no head but his own. Each of the boys was able to make a reconciliation of sorts between himself and Jarrat, on the terms of a quiet and mostly one-sided friendship, but the separation, once accomplished, was permanent, and neither of them came back home to live. And now Tom is dead.
After old Dave’s death and the departure of the two boys, Burley and his mother lived on there together, oppressed sometimes by the emptiness of the big house, but managing, as Burley said, to peg along.
“We’ll peg along, old girl,” he would say to her.
She would sniff, and then laugh, at his impudence.
The old woman lived on in bewilderment, divided from the lives that had been her care and duty. She went through times of deep loneliness; sometimes at night, after Burley had gone to bed, he would hear her wandering among the empty rooms of the house, whispering to herself.
During those last few of her years, Burley made the first honest attempt of his life to please her. He tried—always fumblingly, often with extravagant miscalculation—to be the kind of son he figured she had wanted him to be. He left off, as nearly as he could bear it, what she thought his most wayward habits, and when he was not at work or in town on some errand he mostly stayed at home with her. They would sit in the living room at night, and talk; or, more often, he would listen and she would talk, her old voice wandering at random among her memories. The past had come near to her, and she would talk on and on, remembering idly and easily, but also obsessively and endlessly. She would exhaust his ability to pay attention to her, and he would sit there, his mind drifting, nodding his head. She repeated the same stories time and again, reminded of them by new memories, until finally he was able to tell what story she was on just by the sound of it.
Occasionally in these ramblings of hers she would stumble, by accident, onto one of his misdemeanors. She would be taken by surprise; the recollection would come to her as forcibly as if it had just then happened. She would look up at him suddenly, crossly, over her glasses, and point her finger at
him.
“And you, Burley Coulter, were drunk.”
She would shake her head, surprised and grieved that a son of hers could ever have been drunk.
“Yes, Ma’am,” Burley would say. “I expect.” And he would get up quietly and go out of the house, leaving her to whisper and gesture her way through her old anger.
Her early memories came back to her in swarms, but her ability to keep the immediate past in mind grew weaker. She could remember what happened fifty or twenty-five or ten years ago with lucidity and clarity of detail that were surprising even to her. She would have sudden recollections of things that she was no longer aware of having forgot. But she would be unable to remember what came in the mail the day before. She would hunt sometimes for half a day, having forgot where she had put down her glasses or her thimble. Her lifelong habit of putting things away was transformed, by this failure of her memory, into the interminable and wearisome process of hiding things from herself and finding them again, always by accident and with great pleasure, sometimes months later. A few things that she regarded as keepsakes or valuables she put away carefully and never found again.
One Christmas she put away a box of candy—thinking that she would ration it out carefully and it would last a month or two—and never came upon it again until the week after Easter. By then the candy was hard as gravel, and she had forgot how long it had been since she put it away. Burley, to please her, ate nearly the whole box—in two nights, to get it over with—talking the whole time about how tickled he was that she had saved it. And she nibbled along at it herself, looking inquiringly over her glasses, uncertain whether to believe him or not.
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 76