Mat’s coming has added something implicitly formidable to the uncertain pleasantness of the gathering. Now, in the faces of all three of the Feltners, there seems to Brother Preston to be a secrecy preserved against him. They have, none of them, made any acknowledgment of what they must know to be his reason for coming. It is as though their very grief is an affirmation of something that they refuse to yield to him.
At last, taking advantage of a break in the conversation, he begins, straightening in his chair and leaning forward a little, his eyes moving to the eyes of each of them:
“My friends, I’ve come because I know of your trouble.”
He is surprised by what seems to him to have been the forcefulness of his voice. It is as if some barely perceptible stirring has moved among them, as at the first rising of a wind among tree leaves.
Now Margaret Feltner lifts her hand out of her lap and touches the tips of her fingers lightly to the side of her face.
But he has begun and he goes on, hastened, like a man walking before a strong wind, moved no longer by his intention but by the force of what he is saying. His eyes have become detached from his hearers; he might be speaking down from his pulpit now, looking at all, seeing none. But beneath the building edifice of his meaning, he is aware of something failing between them. It is as though in the very offering of comfort to them he departs from them. And now he is hastened also by an urgency of haste. He feels that the force of his voice is turning back toward himself, that he is fleeing into the safe coherence of his own words, away from those faces shut between him and their pain. He speaks into their silence like a man carrying a map in a strange country in the dark.
At the beginning Mat only half listens. He sits, staring out the window, like a boy in church. But knowing what must be the difficulty of the situation for Margaret and Hannah, his attention is drawn to them, and his separateness from the voice of the preacher is destroyed. He watches the two women, sorry for them, determined to bear with them, as dumbly as he has to, what must be borne. It is of the loss, accomplished or to come, of Virgil Feltner that the preacher is speaking. And Mat’s fear, which he has kept silenced until now, begins to take its words. It is the fear of the loss of his boy, his good and only son—the preacher’s voice seems to search it out. The preacher’s voice, rising, rides above all chances of mortal and worldly hope, hastening to rest in the hope of Heaven.
In the preacher’s words the Heavenly City has risen up, surmounting their lives, the house, the town—the final hope, in which all the riddles and ends of the world are gathered, illuminated, and bound. This is the preacher’s hope, and he has moved to it alone, outside the claims of time and sorrow, by the motion of desire which he calls faith. In it, having invoked it and raised it up, he is free of the world.
But in this hope—this last simplifying rest-giving movement of the mind—Mat realizes that he is not free, and never has been. He is doomed to hope in the world, in the bonds of his own love. He is doomed to take every chance and desperate hope of hope between him and death, Virgil’s, Margaret’s, his. His hope of Heaven must be the hope of a man bound to the world that his life is not ultimately futile or ultimately meaningless, a hope more burdening than despair.
It is from this possibility of meaninglessness that the preacher has retreated. So that the earth will not be plunged into the darkness, he has lifted up the Heavenly City and hastened to refuge in its gates. And Mat, in the very act of leaning toward that restfulness, turns away from it to take back his pain. His mind seems to steady and move out again to its surfaces. He watches Hannah and Margaret, anxious for them, sorry for their sorrow. He is conscious again of the room, the window, the wet street opening into the town. The buds on the maple trees leaning over the road have grown big. He notices this as he always notices it for the first time in the spring, with an involuntary pleasure, saying to himself that he is surprised to see it happen so early.
The preacher sits with his head tilted so that the lenses of his glasses reflect the window. In his rapt intent face the opaque discs of light look exultant and blind.
Mat and Margaret seem to look at him now with a peculiar kindness, nodding their heads, not so much attentively as indulgently. He feels that he has become again the object of their generosity, that they are offering to him, out of some kind of hospitality, the safe abstraction of his belief. They are releasing him from the particularity of the time and place, and of the life he is talking about.
Concluding, preparing to leave them, he looks again at Hannah. She sits at the end of the sofa, beyond the light of either of the windows, looking down at her hand which lies beside her on the cushion. She reminds him of some white-petaled delicate bloom. “Surely,” he thinks, “the people is grass.”
He stands up abruptly.
“I must go.”
Mat helps him into his coat and walks out onto the porch with him. They make the small sentences of leave-taking while the preacher puts on his rubbers and opens his umbrella. They shake hands.
“Come back,” Mat says. “Thank you.”
He stands on the edge of the porch while Brother Preston goes down the steps and starts out toward the street.
Coming into the house again, he thinks: “Well, that’s done. That’s over.”
The living room, as he goes back into it, holds the quiet of a Sunday, as though the voice of the preacher is still present in it. Margaret has got up and is moving about in the room, halfheartedly and needlessly straightening the furniture and the papers on Mat’s desk. Hannah is sitting as before. He goes over to her and reaches down to pat her shoulder.
“All right?”
“I’m all right.” She nods, smiles.
And then as though suddenly jarred, she cries aloud like a hurt child:
“No! I’m not all right! I’m not!”
Margaret comes to her and holds her while she cries. Against Hannah’s hair Margaret’s face is turned to Mat. Their eyes hold them there a moment, admitting their sorrow for the girl and for each other and for themselves.
And then Mat turns and goes. In his life he has made this movement time and again, this turning away from himself or his loved ones, leaving them to bear what they must. With his children, time after time, he has come to this turning away.
His mouth set, thinking “If it has to happen, it’ll have to happen,” not daring to think what he means, he goes out of the house and turns down the street toward Jasper Lathrop’s store.
Passing under a low maple branch, he breaks off a twig. He feels the softening bud at the tip of it, tastes the cold, bitter taste of the sap. And then, hating to waste it now that he has broken it off, he sticks it into the band of his hat.
THE SANCTURARY
Swollen by the wet weather, the door binds against the sill. Brother Preston shoves hard to open it, and the sound of its breaking loose falls like a long plank into the empty church. But entering, shutting the door behind him, he does not make a sound. He stands just inside the vestibule a moment, letting the quiet of the place come to him. To his right, within reach of his hand, the heavy bellrope hangs down, the lower foot and a half of it polished and darkened by Uncle Stanley’s hands. It drops straight into the vestibule from the arm of the bell up in the steeple, the hole drilled for its passage through the ceiling worn whopsided by the rope’s sawing through it, and the rope at that place fretted to half its original thickness. At the end there is a big club of a knot which Uncle Stanley can just reach, and which is just out of reach, it is hoped, of the members of the Intermediate Boys’ Sunday School Class.
On either side of the vestibule a door opens into a high narrow room, stark in its proportions and furnishings. Uncle Stanley has been in to clean up in preparation for the Wednesday-night prayer meeting, and everything is in a state of neatness and order which now, in the quiet, seems to deny its dependence on the likes of Uncle Stan. Unviolated now by any presence but his own, the old church seems to Brother Preston to stand erect and coh
erent, enclosing him.
As though the racket he made opening the door signaled a division between the church and the town, the sanctuary is now filled with quiet. He might be moving across the bottom of a deep pool. Tiptoeing, not making a sound, he comes on down the aisle and sits on a bench near the pulpit and directly in front of it.
He came away from the Feltner house grieved by the imperfection of his visit. It was not, as he had hoped it would be, a conversation. It was a sermon. This is the history of his life in Port William. The Word, in his speaking it, fails to be made flesh. It is a failure particularized for him in the palm of every work-stiffened hand held out to him at the church door every Sunday morning—the hard dark hand taking his pale unworn one in a gesture of politeness without understanding. He belongs to the governance of those he ministers to without belonging to their knowledge, the bringer of the Word preserved from flesh. But now, sitting on the hard bench in the chilled odors of stale perfume and of vacancy, he feels that he has come again within the reach of peace. On the back of the bench in front of him, like some cryptic text placed there for his contemplation, are the initials B.C. in deeply cut block letters four inches high. Leaning forward, his finger absently tracing the grooves of the initials, he bows in careful silence while his mind seems to stand in the pulpit above him, praying as always: “Our gracious and loving Heavenly Father, we are come into Thy Presence today with our burdens, our troubles, our sorrows.”
The afternoon goes on, and he continues to sit there, his mind coming slowly to rest. He leans back, his hands folded and idle in his lap. Showers come and pass over without his hearing them.
The outside door clatters and slams, and footsteps tramp in. The vestibule door is bumped open, and Uncle Stanley appears at the head of the aisle. In one arm he carries a load of kindling, in the other hand a gallon bucket of corncobs soaking in coal oil. Loaded as he is, Uncle Stanley manages a whole chorus of gestures which greet and exclaim and apologize. Peeping over his load, waving the bucket of cobs, he shuffles down the aisle, his walking cane, hooked into his hip pocket, trailing on the floor behind him like a tail.
“Go right on, Preacher,” he yells. “Go right ahead. Don’t mind me. Keep right on a talking to Him. I know you got it to do. By juckers, if you can squeeze it in anywhere, you can tell Him about me.”
He drops the wood with a racking crash down against a leg of the stove. He opens the fire door and lays in cobs and kindling, and douses in coal oil from the bucket. He tosses in a lighted match, the fire ignites, and the crackling of the flames is immediate and steady. In all this he makes a large avoidance of looking at Brother Preston or speaking to him, leaving him to his prayers.
He goes out, and returns carrying two buckets of coal which he places beside the stove. He adds more kindling to the fire, throws in a few lumps of coal, and goes to the nearest bench and sits down, still wearing his hat. He has gone about his work, and now sits and rests, with utter familiarity toward the place. His attitude intimates that he is a fire builder by profession, the best in the trade, and that his skill and responsibility require a certain indifference to all other considerations. A large chew of tobacco is actively at work in his jaw.
Not wanting to appear unfriendly, Brother Preston comes back and sits near the old man—trusting that, by keeping a distance of four or five feet between them, he can hold the conversation to an exchange of formalities and then leave in a few minutes. But he is exactly as much mistaken as he was afraid he would be. Uncle Stanley gets up and spits into the stove, and then sits down next to him and claps a hand down onto his knee.
“Yessir! By grab, last thing I’d want to do is break in on a fellow’s praying. I reckon there’s plenty of need for it around here. I reckon I ought to know that. But I had to get that fire to going for the prayer meeting tonight. Take the damp outen this air.” He laughs knowingly, slapping the preacher’s knee again. “Take their mind off of their old bones while you say your say to ’em. We all got our calling. You got yours and I got mine. And we go about ’em and get along. Ain’t that right, Preacher?”
“That is so, Mr. Gibbs,” Brother Preston says.
A KNACK FOR THE HERE
March 9, 1945
Dear Nathan,
I’ve laid off to write to you every day for the last four, but it has been hard to get around to. I’ve been hoping for some good news to tell you. But none has happened.
I was in the barbershop the night you left, and Mat Feltner was there and told us that Virgil is missing in action. I’ve been studying the last four days whether I ought to tell you about it or not. I know you’ll be sorry to hear it, but my guess is you would want to know it anyhow. He was a good boy.
I talk like he’s dead for certain, which there ain’t any reason to believe yet. But in town I notice it’s coming mighty easy to most to talk about Virgil as if missing means dead. You don’t hear Virgil is. You hear Virgil was. It’s understandable. It’s simpler to go ahead and think the worst and get it over with, and hard for most people to hold out much for people they’re no kin to. But Mat and them are holding out. I hand it to Mat. He’s just himself, the way he always has been, as far as he’s letting anybody see. He come up to this a man. And I reckon will go through it a man.
I never been what you would call close to Mat. In spite of knowing him right onto fifty year. He hasn’t been the kind you would need to worry about, for his sake or yours either. He has minded his business and stayed at his work. Has known his place, as they say. But the last four days he has been on my mind. I have the feeling that I’m holding out for him. In my mind I stick with him and hope his boy is alive. That’s sympathy, I reckon. And we’ve come to it a hell of a way. By what has happened to us we’re set apart kind of, and made to know each other.
Wednesday afternoon, after the news had pretty well got around, I seen Brother Piston going in up there at Mat’s. And I says to Jayber, “I know the speech he’s going to make.” And so would all of us. He come and said all that to me after we knew Tom was dead. And none of it quite fit. You could say that he didn’t have too good of an idea who he was talking to. While he was having his say I sat there and thought my thoughts. Here in a way he’d come to say the last words over Tom. And what claim did he have to do it? He never done a day’s work with us in his life, nor could have. He never did stand up in his ache and sweat and go down the row with us. He never tasted any of our sweat in the water jug. And I was thinking: Preacher, who are you to speak of Tom to me, who knew him, and knew the very smell of him?
And there he sat in your grandaddy’s chair, with his consolations and his old speech. Just putting our names in the blanks. And I thought: Preacher, he’s dead, he’s not here, and you’ll never know what it is that’s gone.
The last words ought to say what it is that has died. The last words for Tom ain’t in the letter from the government, and they won’t be said by the preacher. They’ll be said by you and me and the rest of us when we talk about our old times and laugh about the good happenings. They won’t all be said as long as we live. I say that a man has got to deserve to speak of the life of another man and of the death of him.
The difference between people is what has got to be taken notice of. There’s the preacher who has what I reckon you would call a knack for the Hereafter. He’s not much mixed with this world. As far as he’s concerned there is no difference, or not much, between Tom Coulter and Virgil Feltner. Their names fit into the riddle he thinks he knows the answer to. I wouldn’t try to say he ain’t right. I do say that some people’s knack is for the Here. Anyhow, that’s the talent I’m stuck with. For us it’s important to keep in mind who Tom was. And for Mat and them I judge it’s important to know who is meant when they speak of Virgil. We don’t forget them after somebody who never knew them has said “Dead in the service of his country” and “Rest in peace.” That’s not the way these accounts are kept. We don’t rest in peace. The life of a good man who has died belongs to the people who cared
about him, and ought to, and maybe itself is as much comfort as ought to be asked or offered. And surely the talk of a reunion in Heaven is thin comfort to people who need each other here as much as we do.
I ain’t saying I don’t believe there’s a Heaven. I surely do hope there is. That surely would pay off a lot of mortgages. But I do say it ain’t easy to believe. And even while I hope for it, I’ve got to admit I’d rather go to Port William.
As Jayber says, when we seen Brother Piston go in up at Mat’s, the worst thing about preachers is they think they’ve got to say something whether anything can be said or not.
Well, it’s been raining right along since you left. The ground, you know, was soaked while you was here. So every drop that has fell has gone in the river. The river has got way up. It’s into most of the bottoms. And the creeks are still running out big. And the radio says more to come.
Night before last Anvil Brant sent word up here by his son-in-law that he had a sow and nine pigs he wanted to sell to me and your daddy. So yesterday morning we got in the pickup truck and went down. When we got there Anvil’s wife said he was out to the barn. And we could see why. There Mrs. Anvil was with her children, and there was her and Anvil’s oldest girl with her children, children and grandchildren looked like all running about the same age, and looked like four or five in each set, and all of them been fastened up there together since the rain commenced. And there was Mrs. Anvil, with her hair sticking out right stiff in several directions like a frozen floor mop, and one child sucking and one hanging onto her arm and one standing under her dress so you couldn’t see nothing but its legs, standing there in pee smell strong enough to make your eyes water, slapping here and there and yelling at them all to be quiet, taking three or four minutes to tell us Anvil was down to the barn, anyhow she reckoned he was, she hadn’t seen him since breakfast.
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 83