“And, it must have been two-thirty or three o’clock this morning, I commenced to hear that horn again. And I says to myself, ‘Well, Burley, your dreams are getting too loud to sleep with.’ I rolled over and tried it again and it didn’t stop, and it come to me then that I was hearing it. And I says, ‘Well, durned if the luck ain’t picked you out.’ After I’d listened a while, I could tell it was stuck sure enough this time, wasn’t anybody blowing it that way on purpose. I had the suspicion from the first that it was the same horn. But I somehow hated to admit it.
“I was out of bed by that time and had the light on and was climbing into my clothes, and hurrying. I went down and snatched up the lantern and lit it and started out. And hadn’t more than made it to the yard gate before I realized I didn’t have any idea at all which direction I ought to be going. That horn seemed to be bawling from every direction at once, the air just ringing with it. My head was full of it, and it seemed to be piling up around me, getting louder all the time.
“Figuring any direction was more likely than none, I took off running down the hill, because it was easier, I reckon, and into the woods. And then the sound began to fade out. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ve found out something.’ And I turned around and started back up the hill. As I broke out of the woods I seen a light at Jarrat’s, and then his lantern coming across the field toward my house. I swung my lantern and he answered with his, and we met and went on together. When we climbed over into the lane at the top of the ridge we struck a fresh car track.
“Well, you know that old lane used to go on out the ridge and down the branch, and struck the creek road there opposite Gideon Crop’s house. But I don’t reckon anybody’s used it beyond my gate for twenty-five or thirty years. And that’s where the car had gone. It had a sort of running start by the time it hit the unused part of the road, and it went down the slope of the ridge, spinning and slipping, riding down the weeds and bushes as it went, and then picked up speed where the road turned down into the first hollow, and went over the bank and wedged itself finally into a kind of jungle of undergrowth and grapevines and briars at the bottom of the slant. By the time we’d tracked it into that hollow, we could hear the engine running again just the way we had before. But even after that it took us a while to find it, buried in all that brush, and us with no better lights than we had. We finally caught the shine of one of the taillights and sort of dug our way in to it. And there they were.
“Only this time they were both still in the car. They were just sitting there, looking straight ahead, sort of hopeless and forlorn. And the old man was pouring the gas to it again, like it was that or else. Where the difference was, was with her. Instead of being sort of outside the situation, and mad about it, this time she seemed to be in it as deep as he was, just as puzzled and beat.
“We had to holler and whoop and beat on the roof for it seemed like five minutes before we could get them to see us and unlock the doors and let us help them get out. Which took some doing, the car was so wedged in among the bushes and vines, and at that we couldn’t open but one door. We got them out and got the engine shut off, and then opened the hood to see if we could stop the horn.
“It was like the old man hadn’t heard the horn, or paid any attention to it, until we did that. All of a sudden it just made him nervous all over. He hadn’t listened to it a second before he’d had every bit of it he could take. And he reached in where the motor is and began pulling the wires loose. You never saw anything like it. A man as big and stout as he is, all of a sudden tormented and mad as he could be, pulling that wiring up with his hands like it was grass, and the sparks and blue fire shooting all over the place, and the horn blowing right on like it was coming down out of the sky. There wasn’t a thing for Jarrat and me to do but hold the lanterns up and stand back. Well, he tore out every wire he could lay his hands to, and some of the other pieces besides, and the horn still kept on. And then he caught hold of one of the battery cables and picked the battery up and went to shaking it like a dog would shake a rat—the blue sparks still flashing and snapping—and finally jerked the fastening loose. That stopped the horn, and stopped him too. He quieted right down, then, and just stood there. And so did the rest of us, while the songbirds and mosquitoes and things flew out of our ears and off into the woods. It was so quiet you could hear yourself breathe.
“ ‘Well, Mr. Greatlow,’ I said, ‘this may not be where you was going, but you’ve done got here.’
“ ‘Hanh?’ he said.
“And then he looked back at what the lantern showed of the sort of tunnel he’d bored coming down. ‘The God-damned government,’ he said. ‘Build a thing like this, this day and time, and call it a road.’
“And for a while after that we just kept on standing there in the quiet, like maybe if we waited around it would finally begin making sense to somebody. And it was a right remarkable scene—all of us standing there, listening to the racket flying away, everybody standing sort of alone, all about the same distance apart, all facing the automobile but not looking exactly at it—like it was one of them things you ain’t supposed to admit you know as long as there’s a lady present. And the old woman was standing just where we’d helped her to, her mouth all puckered out like Whistler’s mother. And I said to myself, ‘She’s going to kill him or she’s going to cry.’ Well sir, directly she began to cry.
“About the time she started that, and maybe because of it, it hit me what a comical scene it was, and I began to get tickled. And at the same time I knew that that old woman standing off there by herself, crying, was about the saddest thing ever I seen. She wasn’t asking for any comfort because she never had and didn’t know how, and probably suspicioned that she might not deserve any. And her old husband so hard rode that he couldn’t have gone to her even if he’d wanted to.
“I went to her then, and consoled her the best I could—told her we’d get them home all right, and everything would be fine, and so on. And then I says, ‘Ma’am, how in the world come you all to be trying this road? Mistook your directions, I reckon.’
“But that wasn’t what they’d done. She calmed down before long and told me.
“After we got them unstuck in the afternoon, they went on back to Hargrave by the way we told them to go, and got there about dark. They stopped at the little store this side of the bridge to get some groceries, and the storekeeper tells them, first thing, that Gideon Crop had been in there about the middle of the afternoon. Said he had about a week’s growth of beard and looked like he’d been dug up out of the mud. And acted to the storekeeper like he never saw him before. Just bought some cheese and crackers, and cashed a check for four dollars, and carried his eats out in a paper sack.
“Well, the old woman said she knew then that something wasn’t right. That’s the way she kept putting it: ‘There’s something ain’t right. Lord, I know it.’ So she didn’t do a thing but get back in the car and make the old man turn around and head back up here. They went to Roger Merchant’s first. But Mr. Merchant, he”—and here Burley hesitates, and looks at Margaret—“wasn’t in no shape to receive company.”
“Drunk,” Mat says.
Burley nods. “So when the Greatlows knocked and hollered at the back door, nobody came. The light was on inside and they could hear Roger talking—to himself, I reckon—but they couldn’t raise him. They gave up there finally, and went on over the hill as far as they could go in the car, and then tried to get over to the Crops’ house on foot. Of course there wasn’t any chance of that. They had nearly a mile to go in the mud and the creek to cross, and it still running deep, and they never even had a light. They sort of felt their way along for a while, and finally admitted it was hopeless, and turned back. And then they see that they ought to have left the car lights on because it took them a good while, creeping along the way they had to in the dark, to find the car. They got to it, finally, and got it turned around and started back up the hill—and were just ready to give up and go home again w
hen the old woman remembered the road that used to go down from our place. She figured that if they could get to the foot of the hill there she would at least be in calling distance of the house. So she decided to try it. She hadn’t been down that road since she was young, but she thought that in all that time it surely was bound to have got better, not worse.”
“Burley,” Margaret says, “we’re fixing breakfast for you. You’ll eat with us, won’t you?”
“Why, yes ma’am, Mrs. Feltner. Now that you’ve asked me, I reckon I will.”
“Go on,” Mat says.
“So, anyhow, we decided that Jarrat would take the old people home in the truck, and we’d let them know how Ida was as soon as we could find out. Jarrat started off ahead to get the truck, and I stayed back with the Greatlows, sort of helping the old woman up the climb. Jarrat had the truck waiting at my gate when we got there, and I helped them in.
“I’d already promised myself to go right on down to the Crops’. I hadn’t said so, but seemed to me I had to agree with the old woman—something ain’t right down there.
“Well, the more I thought about it, the more sure I got that they’re in some kind of trouble, and the more I sort of hung back from the thought of walking into it by myself, to tell you the truth. And then I thought of you, Mat, and decided I’d ask you. I know it’s Sunday and all, but would you mind?”
NEVER WHAT IT WAS
At the bottom of the hill, just above the high-water line, Mat pulls the truck to the side of the road, and they get out. Before them in the sediment of the flood is the scrawl of the Greatlows’ first catastrophe and rescue. Where it is broken by the clutter of tracks, the mud has begun to dry.
To avoid the mud as long as possible, they walk along the face of the hill just above what was the shoreline a few days ago. At their feet, the spring has made its small beginnings: narrow grassblades spiking out of their dead sheaths, spring beauties, a few white flowers of bloodroot. The sunlight again becomes a dwelling place. The life of the ground has begun its rise. And Mat walks, thinking, a kind of singing and crying pressing in his throat: “Yes. It has come again.”
They walk as quietly as hunters over the soft ground along the slope as it turns from the river valley into the valley of the creek. The sun is well up now, the warmth of it pressing their heads and shoulders. On the hillside around them there is still that stain of green. In town Uncle Stanley Gibbs is ringing the church bell.
The brush thickens on the slope ahead of them, and to avoid it they turn down the hillside to the creek road. Their feet now weighted with mud, they go more slowly, laboring to walk. Before they have gone many steps, they come to the tracks of a man going out. The tracks turn out of the road just ahead of them, go up the bank, and disappear among the bushes on the hillside.
“They must be Gideon’s,” Burley says. “He went out the same way we’ve come in.”
“And he hasn’t come back. At least not by the same way.”
They are coming toward the upper end of the woods in the bottom, the road going along the edge of the valley floor. They seem to have come, not back into the winter, but beyond any season. Around them everything has been flowed over, coated with mud. A few days ago the water stood higher than their heads where they are walking now, and they do not forget it.
They come out of the woods and Burley stops suddenly and points to the careening barn.
But the barn isn’t all. Fences have been pushed over and weighted with drift. A great fan of rocks and gravel has been thrown out onto the cropland. Along the banks of the creek are several notches where big trees were torn out by the roots.
“Lord, she was rolling when she hit here.”
“Awful,” Burley says. “Awful. Look at them fences. Look at them rocks. It’ll never be what it was.”
The road crosses a rise of the ground, and from the top they can see the long curve of tracks swinging up past the house to the ford of the creek and back down to the road. Deep, brimming with shadow, they are the only marks.
“They’re Gideon’s all right,” Burley says.
“He couldn’t come out by the bridge,” Mat says. “It’s gone. Look yonder.” He points to where the bridge hangs snarled in the tree branches.
“And we can’t get in by it, either, come to think of it. We can cross at the ford, I reckon, the way he did.”
They leave the road, walking beside the old tracks, around the openings of which a dry crust has begun to form. The going becomes harder now. They sink to their ankles at each step, and then, as they heave the other foot out of the mud, sink deeper. Every step requires a combination of main strength and delicate balance.
But they don’t stop again until they come to the ford. There where the high banks have been tapered back to let the road across, they stand a moment looking at the water still running strong, and then they look at each other and laugh.
“Nosir,” Burley says, “we ain’t going to wade that in boots.”
Each dreads it more than he wants to admit, and they stand there another minute, a little fidgety, looking up and down the creek, wishing for a bridge. And then they pull off their boots and socks and britches, and wade the thigh-deep icy stream.
When they knock at the back door, nobody answers. They knock and wait, and knock and wait.
They have just turned to start off the porch when Ida comes around the corner of the house, carrying a load of stovewood and an axe.
She says, “Hello, Mr. Feltner. Hello, Mr. Coulter. How’re you all?” And steps up onto the porch, leaning the axe against one of the posts.
“Fine, thank you,” Burley says. “Better weather, ain’t it?”
Mat says, “We thought we’d stop by to see how you made it through the flood. Gideon ain’t here, is he?”
“No sir, he ain’t.” And, when they seem to wait for her to say something more: “He went off. I ain’t expecting him before supper.”
“Well,” Burley says, “that old creek surely did come out romping and stomping.”
“Yes,” she says, nodding, “it did.”
Mat says, “I usually see Annie before I see you, Ida. Where’s she?”
She hesitates, seems to brace herself between the porch floor and the load of wood; her eyes brim with tears. But her voice, when it comes, is steady and quiet:
“It drownded her. You seen the bridge. Well, she was on it when it tore out.”
For a few seconds they stand, all three of them, as if startled by a sudden loud sound in the distance. And then Ida turns and looks directly at them and smiles, her eyes still blurred by the unfallen tears.
“Lord,” she says, “I’m letting you stand out here like I haven’t got any manners at all. Come in and sit down. I know you’re tired. I know you must have had to walk nearly the whole way. And through that mud.”
She opens the door and goes ahead of them into the kitchen. As she builds the fire, she begins her story: “I was sewing. In that rocking chair right there by you, Mr. Feltner. And all of a sudden the radio up and quit.” And before long she interrupts herself: “I know you all would like some coffee.” And without waiting to let them answer, she fills the coffee pot and sets it on the stove. And then she resumes, interrupting again, when the coffee is made, to fill their cups. She does not sit down with them, but stands, facing them, sideways to the stove, her right hand now and then, absently, reaching for the handle of the coffee pot, which she takes up twice again to refill first Burley’s cup and then Mat’s. She never once falters in her telling. Nor by her tone does she seem to expect help or consolation, as though she simply takes for granted that the time has long gone when she could have been either helped or consoled.
When she has finished, Mat says, “Ida, you oughtn’t to be down here by yourself. Why don’t you come up and stay with us—for a few days anyhow? It wouldn’t put us to a bit of trouble.”
She shakes her head. “I’m much obliged to you, Mr. Feltner. But I got this stock here to look after, and thes
e chickens, and them old cows to milk.”
Mat does not insist. “Well, if you get to wanting to come, you come. We’d be glad. Margaret would be.” He hesitates. “Do you reckon it could be a good while before Gideon gets back?”
“Mr. Feltner,” she says, “he’ll be back. I know if a man’s going to make a crop he ought to be here getting ready. But I’ll see to things.”
But her next words are borne on a pride that divides her from them:
“Of course, that’s up to Mr. Merchant. It’s his place.”
“No,” Mat says, “That’s one thing I wouldn’t worry about.”
She nods, and then smiles. By another change of voice, she again makes them her guests: “You all have another cup of coffee.”
But Mat gets up. “We’ll have to get on. We want to go down and look at the barn before we leave.”
They all go out together to the barn. They go from one upright to another, studying the sprung framing, now and again pointing to a burst mortise or a loosened brace.
“Well,” Burley says finally, “she looks like she’s sort of got herself propped up. She might stand up in this shape for a long time.”
“Yes,” Mat says, “but, still, I wouldn’t trust her too long to a hard wind. She’ll either have to be straightened back, or torn the rest of the way down.”
They go out. At the house Ida thanks them and leaves them.
They wade the creek again, and start toward the river road.
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 88