The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

  They talk on, considering possibilities, looking ahead through spring and summer and fall, thinking of what will have to be done and how they will manage to do it.

  “Ida says all we need to see to is the heavy work—­the plowing and so on,” Burley says. “She’ll do the rest.”

  “Do you think we ought to depend on her to do that?”

  “She’ll do it anyhow,” Burley says. “So we might as well depend on her.”

  GREEN COMING STRONG

  March 25, 1945

  Dear Nathan,

  I laid off to write you last Sunday, but never got around to it, and reckoned you would be on your way across the water anyhow. I expect, if that’s so, you’ll get this one about as quick as you’d have got the one I didn’t write last week. I hope so.

  The flood is over now. It was a bad one, and come at a bad time, and done damage, and has throwed everybody way behind. We got awfully tired of looking at water.

  The worst of it—­which we didn’t even know about until it was over—­was that Gideon and Ida Crop’s little girl, Annie, got drowned on the 10th. Gideon, according to what Ida says, watched over the backwater until it went down. And then he went. And hasn’t been found either. Mat Feltner has been trying to find him, calling the police and such in different places, but hasn’t heard a word of him. It seems a man is about as easy to lose in this world as a pocketknife. I wouldn’t have thought it. But there’s a lot I never would have thought that has turned out to be so.

  Virgil Feltner, by the way, hasn’t been heard from either. Nothing to say about that, I reckon, until Mat says something. Except it’s bad.

  I hate to write down these sad troubles. But I can’t think of any argument why I oughtn’t to tell you. They happened. And I’m in a way obliged to speak of them because they did happen and I know it. Seems to me that when you start home you’ll want to know what’s here and what’s not. And if anybody’s going to write it to you, looks like it’ll have to be me. I said to your daddy the other day, “Why don’t you write to Nathan?” And he said, “God Amighty, Burley, he knows what I’m doing.”

  Making tracks is what he’s doing. Making that team of black mules realize what he fed them through the winter for. Which I imagine you do know.

  Well, spring is here, finally. And we’ve had some days of fine weather. This is one, clear and quiet, hardly any air stirring at all, just warm enough to be comfortable in the sun, and the country turning greener all the time. I’m happy today, in spite of everything, glad to see it all come back.

  The old spring comes up in me just like it comes up in everything, and I’m gladder to be alive today than three weeks ago I imagined I’d ever be. The night, say, of the day you left.

  Speaking of time, I was fifty years old on March 12, and clean forgot it. Jarrat was the one finally thought of it. Day before yesterday he says, “Burley, you’re fifty. You’ve been fifty for two weeks.” It scared me. And then it made me mad. Which made him laugh, which don’t happen every day. And we counted up and fifty’s what I am. Half a hundred years I’ve been alive. And it’s a mystery where they’ve gone. I used to think that when I got to be a man I’d do what I pleased. And what I aimed to please to do was hunt and fish, and breed as far and wide as a tomcat. But there’s a great many pretty girls that I’ve gone by, and a lot of good hunting nights, and a lot of fishing weather. It has happened that that wasn’t so much what I was called to as I thought. What it has been, I reckon you would say, is love, for Jarrat and you boys. I realize now that if my calling hasn’t been that, I haven’t had one. When I die there won’t be much around here that anybody can point to and say “Burley Coulter done that.” There’s not any wheeling and dealing of mine that anybody’ll remember. But for me, when I think of my life I have to think of it with Jarrat’s and yours and Tom’s. And even if there is a lot I’ve let go by, I don’t say I ain’t blessed.

  Don’t pay any attention to what I write, unless you want to. My mind just gets to going. Jarrat and I are so quiet, looks like I don’t know what is on my mind until I go to writing to you.

  When the ground dried off enough to let us get on it with the teams, which was last Tuesday morning, Jarrat went at it just like I told you he would. And I’ve been my usual hundred feet behind him ever since. We’re both soft from the winter and from being idle so much during the wet weather, and pretty old too for such a pace, but I expect we’ve left as many tracks behind us in the last week as we ever did in our lives. The sun has been getting up mighty fast and going down mighty slow.

  We’ve got ourselves behind an awful pile of work—­farming on both of these places, and at Mat’s. Plus we’re trying to help Ida carry on until Gideon turns up, if he does. Plus there’s no chance we can see of hiring much help. There’s sort of nobody here but children and women and old men. I imagine I’m going to get mighty tired of looking at your daddy’s back before October.

  All week we’ve been burning and sowing plant beds—­at Mat’s, and then down at Gideon’s, and since Friday afternoon up here. Fact is, that’s what we’re doing right now. Last night when we quit I said to Jarrat, “Let’s get a little rest tomorrow.” And Jarrat said all right. And we passed it back and forth awhile, saying we’d lay around today and get over some of our soreness and hit it hard again Monday morning. And then this morning early we got to looking over all we’ve got to do, and piddled around and greased the wheels on Jarrat’s wagon and sharpened our axes. And first thing you know we’re out here on the ridge, working like it’s the last good day. And every time we get a little break I come over here to the wagon and write some on this letter.

  It’s on in the afternoon now, and we’re just sitting here, resting and watching the last of it burn. I do like this work. There’s something about this fire going before the new crop that’s cleaning. The thought of it is good. All last year’s old mongrel chances burnt out of the ground. And first thing you know we’ll have them little tobacco plants speckling up through the ashes.

  Everybody seems to be as behind in his work as we are, going early and late. From the house at night I can see the plant beds burning for miles, and smell them too. And you know people are awake and busy around them. It sort of brings the country together in a way it never is any other time.

  Down in the bottoms they’re still waterlogged, just sitting and looking at mud and waiting. Anvil Brant says if it wasn’t for fishing he’d try to get in the Army.

  Old Ike just come up and laid down under the wagon. I’ve heard him treed way down in the hollow nearly all day. And he’s finally dug out whatever it was, and eat it. So I reckon I’ll have to be the one to eat the leftovers tonight. He wants to know what’s the matter with me, I haven’t been hunting with him for so long. And I don’t know what to tell him. I’ve been thinking that if you stay around this part of the country after the war, maybe we’ll get hold of a good bitch and raise a litter of pups, and start over.

  That’s one of my thoughts. Amazing how I’ve got so I depend on my thoughts. I can take one I like and just about wear the hair off of it between supper and bedtime. I can remember a time when my head wasn’t exactly the part of me that I was most interested in. And now there’s actually some thoughts that I kind of look forward to getting a chance to think. I’ve got a pretty good pocketknife and a pretty good dog and three or four good thoughts.

  And a good country to live in, I will have to say. This is about as pretty a time right this minute as you’d ever want to see. Still and clear, and little smokes here and yonder from the plant beds, and that green coming strong. And I’m tired enough that I don’t mind to see the sun going down. I wish you was here.

  Lord bless you, old boy, I think about you all the time.

  Your uncle,

  Burley

  PART THREE

  Chapter 9

  LOOK A YONDER

  From the top of the ladder, among the branches of the apple tree, Mat’s horizon is enlarged. Along the crest of the eastward ridg
e he can see the line of white canvases covering the plant beds that Burley and Jarrat Coulter sowed five days ago. They make a single stroke of whiteness, drawn exactly along the horizon between the blue of the sky and the ridge, which, in the same five days, has become green. Down the gentle fall of the ground behind him is the town, which he turns ­toward and turns away from again and again as he goes about his work. The roofs are still visible, their angles sharp, among the treetops stippled with buds. Northward he can see the opening of the river valley, the folds of the upland on the far side, woods and fields clear in the sun. Feeling the limb on which the ladder is propped spring against his weight as he moves, Mat prunes the tree. He likes this work—­the look of his hands moving and choosing, correcting, among the tangle of the branches. The orchard is one of the works of his life.

  On the ground under the tree Joe Banion is gathering up the cut twigs and branches as Mat lets them fall, loading them onto the wagon. The black clear shadows of the branches tangle over him like a net as he moves. On the edge of the wagon bed, his sheepskin coat buttoned a foot off-center, Old Jack sits watching them, keeping them company. They weren’t at work there a quarter of an hour before Joe said, “Well, we going to have help, Mr. Mat. Here come the old boss.” Sure enough, there he came up along the row ends of the garden and into the orchard. And until now he has sat there holding the team, driving the few feet to the next tree when Mat and Joe move.

  It’s a little past the middle of the morning; the early chill has gone out of the air. The town has become quiet. The children are shut in the school, the men gone to the stores or the fields, the women to the kitchens. The voices of cackling hens in Mat’s henhouse and barn come brassy and loud into the quiet, and from beyond the turn of the hill comes the bleating of sheep. From the wagon Old Jack’s voice follows the turnings of his mind—­sounding both comforted and comfortable, one of the sounds of the place come back into the open.

  The garden gate opens and shuts, and this time it is Hannah they see coming up along the row ends ­toward the orchard. She walks heavily over the uneven ground, leaning backward a little against the weight of the child. The wind blows her skirt and her hair as she walks.

  She does not come near them, but goes into one of the upper corners of the orchard where late yesterday afternoon Mat pruned a peach tree and left the branches lying. She waves as she goes by, and they wave back. They watch her as she moves through the clutter of branches, gathering the budded shoots. By an awkward stooping and bending she picks them up one at a time, holds them up to look at them, their graceful slendering weighted and knobbed with buds, and lays them into the crook of her arm.

  Old Jack sits studying her. “She’s a mighty fine girl.”

  “She is,” Mat says.

  Old Jack shakes his head. “Ay, Lord!”

  They hear the sound of an engine in the air and, looking up, find a small army plane coming fairly low over the town.

  “Look a yonder!” Old Jack says. “Yonder’s one of them flying machines.” A second follows, the look and the sound identical to the first. “God Amighty, there’s another’n!”

  One after another they come, spaced evenly, a considerable distance apart, their sounds building and fading in steady rhythm. The three men stand looking up, Old Jack braced on his cane like a tripod in the middle of the wagon bed, Joe by the mule’s heads where he went to quiet them, Mat on the ladder in the top of the tree. They count. Four, five, six. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six. And when the twenty-sixth one carries its sound away, and none follows, they watch them out of sight.

  The morning goes on. Mat’s mind has been drawn away from his work into the uneasiness of the sky, empty of all sound now. He thinks of the young men enclosed in that deathly metal, their fates made one with interlocking parts and men and events. He feels a cry ­toward them grown in him, unreleased. It is a long time before his mind will content itself again to take back the tree and his own hands busy in it. Below he can hear Joe Banion:

  “How’d you like to fly one of them things, Mr. Jack?”

  “Ay, Lord! I wouldn’t do it.”

  “You and me, boss man. You and me.”

  THE BRIDGE

  As he always does when the first outside work begins in the spring, Ernest felt a little reluctant to give up the orderly enclosure of the shop. And so he was glad enough to spend most of the morning getting ready—­lugging his ladders and rope tackle and jacks and tool boxes out of the shop and loading them on the truck; setting the shop to rights, sweeping it out, putting tools away, feeling the place settle around him and grow still.

  When he came up opposite the Crops’ house, a few minutes before noon, he eased the truck out across the bottom to what, two weeks and two days ago, had been the outside end of the footbridge. He turned the truck around and killed the engine, and ate the sandwiches he had brought.

  During the fifteen or twenty minutes he spent doing that, and the five minutes he spent smoking a cigarette afterwards, the place began to make its claim on him. It took him only a few seconds to foresee in some detail how he would have to go about the rebuilding of the bridge; after that his mind was free to take in the look of the place. Except for the singing of birds and the steady rippling of the creek, the little valley was quiet. There were no human noises anywhere. For a while he remained half alert for the sound of a voice or a door or an engine—­one of the habits of his winter work in town. But he grew used to the peacefulness of the place. He quit expecting anything but the natural sounds. The silted bottoms, he saw, were beginning to show a faint scaling of green, and along the banks of the creek, running clear now over the rocks, the muddied limbs of the willows were putting out new leaves.

  Almost without his realizing it, his thoughts going ahead of him, he has begun his work. The butt of the cigarette still burning in the corner of his mouth, he fishes a pair of rubber boots out from behind the seat. He sits down on the running board and puts them on. He places the crutches under his arms and, moving around the truck, takes a coil of half-inch rope out of one of the tool boxes, and starts up along the creek. He makes his way with some difficulty into the swift water of the ford. The water comes nearly to the tops of his boots, caving them in coldly against his feet and legs. He is aware, almost as soon as he begins to move against the push of the current, of the absurdity of wading swift water on crutches. His gratitude that nobody is there to see him, and then his fear that somebody may come, make him ridiculous to himself. He crosses the creek, feeling his way over the uneven stones of the riffle with the crutch ends, and goes down the shallows along the far edge until he comes to where the bridge dangles in the trees. When he has fastened the rope to the loose end of one of the cables and weighted the free end of the rope with a rock and thrown it over to the other bank, he wades back across.

  Using a block and tackle, he pulls the bridge out of the trees and across the stream and into place. He locks the pulleys and walks to the top of the high bank and stands there for three or four minutes, studying the job now that he has it out where he can look at it. The snarled skein of wood and cable and wire that he has hauled tense between the banks has not even begun to resemble a bridge. The footboards have been broken and split, some of the crosspieces knocked out or broken, the hand-wires wound and tangled through the mess of the rest—­and the whole thing, crusted with silt, bearded and swatched with drift, twisted two full turns. But the beginning is there, made. While he watches, a kingfisher lights on one of the strands of the tangle, perches a moment, sees him, startles, flies off down the creek. “I’ll finish her by sundown,” he says to himself. And he goes back to the truck for his tools.

  Until after sundown, until the bridge is a bridge again, and looks like one, curving its perfect curve between its fastenings, he does not stop. He untwists and splices the broken cables, binds them back around the trunks of the two trees from which they were torn loose, rebuilds the steps up to where the end of the footboar
d will be laid. He goes into it then, building his way across, wedging his way into the mess of it, leaving it made and straight behind him. Fixing as he goes, crawling back and forth for materials over what he has finished, he attaches the crosspieces and lays on and nails down the footplanks. And over his bent back the day moves ­toward the end of its own curve. He hurries at his work, excited by his high balancing out on the thing he has made, feeling the echo of every hammer stroke rock back under him along the taut cables—­and excited by knowing that a bridge is what it is. There comes to be something deeply pleasing to him in the idea of a bridge—­not, maybe, the first mark a man makes on the earth, but surely one of the first marks made by a neighborhood—­and he hastens ­toward its completion. Long before he is done, he already knows how it is going to be, and he is driven on by an appetite for the finished look of it.

  The sunlight goes out of the valley, rising up along the sides of the hills on the eastern side. The ground begins to cool. His mind begins to take leave of his work. He gathers his tools from the ground around the finished steps and goes back to the side he began on, walking without the crutches and having to move slowly with his load to keep balanced. At the other end he puts the tools down, and takes up his crutches. For a moment he stands there, looking at the bridge and the water under it. Finished, he is let down now into his tiredness. He lights a cigarette, smokes it a moment with deliberate pleasure, and turns and begins loading tools and rope and usable scraps back into the truck.

  Hearing something, a footstep maybe, he looks across the bridge at Ida standing on the top step at the other end of it. She is wearing a plain faded cotton dress, and a sweater that he knows at once belongs or did belong to Gideon. She is smiling in reserved greeting to him, in expectation of what from him he does not know. She steps up onto the end of the bridge, and he feels the inwashing sense of the presence of her body, kept waiting inside that coarse, worn sweater of Gideon’s.