The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

  He gets out and helps Hannah out. “You can’t get lumber like that any more, maybe never will again.” He gestures upward with his hand. “I reinforced the loft and put on a new roof when Virgil was thirteen or fourteen years old. It was about the first man’s work he ever did. I sent him over here with Ernest and they did it together. It would worry me to death trying to get any work out of him then, but he’d work for Ernest. I saw how that was and remembered how it was with me. Mighty hard to get a boy to come to it right under his daddy’s hand. I don’t know why.”

  There are cows and calves scattered over the lot in front of the barn, others lying down around the door and inside the driveway. These get up and move slowly out of the way as Mat and Hannah step up to the doorway and into it.

  “Well,” Mat says, “I do know why. By the time a boy gets big enough to work, his daddy’s already been his boss for a long time, and not always an easy one. They’ve already pretty well tested each other, and know each other’s weaknesses and flaws. There are a lot of old irritations all ready-made. And then a man teaching his own boy gets misled by pride. What he does wrong looks like your failure as much as it is his, and so you don’t correct or punish for his sake, but yours. The way around it—­or the way my daddy took with me and I took with Virgil—­is to let him work with somebody older than he is, like Ernest, that you know he admires.”

  “Was he bad?” Hannah asks. “When he was a boy, I mean.”

  “Fairly,” Mat says, and grins. “Though it’s hard for me to tell how to judge a boy’s behavior. He wasn’t any worse than I was, I’ll put it that way. Nor any better, I reckon. He did a good many things he ought to have got a whipping for. And did, and got a few he didn’t deserve, which”—­he opens his hands and folds them slowly, one in the other, behind his back—­“I wish he hadn’t.”

  “He told me several times that you were a good father.”

  “Did he? I’m glad he said that. I’m glad you told me.”

  They are standing inside the barn now, looking out through the doorway. Mat makes a vague abrupt movement with his forearm and hand, whether to dismiss the foregoing part of their conversation or to begin the next, she cannot tell.

  “When he came home from college after his last year, I asked him, ‘What are you planning to do?’ Lord knows, I’d wanted to know a long time before that, and he’d mentioned wanting to farm before, but the time to ask and be told never had come until then. And I was worried a good deal, because I wanted him to come home here and take this up—­or wanted him to want to—­and was afraid he wouldn’t. And was afraid, too, that he’d see what I had on my mind. But I held right steady, watching him, and he said, ‘I want to stay here and farm with you.’ ”

  There is a pause now, while Mat seems to steady and gather himself.

  “I’ll never forget it. I’d have liked to just stop everything right there and celebrate. But I knew we’d only come to the beginning, and you don’t celebrate at the beginning—­even at the risk of never celebrating at all.

  “I said, ‘All right. I’m going to lend you a thousand dollars. You take that, and the old cattle barn over yonder, and those two fields between it and the road—­and let’s see what you can do. When you’re not working for yourself, you can work by the day for me.’ There were hard times then, and it nearly emptied me to get him the thousand dollars. But I did it. It was enough money to put pressure on him, which I aimed to do—­and then, of course, stand pretty close behind him, to see that he didn’t get too badly into trouble.

  “Well, he made it do. He never let me in on it at all. He saw my game, and was proud. And I waited, sort of keeping to the other end of the place, to see what he would do—­scared again, of course, that he’d make some bad mistake. And then one morning he said to me, ‘Come look at my cattle.’ And I came over here with him, and we stood out there in the lot and looked them over. He’d bought six or seven cows and calves and a pretty good bull, and they were all right. He hadn’t broke any records, in judging or buying either, but they were all right. It was a fair start. There are forty-five head of these cows now, and the quality of them has improved right along.”

  He raises his arm and points.

  “Look. There’s one you ought to recognize. That’s the newest one. She’s the one you and Virgil brought from Indiana that night in the truck, not long after you were married. Don’t you remember?”

  “Yes,” Hannah says. “I do.”

  Mat turns and goes on back into the barn, Hannah following. He opens the door to an empty stall. “I’ll put some feed in now. You stand inside there, honey, where you can watch and won’t get tramped on.”

  He empties several buckets of ground corn into the troughs and calls the cattle, and then goes up a ladder into the loft and begins filling the mangers with hay. She can hear him walking back and forth in the loft, the forked hay sliding over the floorboards and dropping down into the mangers. The cattle crowd to the troughs, latecomers throwing their heads up and wedging their way in. The calves, forgotten, play or stand or lie in the open spaces. For the time being, the old cows are held at the trough by pure violence of appetite. Hannah can hear them breathing, their rough tongues sweeping the bottoms of the troughs.

  She feels a strange, threatened happiness. They have talked easily about Virgil for the first time in a month. Mat has told her things about Virgil that she never knew. She feels herself surrounded closely now by this place of his life, his love for the placid hungry lives of cattle.

  Mat comes down, goes into the feed room, and comes out with two big buckets. Turning them upside down against the front of the stall, he helps her to sit down on one of them, and he sits on the other.

  “You oughtn’t to be standing up so much,” he says. “I should have thought of it before.”

  “I wasn’t tired. I’m having a good time.”

  “Good. Well, you tell me what you need. Don’t wait for me to think of it.” He leans forward, putting his elbows on his knees and lacing his fingers.

  “I remember the first crop of his own that Virgil ever tried to raise. He broke about two acres out back there on the ridge, and fenced it and laid the rows off to suit him. I’d told him as much as I knew about it, and let him go. Well, you know this is difficult land to farm. So much of it steep. Hard to keep it from washing. I expect I’ve seen half the topsoil go off of some farms around here in my time. More, maybe. We’ve been slow to have enough sense to farm this kind of land, and lack plenty yet. My daddy hurt some of these hillsides badly in his time. Made some bad mistakes. I tried to learn from his, and went right on and made some bad ones of my own. Anyhow, Virgil broke his ground farther over the brow of the hill than he should have. Like a boy, you know. Didn’t stop in time. But he got his rows laid off about right, and got his crop out—­and I didn’t say anything, hoping he’d have luck and get that mistake free. Thought I’d show him later what he’d done wrong, soon as I could do it without hurting his feelings.

  “But there was an awful rain one night after his crop had been out, I guess, two weeks. I heard it begin and lay awake listening to it, knowing what was bound to be happening. And the next morning I said, ‘Let’s go look at your crop.’ So we went, and walked all the way around it. It was hurt. Bound to have been. There’s no way to plow sideling ground so it’ll hold in a rain like that. ‘Virgil,’ I said, ‘this is your fault. This is one of your contributions to the world.’ That was hard for me to say. And he took it hard. I saw he was about to cry. And bad as I hated to do it, I let it work in him while we stood there and looked. I knew he was hating the day he ever thought of raising a crop, ready to give up. Finally I put my arm around him and I said, ‘Be sorry, but don’t quit. What’s asked of you now is to see what you’ve done, and learn better.’ And I told him that a man’s life is always dealing with permanence—­that the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary. That, anyhow, is what I’ve tried to keep before myself. What you do on the
earth, the earth makes permanent.”

  He laughs, and looks at Hannah. “Every time I make a mistake, that gets more painful to believe.”

  He shifts his position on the bucket, letting his eyes go back to the feeding cattle.

  “I think of the pain I’ve given to my children. Especially to Virgil—­now. You hope for a realization in them, finally, that the pain is given out of love, inept and blundering and blind and wrong as it can sometimes be. I don’t worry so much about Bess. She’s had a family of her own long enough to know the terrified love you can sometimes have for your children. But Virgil I feel like I owe an accounting to. There’s maybe only weakness in it. You want your good intentions recognized, even the failed ones. You want it known by the ones nearest you that your good intentions are a real part of your life, and your love for them.”

  His eyes move over the ranked backs of the cattle, attentively, though Hannah cannot tell whether he is thinking about them or not. She studies his face, seeing in it something she has never seen there before, an old man’s sorrow for the imperfection of his life and of his fatherhood. She understands suddenly how a young man might be borne up, might justify everything, by the hope of perfection—­and, growing old, must realize that he has done nothing perfect. She knows that Mat has allowed her to see, as Virgil never was allowed to, the pained underside of his severity. And she feels, as Mat must, the tragedy in the possibility that Virgil will never see it. She would like to be able to say something comforting, but realizes that she cannot. She cannot comfort even herself.

  Still watching the cattle, as though nothing else has been said, Mat says, “Whenever I can, I take a Sunday afternoon and do what we’re doing now—­go to each barn and feed, and then sit down and watch the stock eat. It’s a way to take time enough to see what I’m doing, and get a little pleasure out of it.”

  “You haven’t been getting much pleasure out of it lately, have you?”

  “No. For the last two or three weeks I’ve been here and seen them and fed them and gone before they could hardly get to the troughs. There’s no satisfaction in that. And I tell you, if a man doesn’t farm for his own satisfaction, he’ll have a hard time finding another good reason to do it.”

  “But you do like it?”

  “There’s not any other life for me. That’s why I wanted Virgil to have it, I reckon—­I knew if he wanted it, it would be a good life for him. I’m not saying it’s not hard. But I can tell you that all my life, in spite of the worst, I’ve been inspired by this place, and by what I foresaw or hoped I could do in it. I’ve lived my life the way a hungry man eats.”

  Mat stands up.

  “I’m about to forget the main thing.”

  He grins at the curiosity that comes into her face, but does not tell her what the main thing is. The resemblance between him and Virgil is suddenly strong. She watches him go into the feed room with his bucket and come back. He helps her up and opens the door to the next stall.

  “Here’s a family I thought you’d like to see.”

  Inside there is one of the cows, gaunt from giving birth, the afterbirth still hanging. And in the corner, on the clean straw, her calf is lying asleep, curled tightly, making a nest of itself.

  “Oh,” Hannah says, and lets herself clumsily down beside the calf. “Look how little,” she says. She lays her hand gently on the red and white hide. The cow comes over and smells her.

  Mat puts feed into the cow’s trough, and brings fresh water, and then he squats down beside Hannah.

  “Is it a boy or a girl?”

  “A boy. A bull.”

  “He’s so clean.”

  “He was pretty messy at first, but she licked him clean.”

  Mat strokes the calf’s back briskly, roughing the hair. The calf wakes up, lifts its white head and looks at them, and then puts it down again. The white-lashed eyes stay open.

  “And gentle. He’s not afraid of us at all.”

  “Well, his mammy’s not, which helps. But that’s the wonder of anything newborn. He’s clean and unworried and not afraid. And dinner’s ready all the time. Here. Feel his hoofs. See. They’re already hard. When he was born, they were soft, like gelatin.”

  “I never thought of that, but I see how necessary it is.”

  “It’s all pretty well worked out. I’m always a little surprised every time I see it happen. He’s a nice calf. See how well marked he is?”

  “He’s very nice. It’s a nice idea.”

  “Which idea?”

  “The idea of something newborn.” She smiles.

  “One of the best.”

  He helps her up and then picks up the calf and stands it on its feet. “Stand up there, old chap. Let’s see how you are.”

  The calf balances shakily for a moment, its legs looking too weak, its head too heavy. Mat turns him loose. Unsure whether its legs are for propping or walking, the calf starts ­toward the cow. It reaches her finally, tries to nurse between her forelegs, nudges, blunders, staggers, collapses into a mess of legs, straightens itself, gets up, finds the tit at last. They hear its mouth smacking as the milk starts to come. Hannah laughs with pleasure and relief.

  “If he can find his way back there a few more times,” Mat says, “maybe he’ll learn the way.”

  He picks up his bucket and opens the door. “Well, let’s go. We’ve got the rest of the rounds still to make.” At the door he stops and turns around, looking back once more at the cattle. “When he went, you know, he wanted me to sell them—­not trouble myself with them. I wouldn’t do it, and I’m glad I didn’t. They’re here.”

  It is still clearing. When they come out of the dark barn the whole ridge is in sunlight. The green ridgetops before them are sprinkled heavily with dandelions, the woods along the draws and bluffs beaded with leaf buds. In thickets scattered over the slopes of the river valley are the clean white and pink of wild plum and redbud. The shores of the river have turned pale green with the new leaves of the willows. The shadows of clouds slide rapidly over the face of the country, dimming it, leaving it somehow brighter than it was.

  Farther back there is another barn, a tobacco barn, where Mat has wintered a little bunch of steers. Leaving the truck where it is, he and Hannah walk ­toward this second barn. Mat is pointing out various houses and farms in the valley, and saying who used to live there, and who lives there now. Two or three times, as their perspective on the valley changes, they stop and look.

  “When I was a boy,” Mat says, “the showboats used to come up the river in the summertime. You’d hear the calliope commence playing, and then you could hear the people holler for miles on both sides. And that night, when the show time came, they’d all be there, as many of them as could rake up the ticket money. We’d talk about it afterwards for a month.”

  When they come to the barn Hannah stays outside, and Mat goes in alone. She walks on out along the top of the ridge, the sun on her, miles of sunlit country blooming around her. She is comforted by all that Mat has said to her, and by the country filling with spring.

  She turns to the side, going through a gate and down the slope above the bluff into a small patch of woods in a shallow draw. Here over the dead leaves of the last year, the sunlight is webbed with the shadows of branches. On the far side of the little woods there is a white thicket of wild plum, and there are several redbuds at the woods’ edge, brilliant against the dark trunks of the taller trees. And blooming out of the dead leaves there are bloodroot, trillium, trout lilies, Dutchman’s-breeches, twinleaf, yellow and purple violets. Everywhere the fern leaves are uncurling. The May apples are coming up, the two leaves creased and bronze, bent and furled downward from the round flower-bud like a young animal folded to be born. The buds overhead stain the light. Through a rocky trough in the center of the draw runs a clear stream, dropping from one mossy ledge to another, the sound of it filling the grove. On the ridge above her, she can hear Mat calling the cattle. She wanders slowly over the dry leaves, picking violets.


  And then it is not long before she hears him calling her. She answers him, and shortly sees him coming in among the trees, the netting of their shadows falling over him.

  “Well, haven’t you found a nice place!”

  “Isn’t it? Look at all the flowers.”

  “Yes. And a pretty bouquet.”

  The little branch keeps up its steady chattering over the rocks. They stand without talking.

  Finally Mat says, “It’s a mighty nice place to have to leave. But I guess we’d better do it. Are you rested? You feel all right?”

  She nods. They begin the climb back up over the ridge. Mat takes her arm. They step a little formally now, he supporting her, she holding her bouquet.

  “I’m a great one for places. This farm’s just full of places I’ve picked out to spend a day sitting in, if I ever get time to do it. Cool places or quiet ones, with water running or an overlook. I’ve thought of some of them nearly all my life. And looks like I’ve never had time to sit down and be still for very long in a one.”

  “Whoo,” she says.

  She stops to rest and Mat stops beside her.

  “Getting steeper all the time, ain’t it?”

  She laughs. “Much steeper than it was coming down.” But she feels too heavy. She looks up at the rest of the climb with dread. She has got herself into a pretty foolish predicament for a woman eight months gone.

  “You just rest all you need to,” he says. “Take your time. You’ll make it all right.”

  “Of course,” she says. She looks straight into his eyes now and laughs. “I’m not worried. Think of all the calves and lambs and things that you’ve helped get born.”

  “Oh, Lord,” Mat says, “that’s different.”

  They both laugh.