The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

  What Jayber was wanting to talk about was Old Jack Beechum’s doings up at the hotel. The old man has cleaned the weeds and trash off of all the back lots from the post office clean to the pool room. Then yesterday morning he got one of Floyd Mahew’s boys to break up a big garden patch behind the hotel. I didn’t know anything about it until yesterday evening. I’d finished cutting some ground at Mat’s and had loaded the harrow onto the sled and was starting home. It was, I imagine, an hour or so before sundown. I shut the gate and pulled out into the road, and here come Old Jack, waving his cane and hollering, “Whoo! Oh, Burley! Whoa there!” I pulled on up even with him and stopped. He wanted me to come out back and work that garden patch for him so he could plant it.

  I went and did it. It didn’t take long. That ground worked like new ground, which I imagine it is—­fine and black and loose as ashes. When I got it worked good, Old Jack brought out a sack full of garden seed and we laid off some rows and started planting, him dropping the seeds and me a covering. It was right remarkable to see that old man all buttoned up in a winter coat—­for he tells me he never gets quite warm—­going along dropping seeds in the ground. While we were planting the garden Jayber came by. He’d closed his shop for supper and come to hunt up Old Jack, since he hadn’t seen him for three or four days and had got to wondering if maybe he was sick. Well, he soon found out all he wanted to know about the old man’s health, and got put to work pretty suddenly too.

  Nothing at all has been heard of Virgil Feltner beyond what I already told you. It’ll soon be two months now that he has been missing. I know that for Mat and them it has been a long wait and a long hope, and they’ve maybe only begun. Once in a while when you’re talking to Mat you’ll realize all of a sudden that he has quit listening, ain’t there, is way off somewhere in his trouble, and then you can see the pain in his face. That missing doesn’t give him much to take a hold of. These last seven weeks have aged Mat right sharply too. He nearly always seems steady, reined pretty tight. But it’s no trouble to look at him now and see that it has been a long time since he has been at rest in himself.

  Nobody has seen hide nor hair of Gideon Crop either. Several of us are working down there, turn about, to help Ida keep things going.

  You asked me to tell you what things look like now, and I’ll try it the best I can. It’s full spring now. The trees are leafed out. The big ones here in town reach over the road so that from where I’m looking the town seems sort of roofed with leaves. The yards are green and flowers are blooming in some of them. Now and then when I look up into town I see one or another of Minnie Lathrop’s old hens chasing a bug across the road. Uncle Stan has got his old Jersey tied to a stake in the empty lot next to the church. The grass is coming good everywhere and people will be putting their stock on pasture before long. Out home your Grandma’s old lilac is in full bloom and various ones of her flowers is blooming, or has bloomed. As fine a spring as you’d ever want to see.

  Telling you about it makes me wish mightily that you could see it. Which, if the predictors are right, you may before too long. I think a mighty lot of you, old boy. Let me hear a little something when you get the time.

  Your uncle,

  Burley

  Chapter 11

  GREEN PASTURE

  For the last time until next winter Mat has fed the herd of cows. Now, while they eat, he walks out across the barn lot and the small pasture in which the cows and calves have been kept all winter. It’s a bright clear morning, the first of May. From the ridgetop where he walks, he can see the white mist in the valley just beginning to rise into the sunlight and dissolve. Beyond the trampled close-eaten winter pasture the grass is heavy and green along the ridge and on the slopes above the woods. He opens the gate.

  The winter, which has kept him going the rounds of the barns twice a day and more, is all behind him now, and Mat feels his life changing. As though this finishing has cleared the way, he can foresee the long hot days of the summer, when the stock will no longer be so dependent on him but the crops will. And from somewhere still far off in those long weeks, he feels the approach of suffering for him and his house.

  Virgil has been missing now for nearly two months, and in all that time he and Margaret and Hannah have never spoken of the probability, growing stronger every day, that Virgil is dead, or worse, that they may never know. And along with everything else, Mat feels lonesome for Margaret and for their old life.

  Lately he has returned many times to the thought of Gideon Crop’s vigil over the floodwater. It has become a kind of waking nightmare in which he wanders, imagining all that a man might be moved to by hopelessness and hope at the edge of a dark flood in which his best is lost. Often in the midst of these visions he will hear himself curse or groan.

  Out of his understanding of that horror that speaks so to his own, he manages to find time every day or so to see Ida Crop, taking Margaret with him sometimes, other times going by himself. He has become dependent on her, as if her survival of her loss is a lesson to him that he will have somehow to learn.

  Once, after she had made some mention of Annie, he asked her: “How do you stand it, Ida?”

  And she said, “You’re thinking about your boy, ain’t you, Mr. Feltner?” She was looking away ­toward the creek. “I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes I just have to sit down and bawl.” She gave him another one of her studying looks. “What I wish, I wish she was buried somewheres close in a little grave.”

  He nodded. He realized that this was familiar to him.

  “I tell myself that when Gideon gets back it’ll be better.”

  She amazes Mat, and encourages him, though he comes on the pretense of encouraging her. Beyond her pain and endurance and will, it seems to him that there’s a hopefulness in her that is almost calm. It comes, he thinks, from the knowledge, not just that she is young enough yet to have more children, but that other women will get with child, other children will be born, it will go on. It seems to Mat that this must be one of the powers of women. He does not have it in him.

  The cattle have cleaned up the feed he put in for them and are drifting out again into the sunlight. The cows have shed their winter hair and their close summer coats shine in the light. Mat goes into the barn and drives out the stragglers. Beyond the doors, working back and forth, he gathers the herd and starts it ­toward the gate. The cows are fat, their calves vigorous and in good flesh. Looking at them, he feels the satisfaction of success. The winter has been met and dealt with; ahead of them now is the grass.

  Coming closer, the cows see that the gate is open and they go ­toward it at a trot, no longer needing to be driven. They enter the pasture and begin to graze. Mat closes the gate and leans on it, watching. The only sound now is that of the grass tearing.

  CAUGHT

  Before Ernest finished taking down the lower part of the old barn, seeds had already begun to sprout out of the dirt floor that the roof and walls had kept dark for years. Since he took off the roof, the work has gone slowly, involving much moving of ladders, a lot of temporary propping and shoring up as he worked around the weakened corners, days of great painstaking and difficulty in freeing and letting down the heavy timbers of the framing. And there have been rainy days when he could not work at all. But at last the whole lower half of the barn has been torn down, and Ernest has begun siding up the open end of the half still standing. Around the carefully sorted and stacked piles of old lumber and roofing, the weeds have begun to grow tall.

  As soon as he finishes the barn, he will paint it. After that there will be the other jobs of repair and maintenance that Mat has asked him to do. On Mat’s visits to the little farm the two of them have gone the rounds of all the buildings, looking them over, deciding what ought to be done for the preservation of each one.

  Every morning Ida brings him water in the half-gallon vinegar jug, and sees to it that he carries it back with him, freshly filled, in the afternoons. And every day at noon he goes up to the house and washes an
d sits by himself at the table while she brings the food to him as she did the first day—­though in the mornings he still shows up at Dolph Courtney’s at opening time and buys his customary packet of sandwiches. He cannot bring himself to give up either Ida’s company, such as it is, or her hospitality. And because he is a man deeply in the habit of secrecy about himself, he cannot bring himself to give up his deceptions. When he knows that she will be feeding the Coulters or Mat or any of the others who are helping with the work of the place in Gideon’s absence, he finds it easy enough to go back to town at noon on the pretense of needing materials or tools.

  He has misgivings at the thought that she feeds him by her own troubling and providing even though the work he is doing there is not necessarily for her. Aware of the delicacy of the question, and made awkward by it, he has asked several times if there is not some way that he can repay her for her kindness to him. And each time she has scoffed at the idea.

  “I’ve got plenty of canned stuff in the cellar,” she told him once, “and meat in the smokehouse. Somebody just as well be eating it.”

  Now and then when he sees she needs it, he will buy some staple such as salt or coffee or flour and bring it to her, and always she will take it with simple thanks and the observation that she was needing it, as if the whole business is perfectly natural and even ordinary. It would delight him to bring more, to buy and bring by the armload, but he knows that to buy more where there is already plenty would seem ridiculous to her.

  Nothing has passed between them except her hospitality, the same as she would offer to anybody who might come there to work—­not just her hospitality, as she offers it, but Gideon’s as well. Or you could say that it is not her hospitality that she offers at all, but only Gideon’s, her offering of it being necessarily more meticulous because he is not there to offer it himself.

  But during the weeks that Ernest has been at work there, eating in her kitchen, studying her ways and looks and movements, she has come into his mind. In spite of her careless old dresses, her apparent unconcern about her looks, there is a certain beauty that she has, and a certain dignity and strength that draw him ­toward her. Wherever she moves at her work, in or out of his sight, he is aware of her. A kind of imagining sight and touch carries his mind to her against his will. He imagines himself living there with her, doing such farming as his lameness might allow. In this dream of his, his shop is lifted intact out of Port William and set down in place of Gideon’s old toolshed under the oak tree. Except for this holding on to the idea of the shop, one of the emotions of his dream is surprise at the ease with which his old life can be given up.

  That her mind is not on him at all—­that except for what she would think of as a decent and necessary kindness ­toward him, her attention is turned away from him, as though she is always listening for the approach of somebody else—­this makes him all the freer to cultivate his dream.

  There are times when he realizes vaguely that he is trapped, endangered, like an animal that has crept through a narrow opening and fed until it has grown too large to escape. The orderly interior of his shop is remote from him now, of little use to him. In these moments of understanding, he knows that something behind him in his life is being destroyed. Even if he could escape and make his way back to it, it would no longer serve.

  DAYLIGHT

  Old Jack never did have any trouble waking up. Now out of the light sleep of his old age he wakes more easily than he ever did. And he is hardly awake before he is up, cap already on, standing in the middle of the floor, scratching his stomach and getting his bearings. Unhooking his cane from the bed, he goes to the window and looks out. Above the pale whitening of dawn in the east the morning stars are bright. It will be a clear day.

  Beyond the window the town is quiet. There is not a light burning anywhere. As usual he is the first one up, and he likes the feeling of that, has liked it all his life. Most of his days have begun in that silence, and it is still one of his needs. He slept with the window half-open and he opens it wide now and, turning back into the room, puts on his clothes. He makes his bed in the dark, and instead of sitting at the window to wait for daylight to come as he usually does, he goes out the door and starts down the hall.

  Wheeler has promised to come by for him early this morning and take him out to spend the day at his farm. He has been planning this with Wheeler for a couple of weeks, but for various reasons it has had to be put off until now. Wheeler has a case to try in Frankfort today, so he will not have to go much out of his way. Jack could just as easily have asked Mat to take him, but Wheeler is his lawyer, not Mat, and he sees Mat every day anyhow.

  At the top of the steps he can hear Mrs. Hendrick snoring in her room. He rakes his cane along the balusters lightly, and hears her stop and groan and turn over.

  He decides not to bother with waking her. Let all the day be good.

  He goes on down the stairs and back along the hall and through the kitchen and out the back door. Going out near the fence, he urinates, making of the necessity an opportunity to look at his garden, which is growing well. He cleaned it of weeds yesterday, and that cleanness and the dewy freshness of the morning seem to him to go together. In the grey light the young plants in their rows show dark against the ground.

  He goes back into the kitchen and turns on the light. Pawing around in the old refrigerator, he finds bacon and eggs and, lighting the coal-oil stove, makes himself a breakfast, cooking plenty and helping himself to a bowl of cold biscuits that he finds in the dish cabinet. The bacon is not well done and the eggs are too greasy, but he eats heartily, offsetting the grease with half a dozen biscuits and a lot of water.

  Last night he had Dolph Courtney make him some baloney sandwiches for his lunch today. He gets the packet out of the refrigerator now, turns off the kitchen light, and goes to wait on the front porch. The daylight is getting strong, though it will still be half an hour or so until sunup. Things have begun to stir at Mat’s, and up and down the street other houses have begun to show signs of life. Old Jack goes over to the edge of the porch and looks out the road ­toward Hargrave. He imagines that Wheeler is on his way. He lets his mind leave Wheeler’s house down at Hargrave and come up the road ­toward Port William at what he thinks is about thirty-five miles an hour, careful to observe all the landmarks as they go by. By the time his mind comes up out of the river valley and starts across the ridge to Port William it is making at least sixty, though if he knew it he would never let it go that fast. He lets it drive in over at Mat’s to take some message from Wheeler’s wife, and then back out and pull down in front of the hotel and park itself under the shade trees. But Wheeler still has not come in sight. Old Jack looks and listens out the road, but does not hear a thing. The east has begun to redden ahead of the rising sun, and he knows she will be right on up. He takes out his watch and—­considering that it is late, and that how late does not matter—­puts it back without looking at it. He has not spent a full day at home since he moved to Port William last fall, and now that the day has finally come he grieves for every lost minute of it. Standing there, watching the sky redden, thinking of how much daylight is already behind him, he is overcome by a kind of sad panic. He decides he had better call Wheeler’s house to see if he has left.

  On the wallpaper over the telephone he has written in strokes an inch high:

  WHEELER CATLETT

  OFFICE 7–2854

  HOUSE 7–3672

  He dials the house number and waits, hopeful. He can just hear Wheeler’s wife answer the phone and say, “Yes, Uncle Jack. Wheeler left a good while ago. He ought to be getting up there about now.” It rings and rings. It does not take Old Jack long to guess what that means. Wheeler is not up. It is a fact that Wheeler sometimes sleeps as late as seven o’clock. That is the only bad fault Old Jack has ever found in Wheeler. He must have told him a thousand times, by various subtleties and hints, that a man cannot hope to get anywhere lying in the bed so late of a morning with the sun shining in his
face.

  “My Lord Amighty!” Old Jack says in disgust, as ashamed and humiliated and angry as if Wheeler was his own boy.

  He lets her ring.

  Finally the receiver clicks up on the other end.

  “Hello!” Old Jack does not have much faith in the instrument, and he talks loudly.

  Somebody speaks into the other end.

  “Hello!”

  “Hello.” The sound still seems to come from too far away.

  “Who is that a talking?”

  “It’s Wheeler, Uncle Jack. What’s the matter?”

  “Wheeler, I’m ready, honey. It’s daylight. Are you coming?”

  “I told you I’d be there, didn’t I? And I didn’t say when. I said pretty early.”

  “Well?”

  “Well,” Wheeler says, “the sun’s not even up!”

  Old Jack was not aiming to let on what he thinks, but he cannot help it. “Damn it to hell, don’t tell me what the sun does in the morning! I know and you don’t!”

  They’re both good and mad now.

  “Well,” Wheeler says.

  “Well what?”

  “Never mind!”

  “Well, are you aiming to come or not? I got business I want to take care of.”

  “I’ll be there, Uncle Jack,” Wheeler says. “Just hold on. It’ll be about thirty minutes. Be ready.”

  “Ready, hell!” Jack says. “I been ready!” And he hangs up.