She does not free herself of the thought of Virgil. Intimations of him are still all around her. But out here the remindings of his life remain peculiarly intact, as though only stopped, not changed, by the thought of his death. Something of him seems still to be present in the life of the place. She senses him almost palpably, just outside her reach.
She remembers walking up this way, carrying a water jug, one hot July afternoon in the summer before the war. They were shocking hay on top of the ridge, Virgil and the others. After helping wash and dry the dinner dishes, she picked up the jug and went out. Stopping by the cistern at the barn to pump the jug full, she carried it to the field to them, climbing slowly, oppressed by the heavy brilliance of the heat. She came to Virgil first, and handed the jug to him, and he tilted it and drank. She stood watching him—his shirt and the waistband of his pants dark with sweat, his face and throat and bare arms glistening with it, the green hay-chaff sticking to his skin and his clothes. He finished and handed the jug to the next man. Smiling at her, he made some casual remark to her that she cannot remember, and went back to work. What came to her then—and comes to her now—was the sense of the abundance of strength in him that accepted the heat and the tiredness of that day with a kind of joy.
Like an answer or echo to the life that so filled and moved him then, she feels grow and quiver in herself the pain of the subsiding of his body, of stillness coming over him. But also, as she climbs steadily upward, bringing more and more into sight that country so charged with her memory of him, there is a strengthening in her of the sense that what he was still is. And with a kind of yielding, she receives him into herself, not to be lost again.
She walks along the ends of the tobacco rows, in which the young white-stemmed plants have begun to grow again after the transplanting. The field has just been plowed, and the earth between the rows is dark and fresh. The small plants are erect and green. Looking at them, she feels the world going on, her life continuing with all that is alive.
The baby becomes restless, and she walks more swiftly now, climbing straight on to the top of the ridge. At the highest point she sits on a pile of posts in the shade of a walnut tree. She lays the baby on her lap, and leans over and smiles down at her. The baby lies still, appearing to look up through the airy mass of the leaves.
“Look up at the sky,” she says. “See the sky?” But the baby’s face crumples and she begins to fret and then to wail. “I’m sorry. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Hush now.” She opens her blouse and lifts the small reddened face to her breast. Once the milk begins to come, the baby relaxes against her, beginning a tiny breathless singsong.
Settling herself, Hannah lets her head rest against the tree, looking up through the yellow-green of the leaves at the sky. She becomes conscious now of the stirring and murmuring of the life of the place—the voices and comings and goings in the town below her, the humming of insects among the blooms of the fields, now and again the far-off bleating of Mat’s sheep somewhere back of the hill. The light has begun to cool. On the slope below her the swallows are curving over the still face of the pond.
The baby finishes nursing and sleeps. Having buttoned her blouse and made the baby comfortable on her shoulder, she resumes her stillness.
A small yellow-striped fly, known around Port William as a steady-bee, comes and stands still in the air in front of her. It moves several times back and forth sideways, from one standing-still place to another, remaining at each one several seconds before moving abruptly and exactly to the other. And then it comes down and lights on the back of her hand, its clear wings outspread. Its pointed curved abdomen pulses up and down, tapping at her skin. She waves it off, and it goes two or three feet away and stops in the air again as though watching her.
Again she leans her head back and looks up into the tree. The black branches fork, taper, diminish, supporting the luminous, airy globe of leaves. The sky shows raggedly through, and now and then the winged black speck of a bird appears in one of the openings, wavering and turning in the high blue an instant. For a long time Hannah sits there, not thinking of herself, or of the child slackened against her in sleep, but filled with awareness of the tree, its green and gold hung in the light above her.
Finally, as though waking, she lifts her head and looks around. The steady-bee is not there anymore, and the air is cooler. Before her the town is a silhouette against the low sun. The half-dark of the evening has begun. The weedy dampness of nightfall is beginning to rise out of the hollows. The silence has altered, deepened, but the sounds that take place in it now are more distinct and clear: a voice calling cattle, a dog barking, a voice shouting “Hush!”—and the silence returning deeper than before.
The melancholy of it comes over her, and she shudders. The place, in its submission to the night, now seems to withdraw from her and to leave her alone.
She hears Mat’s old truck come into the lot, and she gets up. Gathering the baby firmly against her, she hurries down the long slope to the barn.
HAUNTED
In the depth of Mat’s grief there are stretches of days in which he loses track of time. He seems to work through these days almost without consciousness, coming aware of himself at odd moments with a kind of shock, a fearful sense of the strangeness of everything—held to the place and his work only by old habit. These are times of heavy dreamless sleep, from which he can hardly force himself awake.
There are other times of almost unbearable clarity and activity of mind, when he can hardly sleep for thinking, when he wakes knowing he has been thinking in his sleep.
At these times his thoughts more and more take the form of talk between himself and Virgil—Virgil having become obsessively the other person of his thoughts. He is haunted by Virgil as though he summons him from the dead in order to explain himself. Becoming aware of his thoughts in the midst of his work, or lying awake at night, he will find himself already explaining—telling how he felt when Virgil did this or did that, telling what his plans were, telling some clarifying fragment of their history. And Virgil listens, smiling in sympathy and understanding. “That’s all right,” he says. “Yes. I know.” Mat can rarely visualize more than his face. Now and then a hand appears—a muscular hand, strongly veined—and touches his cheek or temple, or scratches thoughtfully in his hair.
Chapter 14
A FAMOUS ESCAPADE
On the Thursday of the second week of July, Andy and Henry Catlett come to the Feltner house for a visit. Their usual early arrival having been delayed this summer by first one adult circumstance and then another, they carry their bundled clothes into the house with an impatience born of the certainty of missed excitements.
“Well,” Henry says, dropping his bundle at the foot of the stairs, “where’s Uncle Ernest?”
“At work,” Margaret tells him. “Way down there on the creek.”
“Where’s Grandad?”
“At work too. I don’t even know where.”
“Take those clothes upstairs and put them away,” Bess says.
They do as she says, and then come back down and kill time listening to the women’s conversation in the living room. But that is tame and disappointing compared to what they hoped to be doing by now. They sit there, settling deeper and deeper into the bitter sense of having come too late.
Finally, as their mother is getting ready to leave, they hear the rumbling of a wagon out toward the barn. Margaret glances at them and smiles, giving permission, and they head for the back door.
When they come to the barn, Joe Banion has just driven his team and wagon into the lot, and stopped to go back and shut the gate. The boys call to him, and he grins and raises his hand.
“Hello, buddies.”
He shuts the gate. They run up to him.
“Let us go with you. Where you going?”
“Just over yonder to the wagon shed to put away the wagon.” He laughs at the disappointment in their faces, and says, “But I reckon you can ride with me that fa
r.”
“What you going to do after that?” Henry asks.
“Going to unhitch the mules.”
He climbs slowly up onto the wagon and helps them up after him.
“Let me drive,” Henry says.
“Ain’t going far. Just over to the shed.”
“Well, let me drive just that far.”
Joe hands him the lines. “Now you let them go slow and do what I tell you.”
Henry clucks to the team. “Come up.”
They don’t move.
“Come up! What’s the matter with them, Joe?”
“They ain’t used to you, buddy. I expect they don’t believe what you say.”
Henry shakes out one of the lines and swats the off mule hard across the rump.
“COME UP, you son of a bitches!”
In a second or two a good many things happen. The mules throw their heads up and plunge forward. Andy falls backwards, rolling, onto the bed of the wagon. Joe lurches back two or three steps, and then stumbles forward, grabbing the lines with one hand and Henry’s arm with the other.
“Whoa, Jack! Whoa now! Sit down, Henry!”
The mules run the length of the lot, the wagon bouncing and pounding and rattling behind them. Joe manages to get control of them as they come near the fence, and he brings them around, making a long turn, settling them down to a trot, and then to a walk, and finally bringing them to a stop about where they started.
“Whoa now.”
He turns and looks down at Henry, who is sitting pop-eyed on the boards behind him.
“Now, buddy, that don’t do. And you know better. We all like to got killed. The mule ain’t going to stand to be insulted that way—specially not by a stranger.”
“I ain’t any stranger,” Henry says. “He’s my grandaddy’s mule.”
“That Jack mule don’t care who your ancestors is, boy. He ain’t no respecter of persons. President of the United States whap him for no reason, he’d better have his ass close to the wagon, ’cause he’s going to travel.”
“You said ass,” Henry says.
“Well, what was that you called them mules?”
Joe drives across the lot and backs the wagon into the shed and gets down to unhitch, the boys crowding up beside him.
“Ge’ back! Ge’ back!” Joe says, cross sure enough now.
“We ain’t doing anything but watching.”
“And you liable to see something, too. She show you the bottom of her foot. Now you all behave or I’ll have to tell Mr. Mat.”
He knows that Mat’s displeasure is more fearful to them than the possibility of being kicked, and so he knows he will not have to tell on them.
They get back, and stay out of the way while Joe does up the lines and leads the mules to the barn and waters them and takes their harness off and puts them in their stalls.
At quitting time Burley Coulter comes down from the tobacco patch, bringing his team to the barn, riding one mule and leading the other. He comes through the gate and around the barn to the cistern. The mules walk up to the water trough and lower their heads, and Burley drops to the ground. He looks at Andy and Henry, and grins.
“Hello, boys.”
They tell him hello, grinning back, expecting him to say something funny. There is something fine, Andy thinks, in the way he stands there, one hand still holding the mule’s hame, and takes off his old felt hat and scratches his head with the same hand and puts the hat back on—good-humored and at ease, done for the day.
The mule standing next to Burley has raised his head, and stands gazing out across the lot, his muzzle dripping. Burley gives him a little nudge with his elbow. “Drink!” The mule wearily lowers his head again and drinks. “He knows when his daddy’s talking to him.”
The boys giggle. “You ain’t his daddy,” Henry says.
“Well, I am. But he got most of his looks from his mother.” He looks at Joe. “I seen you all was having a race down here,” he says. “Who won?”
Joe shrugs and shakes his head. “That Henry there can tell you. Don’t ask me.”
“That Henry,” Burley says, “he’s a driver.”
“I’d really have got them going,” Henry says, “if Joe hadn’t took away the lines.”
“You’d have got them going, all right,” Joe says crossly. “You’d have got us killed, and hard telling what else.”
Duty-bound to keep Henry reminded of the seriousness of his offense, Joe makes a final attempt to frown. But watching the face of the little boy, which since the mules ran off has been big-eyed with startlement and impudence, he begins to struggle to keep his mouth straight. His eyes begin to fill at the corners with a little glistening. And suddenly he seems to wilt, bending over and slapping his knee, and then rearing back. They watch him, Burley with amusement and the boys with relief, knowing that his laughter implicates him and he won’t be likely to tell on them now—if he ever meant to, which they doubt.
And now they all laugh, allowing it to be as funny as it was. Joe tells what Henry said, and how he swatted the mule, and how the team started, and how scared he was, and how he got them turned and then stopped, and how Henry looked. And Burley tells how it looked to him from up on the hill, and describes the motions each one made. The boys stand there, laughing, looking from one of the men to the other, proud to have been in such a famous escapade, and knowing better than to show it. If they were to seem too cocky about it, they know, the laughter would stop, and Burley or Joe would have to say in a dutifully sober tone: “Well, it’s damn lucky nobody got killed. You boys ought to be careful.”
In the midst of the laughter, Joe throws up his hand and says: “Shhh! Mercy sakes alive, here comes the boss!”
Not wanting Mat to learn what has been going on, though not wanting either to admit that to the boys, Joe and Burley get busy in a hurry—with a burlesque of caution that makes Andy and Henry laugh again. Joe starts out to the gate to call the milk cows. Burley leads his team back into the driveway and begins taking their harness off. The boys go down across the lot and open the gate for Mat, who looks up the hill and sees them and waves.
He has unhitched the mules and is walking behind them, the slack of the lines looped in his hands. Shifting both lines into one hand and stopping the mules as the boys run to him, he hugs first Andy and then Henry.
“Hello, Andy! How’re you, hon? Hello, Henry boy!”
“We’ve come to stay, Grandad,” Henry says.
“Well, good! I’m glad you have.”
Burley is putting his mules into their stalls. Mat does up the lines and waters his team, and for a few minutes there is a steady hustle of activity as Burley helps to unharness Mat’s mules and put them away. Joe drives the cows in and Burley and Mat put in hay and corn for the teams.
And then they are finished. In the silence they can hear the mules eating their corn, the ears rattling in the troughs.
“Well, Mat,” Burley says, “looks like you got about all the help you need now.”
And Mat smiles and says, in what seems to the boys a very loving and proud way: “Yessir. It looks like I have.”
The four of them stand in the driveway, looking out at the red sunset, Mat holding the boys’ hands. And then Burley slips his hat off and scratches his head in that way Andy admires, and settles his hat back on, and lights a smoke. “Well, Mat, I’ll see you tomorrow. Take it easy, boys.”
THE PRESENCE OF GRIEF
After Virgil went to the war, Andy, as soon as he learned to write, wrote him letters, and Virgil replied—letters full of the familiar old foolishness, and promises of fine things they would do when the world got straightened out. And he sent him a soldier’s hat, a knife, and other odds and ends picked up with a fine sense of what would be of interest.
Andy got into the habit of thinking, whenever he was displeased or lonely, and whenever he wanted to do something he was not big enough to do by himself, that if Virgil were there it would be different. Virgil, in his absence, b
ecame the hero of the boy’s daydreams—the embodiment, in perfection, of whatever power he lacked at the moment. In all the conflicts Andy got into with his teachers and playmates and parents—and there were quite a few, for he has always been a moody, headstrong sort of boy—he imagined Virgil as his defender, the dealer of whatever justices and vengeances his injuries required.
But the letters stopped, and he was told that his uncle was missing in action—which meant, his mother said, that they were all worried about him, but maybe everything would turn out all right. Andy took that to mean that there was not much to worry about. It had been his experience that most grownups’ worries were without consequence. He adopted a certain caution in speaking of his uncle to his playmates, and he developed a new curiosity in observing the grownups of his family—which revealed nothing to him except that they were all filled with an anxiety that they tried to keep hidden from each other and from him.
And then, not long ago, after he had made some idle remark about his uncle, Bess took him aside and told him that they believed now that Virgil was dead. They had no reason to hope that he might be alive. She ended by saying that he should not tell Henry. He was old enough, and should know, but Henry might not understand.
But Andy does not understand either. He is in the bewilderment, the bad luck special to children, of experiencing the effect without any of the clarification or relief that might come with some understanding of the cause. For weeks he has felt himself surrounded by the grief of the family, but he has not yet felt any grief of his own. He has continued, in a sort of guilty secrecy, to believe that Virgil is somewhere and somehow still alive. And he has kept on praying for his safe return.
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 99