Lying in bed in the dark, he is aware of the presence of the grief of the household, and aware of the difference between that and the pleasantness of it, so familiar and comforting to him, and kept there, he knows, partly for his own sake. His consciousness widens slowly out of the bounds of the room and the house into the night overlying the world. And he feels himself to be present, placelessly, in all the far and wide of that darkness, filled with a vague troubling over all he feels but does not know.
At last tiredness seems to place and shape him there in the bed in the room. The sweet familiarity of the house presses around him again, and he falls asleep.
A RAMBLE
“Come in,” Aunt Fanny says. She is sitting in a rocking chair behind the cold drum stove, rubbing an ointment of some kind on her fingers. She looks up inquiringly at them, squinting hard through her round brass-rimmed glasses, blinded by the brightness of the doorway until they shut the door, and then she raises her hands and opens her mouth in a broad show of pleasure and surprise.
“Awww, well I declare to goodness, if it ain’t Miss Bess’s little boys! How’s your mother, honeys?”
“Fine,” Andy says.
“And your daddy’s fine, I reckon, too? Well, ain’t that nice. Sit down, children, and talk to me. Let me look at you. My, ain’t you growed! I’m so glad to see you. Yes indeed! Just a while back I say to Joe, ‘Well, now it’s summer and I expect little Andy and Henry’ll be to see me, if I live and nothing happen and all go well with the world!’” She gives a long cackle of laughter and says, “Yes indeedy.”
The boys sit down together on a wicker settee placed between the door facing and the side of an iron bed, both of them a little abashed and awed having come into a different kind of life, though it is familiar to them from many other visits.
Aunt Fanny is Joe Banion’s mother, older than anybody knows. She sits a little wearily in her chair as old women often sit, her short, squat, ample body bunched into the angle of seat and back like a heap of cushions, her bowed knees set wide apart. Her hair has been gathered and braided into perhaps a dozen short erect grey pigtails. Her mouth contains only a few widely spaced amber-stained teeth. Her lower lip bulges slightly with the snuff packed inside it. A coffee can, her “spit-can,” is set at the end of one of the chair rockers at her feet. Her shoes—work shoes, probably a cast-off pair of Joe’s—have been so ventilated for the easing of corns and bunions as to have the look of sandals. Her long dress reaches to the tops of her shoes, and over it she wears a starched white apron. She is a woman of much pride. Her manners, though peculiarly her own, are impeccable. She is an accomplished seamstress, and the room is filled with her work: quilts, crocheted doilies, a linen wall-hanging with the Lord’s Prayer embroidered on it in threads of many colors. In the house she is nearly always occupied with her needle, always complaining of her dim eyesight and arthritic hands. Her dark hands, though painfully crooked and drawn by the disease, are still somehow dexterous and capable. She is always anointing them with salves and ointments of her own making. The fingers wear rings made of copper wire, which she believes to have the power of prevention and healing. She is an excellent gardener. The garden beside the house is her work. She makes of its small space an amplitude unlike anything else in the town: rows of vegetables and flowers—and herbs, for which she knows the recipes and the uses.
That is the daylight aspect of Aunt Fanny. But there is a night aspect too. And to Andy the garden, the quilts on the bed, or the quilting frame always seem threatened, like earthquake country, by an ominous nearness of darkness in the character of their maker. Aunt Fanny has seen the Devil, not once but often, especially in her youth, and she calls him familiarly by his name: Red Sam. Her obsessions are Hell and Africa, and she has the darkest, most fire-lit notions of both. Her idea of Africa is a hair-raising blend of lore and hearsay and imagination. She thinks of it with nostalgia and longing—a kind of earthly Other Shore, Eden, or Heaven—and yet she fears it because of its presumed darkness, its endless jungles, its stock of malevolent serpents and man-eating beasts. And by the thought of Hell she is held as endlessly fascinated as if her dearest ambition is to go there. She can talk at any length about it, cataloguing its tortures and labyrinths in almost loving detail. Her belief in Heaven is just as firm, but she simply depends on that and lets it go. It is Hell that draws her mind to its tightest focus, and entices her into the depths and rhapsodies of prophetic vision. Next to Hell, she is drawn by visions of the End of the World and the Judgment Day. And what most frightens the two boys in her talk of these things is not so much the horrors themselves as the old woman’s delight in them, as though in telling of them she affirms, beyond any power of small boys to doubt, that these truly are the foundation of the world. She seems to give a respectful credence to the statement that God is love, only to hurry on to explore with real interest the possibility that God is wrath. She can read from the Book of Revelation with a ringing of conviction in her voice that can make the Creation seem only a stage-setting for the triumphant thunderation of the End. Stooped in the light of a coal-oil lamp at night, following her finger down some threatening page of the Bible, her glasses opaquely reflecting the yellow of the lamp, her pigtails sticking out like compass points around her head, she looks like a black Witch of Endor.
She possesses a nearly inexhaustible lore of snakes and deaths, bottomless caves and pools, mysteries and ghosts and wonders. One of her stories can populate a month of nightmares. There have been nights when, after listening to her, Andy and Henry have been unable to go the dark way home by themselves, and Joe has had to hold their hands and lead them up the hill toward the happy lights of their grandad’s house. But though they are frightened by her ominous knowledge, they are as fascinated as she is by the dark spaces between days and stars that she opens toward them and fills with the designs and impendings of dire purpose.
But her daylight aspect is as bright as the other is dark. Now, as she sits there in the chair among the substances of her life, anointing her hands, the world seems firm enough around her. Her dark company of visions and devils and spirits seems to have withdrawn from her and from the daylight like so many bats and owls.
“How’s your rheumatism, Aunt Fanny?” Andy asks.
“Aw, honey, it’s bad.” She laughs, as though to affirm that hers is a faithful pain and can be depended on. “Oh yes, it don’t get no better. This ointment just keep it from getting worse.”
“Well, I’m glad it’s not worse.”
“Oh yes, just bad, not worse. I rub my hands and put heat on them, set with them in the sun, and they stay so I can use them. I say to Joe a while back, ‘Well, if I live and nothing happen and all go well, I believe they’ll last me.’ That’s what I say, and I believe they will. Eyes too. Old eyes and old hands. Old feet too, and old knees. Old everything. But I believe they’ll all last me, long as I’ll need them. I pray so, and trust the Lord. All you can do, honeys.”
She laughs again, and screws the top back on the jar of ointment, and gets heavily up.
“What’re you going to do this morning?” Andy asks. He is suddenly anxious. Sometimes she is too crippled to do anything, and it is always disappointing to have the good possibilities held back by old hands or old feet or old knees. But this morning the prospects are better than he hoped.
“I been thinking I’d go on a ramble.”
“Can we come?” Henry asks.
“You mind and behave, you can come.”
“We will.”
“No squibbling and squabbling, I mean. And you walk behind me so you won’t be trampling up everything before I can get to it.”
“All right.”
They follow her into the kitchen, where she ties on a faded blue sunbonnet and hunts up a basket and a sharp paring knife.
“I’ll carry those for you,” Henry says.
“Or I will,” Andy says.
“I’ll carry it, I expect,” Aunt Fanny says. “You all just keep b
usy watching yourself.”
She loops the handle of the basket over her arm, and they set out, pulling the back door shut behind them and going through the still long shadow of the house into the open daylight.
Aunt Fanny moves at a slow, hobbling, off-balance gait which seems unlikely to carry her as far as the yard fence. But it does, and is, if not fast, indomitably steady.
She goes along a cow path down the steep side of the hollow behind the house, and across the rocks of the streambed, and up the other side, giving a great shaking to the saplings she catches hold of to help herself along. The boys follow her uneasily, expecting her to give up what seems the enormous effort of the going and turn back.
But she advances steadily, leaving one yard and then another of the steep path behind her. And by the time they have come out of the trees into the sun again on the far side, and turned and followed the edge of the woods some distance around the point of the next ridge, the boys have begun as usual to accept, as she does, that her old feet and old knees will last. By now their shoes and the hem of the old woman’s dress are wet with dew.
They walk a little behind her, respectfully staying out of her way. She leads them in long slow zigzags between the fringe of the woods and the open pasture on the ridge, now and then stooping and cutting and dropping into the basket some herb or mushroom or flower. She makes no attempt to cover the ground thoroughly: when she zigs she apparently gives no thought to the possibility that it might be better to zag.
“Why do you want to skip so much?” Andy asks her. “Why don’t we go down there?”
“That ain’t how you ramble,” she says. “You got to be getting and going both at once. You ain’t supposed to get everything, but just only enough. Take some and leave some.”
“Aunt Fanny,” Henry says, “I thought those old toadstools were poison.”
“Some is, some ain’t. Them bad ones you want to stay away from. I heard about a man ate one of them once. They say he just died painful. Whooee! Say he died screaming the Devil was coming after him. Seen him!”
For a moment the story seems to cast a shadow over them, as though a dark tree has suddenly grown up beside them. But she hushes and moves on. They leave the shadow then, and when Andy looks back he sees only the sunlight shining there. Ahead of him, the sun bright on her bonnet, Aunt Fanny walks, studying the ground.
She seems to see everything. Invariably she sees what she is looking for before the boys can see it, in spite of their efforts to be of use. It is as though over a spot of the ground where nothing is she bends, and miraculously there is something—a white round mushroom, and she cuts it off and drops it into the basket, cackling gaily at the boys’ amazement.
Watching her, Andy is again aware that hers is a kind of life different from any other that he knows. He is made happy by her pleased easy taking of the good things that the world provides without effort, that nobody else wants, that most do not even see. Aunt Fanny’s basket, as it slowly fills with the clutter of her discoveries, comes to have for him the excitement of a chest of treasure found in a cave. That these things have grown out of the ground into their secret places apart from anybody’s intention, and that she takes them familiarly and freely without attempting to take them all, that they are the harvest of a ramble and not a search or a labor, all this bespeaks a peaceableness between her and the world.
In their zigzagging between pasture and woods they gradually turn the curves of the long S of their ramble, going around the point of the first ridge and up along the wooded hollow on the far side, and then crossing the hollow and going down around the point of the next ridge. They scare up two or three rabbits. Once, ahead of them, they hear a squirrel barking, and hear the rushing in the treetops as it retreats deeper into the woods. In the open pasture on one side of them the meadowlarks are singing, and on the other the patches of underbrush along the edge of the woods are stirring and rustling with the movements of redbirds and towhees and sparrows. Aunt Fanny walks steadily on, here and there stooping and cutting and naming and dropping into the basket a sprig of this, a few leaves or a bloom of that.
At last they turn straight up the side of a ridge and go through a gate and past the cattle barn on the far place and through another gate, and down the next slope. They can see the river valley below them now.
Above the woods on the bluff there are two tall stone chimneys and the heaped foundation stones of a house. This was the first house that Mat’s people built and lived in after they came to Kentucky. The last member of the family to live there was Mat’s Great-Aunt Milly, who, crippled by some childhood disease, died there, an old maid, when Mat was about fifteen. After that, until it was torn down a generation later, it was lived in by one or another of the Negro families who worked on the place. Aunt Fanny was born and raised in a cabin that used to stand behind the house, and later lived for a while in the house itself.
“Here we are where you used to live,” Andy says to her, hoping for a story.
But she only says, “That was long gone years ago,” and laughs as if to convey her familiarity with the darkness that has swallowed all that time.
They continue their rambling down through the ragged, half-dead locusts of what used to be the yard, and make a sort of loop on the hillside below the house site, skirting the upper edge of the woods. The basket filled at last, they sit down to rest on the hearthstones of the eastward chimney, leaning back into the cool, stony-smelling shadow.
“A mighty fine place to rest yourself,” Aunt Fanny says. “So pretty and nice.”
“Tell about you all sitting on the porch,” Andy says.
“Old porch,” she says, gesturing with the paring knife, “used to go all the way across the back of the house. And a mighty fine setting place too. After the hot days we’d go out there and set till bedtime. Be a breeze. And we’d talk, and now and then see the lights of a steamboat on the river and hear it whistle. Mighty fine to do. Oh yes, I remember them old gone times. I can see them clear.”
She subsides, and pokes with satisfaction into the contents of the basket.
“Tell about Aunt Milly’s ghost.”
She glances up and is silent for a moment, as if examining her memory for a good starting place.
“Well, not long after Miss Milly died, the house we was living in begun to leak and get in bad shape. And Mr. Mat’s daddy Mr. Ben says, ‘Ain’t got money to fix it now. Move in the big house.’ So we moved in. And wasn’t long after that till we begun to hear things at night. Hear them crutches walk. Be laying in the bed at night, and all quiet, and here they’d come, down out the old attic, step at a time down the stairs, and on down the next stairs, just like they used to sound when she was alive and walking on them. And then they’d just wander, in and out the rooms, out on the porch, and up and down. We nailed the attic door shut, and here they come again same as ever: thunk-a-tunk. And sometimes it’d sing:
Whooooo is that all dressed in red?
Must be the children that Fee Fo fed.
Whooooo is that all dressed in green?
Must be the children that Fee Fo seen.
“And it’d go on that-a-way, singing in all the colors there was, whooing like a hoot owl:
Whooooo is that all dressed in blue?
Must be the children that Fee Fo slew.
Whooooo is that all dressed in black?
Must be the children in Fee Fo’s sack.”
To Andy, again, there seems to have grown up beside them a dark tree, veiling the sun. And within that darkness he seems to see as with an owl’s vision the hobbling wraith of his great-great-great-aunt in its mournful wandering in the old house—and to sense beyond the house, in a windy, ever-deepening darkness, the tireless walking of Fee Fo.
When Aunt Fanny intones the mournful drawn-out singing of the ghost, Henry shudders.
“Didn’t that scare you?” he asks.
“Didn’t that scare me! Lord, honey, you wake up in the middle of the night, and you hear that thu
nk-a-tunk and that singing, it’ll make the hair stand up offen your head! It sho will!” She laughs, and the little boy shudders again. “When you shiver like that,” she says, “somebody’s walking on your grave.”
“I haven’t even got any grave.” Henry says. “I ain’t dead.”
“Well, maybe you ain’t got one yet that you in, honey, but you got one that you going to be in.”
The darkness of the old woman’s knowing hangs over them, and they fall silent, the boys wanting to know more, yet dreading the answers too much to ask the questions. Andy wants to ask her about his Uncle Virgil—is he dead? Was whatever grave he may have come to appointed to him in his childhood, or when he was born, or at the beginning of the world? But he knows that her answer will be one he will have to struggle with. And he does not ask.
Aunt Fanny gets up presently, and they start home. Again they seem to Andy to move out of a dark place back into the sunlight.
The ramble over now, they go by the straightest way. Aunt Fanny puts the paring knife in the basket, and sets the basket on her head. The dew has dried long ago. The waverings of heat have begun to stand over the fields.
When they come back into the dimness and wood-smoke smell of the kitchen, Aunt Fanny hangs up her bonnet, and they sit down at the table. The boys watch as the old woman brings the cluttered gatherings of their ramble finally to an orderly harvest. Piece by piece she sorts out the contents of the basket. When she gets done she has lying on the newspapers spread out before her a bouquet of flowers, two or three small piles of herbs, a small clutch of mushrooms like a nest of eggs. She sits there looking a moment, and then gets up and puts the flowers into water, and goes into the next room and sits down with snuff and spit-can to rest.
The boys remain with her, sitting again on the wicker settee, hoping to prolong the pleasure of the morning. But she seems to them to accept the end of the ramble too complacently, talking now of sleeping a few winks after dinner, and of the cool of the afternoon when she will go out to work in her garden. And gradually the excitement leaves them, and they begin to wish to go, only kept there by politeness. They stay until the ringing of the dinner bell calls them up the hill to eat.
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 100