The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

  He gavels mightily on the wall, and then helps Burley help Big Ellis get up. As soon as he is up, Big Ellis’s feet try to walk away and leave the rest of him hanging there between Burley and Jayber, and they all fall in a heap. They lie as they fell for a considerable time, as though asleep, or resting, or waiting to see what they will do next.

  After a while Burley says, “If I knew which way is up, I’d get up.”

  “You see any stars?” Jayber says.

  “No.”

  “Well, turn over.”

  “Ah!” Burley says. “That’s them.”

  He gets up, and Jayber gets up, and again they help Big Ellis to his feet.

  “The idea is to keep your feet on the bottom,” Burley says, “and your head on top. Watch this.” He gives a walking demonstration, first one way, then the other.

  “That’s good, Burley,” Big Ellis says. “Really good!”

  “You think you got the hang of it now?”

  “Yes-sir-ree!” Big Ellis says. “Turn me a-loose! I’m a tomcat! I’m a ring-tailed twister!”

  “You know where you going?”

  “Yes I do! To my car.”

  “You know where you are?” Jayber says.

  “Yep. Right here.”

  “Jayber’s shop,” Burley says. “Don’t get lost.”

  “Never was lost in Port William but once in my life,” Big Ellis says. “And that was three or four years ago.”

  He goes off into the dark; his footsteps fade into the silence.

  Burley and Jayber stand and wait. They lean against the building and wait. They sit down and wait.

  “Well, he’s either lost, or gone to sleep, or parked his car clean outside town,” Burley says, “—­or something.”

  The roaring of an engine rises in the darkness not thirty yards up the street. There is a long scream of gears, the engine roars again, and they hear the tires beginning to move over the gravel.

  “Turn on the lights!” Burley shouts.

  As if he was only waiting to be told, Big Ellis turns them on—­to reveal that he is backing rather rapidly away from them, heading—­as nearly as they can tell—­straight for Milton Burgess’s store.

  “Whoa!” Burley shouts.

  Again, as if grateful for the advice, Big Ellis obeys. The tires slide a little and dust rises into the beams of the headlights.

  “Put her in forward!”

  Big Ellis puts her into something different—­high maybe—­and brings her back down the street at a canter.

  “Whoa!” Burley says. “Now cut the wheels over this way, and back her easy.”

  With the help of much loud instruction and a good deal of trial and error, Big Ellis succeeds finally in backing the car up onto the sidewalk. They open the trunk, and then gather around the still inert and snoring corpse of Whacker.

  “And now, gentlemen,” Jayber says, “with deep respect, with reverence, with kind and loving thoughts of the dear departed, let us bear the body to the grave.”

  All three of them tugging at Whacker’s shoulders and arms, with great heaving and grunting, they manage to turn him away from the wall and drag him perhaps a foot before they have to stop to rest. Letting him lie full length on the ground, they stand swaying over him, getting their breath. He lies in massive repose, like a hill, his belly cresting higher than their knees. They no sooner begin to rest than they begin to anticipate and dread the weight of him, but after many struggles and stops to rest they manage to lift and drag and push him over to the car, and cram him into the trunk.

  “What we going to do with his feet?” Burley asks.

  “The wagon,” Jayber says. “Where’s his wagon?”

  They find the wagon and unload it and tie it to the bumper and put Whacker’s feet in it.

  “And that’s a meaningful and moving and beautiful example of the funeral director’s art,” Jayber says, “if ever I saw one—­and I have saw a few.

  “Driver!” he says.

  Big Ellis, giggling, goes around and gets into the driver’s seat. And then for many seconds nothing happens at all.

  “What’s matter?” Burley says.

  “You all coming?” Big Ellis says. “Get in.”

  “No!” Jayber says. “We got to carry this out with due propriety, and a due sense of what is fitting, and with due solemnity, and with dignity. He must have a procession, a cortege. You drive ahead, Big Ellis, at a slow, a stately, an elegiac, and a dirgeful pace. And we will walk behind.”

  Big Ellis starts the engine. He guns it fiercely to test its mettle and discipline it thoroughly beforehand. He throws it into gear. The car makes three hunching lunges and dies with a cough in the middle of the road.

  “Low, sweetheart,” Burley says. “Put her in low.”

  Big Ellis gets her in the right one this time, and the procession moves off, Big Ellis driving at an elegiac and a dirgeful pace, followed by the red wagon carrying Whacker’s feet, followed by Burley and Jayber, each with an arm around the other for consolation and for help in walking, their hats dangling in lamentation from their free hands.

  “A famous cortege, if ever I saw one,” Jayber says. “Drum!” he says.

  And Big Ellis begins to beat with his fist against the car door the ponking concussions of a funeral march.

  “Oh, a redounding and a sublime cortege,” Jayber says. “Nothing is so redounding and resounding in the history of a town as a good calamity or a classy funeral or an event of that stripe. God knows they happen seldom enough.”

  Inspired by the thought of mending the history of Port William with a funeral of unimpeachable class, he lines out the chorus of a dirge:

  We are hauling,

  We are hauling

  His aaaaass

  To the graveyard.

  And they sing it a second time together. Jayber chants:

  We’ll haul him to the graveyard,

  And there lay him down.

  And they all sing:

  We are hauling,

  We are hauling

  His aaaaass

  To the graveyard.

  We’ll bury this peckerwood

  In six foot of ground.

  We are hauling,

  We are hauling,

  His aaaaass

  To the graveyard.

  They have raised around them by now a great barking and howling of dogs. Citizens’ voices are shouting out of the darkness. House lights are snapping on. People are coming out onto lighted porches in their night clothes. But nobody follows except four or five dogs who, though they make a loud boast of barking and growling, keep a respectful distance.

  Through it all the members of the cortege maintain an invincible solemnity and dignity. They sing their chorus many times over with the strength and loudness of deep conviction. In the pauses Jayber makes hieratic and indecipherable gestures in the air with both hands, intoning: “Et-t-ceterah. Et-t-ceterah. Et-t-ceterah.”

  As they bear down on the outskirts, he becomes inspired again, and sings some new verses, holding his right hand in benediction in the air each time Burley and Big Ellis come in on the chorus:

  The forementioned peckerwood

  Was a mountainous bootlegger.

  And if the grave don’t fit him

  We will have to dig it bigger.

  Do not scoff, my townsmen.

  We all need a grave to fit us.

  They sing the chorus, Big Ellis pounding the car door, the dogs barking, Whacker’s feet keeping their perfect repose in the wagon.

  Yes, that old dark and silent

  Ground is finally going to get us.

  Jayber is shaken and a little sobered by the turn his song has taken. “A true grave digger’s tune,” he tells himself. And he tells himself, “Once a preacher, always a preacher.” But now that he has sung his way into it, he reckons there is nothing to do but dig in and sing his way out of it.

  If you think that stops the story

  And puts an end to the matter

&nbs
p; Burley and Big Ellis bawl the chorus.

  Maybe so. But maybe there’s a glory

  Where you’d rather we’d all gather.

  There is something incorrigible about his mind. He has always known it. No matter how near home he sets his mind to work, it always beelines for the final questions. His thoughts return to the verge of this life, the place of their defeat, with fascination and with strange delight. Is it noble faith or cowardice that, though he cannot see that all loves do not end in the dark, he cannot believe they do?

  It can’t be seen with the naked eye,

  And the grave’s not a telescope

  They sing the chorus. The end in sight, Jayber begins to be conscious of the darkened country lying quiet beyond their singing and the commotion of the dogs.

  To see a land beyond the sky.

  But, brothers, we will hope.

  That movement of his mind completed, he feels himself returning, fully and gladly present again with the others. As he listens to his companions singing the chorus, the sense of the rarity and extravagance of the occasion comes back to him, the sense of the rarity of their comradeship, and he laughs aloud and sings with them. They are approaching the graveyard now, and the dogs, as if having pursued to the limit of their jurisdiction, have quit following.

  Their turning off the road at the graveyard gate seems to Jayber to mark a culmination of large significance, and he calls to Big Ellis to stop.

  “A few appropriate words will be appropriate at this time,” he says.

  “Gentlemen,” he says, “that was a procession, I dare say, without equal, and will not be forgotten, I dare say, in the lifetimes of those now living—­it being in any case an accomplishment—­a glorious achievement in the pride of which we may all rejoice—­a triumph—­a gilded pinnacle in the history of this noble city, this alabaster village, this fairest flower, this yaller rose of the valley of the green Kentuck. Can you say amen?”

  “AMEN!”

  “Forward!”

  In solemn triumph they advance between the stone pillars of the gate and up the hill, Big Ellis’s headlights picking out the white of the headstones under the cedars. They have hushed their singing.

  At the top of the rise they follow the road as it turns to the left and goes among the graves along the ridge.

  “Right here,” Jayber says. “Whoa!”

  Big Ellis gets out, and in the red glow of the taillights, as quietly as they can, they begin the job of getting Whacker out of the trunk. Getting him out is for some reason harder than getting him in. At each straining heave they move him only inches. As they tug and haul on his great arms and legs, they are intimidated by the size of him.

  “What a tub of guts!” Jayber says. “He must weigh five hundred pounds.”

  “He don’t miss it far,” Burley says.

  They laugh.

  “Shhhhh!”

  “We look just like devils in this red light,” Big Ellis whispers.

  They are all stopped a moment by the thought of that.

  Burley whispers: “We’d look like the devil if it was daylight.” And straightening from their labor, they laugh. They are wavering helplessly now between hilarity and a strict silence that they feel to be demanded of them by the silence around them—­not so much the heard silence pierced by the voices of insects as the imagined perfect silence of the dead. And though in their silences they are beginning to be troubled by what seems to them their disturbance of the dead, that seems to make what is funny even funnier.

  They finally get Whacker out and lay him on his back on the wagon, his head dangling over one end and his legs over the other.

  “Now . . .” Jayber whispers.

  But he does not finish, for they become aware that Big Ellis’s old car, relieved of its burden, has begun to roll. It has eased off slowly, rocking a little over the bumps, following the road down the gentle slant of the ridge.

  “Oh, Lordy!” Big Ellis says. “It’s got a hant in it!”

  They stand transfixed, chilled to the bone by what, in that place under those circumstances, seems a certainty.

  Finally Jayber says, making a blind leap in the direction of rationality: “You didn’t put on the brake, Big Ellis.”

  And Burley says: “Oh mercy ! All that crockery!”

  And all three of them begin to run after the car, which has a good head start and is rolling faster.

  As they run they whisper violently to each other: “Run!” “Hurry!” “Watch out!” “Oh, Lordy!” And running in the dark, their feet pounding the uneven gravel, they stagger and lurch, bumping into each other, ricocheting both ways out of the road. And somehow they gain on the car, which keeps its even pace straight ahead in the wheel-ruts. Then where the road makes a right angle turn to the left, the car keeps going straight, climbs over the low embankment, which checks its speed, and comes to a stop against a large granite tombstone whose markings show with sudden clarity in the beam of the headlights. And then the three pursuers fetch up against the tombstone too. Leaning down between the stone and the car, Burley inspects for damage.

  “Not a dent, not a scratch.”

  And then they all sit down to get their breath. They sit facing the car whose headlights peer steadily at the tombstone, almost touching it, for all the world like a nearsighted person trying to make out the inscription.

  As soon as they have rested, they get up and walk back to where they left Whacker. Following Jayber’s whispered orders, Burley and Big Ellis each pick up one of Whacker’s legs, and Jayber taking the tongue of the wagon, they start slowly down among the stones ­toward the newly dug grave of Ernest Finley. All the way there they labor in conscientious quiet, keeping the wagon uneasily balanced as with great effort they lug it over the mounds.

  They halt it at the end of the grave and begin the difficult and perilous business of lowering Whacker down. Gravity is too much in their favor now, and they accompany their work with much grunting and whispered cautioning as they roll Whacker over on his belly and start him in feet first and backwards.

  “Oh, me!” Big Ellis whispers. “I believe the grave will be the end of us all.”

  And leaving Whacker bent like a hinge over the lip of the grave, they let go and laugh, rolling on the ground until, intimidated by their noise, they fall silent again.

  Now, Jayber getting down into the grave to pull and the other two lifting at Whacker’s shoulders, they work him carefully backward and downward. But it is not until Whacker’s balancing-point slides over the edge that they realize that instead of leading they are being led. For Whacker is going on his own now, and they lack the strength to pull him out—­or to hold him, either, for very long. Down in the grave Jayber fights off the impulse to turn loose and run, knowing there is no place to go; he takes his stand where he is, shoving at Whacker’s great buttocks for dear life, his voice rising up quick and small from under his burden.

  “Hold him, boys, hold him! Take hold and rear back!”

  Burley and Big Ellis do take hold and rear back, with the strength of desperation, but there is nothing to do, seeing that Whacker is bound to go, except slow him down. But the farther he slips into the grave, the faster he goes. His arms are too large even at the wrists to take much of a grip on, and Burley and Big Ellis finally hold him only by his fingers. Below them in the grave they can hear Jayber grunting, yielding ground inch by inch as the big man comes irresistibly down.

  But they do at last get him laid down in the bottom of the grave without letting him fall. The big head comes to rest between Jayber’s feet. They pitch in his hat and Jayber places it over his face and folds his hands, and steps up onto the mound of his stomach and is hauled out.

  And now the difficulty and danger of their labor only serve to increase their sense of accomplishment. They feel that they have achieved a rare distinction. Up on the hill they can see Big Ellis’s car lights growing dim, the battery nearly played out, but that seems not to matter now.

  “Well, it did fit
him,” Big Ellis says.

  Burley laughs. “It’s not exactly what you’d call roomy, is it, Jayber?”

  “No,” Jayber says, “ ’tis not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church door, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve.”

  “Durn if that ain’t fine, Jayber. Say some more.”

  “Say some more, buddy.”

  Jayber straightens himself at the head of the grave and raises his hand. And as though seized by meanings he cannot resist, he speaks slowly and with feeling:

  Water into water, earth into earth,

  Breath into breath, light into light,

  Singing into singing, birth into birth,

  Thought into thought, sight into sight,

  Let this man’s makings be unmade,

  Let stillness be, let peace come

  To this place that was a man.

  Stooping, he lifts in his cupped hands some dirt from the mound at the grave’s edge and lets it sift slowly in.

  Overtaken and sobered by Jayber’s words—­Jayber as much as the others—­they stand with their heads bowed after he has finished. Apart from anything any of them could have intended or expected, Jayber’s words have transcended drunkenness and farce. The meaning of the time has been lifted far above the snores that come with astonishing power out of the grave. Jayber’s words have returned them to the occasion they started with—­the end of the war, the dying, the deaths—­the graves of the millions that, beyond knowing, peace has come to.

  A PASSING DIRGE

  Mat wakes up in one of the folding chairs in the dim light of the lamp left burning at the head of the coffin. He wakes to resume the heaviness of Ernest’s death, cramped from sitting asleep in the hard chair, the old pain lying deep and keen in his shoulder. He knows he cannot have slept long.