The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

  “We wouldn’t let one of them stand long in our way,” he thought.

  Art Rowanberry walked like the first man to discover upright posture—as if, having been a creature no taller than a sheep or a pig, he had suddenly risen to the height of six feet and looked around. He walked too like a man who had been taught to march, and he wore a uniform. But whatever was military in his walk was an overlay, like the uniform, for he had been a man long before he had been a soldier, and a farmer long before he had been a man. An observer might have sensed in his walk and in the way he carried himself a reconciliation to the forms and distances of the land such as comes only to those who have from childhood been accustomed to the land’s work.

  The noises of the town were a long way behind him. It was too early for the evening chores, and the farmsteads that he passed were quiet. Birds sang. From time to time he heard a farmer call out to his team. Once he had heard a tractor off somewhere in the fields and once a towboat out on the river, but those sounds had faded away. No car had passed him, though he walked a paved road. There was no sound near him but the sound of his own footsteps falling steadily on the pavement.

  Once it had seemed to him that he walked only on the place where he was. But now, having gone and returned from so far, he knew that he was walking on the whole round world. He felt the great, empty distance that the world was turning in, far from the sun and the moon and the stars.

  “Here,” he thought, “is where we do what we are going to do—the only chance we got. And if somebody was to be looking down from up there, it would all look a lot littler to him than it does to us.”

  He was talking carefully to himself in his thoughts, forming the words more deliberately than if he were saying them aloud, because he did not want to count his steps. He had a long way still to go, and he did not want to know how many steps it was going to take. Nor did he want to hear in his head the counted cadence of marching.

  “I ain’t marching,” he thought. “I am going somewheres. I am going up the river ­towards Hargrave. And this side of Hargrave, before the bridge, at Ellville, I will turn up the Kentucky River, and go ten miles, and turn up Sand Ripple below Port William, and I will be at home.”

  He carried a duffel bag that contained his overcoat, a change of clothes, and a shaving kit. From time to time, he shifted the bag from one shoulder to the other.

  “I reckon I am done marching, have marched my last step, and now I am walking. There is nobody in front of me and nobody behind. I have come here without a by-your-leave to anybody. Them that have known where I was, or was supposed to, for three years don’t know where I am now. Nobody that I know knows where I am now.”

  He came from killing. He had felt the ground shaken by men and what they did. Where he was coming from, they thought about killing day after day, and feared it, and did it. And out of the unending, unrelenting great noise and tumult of the killing went little deaths that belonged to people one by one. Some had feared it and had died. Some had died without fearing it, lacking the time. They had fallen around him until he was amazed that he stood—men who in a little while had become his buddies, most of them younger than he, just boys.

  The fighting had been like work, only a lot of people got killed and a lot of things got destroyed. It was not work that made much of anything. You and your people intended to go your way, if you could. And you wanted to stop the other people from going their way, if you could. And whatever interfered you destroyed. You had a thing on your mind that you wanted, or wanted to get to, and anything at all that stood in your way, you had the right to destroy. If what was in the way were women and little children, you would not even know it, and it was all the same. When your power is in a big gun, you don’t have any small intentions. Whatever you want to hit, you want to make dust out of it. Farm buildings, houses, whole towns—things that people had made well and cared for a long time—you made nothing of.

  “We blew them apart and scattered the pieces so they couldn’t be put together again. And people, too. We blew them apart and scattered the pieces.”

  He had seen tatters of human flesh hanging in the limbs of trees along with pieces of machines. He had seen bodies without heads, arms and legs without bodies, strewn around indifferently as chips. He had seen the bodies of men hanging upside down from a tank turret, lifeless as dolls.

  Once, when they were firing their gun, the man beside him—Eckstrom—began to dance. And Art thought, “This ain’t no time to be dancing.” But old Eckstrom was dancing because he was shot in the head, was killed, his body trying on its own to keep standing.

  And others had gone down, near enough to Art almost that he could have touched them as they fell: Jones, Bitmer, Hirsch, Walters, Corelli.

  He had seen attackers coming on, climbing over the bodies of those who had fallen ahead of them. A man who, in one moment, had been a helper, a friend, in the next moment was only a low mound of something in the way, and you stepped over him or stepped on him and came ahead.

  Once while they were manning their gun and under fire themselves, old Eckstrom got mad, and he said, “I wish I had those sons of bitches lined up to where I could shoot every damned one of them.”

  And Art said, “Them fellers over there are doing about the same work we are, ’pears like to me.”

  There were nights when the sky and all the earth appeared to be on fire, and yet the ground was covered with snow and it was cold.

  At Christmas he was among those trapped at Bastogne. He had expected to die, but he was spared as before though the ground shook and the town burned under a sky bright as day. They held their own, and others, fighting on the outside, broke through.

  “We was mighty glad to see that day when it come,” he thought. “That was a good day.”

  The fighting went on, the great tearing apart. People and everything else were torn into pieces. Everything was only pieces put together that were ready to fly apart, and nothing was whole. You got to where you could not look at a man without knowing how little it would take to kill him. For a man was nothing but just a little morsel of soft flesh and brittle bone inside of some clothes. And you could not look at a house or a schoolhouse or a church without knowing how, rightly hit, it would just shake down into a pile of stones and ashes. There was nothing you could look at that was whole—man or beast or house or tree—that had the right to stay whole very long. There was nothing above the ground that was whole but you had the measure of it and could separate its pieces and bring it down. You moved always in a landscape of death, wreckage, cinders, and snow.

  And then, having escaped so far, he was sitting by his gun one afternoon, eating a piece of chocolate and talking to an old redheaded, freckle-faced boy named McBride, and a shell hit right where they were. McBride just disappeared. And a fragment came to Art as if it were his own and had known him from the beginning of the world, and it burrowed into him.

  From a man in the light on the outside of the world, he was transformed in the twinkling of an eye into a man in the dark on the inside of himself, in pain, and he thought that he was dead. How long he was in that darkness he did not know. When he came out of it, he was in a place that was white and clean, a hospital, and he was in a long room with many beds. There was sunlight coming in the window.

  A nurse who came by seemed glad to see him. “Well, hello, bright eyes,” she said.

  He said, “Why, howdy.”

  She said, “I think the war is over for you, soldier.”

  “Yes, mam,” he said. “I reckon it is.”

  She patted his shoulder. “You almost got away from us, you know it?”

  And he said, “Yes, mam, I expect I did.”

  The uniform he wore as he walked along the road between Jefferson and Hargrave was now too big for him. His shirt collar was loose on his neck, in spite of the neatly tied tie, and under his tightened belt the waistband of his pants gathered in pleats.

  He stayed in hospitals while his life grew back around the wound, as a l
ightning-struck tree will sometimes heal over the scar, until finally they gave him his papers and let him go.

  And now, though he walked strongly enough along the road, he was still newborn from his death, and inside himself he was tender and a little afraid.

  The bus had brought him as far as the town of Jefferson on the north side of the river, letting him out in the middle of the afternoon in front of the hotel that served also as a bus station. From there, he could have taken another bus to Hargrave had he been willing to wait until the next morning. But now that he was in familiar country he did not have it in him to wait. He had known a many a man who would have waited, but he was old for a soldier; though he was coming from as far as progress had reached, he belonged to an older time. It did not occur to him, any more than it would have occurred to his grandfather, to wait upon a machine for something he could furnish for himself. And so he thanked the kind lady at the hotel desk, shouldered his bag, and set out for home on foot.

  The muddy Ohio flowed beneath the bridge and a flock of pigeons wheeled out and back between the bridge and the water, causing him to sway as he walked, so that to steady himself he had to look at the hills that rose over the rooftops beyond the bridge. He went down the long southward arc of the bridge, and for a little while he was among houses again, and then he was outside the town, walking past farmsteads and fields in unobstructed day. The sky was overcast, but the clouds were high.

  “It ought to clear off before morning,” he thought. “Maybe it’ll be one of them fine spring days. Maybe it’ll do to work, for I have got to get started.”

  They would already have begun plowing, he thought—his father and his brother, Mart. Though they had begun the year without him, they would be expecting him. He could hear his father’s voice saying, “Any day now. Any day.”

  But he was between lives. The war had been a life, such as it was, and now he was out of it. The other life, the one he had once had and would have again, was still ahead of him; he was not in it yet.

  He was only free. He had not been out in the country or alone in a long time. Now that he had the open countryside around him again and was alone, he felt the expectations of other people fall away from him like a shed skin, and he came into himself.

  “I am not under anybody’s orders,” he thought. “What I expect myself to do, I will do it. The government don’t owe me, and I don’t owe it. Except when I have something again that it wants, then I reckon I will owe it.”

  It pleased him to think that the government owed him nothing, that he needed nothing from it, and he was on his own. But the government seemed to think that it owed him praise. It wanted to speak of what he and the others had done as heroic and glorious. Now that the war was coming to an end, the government wanted to speak of their glorious victories. The government was made up of people who thought about fighting, not of those who did it. The men sitting behind desks—they spent other men to buy ground, and then they ruined the ground they had and more men to get the ground beyond. If they were on the right side, they did it the same as them that were on the wrong side.

  “They talk about victory as if they know all them dead boys was glad to die. The dead boys ain’t never been asked how glad they was. If they had it to do again, might be they wouldn’t do it, or might be they would. But they ain’t been asked.”

  Under the clouds, the country all around was quiet, except for birds singing in the trees, wherever there were trees, and now and then a human voice calling out to a team. He was glad to be alive.

  He had been glad to be alive all the time he had been alive. When he was hit and thought he was dead, it had come to him how good it was to be alive even under the shelling, even when it was at its worst. And now he had lived through it all and was coming home. He was now a man who had seen far places and strange things, and he remembered them all. He had seen Kansas and Louisiana and Arizona. He had seen the ocean. He had seen the little farms and country towns of France and Belgium and Luxembourg—pretty, before they were ruined. For one night, he was in Paris.

  “That Paris, now. We was there one day and one night. There was wine everywheres, and these friendly girls who said, ‘Kees me.’ And I don’t know what happened after about ten o’clock. I come to the next morning in this hotel room, sick and broke, with lipstick from one end to the other. I reckon I must have had a right good time.”

  At first, before he was all the way in it, there was something he liked about the war, a reduction that in a way was pleasing. From a man used to doing and thinking for himself, he became a man who did what he was told.

  “That laying around half a day, waiting for somebody else to think—­that was something I had to learn.”

  It was fairly restful. Even basic training tired him less than what he would ordinarily have done at that time of year. He gained weight.

  And from a man with a farm and crops and stock to worry about, he became a man who worried only about himself and the little bunch of stuff he needed to sleep, dress, eat, and fight.

  He furnished only himself. The army furnished what little else it took to make the difference between a man and a beast. More than anything else, he liked his mess kit. It was all the dishes a man really needed. And when you weren’t cooking or eating with it, you could keep things in it—a little extra tobacco, maybe.

  “When I get to Ellville,” he thought, “I won’t be but mighty little short of halfway. I know the miles and how they lay out end to end.”

  It had been evening for a while now. On the farmsteads that he passed, people were busy with the chores. He could hear people calling their stock, dogs barking, children shouting and laughing. On one farm that he passed, a woman, a dog, and a small boy were bringing in the cows; in the driveway of the barn he could see a man unharnessing a team of mules. It was as familiar to him as his own breath, and because he was outside it still, he yearned ­toward it as a ghost might. As he passed by, the woman, perhaps because he was a soldier, raised her hand to him, and he raised his own in return.

  After a while, he could see ahead of him the houses and trees of Ellville, and over the trees the superstructure of the bridge arching into Hargrave. All during his walk so far, he had been offering himself the possibility that he would walk on home before he would sleep. But now that he had come nearly halfway and Ellville was in sight, he knew he would not go farther that day. He was tired, and with his tiredness had come a sort of melancholy and a sort of aimlessness, as if, all his ties cut, he might go right on past his home river and on and on, anywhere at all in the world. The little cluster of buildings ahead of him now seemed only accidentally there, and he himself there only accidentally. He had arrived, as he had arrived again and again during the healing of his wound, at the apprehension of a pure emptiness, as if at the center of an explosion—as if, without changing at all, he and the town ahead of him and all the long way behind him had been taken up into a dream in which every creature and every thing sat, like that boy McBride, in the dead center of the possibility of its disappearance.

  In the little town a lane turned off the highway and went out beyond the houses and across the river bottom for perhaps a quarter of a mile to a barn and, beyond the barn, to a small weatherboarded church. It was suppertime then; the road and the dooryards were deserted. Art entered the lane and went back past the gardens and the clutter of outbuildings that lay behind the houses. At the barn there was a cistern with a chain pump. He set down his bag and pumped and drank from his cupped left hand held under the spout.

  “Looks like I ought to be hungry,” he thought. “But I ain’t.”

  He was not hungry, and there was no longer anything much that he wanted to think. He was tired. He told himself to lift the bag again and put it on his shoulder. He told his feet to walk, and they carried him on to the church. The door was unlocked. He went in.

  He shut the door behind him, not allowing the latch to click. The quiet inside the church was palpable; he came into it as into a different element, ne
ither air nor water. He crossed the tiny vestibule where a bell rope dangled from a worn hole in the ceiling, went through another door that stood open, and sat down on the first bench to his left, leaving his duffel bag in the aisle, propped against the end of the bench. He let himself become still.

  “I will eat a little,” he thought, “ ’gainst I get hungry in the night.”

  After a while he took a bar of candy from the bag and slowly ate it. The church windows were glazed with an amber-colored glass that you could not see through, and though it was still light outdoors, in the church it was dusk. When he finished the candy, he folded the wrapper soundlessly and put it in his pocket. Taking his overcoat from the bag to use as a blanket, he lay down on the bench. Many thoughts fled by him, none stopping. And then he slept.

  He woke several times in the night, listening, and, hearing no threat out in the darkness anywhere, slept again. The last time he woke, roosters were crowing, and he sat up. He sat still a while in the dark, allowing the waking quiet of the place to come over him, and then he took another bar of candy from his bag and ate it and folded the wrapper and put it in his pocket as before. The night chill had seeped into the church; standing, he put on the overcoat. He picked up his bag and felt his way to the door.

  It had cleared and the sky was full of stars. To the east, upriver, he could see a faint brightening ahead of the coming day. All around him the dark treetops were throbbing with birdsong, and from the banks of the two rivers at their joining, from everywhere there was water, the voices of spring peepers rose as if in clouds. Art stood still and looked around him and listened. It was going to be the fine spring day that he had imagined it might be.