A Place on Earth (Port William) Read online

  WENDELL BERRY

  The Collected Stories

  Jayber Crow

  The Memory of Old Jack

  A Place on Earth

  Three Novellas

  Also by Wendell Berry

  FICTION

  The Discovery of Kentucky

  Fidelity

  Nathan Coulter

  A Place on Earth

  Remembering

  Two More Stories of the Port William Membership

  Watch with Me

  The Wild Birds

  A World Lost

  POETRY

  The Broken Ground

  Clearing

  Collected Poems: 1957-1982

  The Country of Marriage

  Entries

  Farming: A Hand Book

  Findings

  Openings

  A Part

  Sabbaths

  Sayings and Doings

  The Selected Poems

  A Timbered Choir

  Traveling at Home (with prose)

  The Wheel

  ESSAYS

  Another Turn of the Crank

  A Continuous Harmony

  The Gift of Good Land

  Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work

  The Hidden Wound

  Home Economics

  Recollected Essays: 1965-1980

  Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community

  Standing by Words

  The Unforseen Wilderness

  The Unsettling of America

  What Are People For?

  WENDELL BERRY

  A Place on Earth

  [revision]

  For Mary and Chuck For Katie, Virginia, and Tanya For Den and Billie For Emily and Marshall

  Contents

  PART ONE

  1

  The Empty Store 5

  Missing 8

  The Card Game 12

  A Dream of Absence 14

  A Departure i6

  Rain, Rain 17

  I Can Do It by Myself 19

  A Voice from the Distance 22

  A Little Shift in the Wind 23

  2

  Port William 26

  Company 27

  Like a Bird 32

  The Carpenter Shop 33

  An Old Wound 34

  A Pretty Good Boy 36

  Feeding 37

  3

  The Last 40

  The Hotel 48

  The Grass May Grow a Mile 56

  Images Like Seeds 59

  Waiting 61

  4

  The Barber's Calling 63

  Talk 67

  A New Calling 73

  Light and Warmth 79

  5

  Keeping Watch 87

  The Sheep Barn 88

  PART TWO

  6

  A Dark Morning 93

  A Difference Made 94

  A Comforter 95

  The Sanctuary ioi

  A Knack for the Here 1o3

  7

  Born a Idiot, Educated a Fool log

  The Farm in the Valley 112

  Flood 115

  Where Are You? 120

  Coming to Rest 125

  A Vigil 126

  The Keeping of the Place 128

  Changed 131

  8

  Something Ain't Right 133

  Never What It Was 144

  Some Cleaning Up 147

  A Pleasing Shadow 151

  For Someone Who Will Come Later 153

  A Spring Night 155

  Green Coming Strong 157

  PART THREE

  9

  Look a Yonder 163

  The Bridge 165

  A Guest at a Strange Table 170

  10

  The Wanting of What May Be Lost 176

  Something in the World to Do 186

  A Pleasant Place to Sit 193

  11

  Green Pasture 196

  Caught 198

  Daylight 200

  A Birth 217

  PART FOUR

  12

  Going Down 229

  Dangerous Ground 23o

  He's Dead 235

  13

  Hard at It 237

  A Widow Alone 239

  Haunted 243

  14

  A Famous Escapade 244

  The Presence of Grief 248

  A Ramble 25o

  A Result 258

  The Sense of Time Passing 259

  What Is Left 260

  15

  That's Fine 263

  Another Result 271

  16

  Six Feet 274

  It's Over! 277

  Redounding and Sublime 281

  A Passing Dirge 301

  Among the Dead 304

  PART FIVE

  Straightening Up 311

  A Homecoming 315

  Into the Woods 317

  Author's Note

  This book has had an editorial history sufficiently humbling to its author. I began it in January, 1960, and it was published by Harcourt, Brace and World in 1967. Dan Wickenden, then editor at Harcourt, helped me with patient intelligence to shorten and improve my unwieldy manuscript. But as I recognized after publication, the book was not satisfactory. Later, Jack Shoemaker of North Point Press offered me the opportunity of a new edition, to be published in 1983, for which I made many cuts, some large, and a lot of editorial changes. For this Counterpoint edition of 2001, thanks once more to Jack Shoemaker, I have made a good many further changes, both to improve the writing and to correct geographical and historical discrepancies between this and my other books about Port William.

  A Place on Earth

  Part One

  1

  The Empty Store

  The seed bins are empty. The counters and rows of shelves along the walls, stripped of merchandise, contain only slanting shadows and the slanting rainy light from the front windows. The interior of the store has been reduced to a severe geometrical order over which the light breaks without force, colored but not brightened by the white of the walls, the pale green of the counters and shelves. Its swept surfaces outline precisely the dimension of its silence and emptiness, but the strict order and cleanness of the room make it a silence that seems actively expectant of sound, a carefully tended emptiness anticipating an arrival. In the back, near the entrance to a small screened-off area once used as an office, a black iron safe stands against the wall. When Frank Lathrop cleaned out the store after his son jasper went into the Army at the beginning of the war, he left the door of the safe ajar for fear that if he closed it he would never be able to work the combination to open it again. He did not foresee that he would ever want to open it again, but at the time the precaution seemed necessary, consistent with the careful neatness in which he had left the place.

  The four men who sit at the card game in the makeshift office feel the vacancy of the larger room as a condition of the smaller, which, like the seepage of wind through the back wall, subtly qualifies their presence there. All afternoon the sound of rain on the tin roof has pecked and swiveled through the hollow building, constantly changing in force and inflection, but never ceasing, until it seems to them the very presence and noise of emptiness. They have got used to the sound; consciousness, attentive to the details of the game, has overridden it, but at the back of their minds it persists. And the rain itself has persisted for days into the beginning of March, making the dawns sluggish, the evenings early and sudden, so that they have come to think of time as a succession of nights rather than days.

  A large desk, its cover pulled down and locked, stands at the end of the room farthest from the door. On its top are several neatly marked boxes of accounts and receipts, and a radio play
ing so quietly that the music is no more than a series of stuttering accents like the far-off rattling of a snare drum. Between the desk and the heating stove at the opposite end of the room jasper Lathrop's meat block has been placed to serve as a card table. The two windows in the back wall look out on a narrow lot covered with dead weed stalks, chicory and poke and burdock, and the lighter brown napping of foxtail and wild oat. In the center of the lot there is a disjointed heap of weather-blackened crates that Frank Lathrop once intended to burn; but on the day, a week or so after jasper's departure, when he set the store in order and shut the building, he felt his duty to his son was more finished than he wanted to believe. The act of burning seemed too final, too suggestive of a conclusion he was unable to face. In the three years that have gone by since then, the crates have stayed there, and now in the steady rain they have the look of permanence, the stack of them monolithic and at ease, an indelible feature of the casual back view of the town. At the rear of the lot, built sidelong to the fence, is the small carpenter shop of Ernest Finley. Black coal smoke comes from its chimney, twisted off the bricks by the wind and driven to the ground, turning delicately amber as it thins. The carpenter's pickup truck is parked in front of the door, and through the afternoon the men at the card game have heard the measured sounds of his hammering and sawing. Beyond the shop a broad pasture swags down to a creek branch and tilts up again, gently, to the top of a long ridge. A flock of sheep, heads down against the rain, straggles toward the barn at the top of the ridge for the night feeding. Beyond the ridge is the opening of the river valley.

  The light is still strong in the room. The card faces turned up on the hacked surface of the meat block are still white and exact. Outside the windows the gutter drips, also exact, as steady and half-heard as a clock ticking. The sounds of voices and automobile engines out on the street reach back to the room only occasionally and faintly. The smoke from Mat Feltner's cigar, which he has balanced fire-end out on the edge of the block, rises in a straight thin shaft a yard high, then scrolls out beneath the ceiling, clouding bluely down again into the light at the tops of the windows. Mat taps the fingers of his left hand against the seat of his chair, repeating the same rhythm half a dozen times, and then stops; the nervous rapidity of the sound seems to him to have communicated his uneasiness, and he glances at Frank Lathrop and then at Jayber Crow and Old Jack Beechum to see if they might have noticed. But they are occupied with their cards. He hooks his thumb into his belt.

  He sits with his feet drawn back to the sides of his chair, his hat pushed back off his forehead. He is a fairly big man, and although his hair is white his body is still solidly composed, without excess or diminishment. The whiteness of his hair emphasizes the prominence of his features, the green of his clear eyes. Except for a slackening in the flesh of his cheeks his face has retained its angularity and firmness. It is a flexible, expressive face, deeply lined around the mouth and eyes, so that now in its apparent calm it seems near to both humor and sorrow. So far only his hand has betrayed him.

  It is his turn to play. He draws from the deck and looks down to study his cards, his metal-rimmed reading glasses set a little low on his nose; he discards and leans back, taking up the cigar again.

  Nobody else moves.

  "Jayber, it's your play, ain't it?" Frank Lathrop says finally.

  "Let a man think."

  "Hell," Old Jack Beechum says, "a mule could've thought by now."

  Jayber plays. They play out the hand, and Frank Lathrop gathers the cards and shuffles and deals. Mat arranges his cards and tilts his chair back against the desk. He and Frank and Jayber wait quietly, watching Old Jack.

  The old man holds the cards clumsily in his huge hands, fumbling them from one semblance of order to another with the forceful deliber ate movements of a man laying bricks-a man building a spindling unwieldy tower of bricks that constantly requires the addition of one more brick to balance it upright. The earflaps of his corduroy cap have come untied; they flail out at warped angles from the sides of his head, dangling their strings, like the wings of some disgruntled bird. He reaches out, turning his cards face down against the block, and looks aggressively at the others as though to answer an insult.

  "Your turn, old mule," Jayber Crow says. He grins as he speaks, but speaks with a patience that amounts almost to gentleness.

  Old Jack draws a card from the deck, stares at it, deciphers the message, and swats the meat block with it. He rolls his chew of tobacco over his tongue into the opposite jaw and clamps it there and turns away, aloof and silent; the movement abruptly repudiates his involvement in the game, dismisses his opponents and the game itself as finally as if he had gone out of the room.

  They know that when his turn comes again they will have to call him back.

  Missing

  Mat looks out the window at the crates tumbled together in the lot; the leafless weedtops poke through them, jerking and wavering in the wind. The pile of them, like the vacancy of the store, is a fact of the war; it remains for the same reason that he and Frank together have allowed the store to remain empty; they've foreclosed no possibilities. But now the boxes cluttered together in the rain seem to Mat to insist upon his own disquiet. His anxiety has become, after the first violence of its onset, more a physical state than anything else, a remote vibrance of numbness clenching and unclenching in his body as acutely as pain. The feeling is intensified by a vague awareness that, if he examined it, it would declare itself to be an extreme and desperate fear; but he has resisted any acknowledgment. He feels simply that he is bracing himself to confront an actuality not yet apparent-which, in loyalty to his son and his son's life, he cannot allow himself to anticipate.

  When he went to the post office shortly before noon to get the mail, there was no letter from Virgil. There had been none from Virgil for more than three weeks; but they had hoped, he and Margaret and Hannah, that there might be one on Monday. But he carried the mail home folded in the newspaper without looking at it, hastening then, in the presence of the fact, to qualify his hope, admit beforehand that he would be disappointed, to say that although he had hoped, he had expected nothing.

  When he stood on the back porch a few minutes later, looking at the envelopes of what mail had come, he realized that he had failed to prepare himself, his precaution had spared him none of the force of his disappointment. It was not until he thumbed through the mail a second time that he noticed the government envelope addressed to Hannah, and felt change pass over his head like a chill. He picked the letter out from among the others, as though to dispose of it. And then he laid it down again, straight, with the others inside the newspaper, and he began an almost soundless whistling under his breath.

  It is in his mind forever, that moment. For what seems a long time he stands as though deep in thought, though he is not thinking, the thin dry thread of his whistling crossing the edges of his teeth. His fingers tap nervously on the underside of the troughed newspaper. And then he thinks of Hannah and Margaret, and steps back into the angle between the wall of the house and the enclosure of the back stairway so he cannot be seen from the window. He leans against the stair door, looking out across the yard.

  Rainwater has collected shallowly beneath the maple trees, making a large irregular pool stretching from the walk along the edge of the porch to the lilac bush beside the gate to the chicken yard. The rain is falling slowly in large drops so that the circles it makes striking the surface of the pool remain intact. For a moment at the center of each circle the black branches of the trees are mirrored perfectly, and then distorted and fragmented as the circles interlink and subside and renew. Across the fence in the chicken yard seven or eight hens stand together under the eave of the tool shed.

  The chicken yard is bounded on one side by the wall of a large feed barn. The barn is painted white, and on its red roof there is a white redroofed cupola with a spire and wind vane. Opposite the barn, beginning within the L-shape of the chicken yard and extending beyond it, is a
large garden plot. To Mat's right, looking off the porch toward the side of the lawn, a fence overgrown with honeysuckle hides the town from him; he can see only the roofs of the store buildings, the bare treetops among them, the roof and tall octagonal steeple of the church.

  For a moment these things occupy his attention without his naming or thinking about them, as though his mind has become simply the cool grey-lighted space containing them, into which the rain falls.

  But now he hears the pounding of his brother-in-law's crutches coming up the walk beside the house. The familiarity of the sound is suddenly welcome to Mat. It fixes him steadily again in the day and place. Ernest is home for dinner. They will go into the house now.

  Coming around the corner of the house, Ernest looks up, smiling at Mat. "Dinner ready?"

  "I don't know. I just got here myself."

  Ernest swings up onto the porch with a movement both cumbersome and strangely agile. He is ten years younger than Mat, his dark face finely modeled, strong-boned, the lips set firmly and evenly together in denial or concealment of the difficulty of his lameness. His faded work jacket fits him tightly across the shoulders. A flat yellow carpenter's pencil sticks out beneath the band of his cap.

  He stands beside Mat, leaning on the crutches while he reaches inside his jacket for a cigarette. "Did you hear from Virgil?"

  Mat shows him the envelope. The two men look at each other a moment. Ernest shakes his head and starts to the door.

  Having put it off as long as he can, Mat turns to follow him.

  Margaret and Hannah are sitting at the table, Margaret beating eggs in a bowl she holds in her lap, Hannah sewing, holding the piece of white material a little awkwardly above the bigness of her pregnancy. They look up as the two men come into the kitchen. The room is warm, the air heavy with the smells of cooking. Nettie Banion stands at the stove, a lifting rag in her left hand, which she rests against her hip.

  "Here they are," Margaret says. "Put the biscuits in, Net."

  Ernest goes out into the hall. Mat goes to the table and holds the letter out to Hannah. There comes over him a great need to do this gently. But he can only do it bluntly, with a kind of shame as though there might be a polite way to do it but he does not know what it is.