The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Read online

  Tol knew furthermore that when Walter laid one of those opinions of his in front of all the world, the Hardy brothers would laugh at it. The Hardys were stout, good-natured, smiling fellows, enough alike almost to be twins, except that Tom pitched and Braymer caught, and Braymer never owned anything he wouldn’t trade and Tom never owned anything he would. They were half Proudfoot, the sons of Tol’s sister, and Tol took much pleasure and pride in them. But they were young yet, too willing to laugh at somebody’s failings. So far as he could, Tol would go along with Put just as he would go along with Nightlife; he would do what he had to do, or what he could do. If, after it was over, it made a good story, then he would tell it; if it was funny, he would laugh. But now was no time for laughter.

  Nightlife had stopped again. He had come to one of the rare places where the bank slanted down gently almost to the water’s edge. He sat down on the exposed roots of a big water maple that leaned out over the water; the gun lay across his lap and his hands rested on the gun. All the trees were big there, the riverbank was clear of brush, and Tol and the others had fallen a long way back. From his distance behind them, Put could no longer see Nightlife at all. Presently Tol saw Put break cover and start forward. Put was curious; he wanted to be where he could look at Nightlife. But Tol knew that he also had got lonesome and was longing for company and approval. Wanting no more commotion than necessary, Tol eased quietly back to forestall him.

  “How’re you, Put?” Tol said.

  “Aw, Tol, I ain’t no good,” Put said. “I’ve had my misery a right smart lately. You know how this weather does me. How you, Tol?” he asked sympathetically, as if Tol suffered from the same misery.

  “Fine,” Tol said.

  “Well, Uncle Othy was telling me about Nightlife and all. What do you reckon is going to happen? You reckon he’s going to shoot hisself ?”

  They were talking under the white limbs of a large sycamore, well out of sight of Nightlife, but Put was peering ahead, trying to see him; he had hardly looked at Tol. “Where’s he at?”

  “He’s yonder,” Tol said.

  Now, having seen Tol move back, the others were coming, too.

  Walter Cotman came up beside Tol just as Put said, “Well, I just thought you might need some help.”

  And Tol imagined Walter saying to Put—­or to one of the others, for he would say it in front of Put but not to him, “If somebody’s going to get shot, he’d like to be on hand to see it, long as it ain’t much trouble.” Tol could hear it as plainly as if Walter had said it, though so far Walter had said nothing.

  “Honey,” Tol said to Walter, “I expect one of us ought to keep an eye on Nightlife. We don’t want him to go off without us.”

  Walter nodded and went back.

  “Why, sure,” Tol said to Put. “A fellow never knows when he’ll need help.”

  After Nightlife got up from the roots of the maple and started on, it was a long time before he stopped again. He stayed near the river, avoiding the farmsteads, using farm roads or cow paths when he came to them and they were going in his direction; where there was no beaten way, he kept to his course anyhow. Briar patches he went around; other obstacles he climbed or went through apparently without granting them notice of their existence. He went through patches of nettles up to his waist. He went through brakes of horseweed that were over his head. He was not hurrying, but neither did he alter his pace or stop. And Tol followed just as steadily behind him, with the young men spread out on either side of him as before and Put Woolfork coming along behind. The crops having been laid by, the six of them walked in a deserted country even there among the fields, and as they walked, the hot bright afternoon stood tall and still above them. Around them, in the heat, the low fields shimmered and swayed.

  Tol was hungry. He had not forgotten the smell of fried fish wafting out from Aunt Cordie Dagget’s kitchen. He was sorry he had not thought to leave Walter or Sam to wait for Uncle Othy to open the store and bring along maybe some cheese and some crackers, or maybe a few cans of sardines. He did not wish to indulge such thoughts, but they came to him uninvited, for he was a big man and he was used to three big meals a day.

  But he was troubled also because he knew—­he had known ever since that moment at the Daggets’ when he had watched Nightlife walk unchecked and preceded by no warning through Aunt Cordie’s kitchen door—­that the day was beyond their control. The only man who had control was Nightlife, who did not know he had it. Their proven helplessness at the Daggets’ forced Tol to acknowledge that he could not foretell any of the bad outcomes that might lie ahead—­or any outcome at all, for that matter. Maybe, he thought, you could keep a crazy man with a gun from shooting you or somebody else, if you could guess correctly what he was going to do and watch closely enough and keep far enough away. But how in the world you could keep him from shooting himself if he wanted to, unless you had a gun yourself and shot him first, Tol could not imagine.

  And so along with heat and hunger and the beginning of weariness, Tol’s mind began to be afflicted by a sense of the futility, even the foolishness, of what he and the others were doing. For a while his thoughts lurched here and there as if unable to accept that there was not something better to do, or a better way to do what they were doing, some reasonability or sense that could be invited in. But he gave that up, as he gave up with the same motion of his mind the hope of food or rest or comfort.

  It was not going to make sense, not yet, and maybe not for a long time, if ever. And for a while, maybe a longish while, there would not be food or rest or comfort either. When they got to the end of the story, he reckoned, they would at least eat. He said to himself, “I reckon it would be better not to have got involved.” But he knew even so that, helpless or not, hopeless or not, he would go along with Nightlife until whatever happened that would allow him to cease to go along had happened. And he knew that Walter and Sam and the Hardys would keep going as long as he did, just as he knew that Put would not. He thought, “I reckon I am involved.”

  They had had a quick drink where a spring fed into Squire’s Branch just above Uncle Othy’s tobacco patch, and none since. Nightlife had not stopped to drink at all. Now they saw Nightlife veer away from the river toward an isolated barn where they knew there was a cistern. The cistern was in a small lot now in the shade at one of the barn’s eastward corners. Keeping their distance, they watched Nightlife enter the lot, unhook a tin can from the barn wall, and pump himself a drink. He leaned the gun against the barn when he took down the can, and now he sat down on the cistern top with his back to the gun and with the full can of water in his hand.

  “Lordy Lord,” Tol thought, “if only one of these boys was close enough to snatch that old gun and run with it!”

  But they were not close enough. They were standing in the sun at the edge of a cornfield, scattered out as before. Except for Put who had kept his distance from them as they from Nightlife, they were well within sight of one another, watching Nightlife who was sitting and resting in the shade with that can of cool water in his hand. With the cistern in sight, they suffered from their thirst. Nightlife took his time. The shade held him, and he sat there, sipping water from the can, while the barn swallows dipped and circled around him and overhead. And still he kept the same straight-ahead fixation on whatever was on his mind; he did not turn his head this way or that; he did not appear to be looking at anything.

  After a while—­an almost insufferable while for those who watched, thirsty, at the weedy edge of the cornfield, furnishing dinner to the sweatbees and the deerflies—­he got up, hung the can back on its nail, picked up the gun, and went on in the same direction as before.

  When Nightlife went out of sight into a wooded hollow, well beyond gun range of the barn, Tol’s little company headed for the cistern—­the Hardy brothers first, running, Sam Hanks not far behind them, and then Walter Cotman, who disdained to concede by any haste that he was as thirsty as the others, and then Tol. When Tol got almost to the little cis
tern lot, Put Woolfork emerged from the cornfield.

  Now that they were close enough to one another, the Hardy brothers were almost as eager to talk as to drink.

  “Whew!” Tom was saying as Tol came up. “When I seen him go in at Uncle Othy’s, I didn’t know what.”

  He had pumped for Sam, and now he pumped again while Braymer held the can under the spout.

  “I sure didn’t want to hear that old gun go off,” Braymer said. He grinned, shook his head, and wiped his mouth. “Uncle Tol,” he said, “I don’t reckon you was worried.”

  Tol laid his hat on the cistern top and wiped his face on his sleeve. “No,” he said, “I wasn’t worried. A man has a fit one night in church, and the next day picks up a loaded gun and goes off into the woods by hisself, and then walks in on an old couple at dinnertime without a knock or a ‘come in,’ that ain’t no kind of a worry.”

  “What I want to know,” Braymer said, having drunk and handed the can to his brother, “is how long can he keep up this traveling. Don’t you reckon he’ll get hungry before long? He ain’t had no dinner.”

  “We ain’t either,” Sam said, “that I noticed.”

  “I reckon a man going to shoot hisself don’t need to worry much about dinner,” Tom said.

  “How do you know he’s going to shoot hisself?”

  “Well, he said he was, didn’t he?”

  “He said he might as well. Maybe he ain’t going to.”

  “Maybe he ain’t.”

  Walter filled the can and offered it to Tol.

  “Drink,” Tol said.

  Walter drank, refilled the can, and handed it to Tol.

  “Well,” Walter said, gazing off where Nightlife had disappeared, “if the damned fool is going to shoot hisself, why don’t he go on and do it, and let the rest of us get back to work?”

  That was Walter exactly, Tol thought. He would not leave a thought unsaid. And he could not ignore a difference.

  But Walter did not leave, as Tol—­and Walter himself—­knew he would not. He said no more. He simply snorted, seeing that Put had now come up and seated himself on the cistern top.

  Having emptied the can once fast and once more slowly, Tol handed it to Tom Hardy who was still at the pump, and stepped off toward the woods’ edge, begrudging himself the three or four minutes he had stopped to drink.

  Tol had not gone many steps from the barn before Sam Hanks put his hat back on and started after him. If there was danger in Nightlife, then Tol walked at risk now as he approached the woods; though Tol could not see Nightlife, Nightlife, if he wished, could see Tol. Once again it was possible for Sam to imagine the single abrupt syllable that was Old Fetcher’s entire vocabulary. Sometimes during that day it had been possible to forget the old gun’s plain and sudden eloquence; sometimes it had not been. Sam remembered it now with an exact presentiment of the difference it could make. He was glad to see that Tol circled out well wide of the place where Nightlife had entered the woods.

  In his battered and frazzled old straw hat that no longer by its shape distinguished front from back, and his increasingly disheveled clothes now soaked with sweat, Tol reminded Sam of a tree. He was like a tree walking. Over the difficult terrain of that day he had taken the footing as it came, uphill or down, sidling or flat, brushy or open, as concentrated in his way as Nightlife in his.

  The others also were coming now, hurrying to catch up, Walter Cotman and the Hardys positioning themselves in relation to Tol as before, Put Woolfork falling back into his accustomed place at the rear.

  Their little delay at the cistern had cost them; now, for the first time since the beginning, they did not have Nightlife in sight and did not know in which direction he had gone. Once they were in the woods, they circled about in order to cross his track.

  In a little while Walter Cotman said quietly, “Here he went.”

  And now they arranged themselves according to the known reference of Nightlife’s track, which curved around a slue and then on out of the woods into another grass field where, at last, they had him in sight again.

  From the barn where they drank, Nightlife had not gone back to the river, but slanted across the bottom generally in the direction of the mouth of Willow Run. He went on as before, straying around impassable obstacles, avoiding places where there might be people. For Tol and the others, following him had ceased to seem unusual. In the heat and the difficulty of their constant effort to keep just within sight of their strange neighbor, who had become at once their fear, their quarry, and their leader, they had ceased even to wonder what end they were moving toward. This wild pursuit that at first had seemed an interruption of their work had become their work. Now they could hardly imagine what they would be doing if they were home.

  At the edge of a tobacco patch, they came upon two rows of tomatoes. Going by, they each picked two or three ripe ones. Tom Hardy picked a half-rotten one and aimed a perfect throw at the back of his brother’s head. If the tomato had been anything harder, it would have knocked Braymer down. Braymer returned the fire with two tomatoes, one of which, aimed at Tom’s head, caused him to duck, the second knocking off his hat. This exchange occurred in perfect good humor and in absolute silence.

  Tol, who had a large tomato in each hand, whispered, “Boys! Boys! Boys!” and kept walking.

  Tom made as if to throw a tomato at Tol’s back, grinned at his brother, and followed Tol, eating the tomato.

  Nightlife reached the river again just a little downstream from the mouth of Willow Run. He kicked aside a few little pieces of driftwood and made himself a place to sit down and then he sat down, leaning his back against a large sycamore. There were several big trees there, water maples and sycamores and cottonwoods, making the shade deep.

  A good breeze, the first they had felt all day, was coming up the river. They would have been comfortable, waiting there, except that they were thirsty again, and even if they had wanted to drink out of the river in dog days, they could not have gone down the bank now without putting themselves too much into view.

  And so they just stopped when Nightlife stopped, and stood still, only taking their hats off to let the breeze cool their heads. After they had been there, unmoving, a little while, the stillness of the place sealed itself over them. Even the little wind ripples on the water seemed to grow attentive and still.

  And that was when they heard Put Woolfork squall.

  It was really not much of a squall, just the single abrupt syllable, “Wa!”—­a statement that Put would not be allowed to forget for the rest of his life. It might have been merely the startled, despairing outcry of some unfortunate animal.

  But Tol knew what it was, and he thought, “Boys!”

  If Nightlife had heard, he gave no sign. He did not move. Tol looked then to see which of his young companions was missing, and found that no one was. They were all looking at him.

  He started back toward the place the squall had come from. Seeing that all four of the others had started back with him, he stopped; he motioned to Sam to stay and keep an eye on Nightlife, and then went on, Walter and the Hardys moving quietly along with him.

  Presently they saw, standing at the foot of a tall cottonwood, Burley Coulter with three days’ whiskers, holding an unlit lantern, grinning at Put Woolfork, who was fussing at him in a whisper.

  “It ain’t a damn bit funny,” Put was saying. “You just done it because it was me. I’d like to see you try it on Walter Cotman.”

  Burley simply continued to grin. And then when he saw Tol and Walter and the Hardys coming up, he shifted his grin to them.

  For a few seconds nobody said anything, and then Tol said, “I knowed it was a boy. I just didn’t know which boy it was.”

  Burley was twenty-one that year, old enough to take the word boy either as a judgment or as a pleasantry. Tol offered it as both, and Burley received it with his grin unaltered.

  “Howdy, Burley,” Walter Cotman said. “Has Put treed a squirrel?”

  Burley
told what there was to tell. He had been in a patch of elderberries at the edge of the riverbank trees, just ready to step into the shade to cool off and maybe take a swim in the river, when he saw Nightlife coming along with the gun; Burley recognized it as Tol’s Old Fetcher. From Nightlife’s possession of the gun and from the look of him, Burley knew that something was out of fix. He kept still. Presently he saw Tol and Sam and Walter and the Hardy brothers, who obviously were following Nightlife. And then, coming way behind, he saw Put. When Tol and the others stopped, Put, who could not see Nightlife, stepped behind the big cottonwood and began to peep around it. He was so given over to his curiosity that Burley could not resist the temptation to creep up behind him and poke him in the back with a stick. Thereupon, expecting to die, Put had uttered the aforementioned famous exclamation.

  The circumstances did not permit laughter, but even Tol smiled.

  And Put said, “Slip up on a fellow that way! It’s about what you’d expect.”

  “If you expected it, what did you holler for?” Burley said.

  Burley was a wild young man. As the others knew, Put was an eager carrier of tales about Burley; they knew that Burley knew it, and knew that Put knew that Burley knew it.

  “Well, what are you doing here?” Walter asked Burley.