The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 15

  After Lester’s noisy entrance among them, their conversation had been quiet. Now they laughed as quietly as they had spoken. And then, except for the hound still clamoring at the tree, the quiet restored itself.

  For some time, where they were, it was silent altogether.

  And then Tom Hardy said, “A man would think of killing hisself, he ain’t at hisself, surely.”

  “He’s at hisself, all right,” Tol said. “He ain’t nowhere but at hisself. Look at old Nightlife just rambling on, not looking right nor left, going like he knows where, and he don’t know.”

  “The way he is now,” Walter said, “he just as well stayed home or stayed asleep. Or never been born. He don’t know where he is.”

  “Don’t matter where he is,” Tol said. “He’s just wandering around inside hisself, looking for the way out. In there where he is, it’s dark sure enough.”

  “Well, here we are. Or there we were. Right there with him.”

  “And what did we do? Or what could we? For he ain’t just wandering around inside hisself; he’s wandering around out of reach—­by about the range of that old gun.”

  “You got to live whether you want to or not,” Tom Hardy said.

  Tol said, “Boy, I think you’ve got to want to.” He said nothing for a long time then, and then he said, “You’ve got to like to live in this world. You can’t just mortal it out from one day to the next for three score years and ten.”

  They were quiet again for a while, and then Lester stood up and relit his lantern. He said, “I reckon being as that keen-eyed fellow’s up there with Tol’s gun, I won’t bother about your dog now, Burley. I’ll slip up there after daylight and bring him down to the house. You get him when you can.”

  “I’d be much obliged,” Burley said.

  Lester stepped out of the firelight then. For a few seconds they heard his footsteps descending the slope, and then it was quiet. They could hear the hound, and that was all.

  When Lester had gone, they began to feel their weariness. One by one they lay down beside the fire and slept.

  “Couldn’t you stay awake? Couldn’t you stay awake?”

  Gray daylight had come. The fire had burned down to white ash. Now, though the hound was exactly where he had been before, his voice sounded farther away and smaller. But what had wakened them was Nightlife standing over them, one foot in the ashes. He was holding the gun, but not threatening them with it. It dangled from his hand as unregarded as if it had been the bail of an empty bucket.

  “Couldn’t you stay awake?”

  The lenses of his glasses apparently as opaque as bark, he was looking right at them and not seeing them. They were frightened, astonished, tickled at their own and one another’s fright and astonishment, and most of all ashamed.

  “Sit down, Nightlife,” Tol said. “Sit down, old bud. We’ll go home pretty soon and get some breakfast.”

  “You think there ain’t no breakfast here?” Nightlife said. “Where the hell you think breakfast is at? I’ve got breakfast right here.”

  His voice had grown louder, and now he raised the gun and gestured with it in a way that caused them to make various motions backward. “Couldn’t you stay awake?” he said.

  “Well, we thought if you shot yourself it would wake us up,” said Walter Cotman.

  Nightlife went on then. He stepped out of the circle of men around the dead fire, and started back up into the woods. They lay there with their heads raised and watched him go.

  “Shoo!” Tom Hardy said quietly. It seemed to them all that they now began to breathe again.

  Tol grunted, getting himself to his feet. “If he hadn’t found us,” he said, “I don’t reckon we ever would have found him.”

  The others got up slowly and followed—“three meals in arrears by then,” Sam Hanks would say years later, “and we were feeling it, I can tell you.”

  In a little while it seemed to them that they had never stopped. They went on as before. Even their hunger and thirst were familiar. They came to another spring and drank, and then they were only hungry.

  They were going upstream through the woods on the westward side of Willow Run valley, which was the eastward side of Cotman Ridge, the westward side of which they had gone down the morning before. They were approaching Tol Proudfoot’s place from the direction opposite to that of their departure.

  When Nightlife stopped again, Tol dropped back a little and beckoned Sam to him.

  “Looks like we’ll be pretty close to home again before long,” he said.

  “Maybe he’ll circle right back to there,” Sam said. “You reckon?”

  “Maybe so. If he don’t, maybe we can at least get a bite to eat as we go by. If you don’t mind, would you just cut straight across to my house and ask Miss Minnie would she kindly see if she can’t scrape us up a little something to eat?”

  “Why, sure,” Sam said. “Looks like that Nightlife would get hungry sooner or later hisself. Don’t you reckon a good meal mightn’t get him unfittified?”

  “It might,” Tol said. “There’s a world of sanity in a little meat and gravy. It sho would help me.”

  The women, of course, had anticipated this hunger. When Sam stepped into Miss Minnie’s kitchen, Thelma Cotman and the two Josie Hardys, Josie Braymer and Josie Tom, were frying chicken and baking biscuits and making gravy and slicing tomatoes and boiling beans and potatoes. Even old Mrs. Hample, Nightlife’s mother, was there. Miss Minnie had sent for her, and she had walked up not long after daylight, worried and needing company. She was making a kind of dutiful effort to help the other women, but was so distracted and full of hesitations that she was only getting in their way, wringing her hands beneath her apron and trying to disguise her repeated glances out the windows and the door. “I just don’t know what’s got into that boy’s head,” she kept saying. “I just wisht I knowed.”

  The smell in the kitchen was almost too much for Sam Hanks. “I thought I was going to faint,” he said. “I had to sit down and hold on to the table.”

  But he delivered his message: One way or another, sooner or later, they would be there to eat. They would need a lot. They were hungry.

  “I should think so,” Miss Minnie said. “Poor Thacker Hample!”

  “Poor Thacker Hample!” Sam said. “Good God!”

  To appease him and to comfort him on his walk back into the woods, she gave him two chicken legs and three biscuits, which in pure kindness Sam ate in a hurry, so as not to torment Tol and the others by the sight.

  It was not a true circle that Nightlife had traveled in. He had been governed too much both by the lay of the land and by his craziness for his course to have assumed any sort of regular shape. Nevertheless, it was clear by midmorning that he was headed back toward their starting place. He came up out of the woods and began picking his way across the pastures and hayfields and around the tobacco and corn patches of the ridgetop, and he was tending generally in the direction of Tol Proudfoot’s place.

  For some time they had been hearing thunder in the distance, and every leaf in the woods had held still. When they came out of the woods onto the high and open ground, they could see under the general overcast a dark cloud sharply outlined above the horizon in the southwest. And the thunder was louder. They could hear it rumbling and stuttering. It had about it the quality of preoccupation, as if the Power inhabiting the cloud was too intent upon his preparations to concern himself yet with what he was going to do.

  Keeping Nightlife in sight was no longer a problem now that they were on the open ridge. He went his way as before, looking neither left nor right, as if he were the only human being left on earth. Tol and the others maintained their distance from him, safely out of gun range, close enough to see him. When they got to the top of the ridge and could look down and see Tol’s house and outbuildings, Tol beckoned to Sam and Burley and Walter.

  “Boys, work your way around on the right, now. Stay between him and the house. Don’t let him go to the house. Sam,
you go tell the women to lock the doors.”

  So now Tol and the Hardys followed Nightlife as before, but Walter and Burley and Sam walked almost even with him, well out to his right. And now the sky lowered and darkened until it seemed to enclose them all.

  The road across from Tol’s place was bordered by a rock fence. Because they were approaching at an angle to the road, the three who were walking to Nightlife’s right got to the fence before he did, and crossed it and stepped down the bank into the road. Nightlife then approached the fence and started to cross.

  And that was the last that Tol and the Hardys saw of him before the storm hit. It fell upon them all of a sudden—lightning and thunder and wind and hard rain all at once. Tom and Braymer started running and also disappeared from sight. The rain fell hard, so nearly a solid spout that, Burley said, “a fish could have swum up it.” When the big drops struck and splashed, the wind seized the spray and sped it along in sheets.

  Tol went down the slope to the rock fence, clambered over it, fell, and slid down the bank into the road. He glimpsed the opening of the driveway, and went in under the greater darkness of the yard trees. By then he, too, was running.

  The shop was the first outbuilding reachable from the road. And now Tol could see that the door of the shop was open, and he knew the others had gone inside. He was not fast on his feet, but he passed one other man who, he realized only after he had gone by, was walking, and carrying a gun.

  “No, boys!” he called into the shop as he ran. “Wait! Come out!”

  He stumbled into the dark interior of the shop only a step or two ahead of Nightlife, who stopped just inside the door.

  When Nightlife stepped through the door behind Tol, and took his stand, cradling the gun in his hands as if expecting a covey of quail to flush at any second, that put an end to the little breathless laughter that had started among the others because of their wild run through the storm and their escape into shelter at last.

  They hushed and stood still in their sopping clothes. Sam Hanks then quietly sat down on a nail keg in front of the forge. Now that they looked at Nightlife face-to-face, after all he had caused them to do and to think, they were struck by how ordinary he looked. He looked like his same old self—except that, looking straight at them, he appeared not to see them, or to be looking through them at whatever was behind them.

  “Brethren,” he said, “let us stand and sing.” And he began, alone at first, to sing “The Unclouded Day.”

  Staggeringly, the others began to join in. And here it was discovered that Sam Hanks, who was the only one sitting down, had not stood up. He had instead managed to find a dry match and had lit his pipe.

  “Sam,” Tom Hardy said to him in a whisper, “ain’t you going to sing?”

  “Naw sir!” Sam said out loud. “I ain’t a-going to sing just because the likes of him tells me to.”

  “Well, he’s liable to shoot you.”

  “Well, he’ll just have to do it, then, because I ain’t going to sing.” And Sam expelled several small complacent puffs of smoke, looking out past Nightlife into the rain.

  But the others sang, and sang pretty well, too, Burley’s and Tol’s strong voices carrying the others:

  O the land of cloudless day,

  O the land of an unclouded day;

  O they tell me of a home where no storm clouds rise,

  O they tell me of an unclouded day.

  They lifted the fine old song up against the rattle of hard rain on the roof and up over the roof and out into the gray, rainy light—­as if in them the neighborhood sang, even under threat, its love for itself and its grief for itself, greater than the terms of this world allow. By the time they got to the second verse, the onsetting force of the storm having abated, Miss Minnie and Thelma and the two Josies and old Mrs. Hample could hear them all the way to the kitchen, and I can hear them now:

  O they tell me of a home where my friends have gone,

  O they tell me of a land far away,

  Where the tree of life in eternal bloom

  Sheds its fragrance thro’ the unclouded day.

  When they finished the hymn, Nightlife began his sermon—­the one, as they supposed, that he had prepared for the revival service of the night before last. His text was Matthew 18:12, which he knew by heart:

  How think ye? if a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which is gone astray?

  Though Christ, in speaking this parable, asked his hearers to think of the shepherd, Nightlife understood it entirely from the viewpoint of the lost sheep, who could imagine fully the condition of being lost and even the hope of rescue, but could not imagine rescue itself.

  “Oh, it’s a dark place, my brethren,” Nightlife said. “It’s a dark place where the lost sheep tries to find his way, and can’t. The slopes is steep and the footing hard. The ground is rough and stumbly and dark, and overgrowed with bushes and briars, a hilly and a hollery place. And the shepherd comes a-looking and a-calling to his lost sheep, and the sheep knows the shepherd’s voice and he wants to go to it, but he can’t find the path, and he can’t make it.”

  The others knew that Nightlife knew what he was talking about. They knew he was telling what it was to be him. And they were moved.

  Long afterward, Elton Penn asked Walter Cotman, “Did what he said make sense? I mean, did you feel for him?”

  “Me?” Walter said. “Course I felt for him! The son of a bitch could preach!”

  They were moved. Even Sam Hanks was moved. But they also began to be amused—­begging sympathy’s pardon—­because Miss Minnie’s old setting hen had returned from wherever she had been to breakfast, only to find Nightlife standing and preaching right in front of her nest. The hen began to walk back and forth at Nightlife’s feet, crying out with rapidly increasing hysteria, “My children! My children! What will become of my children?” Now and again, she squatted and opened her wings as if to fly up to her nest, and then changed her mind.

  At last she crouched almost directly in front of Nightlife, and with a leap, a desperate, panic-stricken, determined outcry, and a great flapping of wings, she launched herself upward.

  But she had miscalculated Nightlife’s height; he continued to rise up in front of her long past the point at which she had expected him to stop. She got up a little above breast height, and then either lost her nerve or decided to stop and reconsider. She hung there, flapping and squawking, right in Nightlife’s face, and Nightlife struck her an open-handed blow that Walter Cotman said would have given second thoughts to a mule.

  After Nightlife hit the hen, Walter told Elton, she hung suspended in the air for many seconds, whirling like a pinwheel and shedding feathers around her in spirals.

  That was all it took. By the time the hen hit the ground, still squawking, a change had come over Nightlife. He looked around like a man just awakened, and it was plain to the others that he saw that they were there with him and that he knew them. It looked to them as though the very lenses of his glasses were clarified by intelligence. He leaned the shotgun against the bench, and stood free of it.

  Tol then stepped up beside Nightlife and picked up the gun. He said, “Nightlife, honey, I want you to see my gun. My daddy had it before me. It’s an old one.”

  He opened the breech, removed the shell, and put the shell into his pocket. He snapped the breech shut again and handed the gun to Nightlife, who took it and looked it over.

  “It looks like a right good old gun, Tol,” Nightlife said, and he handed it back.

  They heard the dinner bell then, for Miss Minnie, feeling that she should do something, and not knowing what else to do, had sent Josie Tom out to ring it.

  “Boys,” Tol said, “I believe Old Marster and the good women have kept us in mind. Let’s go eat!”

  “Oh, that was a meal that was a joy to set on the table!” Miss Minnie said.

  She and her nephew, Sam Hank
s, had been telling Granny and me the story of Nightlife’s spell and his long ramble through the woods. It had taken most of the afternoon. Miss Minnie’s account of all they had to eat and of all they ate had been a small epic in itself.

  It was a story I never forgot, and as time went on I would pick up bits of it from Braymer Hardy, from Walter Cotman by way of Elton Penn, and from others. But Miss Minnie, I think, understood it better than anybody. She had taught at least four of those young men at the Goforth school: Nightlife, Burley Coulter, and the two Hardys. And she and Tol had been neighbors to them all. She knew pretty exactly by what precarious interplay of effort and grace the neighborhood had lived.

  “Poor old Thacker Hample,” she said. “They kept him alive that time, anyhow. They and the Good Lord.”

  “And that old hen,” Sam Hanks said.

  “Yes, that old hen,” Miss Minnie said.

  She mused a while, rocking in her chair. Finally she said, “And don’t you know that old hen survived it all. She hatched fourteen chicks and raised them, every one!”

  A Half-Pint of Old Darling (1920)

  PTOLEMY PROUDFOOT and Miss Minnie did not often take a lively interest in politics. They were Democrats, like virtually everybody else in the vicinity of Cotman Ridge and Goforth. They had been born Democrats, had never been anything but Democrats, and had never thought of being anything but Democrats. To them, being Democrats was much the same sort of thing as being vertebrates; it was not a matter of lively interest. Their daily lives were full of matters that were in the most literal sense lively: gardens and crops and livestock, kitchen and smokehouse and cellar, shed and barn and pen, plantings and births and harvests, washing and ironing and cooking and canning and cleaning, feeding and milking, patching and mending. That their life was surrounded by great public issues they knew and considered, and yet found a little strange.