The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Read online

  Her ghost walked because she wanted to be buried in the graveyard with the rest of the dead people in our family. But nobody had ever taken the time to dig her up and bury her there. We never even put flowers on her grave.

  The top of the grave was caved in where the dirt had fallen into the hollow places between her bones. I thought her bones had probably rotted too. It would have been hard to dig her up and take her anyplace. We’d waited too long. A big hickory grew up beside the grave, and she was just some earth tangled in the roots. It was strange to think of Aunt Mary being a part of Grandpa’s farm, or maybe a hickory tree.

  We climbed out of the hollow and walked along the edge of the big woods on the river bluff, then crossed the point of the ridge and went down again until we came to the hollow where Grandpa’s spring was. Old Oscar was standing in the shade of the oak trees below the spring.

  Grandpa had raised and trained saddle horses once until he went broke at it. And old Oscar had been his stud. He was a dark chestnut with a narrow white blaze on his face. He’d been beautiful when he was young, and high-spirited. When they were breaking him he kicked Grandpa in the face and left a long, jagged scar across his cheek. But now he was gentle. He was twenty-five years old, and he stayed thin because his teeth were bad. Uncle Burley said he’d finally starve to death because he wouldn’t have enough teeth to eat with. He was blind too, and his eyes were as white as milk. It was as if he’d turned his eyes back into his head to look at whatever it was he thought about.

  Brother and I spoke to him and walked toward his head. He rattled his breath through his nose and trembled until we let him smell our hands and he recognized us. Brother caught him by a hank of his mane and led him over to the spring wall. I broke a switch off a tree and stripped the leaves; we climbed up on the wall and onto Oscar’s back. We guided him with the switch; when we wanted him to go to the right we jiggled the switch against the left side of his face, and against the right side of his face when we wanted him to go to the left.

  Daddy and Grandpa always said that Oscar would fall down someday and cripple us. But he hardly ever stumbled. Uncle Burley said Oscar knew his way around the farm as well as he knew the inside of his skin. He had it all in his head. He didn’t need to see it. In a way, Oscar walked and grazed and drank in his own mind.

  Brother guided him around the spring and along the side of the hill to the Coulter Branch hollow, and then turned down toward the river. Oscar didn’t like walking in a strange place, but we spoke to him and encouraged him, and before long he got used to the slant of the hill. He walked slower, though, than he did when he was in the pasture, as if afraid the road might drop out from under him or a tree grow up in his way.

  We followed the old wagon road down Coulter Branch to the bottom of the hill and turned upriver past the old Billy Hole landing where Beriah Easterly had his store. The river ran close to the road there. We took the path down through a woods of water maples and elms and sycamores to where Uncle Burley’s fishing shack stood overlooking the river.

  Once the shack had been painted green, but the paint had weathered to a color that was as much blue as green. The trees grew up close around it, and vines had grown over the walls and out along the eaves.

  We got off old Oscar at the camp house and walked the rest of the way to the river. He stood still where we’d stopped him, as if he’d run against a wall and didn’t know how to get around it.

  We walked upstream along the top of the riverbank. Behind us the trees closed around the camp house and Oscar; and then we went into a patch of horseweeds and out of sight. The horseweeds grew high over our heads, and so thick we had to bend them out of our way.

  “This is a jungle,” Brother said. “Nobody ever was here before.”

  All we could see was horseweeds. We had to look straight up to see the sky. But we knew where we were, and we went on, turning the bend of the river.

  Brother stopped and broke off two dead weed stalks and handed one of them to me. “Here’s a gun,” he said.

  “We’ll kill a lion,” I told him.

  Before long we crossed a gully filled with tin cans and bottles, and followed a path into the open place that Jig Pendleton had cleared on the bank above his shanty boat. From there we could look down into the bend and see Uncle Burley’s camp. Oscar stood there with his head turned toward the river.

  In the middle of the open place was a table where Jig cleaned his fish. Above the table an old set of grocery scales hung from a tree limb. A few worn-out nets were strewn around on the ground, and one of Jig’s trotlines was stretched between two trees to dry.

  The path went to the edge of the bank, and then stair-stepped to the water. We went down the steps and crossed the plank to the shanty boat.

  Jig Pendleton lived there alone and fished for a living. He was crazy on religion, and when he wasn’t busy fishing he’d fasten himself in the shanty and read the Bible from cover to cover over and over again. He worried all the time about the sins of the flesh, and believed that if he could purify himself the Lord would send down a chariot of fire and take him to Heaven. But he never could quite purify himself enough. Sooner or later he always gave it up and got on a drunk, and then he’d have to start all over again.

  He’d invited Uncle Burley and Brother and me in to see him several times, and the inside of his shanty was a sight. He’d found an old Singer sewing machine, and thrown the sewing part of it away, and fastened the iron frame with the wheel and treadle to the floor. Then he’d wired a lot of spools to the walls and run strings between them, zigzagging and crisscrossing from one end of the shanty to the other. This contraption of strings and pulleys was hooked to the wheel and treadle. It worked like a charm, but Jig never had been able to decide what it was for. He just kept adding spools and string until it was more complicated than a spider web. The whole inside of his house was a machine that couldn’t do anything but run. When he was drinking Jig would sit and treadle the machine and sing and shout and pray for the Lord to purify him. One night when he came home drunk he got tangled up in it and nearly choked to death before Gander Loyd came along and found him the next morning. Some of the missionary society women in town saved string and spools to give to him because they felt sorry for him. He had a wife and daughter living somewhere, but they hadn’t had anything to do with him since he’d got so crazy.

  A couple of times Jig had taken his boat out of the river and left the country. He stayed away a year both times, and nobody knew much about where he went or what he did. Once he told Uncle Burley that he just wandered around, looking at the mountains and rivers and oceans that the Lord had made. Since the Lord had gone to all the trouble of making them, he thought the least a man could do was go and look at them. He was as crazy as a June bug, but he was a good fisherman and didn’t bother anybody, and he was Uncle Burley’s friend.

  Jig was busy loading bait and tackle into his rowboat, and we sat down to watch him.

  “Hello, Jig,” Brother said.

  “Hello there, Tom and Nathan,” Jig said. “How’re you little children?”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “We hunted for a lion up there in the horseweeds,” Brother said, “but we couldn’t find one.”

  “The lion and the lamb shall lie down together,” Jig said, “and a little child shall lead them.”

  “You wouldn’t lead the lion that lives in that horseweed patch,” Brother said. “He’d bite your durned arm off.”

  “You oughtn’t to cuss,” Jig said. “It makes Jesus sad.”

  Brother was ashamed of himself then, and he hushed. Jig began to bail out the rowboat.

  “What’re you fixing to do?” I asked him.

  “Fixing to run my lines,” Jig said.

  “We’ll go with you,” Brother said.

  Jig shook his head. “No, honey. You might drown. It’s awful easy to drown in this river.”

  “We can swim,” Brother said. “We won’t drown.”

  “Listen,” Jig sa
id. “If the Lord’s planning for one of you all to drown, that’s His business. But He don’t want me to get messed up in it.”

  He untied the boat and began rowing up the river. Brother and I went back to the bank.

  “Let’s go swimming,” Brother said.

  He started upstream again toward the sandbar, and I went with him, feeling a little guilty as if Jig might tell the Lord on us. But when we got to the sandbar Brother began to take his clothes off, running to the water; and I ran too, trying to beat him.

  I kicked my clothes off and ran out into the river, letting the weight of it against my legs trip me under. I felt the water slap over my head, and I swam down the slope of the rock bottom until the deep cold made my ears ache. I rolled over and looked up into the blackness. The current carried me along. I loosened myself in it, and held still in the movement of the water. I couldn’t tell whether my head was up or down; I felt as if I could swim forever in any direction. My lungs tightened, wanting to breathe, and I kicked the bottom away from me and swam up until I saw a patch of light floating on the surface. I broke through it into the air again.

  I shook the water out of my eyes and floated. The sky seemed a deeper blue after my eyes had been in the dark. Over my head a white cloud unraveled in the wind. The sky widened to the tops of the hills that circled around the valley. Inside the ring of hilltops trees grew along both banks of the river. They leaned toward me—­willow and maple and sycamore.

  I watched them, letting myself float in the slow current. I thought if I floated to the mouth of the river I’d always be at the center of a ring of trees and a ring of hills and a ring where the sky touched. I said, “I’m Nathan Coulter.” It seemed strange.

  Brother swam up behind me and threw water in my face. We raced back to the shallow water, and waded out onto the bar.

  I found a flat rock and stretched out to let the sun dry me. It was warm and I felt clean and tired. Across the river a hawk held his wings to the wind and circled. The sky was empty except for the hawk and the cloud. I cupped my hands around my eyes. And then there were three of us—­the hawk and the cloud and me.

  When we got back to Grandpa’s place we turned old Oscar loose; he wandered off down the hill toward his shade trees at the spring. We went on to the top of the ridge and back toward our place where Grandpa and Daddy and Uncle Burley were digging postholes. The ground was shallow along that part of the fence row; they were digging to the rock and blasting the rest of the way down with dynamite. When we got there Uncle Burley was sitting at the edge of a hole, guiding the rock drill, and Daddy was driving it down with a sledge hammer. Grandpa was working at the post pile, facing the posts with an axe. We sat behind Uncle Burley and watched.

  Daddy glanced at us between swings. “Have you all been riding that old horse again?” He had to interrupt himself to say “Ah” when the hammer came down. The sun was beaming hot, and he was sweating through his shirt.

  “No,” Brother said.

  Daddy looked at Brother and then at me, and swung the hammer down. “If I see you on that horse one more time, I’m going to skin both of you. It looks like you can’t hear when I tell you something.”

  Then he said, “Get out of the way, now, before you get hurt. You don’t have any business up here.”

  He dropped the hammer and went to find the water jug. As soon as he was out of earshot Uncle Burley winked at us. “You’d better do what he tells you, boys. It’s a bad day.”

  “What’s he mad at us for?” Brother said. “We weren’t bothering him.”

  “That’s just his way,” Uncle Burley said. “He loves you boys.”

  Several sticks of dynamite and a coil of fuse and a box of caps were lying on the ground behind us. When Uncle Burley turned his head and began working the drill back and forth in the hole, Brother picked up a scrap of fuse and took a cap out of the box.

  We went out the ridge again and took the road to town. A few patches of red clover were blooming along the sides of the road, and daisies and sweet clover. Big dusty-looking grasshoppers flew up ahead of us, their wings clicking, and dropped back into the weeds, and flew again when we caught up with them. Finally we moved out to the middle of the road to be rid of them.

  The road went slanting over the top of our ridge past Big Ellis’s pond and his house, then it made a sharp turn and ran straight on to where the town’s ridge pointed off on the river bluff. Beriah Easterly’s house set on the outside of the turn, and we stopped to see if his boy, Calvin, was at home. We knocked on the door, but nobody came. We guessed Mrs. Easterly and Calvin had gone down to the store with Beriah. Their old bird dog was asleep under the porch swing, but he just raised his head and looked at us and went to sleep again.

  “It looks like somebody ought to be at home,” Brother said.

  I knocked again. We could hear a clock ticking somewhere inside the house, and that was all. Things had quit working right. Daddy wouldn’t let us stay with him, and now Calvin was gone. All of a sudden it got lonesome. We went back to the road and didn’t stop again until we got to town.

  The town strung out along the road for maybe half a mile—­a few houses and other buildings and the bank and the church. Except for the preacher and the banker and the storekeepers, about everybody who lived there worked on the farms. There was one side road but no houses were built on it. We went past the poolroom and on up the street to where the drugstore and grocery store and harness shop stood in a row along the sidewalk across from the church. The harness shop had been closed a long time. The harnessmaker died and the town didn’t need another store, so it had been left empty. The door and windows had been boarded up and covered with political posters and cigarette advertisements, and Calvin Easterly said that bats lived inside. In the daytime the bats hung together like a curtain down the back wall. It was a scary place when we thought about it, especially at night. But it had been shut up for so long that we hardly noticed it was there.

  Aside from the harness shop it was a pretty town. Most of the buildings were painted white, and tall locust and maple trees grew in the yards along the road.

  Big Ellis and Gander Loyd and the Montgomery twins were squatting in front of the drugstore, leaning back into the shade of the wall. The Montgomerys didn’t look at us when we came up, and we didn’t speak to them. Grandpa had thrashed their father one time for calling Uncle Burley a drunkard, and none of them had ever got over it. They were always shamefaced and hangdog when even Brother and I were around, as if they expected one of us to walk over and kick them in the shins. Their names were Len and Lemuel, but everybody called them Mushmouth and Chicken Little. We walked past them to where Big Ellis and Gander were.

  “How’re you boys?” Big Ellis said.

  “All right,” I said. “How’re you, Big Ellis?”

  “Hot. Too hot to work. What’re they doing over at your place?”

  “Digging postholes.”

  “Whoo,” Big Ellis said. “They’re feeling the heat.” He squinted his eyes and giggled.

  We spoke to Gander and sat down. Gander turned his head and looked at us with his one eye. He was chewing on the end of a matchstick. “Hello,” he said. He wiped the matchstick on the bib of his overalls and began picking his teeth. Gander never had much to say. He’d killed a man and lost an eye in the fight, and it always took me a while to get used to his one-sided face. He stayed quiet, even when he was in town, keeping what he knew to himself.

  “Could you boys use a chocolate ice cream cone?” Big Ellis asked us.

  “We had dinner a while ago,” Brother said. “Thank you just the same.”

  “Aw hell, you can eat a chocolate ice cream cone anytime. Let’s have one.”

  We got up and went into the drugstore.

  “Three chocolate ice cream cones,” Big Ellis said. The girl behind the counter scooped them up for us. Big Ellis gave her three nickels and we went out and sat down again.

  “You boys ever get in a fight?” Big Ellis asked me.


  “No,” I said.

  “If we ever did I’d win,” Brother told him.

  Big Ellis looked around at Gander and giggled. But Gander wasn’t paying any attention. Big Ellis let it go, and ate his ice cream without talking anymore. He wasn’t likely to stir any conversation out of Gander—­or the Montgomerys, either, as long as we were there. It wasn’t very good company. After we finished the ice cream we stayed a while to show Big Ellis that we appreciated his buying it for us, then we thanked him and left.

  Up the street from the harness shop was the hotel. It was a long, two-story frame building with a porch running all the way across the front of it. Salesmen and travelers used to spend the night there, but now the rooms were rented out by the month, to old people mostly. Some of them were sitting in rocking chairs on the front porch when we went by. An old woman nodded her head to us. “Good afternoon, young gentlemen.” She turned to the others and said, “Such fine young men.”

  An old man leaned toward her and said, “Whose boys are they?”

  “Why, they’re Dave Coulter’s grandchildren.”

  “Well, God damn,” he said. “Are they old Dave’s boys?”

  “Grandchildren,” she said.

  On a rise at the far end of town was the graveyard. In a way it was the prettiest part of the town—­with its white headstones and green grass and flowers, shady under the gray-trunked cedars. From there you could see a long stretch of the river valley. Grandma said it was a restful place, and it was. But it was hard to forget all the dead people buried underneath it. In the summer it was easier to forget them than it was in the winter. In the winter you felt they must be cold.