The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Read online

  “Boys, your mother’s dead,” she told us.

  She stood there watching us. I nodded my head, and Brother said, “Yes mam.”

  She walked down the hall. “Come with me. I’ll fix your breakfast.”

  We followed her into the kitchen and sat down in our chairs at the table. The sun wasn’t up far; the light came in at the windows and stretched halfway across the room before it touched the floor. Off in the distance I could hear somebody calling his cattle.

  Grandma took the lids off the stove and kindled a fire. When it had caught she added wood and set the lids back in place. She put the skillet on and got out the bacon and eggs while the stove warmed and ticked in the quiet.

  Daddy came into the kitchen while she was filling our plates.

  “Here’s some breakfast for you,” Grandma told him. “Eat. You’ll need it.”

  He didn’t answer her. He went on out the back door. After a minute we heard his axe at the woodpile.

  We weren’t long eating. When we’d finished we went out where he was. He didn’t notice us. We sat down on a log at the edge of the woodpile and watched him. He took a chunk of sawed wood from the pile and propped it against the chopping block. He swung the axe over his head, sinking the blade, and drew it out and swung again. The chunk split clean, down the middle. Then he split each of the halves and threw them into another pile. Every time the axe came down he said “Ah!”—­the keen sound of it ready to turn into crying, until the bite of the axe stopped it; and he tightened his mouth and swung again.

  The undertaker came in his black hearse and took our mother’s body away. Then some of the neighbors began coming. Big Ellis and his wife came, and the preacher and Gander Loyd and Beriah Easterly and his wife and Mrs. Crandel. As they came in they looked at Daddy working there at the woodpile, then stood on the back porch with the others and watched him, wondering when he’d quit and come to the house and allow them to speak to him.

  Grandpa came, riding his mare into the lot, and stopped on the other side of the woodpile. He looked at Daddy for a minute, as if he wanted to tell him to quit or say something to comfort him. He looked away finally and sat still, only jerking the bridle reins a little when the mare got restless and began to paw and toss her head. Daddy never looked up from his work. The axe blade glinted in the sun and came down. Grandpa spoke to the mare and rode home again.

  When Daddy had split all the wood, he stuck the axe into the block and started to the house. The people watched him cross the yard; when he came to the porch they turned away from him, embarrassed because they’d come to say they were sorry and the look of him didn’t allow it.

  They backed away from the door to let him through. He went into the bedroom and cleaned up. When he came into the living room he stood at the window again, not speaking to any of them.

  The preacher told Brother and me that we should go upstairs and put on clean clothes. “You must be quiet,” he said. “Your mother has gone up to Heaven.”

  “We know it,” Brother said. “We knew it before you did.”

  As we were going up the stairs Mrs. Crandel came to the living room door and said, “Do you boys want me to help you get dressed?”

  Brother said, “No mam.”

  “Do you know where to find everything?”

  “Yes mam.”

  We went upstairs to our room and poured some water into the washpan. The sun came through the window curtains and made their shadows on the floor. When the wind waved the curtains the shadows on the floor waved.

  “Let’s both wash at the same time,” Brother said.

  I said all right. We put the pan between us on the floor and began washing. Brother squeezed the soap and it flew out of his hands and splashed water on me. I splashed back at him; both of us laughed. He started snapping at me with the towel and I caught the end of it, trying to pull it away from him.

  I heard a step behind me, and when I looked around there was Daddy. He grabbed me by the shoulders and held me clear off the floor and shook me. Then he put me down and caught Brother and shook him. He went out the door without saying a word to us.

  I sat on the floor and kept from crying until I started to feel better.

  “Did he hurt you?” Brother asked me.

  “No,” I said.

  I got up and we put our dirty clothes back on; we slipped down the stairs and out of the house.

  “If Mother was alive he wouldn’t pick on us,” I said.

  “She wouldn’t let him,” Brother said.

  I felt like crying again, and I could see that Brother was holding it back too. We started across the hollow toward Grandpa’s place.

  “I’m not going to stay here any longer,” I said. “He doesn’t have any right to treat us that way.”

  Brother kept quiet.

  “Are you coming with me?”

  “We’ll both go,” he said.

  We heard one of the cars start at our house, and Big Ellis and his wife drove out the lane.

  “We’ll go and live with Big Ellis.”

  “All right,” I said.

  We found old Oscar at the spring and rode him out the gate and up the road toward Big Ellis’s place.

  “As long as we’ve got Oscar we’re all right,” Brother said. “If Big Ellis won’t let us stay with him we can go as far as we need to.”

  “We can stay at Big Ellis’s,” I said. “He’ll be glad to have us.”

  When we got to his house Big Ellis was sitting out on the front steps. He still had on his black suit; but he’d loosened his tie and taken his shoes off to rest his feet, and his shirttail had come out.

  We rode through the gate and into the yard.

  “We’ve come to live with you, Big Ellis,” Brother said.

  Big Ellis got up and tramped barefoot across the grass. He forgot old Oscar was blind and couldn’t see him coming. “Hello, boys,” he said.

  When Oscar heard that, he snorted and shied and ran backwards into a flower bed. He hit a wagon wheel that Annie May Ellis had put there for a morning glory to climb on, and sat down on his haunches like a dog. Brother and I fell off.

  “Whoa, boy,” Big Ellis said.

  Annie May ran out on the porch waving her hands in the air. If Oscar hadn’t been blind he’d have run off then for sure. But he just sat there trying to figure out what had happened to him.

  “Get that old horse and them boys out of my flowers,” Annie May said.

  Oscar got up and shook himself, and Big Ellis caught him by his forelock and quieted him. “Never mind about your flowers,” he said. “Go on inside and be still.” He led Oscar out of the flowers.

  Annie May waited until she was certain that Oscar was going to behave himself, and then she did what he’d told her.

  Big Ellis looked at us and giggled. “That old horse can’t see any better going backwards than he can going forwards, can he?”

  “He can’t see either way,” Brother said. “We thought we’d stay at your house for a while, Big Ellis, if you don’t mind.”

  “What do you want to stay here for? We haven’t got any more to eat than anybody else,” Big Ellis said. He was still holding on to Oscar’s forelock.

  “Daddy’s mad at us,” I said.

  “Aw hell, he ain’t mad at you all.”

  “We’ll work for you,” Brother said.

  “Well, I could use a couple of boys all right. But we’d better think about it first. Annie May’s nearly got dinner ready, so you boys just as well come in and have a bite to eat while we think.”

  We heard a horse coming up the road, and Grandpa turned his mare into the driveway. He had a halter and a lead rope over his arm.

  “Don’t tell him about old Oscar falling down,” I said.

  “I won’t,” Big Ellis said.

  Grandpa kept the mare in a stiff rack right up to the gate, then he slowed her down and walked her into the yard. I was afraid he was going to whip us, he came in such a hurry. But he only nodded to Big Ellis and told
us that Grandma had our dinner ready.

  Big Ellis took the halter and slipped it over Oscar’s head and handed the lead rein to Grandpa. “I was about to feed them some dinner here,” he said. He came around and helped Brother and me onto Oscar’s back.

  “I’m much obliged to you,” Grandpa told him. He turned the mare and led us out of the yard. When we were going down the driveway he said, “Damn it, your daddy’s told you to stay off of that old horse.” After a minute he said, “And damn it, I’ve told you.”

  But he kept his face turned away from us, and he let us ride old Oscar home.

  For three days they kept our mother’s body in a coffin in the living room. They kept the lid of the coffin open so people could look at her. They kept flowers around her coffin, and a lamp always burning at her head. The lights never went out in our house during those three days.

  Grandma began staying with us even at night. She told Brother and me to stay in the yard or in the kitchen with her, and not to go in the room where our mother’s body was. Once or twice we looked through the windows at the coffin and the people talking in the living room. But most of the time we stayed away. We’d see Daddy now and then walking around in the house or in the yard, but when he saw us he always turned around and went the other way. He’d changed and we didn’t try to talk to him.

  Everybody brought food to us when they came to sit by the coffin, until the kitchen was fairly stacked with cakes and pies and ham and fried chicken. Brother and I enjoyed looking at all the things they brought, but we didn’t enjoy eating them. Mealtime always reminded us of Mother. It seemed strange to be sitting at the table eating while her dead body was there in the house with us.

  Once while we were eating breakfast Brother looked at me and said, “Many’s dead.”

  I said, “Minnie who?”

  “Many people,” he said.

  We laughed. Grandma turned away from the stove and said, “Oh Lord, boys, you never will see her any more.” And she cried, holding the dish towel against her face.

  We cried too, and then she hugged us and told us not to grieve. She said our mother was in Heaven with all the angels, and she was happy there and never would have to suffer any more.

  “Why, she’s probably up there right now, singing with the blessed angels,” Grandma said. She wiped her eyes on the towel and went back to the stove. “Oh, it’s a pretty place up there, boys.”

  At night a few of the neighbors always came and sat up by the coffin. We could hear them talking and the chair rockers creaking for a long time before we went to sleep, and it seemed that we still heard them while we slept. We felt as if we never had lived in that house before.

  For the first two days there were always cars parked in the yard, and people coming in and out. But on the morning of the funeral it got quiet. Big Ellis and Annie May and Uncle Burley had spent the night by the coffin, but they left early, and nobody else came. Grandma worked until noon, getting the house ready for the funeral, and then she warmed some leftovers for our dinner.

  After we finished eating Brother and I went out on the back porch. Daddy and Grandma were sitting in the swing, talking. When we came out they hushed.

  Grandma stood up and smiled at us. “Well, the boys can come and help me,” she said. She leaned over and laid her hand on Daddy’s arm. “It’ll be time now before long.” She went into the house and up the stairs.

  Daddy sat there looking down at his hands, handling them, running the fingers of one hand across the palm and out over the fingers of the other one. His hands were heavy and big, with white scars on them that never sunburned. His hands never quit moving. Even when he went to sleep sometimes at night sitting in his rocking chair in the living room his hands stirred on the chair arms as if they could never find a place to rest.

  Finally he looked up at us. “You’d better go help your grandma, boys.”

  We went upstairs and found her in our room. She had the bureau drawers open and was packing our clothes into a big pasteboard box.

  “What’re you doing that for?” Brother asked her.

  “You’ll have to come over and live with us for a while. Your Uncle Burley’ll bring the wagon to get you.”

  We started helping her pack the clothes.

  “How long are we going to live at your house?”

  “Oh, a while.”

  “Why do we have to leave?” I asked.

  “Your daddy’s not going to be able to take care of you. He’s going to be by himself now.”

  I saw that she was about to cry again. I didn’t want her to do that, and so I laughed and said what a good time Brother and I’d have with Uncle Burley.

  We packed all the clothes that were in the drawers, and then took our Sunday clothes off the hooks in the closet and folded them on top of the rest and closed the box. Grandma left to get ready for the funeral.

  Brother and I went out in the back yard and waited for Uncle Burley. And before long he came, driving the team and wagon down the ridge toward our house, sitting dangle-legged on the edge of the hay frame.

  He left the team standing in front of the barn and came on into the yard. “Hello, boys,” he said.

  It didn’t come out the way it usually did when he said it. It had the same sound as everything that had been said to us for three days, as if it were embarrassing to be around people whose mother was dead. So all we said to him was hello.

  Grandma came to the back door. “Burley, take Tom and Nathan in to see their mother before you go.” She went back inside, and we didn’t see her any more until that night.

  Uncle Burley put his hands on our shoulders and went with us into the house and down the hall to the living room. When we went through the door I realized that Grandma had forgotten to make us dress up.

  The people quit talking when they saw us. It made me uneasy to have them quiet and watching, and I looked down at the floor while we crossed the room to the coffin.

  Big Ellis and Annie May were there ahead of us, and we stopped to wait for them to get out of the way.

  “Ain’t she the beautifullest corpse!” Annie May said. And she started crying.

  Big Ellis looked around at us and grinned. “Howdy, boys,” he said. His shirttail was half out, and he’d sweated until his collar had rolled up around his neck like a piece of rope. Seeing him made me feel better. I told him hello.

  Annie May finished crying and we went up to the coffin. Our mother had on a blue dress, and her head made a little dent in the pillow. Her hands were folded together, and her eyes were closed. But she didn’t look really comfortable. She looked the way people do when they pretend to be asleep and try too hard and give it away. I touched her face; it felt stiff and strange, like touching your own hand when it’s asleep and can’t feel.

  The inside of the coffin looked snug and soft, but when they shut the lid it would be dark. When they shut the lid and carried her to the grave it would be like walking on a cloudy dark night when you can’t see where you’re going or what’s in front of you. And after they put her in the ground and covered her up she’d turn with the world in the little dark box in the grave, and the days and nights would all be the same.

  We went up to our room to get our clothes. The wind blew the window curtains out over the corner of the bureau where the empty drawers were, and I could see the barn out the window with the sun shining on it. It seemed awful to go. I felt like crying, but I held it down and it knotted hard in my throat. I took the pillow off my bed and crooked my arm around it.

  “You’d better leave the pillow, boy,” Uncle Burley said. “We’ve got plenty of them.”

  “It’s mine, God damn it.” I said it loud to get it over the knot.

  Uncle Burley laughed. “Well, take it then, old pup.”

  Brother and I laughed too, and it wasn’t so bad to leave then.

  Uncle Burley picked up the box and we went down the stairs. As we walked out the back door they started singing in the living room. I listened to them, while we cr
ossed the yard and went through the lot gate:

  There’s a land that is fairer than day,

   And by faith we can see it afar;

  For the Father waits over the way,

   To prepare us a dwelling place there.

  Uncle Burley set the box on the wagon and we climbed on and started out of the lot. I heard them singing again:

  We shall sing on that beautiful shore

   The melodious songs of the blest,

  And our spirits shall sorrow no more,

   Not a sigh for the blessing of rest.

  My mother’s soul was going up through the sky to be joyful with the angels in Heaven, so beautiful and far away that you couldn’t think about it. And we were riding on a wagon behind Grandpa’s team of black mules, going to live with Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Burley, leaving the place where they were singing over her body. The sun was bright on the green grass up the ridge and glossy on the slick rumps of the mules. When we were driving away from the lot gate the people at the house were singing:

  In the sweet by and by,

   We shall meet on that beautiful shore;

  In the sweet by and by,

   We shall meet on that beautiful shore.

  It was pretty; and sad to think of people always ending up so far from each other. We could hear Annie May Ellis’s high, clear voice singing over all the rest of them.

  “That Annie May’s got a voice on her,” Uncle Burley said.

  He let the mules into a brisk trot, and we went up the ridge and around the head of the hollow where Aunt Mary was buried, and down the next ridge toward Grandpa’s house.

  It was strange at first to wake up in the mornings and remember that I wasn’t at home any more, and to see Daddy go away every night and leave us at Grandpa’s. But before long we got used to the way things were and began to feel like a family again. Brother and I began calling Grandpa’s house our home.