The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Read online

  We did the uphill side first because that was the bigger side. But also we wanted to get ourselves well used to the job before we got to work on the downhill side which was all of it steep and almighty high at the eave. To tell the truth, I didn’t have Grover’s problem with heights, but I knew that if you fell from so high onto that old ledgy hillside you wouldn’t get up again maybe until resurrection morning.

  Finally we did conquer the uphill side. We passed our ropes over the comb of the roof then and tied our ladders on the downhill side. And we were keeping our feet always on the ladder rungs. We weren’t taking any chances. We started each one on a side and worked toward the middle. After it seemed like forty days and forty nights we were working pretty close together, which back then wasn’t always the ideal arrangement for Jarrat and me.

  We came back onto the roof one day after dinner and went at it again. We were meaning to get the job over with that day if it took us till dark. I don’t know why it is, but even when you’re getting paid by the day, you want to get done. You’re eager to get done, just as you’d be if you were working for yourself at no wage. And it did seem like we’d been there nearly forever when there were better things to do. Looked back at, it was beginning to seem like a waste.

  And my Lord it was hot ! You couldn’t touch that roof bare-handed, and you could barely see for the sweat. It was pure punishment. By the middle of the afternoon I began to feel unhappy with Jarrat for including me in the deal. I began to put on a little speed, laying that paint on slappity-slap, knowing he couldn’t help but hear. I had to keep it up quite a while before he said anything.

  Finally he said, “What’s your hurry?”

  “Well, you said it’s time we were getting done with this,” I said, no matter that we clearly were getting done with it. “I’m just taking your word for it, that’s all.”

  He didn’t answer. But I knew he was getting mad. It would make him mad when you were being unserious about work. I went on, slappity-slap, loading my brush with paint and making it pop against the roof. Jarrat was commenting by not saying anything. I was cooking him on a slow fire, and I ought to’ve had my ass kicked, for the poor fellow all his life had a harder time of it than I did, but being a man of weak character I couldn’t stop.

  I said, “And I got places to go and things to do.”

  He went ahead, serious about his work, and didn’t say anything for another while. And then he said, “Well, don’t slobber it on.”

  I straightened up and unseriously rolled a cigarette and stuck it in the corner of my mouth and lit it and picked up my bucket and brush. I hadn’t hardly more than just started painting again when we heard this low buzz way off in the sky, and it got louder. We looked where the sound was coming from, and directly out of the heat haze and the shimmer this airplane just appeared.

  Back then an airplane was a rare sight, and this one was a four-winger flying lower than we’d ever seen one. The idea that some body was in that thing flying through the sky seemed to come somewhere between prime idiocy and a miracle. It passed right over the top of us.

  And then several events took place so fast they almost happened at the same time. While I was looking so straight up that my hat started to fall off, I stepped backwards to see better and threw my whole weight right onto the wet paint. I grabbed for my hat with my right hand that had the loaded brush in it and only painted the side of my face, the hat was gone. And so was I, of course. I dropped bucket and brush both to try for a handhold in the thin air, and didn’t find one.

  Half a gallon of spilled paint makes a tin roof uncommonly slick. I hadn’t had time to fall over, so I was going down that roof standing up, like a boy sliding on ice, and I was saying very clearly in my mind, “Well, this is the end of you, old bud.” I shot off the roof right into the top of that old cedar tree, and that’s how come I’m here to tell about it. I never could make my mind up whether it was Providence or luck, so I split the middle and thanked Providence for my luck.

  A tree like that, you know, grows its top branches upwards and its lower ones outwards. As I was flying in among them, the top branches raked some skin off here and there, and I reckon that slowed me down. When I came to the outreaching lower branches, they just bent and tumbled me from one to the next, sort of gently, maybe gracefully, until the bottom one dropped me without too much of a thump onto the ground. And there I sat, spraddle-legged in the shade, cooler than I’d been since dinner.

  When I got reorganized enough to look up at where I’d come from, there was Jarrat holding to his rope and looking over the eave of the roof to see what was left of me. We looked back and forth at each other what seemed a long time, and it was awfully quiet.

  After a while he said, “Well, are you practicing up for something, or was that it?”

  It came to me I was alive. That cigarette was still stuck in the corner of my mouth, still lit. I didn’t answer. I sat there with half my face painted blue and finished my smoke. Jarrat watched me until I reckon he was satisfied, and then he got back to being himself.

  “Long as you’re on the ground, how ’bout getting us a fresh jug of water?”

  The Solemn Boy (1934)

  PTOLEMY PROUDFOOT’S ninety-eight-acre farm lay along the Goforth Hill road between the Cotman Ridge road and Katy’s Branch. It included some very good ridgeland, some wooded hillside above the creek, and, down between Katy’s Branch and the Katy’s Branch road, two acres or so of bottom­land. This creek-bottom field, small and narrow and awkwardly placed, seemed hardly to belong to the farm at all, and yet it was the one piece of truly excellent land that Tol owned. He called it the Watch Fob. He kept it sowed in red clover and timothy or lespedeza and timothy, and every three or four years he would break it and plant it in corn.

  Since the Watch Fob was so out of the way, whatever work Tol had to do there tended to be put off until last. And yet, such was the quality of the crops that came from that land, and such the pleasantness of the place, down among the trees beside the creek, that Tol always looked forward to working there. The little field was quiet and solitary. No house or other building was visible from it, and the road was not much traveled. When Tol worked there, he felt off to himself and satisfied. There were some fine big sycamores along the creek, and while Tol worked, he would now and then hear the cry of a shikepoke or a kingfisher. Life there was different from life up on the ridge.

  Nineteen thirty-four was one of the years when Tol planted the Watch Fob in corn. And that was fortunate, for it was a dry year; the ridge fields produced less than usual, and the Watch Fob made up a good part of the difference. Tol cut and shocked that field last, and then he shucked and cribbed the upland corn before he went back again to the creek bottom.

  Perhaps Tol agreed with the sage of Proverbs who held that “he that hasteth with his feet sinneth”—­I don’t know. It is a fact, anyhow, that Tol never hurried. He was not by nature an anxious or a fearful man. But I suspect that he was unhurried also by principle. Tol loved his little farm, and he loved farming. It would have seemed to him a kind of sacrilege to rush through his work without getting the good of it. He never went to the field without the company of a hound or two. At the time I am telling about, he had a large black-and-tan mostly hound named Pokerface. And when Tol went to work, he would often carry his rifle. If, while he was working, Poker­face treed a squirrel or a young groundhog, then the workday would be interrupted by a little hunting, and Miss Minnie would have wild meat on the table the next day. When Tol went down to the Watch Fob to cultivate his corn, he always took his fishing pole. While he worked with plow or hoe, he would have a baited hook in the water. And from time to time he would take a rest, sitting with his back against a tree in the deep shade, watching his cork. In this leisurely way, he did good work, and his work was timely. His crops were clean. His pastures were well grassed and were faithfully clipped every year. His lambs and his steers almost always topped the market. His harvested corn gleamed in the crib, as clean of shuck and
silk as if Tol had prepared it for a crowd of knowledgeable spectators, though as like as not he would be the only one who ever saw it.

  By the time Tol got around to shucking the corn down on the Watch Fob that fall, it was past Thanksgiving. People had begun to think of Christmas. Tol had put off the job for two or three days, saying to himself, “I’ll go tomorrow.” But when he woke up on the morning he had resolved to go, he wished that he never had planted the Watch Fob in corn in the first place. Tol was sixty-two years old in 1934. He had not been young for several years, as he liked to say. And that morning when he woke, he could hear the wind ripping past the eaves and corners of the little farmstead, and rattling the bare branches of the trees.

  “I’m getting old,” he thought as he heaved his big self off the mattress and felt beneath the bedrail for his socks.

  “I’m getting old”—­he had said that a number of times in the last few years, each time with surprise and with sudden sympathy for his forebears who had got old before him.

  But he got up and dressed in the dark, leaving Miss Minnie to lie abed until he built up the fires. Tol was a big man. When he dressed, as Miss Minnie’s nephew Sam Hanks said, it was like upholstering a sofa. In sixty-two years Tol had never become good at it. In fact, putting on his clothes was an affair not in the direct line of his interests, and he did not pay it much attention. Later, while he sat with his coffee after breakfast and was thus within her reach, Miss Minnie would see that his shirt collar was turned down and that all his buttons had engaged the appropriate buttonholes.

  Tol, anyhow, approximately dressed himself, went down the stairs, built up the fire in the living room, and lit a fire in the cooking range in the kitchen. He sat by the crackling firebox of the range, wearing his cap and coat now, and put on his shoes. And then he sat and thought a little while. Tol had always been a man who could sit and think if he had to. But until lately he had not usually done so the first thing in the morning. Now it seemed that his sixty-two years had brought him to a new place, in which some days it was easier to imagine staying in by the fire than going out to work. He had an ache or two and a twinge or two, and he knew without imagining that the wind was from the north and he knew how cold it was. Tol thought on these things for some time there by the warming stove, and he thought that of all his troubles thinking about them was the worst. After a while he heard Miss Minnie’s quick footsteps on the floor upstairs. He picked up the milk buckets then and went to the barn.

  A little later, having eaten a good breakfast and hitched his team to the wagon, Tol experienced a transformation that he had experienced many times before. He passed through all his thoughts and dreads about the day, emerging at last into the day itself, and he liked it.

  The wind was still whistling down from the north over the hard-frozen ground. But his horses looked wonderful, as horses tend to do on such a morning, with every hair standing on end and their necks arched, wanting to trot with the wagon’s weight pressing onto their britchings as they went down the hill, and their breath coming in clouds that streamed away on the wind. Tol’s fingers grew numb in his gloves with holding them back.

  They quieted down presently, and he drove on to the Watch Fob, sticking first one hand and then the other into his armpits to warm his fingers. And then he untied the first shock, slipped his shucking peg onto his right hand, and began tossing the clean yellow ears into the wagon. It was not yet full daylight. He settled into the work, so that presently he paid less attention to it, and his hands went about their business almost on their own. He looked around, enjoying the look of the little field. Even on so gray a day it was pretty. After he had cut and shocked the corn, he had disked the ground and sowed it in wheat, and now the shocks stood in their straight rows on a sort of lawn that was green, even though it was frozen. And it was pleasant to see the humanly ordered small clearing among the trees. Nearby the creek flowed under thin ice and then broke into the open and into sound as it went over a riffle and back again under ice. But the best thing of all was the quiet. Though he could hear the wind clashing and rattling in the trees around the rim of the valley, there was hardly a breeze down there in the Watch Fob. Surrounded by the wind’s commotion, the quietness of the little cornfield gave it a sort of intimacy and a sort of expectancy. As his work warmed him, he unbuttoned his jacket. A while later he took it off.

  A little past the middle of the morning, snowflakes began to fall. It was nothing at all like a snowstorm, but just a few flakes drifting down. Up on the ridgetops, Tol knew, the wind would be carrying the flakes almost straight across. “Up there,” he thought, “it ain’t one of them snows that falls. It’s one of them snows that just passes by.” But down where he was, the flakes sifted lackadaisically out of the sky as if they had the day off and no place in particular to go, becoming visible as they came down past the treetops and then pretty much disappearing when they lit. It would take hours of such snowing to make even a skift of whiteness on the ground. Pokerface, who in dog years was older than Tol, nevertheless took shelter under the wagon.

  “Well, if you ain’t something!” Tol said to him. “Go tree a squirrel.”

  Pokerface had a good sense of humor, but he did not appreciate sarcasm. He acknowledged the justice of Tol’s criticism by beating his tail two or three times on the ground, but he did not come out.

  There had been a time when a Proudfoot almost never worked alone. The Proudfoots were a big family of big people whose farms were scattered about in the Katy’s Branch valley and on Cotman Ridge. They liked to work together and to be together. Often, even when a Proudfoot was at work on a job he could not be helped with, another Proudfoot would be sitting nearby to watch and talk. The First World War killed some of them and scattered others. Since then, the old had died and the young had gone, until by now Tol was the only one left. Tol was the last of the Proudfoots, for he and Miss Minnie had no children. And now, though he swapped work with his neighbors when many hands were needed, he often worked alone, amused or saddened sometimes to remember various departed Proudfoots and the old stories, but at other times just present there in the place and the day and the work, more or less as his dog and his horses were. When he was remembering he would sometimes laugh or grunt or mutter at what he remembered, and then the old dog would look at him and the horses would tilt their ears back to ask what he meant. When he wasn’t remembering, he talked to the horses and the dog.

  “Me and you,” he said to Pokerface, “we’re a fine pair of half-wore-out old poots. What are we going to do when we get old?”

  It amused him to see that Pokerface had no idea either.

  For a while after Tol started that morning’s work, it seemed to him that he would never cover the bottom of the wagon box. But after he quit paying so much attention he would be surprised, when he did look, at how the corn was accumulating. He laid the stalks down as he snapped off the ears, and then when he had finished all the stalks, he stood them back up in a shock and tied them. The shucked ears were piling up nearly to the top of the wagon box by the time Tol judged it was getting on toward eleven o’clock. By then his stomach had begun to form the conclusion that his throat had been cut, as Proudfoot stomachs had always tended to do at that time of day. And now he began to converse with himself about how long it would take to get back up the hill and water and feed his horses. He knew that Miss Minnie would begin to listen for him at about eleven-thirty, and he didn’t want to get to the kitchen much later than that. He thought that he could go in with what corn he had, but then he thought he might shuck just a little more. He had conducted thousands of such conversations with himself, and he knew just how to do it. He urged himself on with one “little more” after another until he filled the wagon properly to the brim, and in plenty of time, too.

  The day was still cold. As soon as he quit work, he had to put his jacket back on and button it up. The thought of reentering the wind made him hunch his shoulders and draw his neck down into his collar like a terrapin.

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sp; He climbed up onto the wagon seat and picked up the lines. “Come here, boys,” he said to the team. And they turned and drew the creaking load out of the field.

  If Tol had a favorite thing to do, it was driving a loaded wagon home from the field. As he drove out toward the road, he could not help glancing back at the wagon box brimming with corn. It was a kind of wonder to him now that he had handled every ear of the load. Behind him, the little field seemed to resume a deeper quietness as he was leaving it, the flakes of snow still drifting idly down upon it.

  When they started up the hill the horses had to get tight in their collars. It was a long pull up to the first bend in the road. When they got there, Tol stopped on the outside of the bend and cramped the wheels to let the horses rest.

  “Take a breath or two, boys,” he said.

  “Come on, old Poke,” he said to the dog, who had fallen a little behind, and now came and sat down proprietarily beside the front wheel.

  Where they were now they could feel the wind. The snowflakes flew by them purposefully, as if they knew of a better place farther on and had only a short time to get there.

  Pretty soon the cold began to get inside Tol’s clothes. He was ready to speak to the team again when he heard Pokerface growl. It was a quiet, confidential growl to notify Tol of the approach of something that Pokerface had not made up his mind about.

  When Tol looked back the way Pokerface was looking, he saw a man and a small boy walking up the road. Tol saw immediately that he did not know them, and that they were poorly dressed for the weather. The man was wearing an old felt hat that left his ears in the cold and a thin, raggedy work jacket. The boy had on a big old blue toboggan that covered his ears and looked warm, but his coat was the kind that had once belonged to a suit, not much to it, the lapels pinned shut at the throat. The sleeves of the boy’s coat and the legs of his pants were too short. The man walked behind the boy, perhaps to shelter him a little from the wind. They both had their hands in their pockets and their shoulders hunched up under their ears.