The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Read online

  Afterward the men drew off to themselves, carrying their chairs up to the edge of the graveyard. There was a good breeze there on the higher ground, and fine dark shade under the cedars. They took smokes and chews, and the talk started, first about crops and weather and then about other things. I don’t remember exactly how, but a little merriment started. Then somebody said, “Tol, tell that un about Old Ant’ny and the chamber pot.”

  They were sitting more or less in a circle in the shade of two big cedars, and in the silences you could hear the breeze pulling through the branches. Tol was sitting with his back to the graveyard, his chair tilted back, the gravestones spread out behind him. He had outlived nearly everybody he would tell about, some of whom lay within the sound of his voice, and he was sitting not far from the spot where we would lay him to rest before two more years had passed.

  Below us the women were sitting together near the tables, where they had finished straightening up. You could hear the sound of their voices but not what they said. I remember the colors of their dresses: white and pink and yellow, ginghams and flower prints; the widows all in dark blue or black, the dresses of the older women reaching to their ankles. And I remember how perfect it all seemed, so still and comfortable. The Second World War had started in Europe, but in my memory it seems that none of us yet knew it.

  Tol had picked up a dead cedar branch to whittle. His knife was sharp, and the long, fine, fragrant shavings curled and fell backward over his wrists. He was smiling.

  “Boys,” he said, “I couldn’t tell it all in a day.”

  He laughed a little and said no more. Nobody else said anything either. After a minute he began to tell the story. I wasn’t anything but a boy then. I can’t tell it the way he told it, but this is the way he put it in my mind.

  It was a fine, bright Sunday in October, the year Tol was five years old. The Proudfoots had gathered at Old Ant’ny’s. The family had drawn in its various branches, in-laws, and acquaintances. Old Ant’ny had turned out his own mules and horses to make stall room, and by midmorning the barn was full, and saddled horses and harnessed teams stood tied to fence posts.

  All the wives had brought food and other necessaries to add to the bounty already laid in and prepared by Old Ant’ny and Maw Proudfoot, and the big kitchen and back porch were full of women and the older girls, setting out dishes and pitchers and glasses and bowls on tables spread with white cloths.

  The Proudfoot men were gathered around the hearth in what was called “the front room,” where Old Ant’ny sat and where in the early morning there had been a fire. Later, as their numbers grew and the day warmed, some of them sat along the edge of the front porch and others in the open doorway of the barn.

  The girls who were too little to help played or visited quietly enough with each other. They were well acquainted, happy to be together again, and possessed of a certain civility and dignity. There was never much trouble from them.

  The trouble came from the boys, or, more exactly, from the boys between the ages of about five and about eleven, who did not come with any plans or expectations, and who therefore took their entertainment as a matter of adventure, making do with whatever came to hand. There were, Tol said, “a dozen, maybe twenty” of them.

  Before dinner they were kept fairly well under control. They were getting hungry, for one thing, and that held them close to the house. For another thing, the parents were more alert before dinner than they would be afterward. Afterward, they would be full and comfortable and a little sleepy, and most of the men would be a little sleepier and more comfortable than the women, for by then they would have met with some stealthily wandering jug of Old Ant’ny’s whiskey.

  That was the way it always worked. During the morning the boys were kept within eyesight of the grown-ups, and pretty well apart from each other. They fretted and jiggled and asked when dinner would be ready, and got corrected and fussed at and threatened. And then after dinner the range of grown-up eyesight shortened, and that was when the boys got together and began to run. This was their time of freedom, and to preserve it they ran. Whenever they were near the house, where they knew they might be seen and called down, they ran. They ran in a pack, the big ones in front, the little ones behind. Tol was the littlest one that year, and the farthest behind, but he kept the rest of them in sight. Most of them were Proudfoots, and they all looked more or less like Proudfoots. And as long as there were so many of them and they were all running, by the time one of them could be recognized and called to, they all would be gone.

  They ran up the hill behind the barn and over into a wooded draw where their band raveled out into a game of tag, and then a game of hide-and-go-seek—­a great crashing and scuffling in the fallen dry leaves. The biggest boy that year was Tol’s cousin Lester, whose hair, plastered down with water early that morning, now stuck up like the tail of a young rooster, and whose eyes were wide open in expectation.

  Tag and hide-and-go-seek didn’t last long. Lester kept chang­ing the rules until nobody wanted to play. Then Old Ant’ny’s hounds treed a groundhog in a little slippery elm, and Lester climbed up to shake him out. Lester took his jacket off so he could climb better. When he threw it down, the dogs, thinking it was the groundhog, piled on it and tore it up. While they were tearing up Lester’s jacket, the groundhog jumped out of the tree and ran into a hole. The big boys found a couple of sticks and helped the dogs dig until they came to a rock ledge and had to give up.

  All that took a while. They had been missed by then, and Aunt Belle was on the back porch, calling, “Oh, Lester!” So they answered and went back, running, allowing themselves to be seen and forgotten again, and ran on across the cornfield to the creek.

  They played follow-the-leader, which lasted a long time, because Lester was the leader. They went along the rocks at the edge of the creek and then waded a riffle and came back across walking a fallen tree trunk. And then Lester said, “Follow my tracks,” and started taking giant steps across a sand bar. It was a long straddle, and by the time Tol got there the tracks were a foot deep and full of water. He got stuck with his feet apart and fell over sideways.

  “Come here, mud man,” Lester said. “Come here, mud boy.” And he soused Tol, clothes and all, down into the deep cold water and rinsed him off.

  Tol started crying. He said a word he had learned from Uncle O.R. and threw a rock at Lester, and everybody laughed, and then Tol did.

  Aunt Belle was on the front porch now, hollering again. She was a big woman with a strong voice. Lester answered and they all started running back toward the house, leaving Tol behind. He was getting tired, and so he walked on to the house. When he got there the other boys were gone again, out of sight. He went up on the back porch, taking care to avoid notice, and found a plate of biscuits under a cloth on the wash table and took two and went on toward the front door. The women were in the kitchen and in the parlor, talking. Old Ant’ny and Uncle O.R. and Uncle George Washington and Uncle Will and Uncle Fowler and some others were in the front room. A brown and white jug, stoppered with a corncob, was sitting by Uncle Fowler’s chair like a contented cat. They weren’t going to pay any attention to Tol, and he stepped inside the door to eat his biscuits. Uncle Fowler leaned forward in his chair to spit in the fireplace and fell headfirst into the ashes. Old Ant’ny never even looked. The others may have looked or they may not. They never said anything. But Uncle O.R. looked. He was standing on the corner of the hearth, leaning one shoulder against the mantel. He said, “Fowler, you’re putting a right smart effort into your spitting, seems like.”

  Uncle Fowler got himself out of the ashes and into his chair again. “Whoo, Lordy, Lordy!” he said, and fanned himself with his hand, causing a few ashes to float out of his mustache.

  Tol crammed the whole second biscuit into his mouth, and ran back through the house and out the back door, blowing crumbs ahead of him as he ran.

  Lester was up on the roof. He had climbed up on the cellar, and then onto the cellar house r
oof, and then onto the back porch roof, and then onto the roof of the ell that held the kitchen and dining room, and now he was walking up the slope of the roof over the living room and the bedroom above it toward the chimney. Maw Proudfoot’s yellow tomcat was weaving in and out between Lester’s feet, stroking himself on Lester’s legs. The pack of boys had backed up as Lester climbed, keeping him in sight.

  It was a big rock chimney built against the end of the house. Lester reached into it, and held up a black palm for the others to see. The yellow cat climbed up onto the chimney beside Lester. He walked back and forth along the copestones, rubbing himself against Lester’s shoulder, his tail stuck straight up, with a little crook on the end of it like a walking cane.

  It was past sundown now. The light was going out of the sky, and it was turning cool. Except for the pack of boys, everybody was in the house. Nobody had started home. They would get home in the dark and still have the milking to do; maybe the thought of that had quieted them. The old house hovered over them now like a mother hen.

  Lester backed away a step, and he and the yellow cat stood looking at each other, balanced across the foot or so of air that divided them. Some fascination grew upon them. The boys watching down in the yard felt it. And then Lester raised his hand and gave a little push.

  When Lester pushed the cat, he said, “Wup!”

  The cat disappeared, clean out of sight, as if the sky had bitten it off. They heard a fit of scratching inside the chimney, and then it ceased. Lester looked over into the chimney mouth. And then he looked around and down at his cousins. His eyes were as wide open as if he had never batted one of them once in his life.

  “He didn’t go all the way down,” Lester said. “He ain’t going to make it back up.”

  Lester looked down at his cousins, and they looked up at him. Nobody moved or spoke. For maybe as long as a minute, nobody had any idea what would happen next. And then Lester’s eye fell on Toby.

  Several hounds were sitting alongside the pack of boys, watching too, with the same balked expectancy, and Toby was with them. Toby was Old Ant’ny’s feist, white with black ears and a black spot in front of his tail. He was a nervous little dog who had courage instead of brains. He would fight anything, would go unhesitatingly into a hole after a varmint, or anywhere after a cat.

  “Send up old Tobe,” Lester said.

  One of the older boys put Toby in the crook of his arm and carried him up onto the kitchen roof. Lester met him and took the dog. He went back up to the chimney and held Toby so he could look in. He might have intended just to show Toby to the cat so as maybe to scare the cat into going on down. Tol didn’t know. But whatever Lester intended to do turned out to be beside the point. When the cat saw Toby, he spit at him. They could hear it all the way down in the yard. Toby gave a little yelp, in horror probably at what he was about to do, and jumped out of Lester’s arms onto the lip of the chimney and down onto the cat.

  The boys had already started running before Toby jumped. When they passed the chimney, they heard Toby and the cat inside, falling and fighting.

  They went on around and through the front door and into the living room just in time to see the ashes in the fireplace rise up in a cloud. And then the cat, with Toby behind him, broke out and ran up Uncle Fowler’s leg and up his belly and up over the top of his head and off the back of his chair and through the crowd of boys and out into the hall. Old Ant’ny never looked, never turned his head. He just sat there like some people’s idea of God, as if having set this stir in motion, he would let it play itself out on its own, as if he despaired of any other way of stopping it. Uncle Fowler, who had been asleep, woke up, spitting ashes, just as Toby cleared the chair back.

  “Pew!” Uncle Fowler said. He sighed and shut his eyes again in great weariness.

  The only one with enough presence of mind to move at all was Uncle O.R., who started out, running after Toby, only to get tangled up in the crowd of boys standing in the door.

  The cat treed under the chiffonier in the hall, but Toby brought him out of there, and by the time Uncle O.R. got free of the boys, the cat had run into the kitchen and down the middle of the table, with Toby still on his heels, and over Aunt Belle’s shoulder and out the window. They left a sooty streak down the middle of the cloth.

  Aunt Belle was on her feet now. “Who the hell let that cat in? And that damn dog? Where are you, Lester?”

  Uncle O.R. ran on out through the kitchen. The pack of boys, who had been following Uncle O.R., got to the dining room door just in time to run smack into Aunt Belle, who was coming out. She was red in the face and already puffing; she just bounced them all out of the way and ran on up the hall toward the front door. They fell in behind her, running as dutifully as if they were still playing follow-the-leader.

  Aunt Belle ran out the front door and across the porch and down the porch steps and out in the yard just as Lester came around the corner of the house with Uncle O.R. gaining on him. Lester’s eyes were wider open than ever, his hair was sticking up stiff and straight.

  Aunt Belle was still running, too. She was light on her feet for a big woman, and when Lester dodged she turned back quick as a turkey hen. The pack of boys was in the way, so Lester couldn’t run on past the porch steps; without intending to, they headed him, and Aunt Belle and Uncle O.R. drove him up onto the porch and through the front door. The women had all come out of the kitchen into the hall, and Uncle George Washington and Uncle Will were starting out of the living room. Lester took the only open route—­up the stairs.

  Aunt Belle had cut in ahead of Uncle O.R., and she started up, too. She had her skirts bundled in front of her like a load of laundry, and she was going as fast as Lester.

  He got to the top of the stairs and ran into the room over the living room, flinging the door to behind him. But Aunt Belle was right there and caught it before it slammed. When Aunt Belle and Uncle O.R. and the rest of the boys went into the room there was nobody in sight, but they could hear the sound of breathing under the bed. And through the cracks between the floorboards they could hear Uncle Fowler snoring by the fire down in the living room.

  Aunt Belle got down on her hands and knees and looked under.

  “Uh huh !” she said. “Young mister, I been a-laying for you.”

  She crawled partway under, caught Lester by the foot, and dragged him out spread-eagled, turning over a chamber pot that had been left unemptied under the edge of the bed.

  The boys got downstairs again in time to see the golden shower spend its last drops upon the head and shoulders of Old Ant’ny, who sat unmoving as before, looking straight ahead, as though he had foreseen it all years ago and was resigned.

  “Lor-dee!” Uncle O.R. said.

  It was getting dark now. There was a lamp burning in the room, and you could no longer see out the windows. There was a moment that seemed to be the moment before anything else could happen.

  And then Old Ant’ny’s hat brim jerked upward just a fraction of an inch. “Maw, turn back the bed. These folks want to be gettin’ on home.”

  *

  Little snorts of laughter had been leaking out of Tol for some time, and now he let himself laugh. It was a good laugh, broad and free and loud, including all of us as generously as the shade we sat in, and not only those of us who were living, but Old Ant’ny and Maw Proudfoot and Uncle O.R. and Uncle Fowler and Aunt Belle and Lester and the rest whose bodies lay in their darkness nearby.

  And I will never forget the ones who were still alive that day and how they looked: old Tol with his hands at rest in his lap, laughing until tears ran down his face, and the others around him laughing with him. It was Tol’s benediction, as I grew to know, on that expectancy of good and surprising things that had kept Lester’s eyes, and Tol’s, too, wide open for so long.

  And years later my grandmother would tell me that down among the women, hearing Tol laugh, Miss Minnie had smiled the prim, matronly smile with which she delighted in him. “Mr. Proudfoot,” she said. �
��Mr. Proudfoot is amused.”

  A Burden (1882, 1907, 1941)

  “ME AND Teddy Roosyvelt, we rode through hair, shit, blood, and corruption up to here.” Uncle Peach used the stick he was whittling to mark a level across his nose about an inch above his nostrils.

  “You did not,” Wheeler said, but all the same he was laughing. He was seven years old, and sometimes just looking at Uncle Peach made him laugh.

  “The hell you did,” said Andrew, who was Wheeler’s brother, five years older, because to Uncle Peach he could say anything he wanted to, and he did. Andrew, as Wheeler understood, was practicing to be a grownup. An ambitionless boy would not say “The hell you did” even to Uncle Peach.

  The boys supposed, because everybody else appeared to suppose, that Uncle Peach had been somewhere in the Army during the war with Spain. But they knew from their own observation that Uncle Peach’s shotgun, “Old Deadeye,” was an instrument of mercy to all creatures that ran or flew as well as to some that were sitting still.

  The three of them, the two boys and their Uncle Peach, who was their mother’s baby brother, were sitting in the shade of the tall cedar tree in front of the house. Uncle Peach was whittling a small cedar stick, releasing a fragrance. His knife was sharp, and he was making the shavings fine for fear he would use up the stick and have to go look for another. One of his rules for living was “Never stand up when you can set down,” and he often quoted himself.

  None of the three of them wanted to get up, for the day was already hot, and the shade of the old tree was a happiness. It was happier for being a threatened happiness. A sort of suspense hung over them and over that whole moment among the old trees and the patches of shade in the long yard. Maybe that was why Wheeler never forgot it. They did not know where the boys’ father was. They did not know how come he had forgotten them. They knew only that if Marce Catlett came back from wherever he was and found them sitting there, they would all three be at work before they could say scat.