The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 52

  We went back up the hill into the barn lot. In those days there was a long building on one side of the lot that incorporated the corncrib, the wagon shed, what we still called the buggy shed though there was no longer a buggy, and the stall where Dick milked the cows. Over the cowstall was a loft where hay could have been stored, but it was now only a catchall for useless things too good to throw away. Disregarded by the grownups, it was an excellent place to be out of sight and out of mind.

  Fred and I went up the ladder on the wall of the building and into the loft. The main attraction up there was an old trunk filled with books. The books were a numbered set, all alike, thick and heavy and filled with big words, charts, graphs, and tables. Neither of us could read those books, and yet they fascinated us. We called them “the New Orleens books” because their covers were of the same light brown as the cane syrup that we knew as “New Orleens molasses,” and because “New Orleens” sounded exotic and important. What they were remains a mystery to this day, for long before we ever read even the titles on their spines, they disappeared. But to open that trunk and to take those books out one by one and look into them made us feel like archaeologists unearthing a tomb inscribed in an unknown language.

  Fred and I opened the trunk, withdrew the ice-cold volumes, and looked into them, letting the mystery of them come upon us, and then put them back and closed the lid. And then, without the least sense of incongruity, we chanted a poem we had learned from Rufus which seemed to us both extra­ordinarily funny and deeply mysterious, and which revealed that “truck” was another English word with a misfortunate rhyme.

  By then we were cold. Even in the shelter of the little loft, inactivity had let the weather seep into our clothes. We became conscious of our visible breath and of the numbness of our toes and fingers.

  “Let’s go.”

  We hurried down the ladder and back to the stripping room, where we took off our gloves and overshoes and got close to the stove.

  As soon as we were warm again, Jess sent Fred home across the fields to help his mother with the evening chores. Not long after that, Dick Watson left to do his own chores, and I went with him.

  I walked beside him, holding his hand. As we came up to the first gate an airplane came over, and we stopped and watched it.

  I said, “Dick, do you reckon an airplane could fly all the way to Heaven?”

  “Can’t do it, buddy,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “After a ways it gets tough up there. They can’t make it.”

  That was a relief to me. I thought, “Good!”

  Dick and I went to the feed barn first. He unharnessed Beck and Catherine, led them out to drink at the well, and gave them the corn that he had let me carry in from the crib. As often as he could, Dick gave me work to do, because I was always begging to help, but also, I think now, to keep me out of his way or out of danger. When not in the company of other boys, I was inclined to be dreamy. I could slide right out of the present world, right out of the dangers of the present world, into the world of Robin Hood or the Swiss Family Robinson or King Arthur and his knights. Or, on the contrary, I could be recklessly eager to help. And so I was rather often in danger without knowing it, especially around large animals. My reveries and enthusiasms were accustomed to be intruded upon by voices from the responsible world: “Look out, Andy!” “Wake up, Andy!” “Mind now, baby!” “Get out of the way!” My father once went so far as to hit me on the shoulder with his fist in imitation of a mule’s kick: “That’s how it’ll feel, only harder!”

  Dick was never so emphatic, but he too was obliged again and again to remind me where I was: “Wait now, buddy!” “Watch out, buddy!” “Buddy, get back!” But he was more patient than my father and grandfather, and I tried hard to be alert when I was with him.

  Dick, as I have just said again, was kind to me. But of course my saying this raises the question of what to make of a servant’s kindness. There obviously can be no doubt that, if there had been an occasion for such an expectation, my elders would have expected Dick to be kind to me. But there are qualities and degrees of kindness, and a boy is as good a judge of them as anybody. I don’t think Dick was kind in response to expecta-tion. He was kind because it was in his character to be so, just as it was in my character to love him for it. We were living in the history of “race relations,” to be sure, but, like everybody else, we were living as ourselves in it.

  And so when Dick led Beck out of her stall and I was standing too close, he said, “Stand back, buddy,” because, like any adult, he did not want to be responsible for getting me hurt, but also he did not want me to get hurt.

  I knew both what he meant and how he meant it, and I stood back.

  I should have been so tractable in school—­but, though I did not yet know it, that barn was a school.

  We stabled the two other mules and Grandpa’s saddle mare and Henry’s and my pony that had been out on pasture for the day, and I brought corn for them. We drove Grandpa’s coming-yearling steers into the pen in the back of the barn and fastened them up for the night. We climbed up into the loft, and Dick forked down hay for the mules and the mare and the pony and the steers. When we went out at last and drew the sliding doors shut behind us, the barn work was done until morning. The barn then seemed quieted and complete in itself, the animals sheltered for the night. We could still hear them eating after we closed the doors. We went to the cowstall, put in hay and corn for the cows, and while I brought the milk bucket from the house Dick chained them in their places. We got our milking stools, and I sat on mine and watched while Dick sat on his and milked the cows.

  I would have carried the milk to the house, but Dick said, “Next year maybe,” and so I walked with him and held his hand while he carried the bucket. He set the bucket inside the door of the kitchen where Grandma had the milk crocks and the strainer ready.

  And then we went to the woodpile where for a little time again I could really help—­or at least where Dick’s charity allowed me to believe I was really helping. He brought the crosscut saw from its place under the eave of the wagon shed. And then, he lifting the heavy end and I the light, we laid a long locust pole on the sawbuck. Dick laid the saw across the pole. We each took a handle and began sawing the pole into stove-lengths.

  Dick said, “Don’t ride the saw, buddy. Don’t push, just pull. All right.”

  When we had sawed enough, Dick picked up his axe and split the thicker lengths at the chopping block. By then the Brightleafs and Old Man Hawk had gone home, and it was getting dark. We gathered armloads of wood as big as we could manage and carried them to the kitchen where we dumped them into the woodbox beside the stove.

  I wanted to go down and help Dick at his own woodpile, but Grandma said no to that, and so for me the day was over. Night had come. Grandma had a lighted lamp on the kitchen table.

  I took off my wraps and washed my hands and face.

  “Go in the living room where your grandpa is and get warm,” Grandma said. “We’ll have some supper before long.”

  I went through the cold hall to the living room. Grandpa was sitting in his rocking chair on the dark side of the stove. He didn’t say anything. I went around to the other side to Grandma’s chair by her stand table where her best lamp was lighted. My grip was on the floor by the table legs. I opened it and got out The Boy’s King Arthur and sat down.

  Seeing me open the book on my lap, Grandpa said, “Ay God, that’s right, baby. Go to your book. That’s the thing.”

  I am perfectly sure, now, that he would not have seen a nickel’s worth of good in King Arthur and his knights, if he had known of their existence. But he seemed to me then to have extended a great deal of credit to reading about them, and I merely assumed he was right.

  He returned to what he called “studying.” He sat looking down at his lap, his left hand idle on the chair arm, his right scratching his head, his white hair gleaming in the lamplight. I knew that when he was studying he was thinking, but I d
id not know what about. Now I have aged into knowledge of what he thought about.

  He thought of his strength and endurance when he was young, his merriment and joy, and how his life’s burdens had then grown upon him. He thought of that arc of country that centered upon Port William as he first had known it in the years just after the Civil War, and as it had changed, and as it had become; and how all that time, which would have seemed almost forever to him when he was a boy, now seemed hardly any time at all. He thought of the people he remembered, now dead, and of those who had come and gone before his knowledge, and of those who would come after, and of his own place in that long procession. Looking at me, he must have remembered that his own grandfather had been the first of our name to come into this place, in a time that had seemed ancient to him once, that he now knew to have been almost recent, and that the time from his grandfather to his grandson had been short. He thought of the living and of how they would appear to the dead, until the dead lived again in his thoughts, and the presently living appeared as ghosts of a future yet to come. He thought of the history of his hands. He laid them in his lap and studied them, and he saw that they were hard-used and now almost useless. This was a study he could not have remembered beginning, and surely he knew that it could not be finished, by him or by anybody.

  As he studied his memories and thoughts, I studied him, so that I have not forgotten him. And then I opened my book and studied it. I looked at the print, but my mind, like a dull blade, glanced off. It would not bite in, for the English of those pages was old-fashioned; it was strange to everything I knew. When my mother had started reading it to me on Christmas night and the nights following, I had understood it and been charmed by it, but hearing received it more readily than sight, and she had given me the explanations I needed. And so when I opened the book, unable as I felt to read it for myself, I let into the quiet of the room the memory of my mother’s voice reading, which was a comfort to me then as it is now. Besides, the book contained full-page illustrations in which the knights wore armor made of metal as brilliant almost as sunlight and the horses were as fierce and beautiful as dream horses come alive. These were to me then almost endlessly worthy of study. And from the opened pages rose then as now, for I still have the book, the sound of my mother’s voice reading quietly and yet urgently, as if anticipating all that was to follow: “It befell in the days of the noble Utherpendragon, when he was King of England, that there was born to him a son who in after time was King Arthur.” This might have made me homesick, except for the sound of Grandma’s footsteps in the hall and the hall door opening.

  “Supper’s ready, Marce. Come on, Andy.”

  We ate our supper in the lamplight that glowed over the table and left much of the kitchen shadowy and dim. Grandma had warmed the beans and potatoes from dinner, but instead of sausage, we had slices of her Christmas ham and turkey, and instead of biscuits she had corn battercakes that she kept putting on our plates hot from the griddle and that we also ate with sorghum molasses for dessert.

  I stayed after supper to dry the dishes just to be in the kitchen with her, and then we went into the living room, she carrying the lighted lamp, which she set on the mantelpiece above Grandpa’s chair, where again he sat quietly studying his thoughts and scratching his head. She went to her own chair, took her sewing basket and darning onto her lap, and began to thread a needle, which was more of a job now, she said, than it used to be.

  At home at night, when we didn’t have homework to do, we played the radio, but that had not yet become a habit of this house. The radio sat on the stand table by the front window, its batteries on the floor beneath, waiting to be turned on when there was something especially good to hear: Renfro Valley on Saturday night, maybe, or Wings over Jordan on Sunday morning. Batteries cost money and they were not to be wasted. Grandma would have turned it on for me if I had asked, but I didn’t ask, for there was no shortage of things to do.

  I went to the closet—­“press” was her term for it—­behind Grandma’s chair and took out her button box. Every house I visited as a child had a button box. It has disappeared now from every house I know, but then it was a necessary part of household economy. No worn-out garment then was simply thrown away. When it was worn past wearing and patching, all its buttons were snipped off and put into the button box. And then when something old needed a new button, or when something newly made needed a set of buttons, the button box provided. Grandma’s was an old shoe box better than half full of buttons of all sorts. It was a pleasure just to run your fingers through, like running your fingers through a bucket of shelled corn. My old game with it was to paw through it in search of matching sets of buttons, especially the intensely colored glass buttons that had come off dresses. I sat on the floor by Grandma’s chair with the box in my lap and fished out a set of shapely black buttons and lined them up on the linoleum beside me.

  And then it came to me that I was no longer interested in button boxes. Maybe it was because I was now traveling away from home by bus, by myself, but I knew suddenly and finally that my time of playing with buttons was past, just as one summer evening a year or two later, when I had found a perfect slingshot fork in the top of a tree, it came to me that I was no longer interested in slingshots, and I climbed down and left the perfect fork uncut.

  I got out the catalogue and looked at the farm equipment, especially the work harness, for I wanted above all things to own my own mule and my own harness. And then I got the paper and read the funnies. But my new knowledge that I had grown beyond playing with buttons had disturbed me, and I was restless.

  Seeing that I was, Grandma said, “Why don’t you get your horse book and look at it with Grandpa?”

  I went and got the book and climbed with it onto Grandpa’s lap, something else I was not going to permit myself to do much longer. The book was The Trotting and Pacing Horse in America by Hamilton Busby, published in 1904. My father, when he was away at law school, had bought the book and sent it home to Grandpa. I doubt that it had ever mattered much to him, for he was not a man who went much to books for anything, but it mattered a great deal to me. Though the passages on breeders, breeding, and pedigrees meant little to me and I skipped them, by then I was familiar with its many photographs, which I had looked at again and again, and I had practically memorized a few stories of great horses and great races.

  It was a book about a kind of glory: the glory of preeminent horses. A horse hitched to any kind of horse-drawn vehicle, by now, is to most people the veriest symbol of obsolescence, and so it comes a little hard to think of the standardbred horse as a phenomenon of the modern world, but that is what he was. His great era was that between the development for general use of smooth-surfaced roads, over which a harness horse could travel at speed, and the mass production of affordable automobiles. At the time of Grandpa’s youth and on into his middle years, fast trotters and pacers were in demand. Dan Patch, a bay horse who paced a mile in one minute and fifty-five seconds in 1905, had the reputation of a hero. For a while in his younger days, Grandpa had trained standardbred horses and had even driven in races in Lexington. He was in Lexington the night they brought the great Dan Patch into the lobby of the Phoenix Hotel. Grandpa did not speak much of these things even to my father, for his own effort ended in disappointment. Hard times came, and he had to give it up. But the passion of it had stayed with him, for it rested upon a passion for good livestock, chiefly horses and mules, that never left him.

  There is such a thing as lovesickness for good horses and mules, and for this there is no cure. People who operate machines know nothing like it. This creaturely love can keep one interested all day long in every motion of a good team or a good saddle horse. And not only all day long, but all year round and all life long. Grandpa’s life, I think, was shaped around this passion. To him the difference between a good horse or mule and one not so good was paramount, as was the question of how one drove or how one rode.

  And so when I climbed into his lap and ope
ned that book, which I believe was the only book that ever had actually belonged to him, and which he probably had not opened for years before I came along and found it and again opened it, I opened a part of his own history that undoubtedly had disappointment in it and pain, and yet I called forth his old passion too, and so he indulged me. Without his small-lensed glasses that he rarely used and probably could not have found, he could not see to read. But I turned through the book from picture to picture, and as his finger came to rest under each one I read off the name of the horse: Lou Dillon, Major Delmar, Dan Patch, Prince Alert, Flora Temple, Dexter, Goldsmith Maid, Nancy Hanks. At that point, for reasons unknown to me then and now, he would exclaim, “Good God A’mighty! Is that Nancy Hanks?” Whatever his reasons, he was moved by his memory of the brown mare who then stood before us, her lead rein held by a man with a mustache wearing a felt hat cocked over his eyes and suspenders over, apparently, a long-sleeved undershirt.

  When we had looked at all the pictures, Grandpa put on his coat and cap and overshoes, and, though Grandma said, “Oh, don’t go out in that old cold wind,” I put on mine. We went out to the barn, Grandpa carrying a lighted lantern in one hand and his cane in the other, I walking behind him in the lantern’s glow. Our long shadows strode with us, while the starless dark pressed in around us as though to extinguish our light. In the barn we went from stall to stall and into the pen of steers. We looked at every animal. Any one that was lying down Grandpa prodded with the cane, and it got up and stretched and looked at us wide-eyed through the cloud of its breath.