The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Read online

  On the far side of the cornfield I went through a gate into the creek road and then through another gate into the lane that went up to the Brightleafs’ house. There was a row of tall Lombardy poplars that somebody had planted along the little stream that flowed from the Chatham Spring. When I got into the shadow of the first poplar I stopped and called, “Oh, Fred!”

  Nobody answered. All around it was quiet. I walked the stepping-stones across the stream and went up to the house, knowing already that nobody was home but not wanting to believe it. I went all the way up to the yard fence and called again. It was a fact. Nobody was there, except for Jess Brightleaf ’s old bird dog, Fern, who had a litter of pups under the front porch, and Mrs. Brightleaf ’s old hens who looked at me from their dust holes under the snowball bush and did not get up. It was hot and sweaty, the kind of afternoon that makes you think of water.

  Everybody was gone, and for a minute or two I felt disappointed and lonesome. But then the quiet changed, and I ceased to mind. All at once the countryside felt big and easy around me, and I was glad to be alone in it.

  I looked at the sugar pear tree, but no pears were ripe yet, and I went on down to the spring. Some of the Chathams had lived there once and had left their name with the good vein of water that flowed from the bedrock at the foot of the hill. But the Chathams probably had not called it the Chatham Spring; probably they had called it after somebody who had been there before—­maybe after an Indian, I thought. People named springs after other people, not themselves.

  The Chatham Spring was cunningly walled and roofed with rock. There was a wooden door that you opened into a little room, moist and dark, where the vein flowed out of the hill into a pool deep enough for the Brightleafs to dip their buckets. The water flowed out of the pool under a large foot-worn rock that was the threshold of the door. The Brightleafs carried all their household water from the spring.

  I opened the door. When my eyes had accepted the dimness I could see the water striders’ feet dimpling the surface of the pool and a green frog on a glistening ledge just above the water. I fastened the door and lay down outside at the place I liked best to drink, which was just below the threshold stone where the water was flowing and yet so smooth that it held a piece of the sky in it as still and bright as a set in a ring. The water was so clear you could look down through the reflection of the sky or your face and see maybe a crawfish. I took my hat off and drank big swallows, relishing the coldness of the water and the taste it carried up from the deep rock and the darkness inside the hill. As I drank, the light lay warm on my back like a hand, and I could smell the mint that grew along the stream. When I had drunk all I could hold I put my nose into the water, and then my whole face.

  The Chatham Spring had never been dry, not even in the terrible summers of 1908 and 1930 and 1936. People spoke of it as “an everlasting spring.” There was a line of such springs lying across that part of the country, and all of them had been cared for a long time and bore the names of families: Chatham and Beechum and Branch and Bower and Coulter. There were days, I knew, when my Grandfather Catlett would ride horseback from one to the other, arriving at each one thirsty, to drink, savor, and reflect on the different tastes of the different waters, those thirsts and quenchings, tastes and differences being signs of something he profoundly knew. And I, as I drank and wetted my face, thought of the springs and of him, my mind leaning back out of the light and into time.

  From the spring I went back to the creek road and across and through another gate and up the long slope of an unclipped pasture. I could see my grandfather’s steers gone to shade in a grove of locust trees on up the creek. I walked a while through the ripened bluegrass stems and the clover and Queen Anne’s lace, and then I came to a path that led up to a gate at the top of the ridge. There was a fairly fresh manure pile in the path, and I stopped to watch two tumblebugs at work. They shaped their ball, rolled it onto the path, and started down the hill with it, the one in front walking on its forelegs and tugging the ball along with its hind legs, the one in the back walking on its hind legs and pushing the ball with its forelegs. For a while I lost myself in poking around on my hands and knees, looking at the other small creatures who lived in the grass: the ants, the beetles, the worms, the butterflies who sought the manure piles or the flowers, the bees that were working in the clover. Snakes lived in the field too, and rabbits and mice and meadowlarks and sparrows and bobwhites, but I wasn’t so likely to come upon those by crawling around and parting the grass with my hands.

  After a while I went on up to the gate, and through it, and across the ridge to the pond. That field was the one we called the Pond Field. Grandpa said that when he took over the farm as a young man, that field had been ill used and there were many gullies in it. He had made the pond by working back and forth across a big sinkhole, first with a breaking plow, and then with a slip-scraper in which he hauled the loosened earth to the gullies and filled them. And thus he restored the field at the same time that he dug the pond. A breeze was moving over the pond, covering the surface with little shards and splinters of blue sky. I shucked off my sweaty clothes and laid them in the grass.

  Fred Brightleaf and Henry and I were absolutely forbidden to swim in the pond, or anyplace else, without a grown-up along. We were absolutely, absolutely forbidden to go swimming alone, without at least another boy on hand to tell where we had drowned. My poor mother, terrified by my transgressions, attempted to keep me alive until grown by a remedy known in our family as “peach tree tea”—­a peach (or lilac) switch applied vigorously to the shanks of the legs. This caustic medication inflicted great suffering on me and on her, and produced not the slightest correction in my behavior. If she had been able to whip me while I was swimming, then the pain might have overridden the pleasure and destroyed my willfulness. But since her punishment was necessarily distant from my immersions, the pleasure outweighed the pain and lasted longer. Back there at the pond by myself I could maintain for at least a while the illusion that I was no more than myself, Andy Catlett, as ancestorless as the first creature, neither the son of Bess and Wheeler Catlett nor the grandson of Dorie and Marce Catlett and Mat and Margaret Feltner.

  I crossed the rim of deep cattle tracks at the edge of the pond and waded in, feeling the muddy bottom grow soft and miry underfoot. When I was in knee-deep I launched myself flat out, smacked down, went under, came up, and swam my best overhand stroke out toward the middle. If Fred and Henry had been there we would have raced. Being alone, I took my time. When I got out to the deep place I sucked in a big breath and dived. Way down where the water was black and cold it was revealed to me that if I drowned before I lived to be grown I would be sorry, and I kicked and stroked at the dark, watching the water brighten until my head broke out into daylight and air again.

  I swam back into shallow water. This partial concession to my mother’s fears made me feel absolved without confession, forgiven without regret. I turned over on my back and floated for a long time. Looked at from so near the surface of the pond, the sky was huge, the world almost nothing at all, and I apparently absent altogether. The sky seemed a great gape of vision, without the complication of so much as an eye. Now and then a butterfly or a snake doctor or a bird would fly across and I would watch it. But what really fascinated and satisfied me were the birds high up that, after you had looked into the sky a while, just appeared or were just there: a hawk soaring, maybe, or a swift or a swallow darting about.

  There were three joys of swimming. The first was going down out of the hot air into the cooling water. The second was being in the water. The third was coming out again. After I was cooled and quiet, a little tired, and had begun to dislike the way my fingertips had wrinkled, I waded out into the breeze that was chilly now on my wet skin. I stood in the grass and let the breeze dry me, shivering a little until I felt the warmth of the sun. And maybe the best joy of all, a fourth, was the familiar feeling of my clothes when I put them on again.

  For a long time the
n I just sat in the grass, feeling clean and content, thinking perhaps of nothing at all. I was nine years old, going on ten; having never needed to ask, I knew exactly where I was; I did not want to be anyplace else.

  Chapter 2

  WHAT MOVED me finally was hunger. I thought of the bowl of cold biscuits that Grandma kept covered with a plate in the dish cabinet. If she was in the kitchen when I got there, she would butter me two and fill them with jam. If she was not in the kitchen, I would just take two or three from the bowl and eat them as they were, and that would be good enough.

  When I came over the ridge behind the house and barns and started down toward the lot gate, I was pretending to be a show horse. Our father had taken Henry and me to the Shelby County Fair not long before. We had watched the horse show in the old round wooden arena, and I had brought home a program that I read over and over to savor the fine names of the horses. And often when I was out by myself I did the gaits.

  It was not apparent to me how a two-legged creature could perform the slow gait or rack, but I could do very credible versions, I thought, of the walk, trot, and canter. And so I was a three-gaited horse, light sorrel, very fine in my conformation and motion and style. And I was the rider of the horse I was. And I was the announcer who said, “Ladies and gentlemen, please ask your horses to canter.”

  I saw my grandfather then. He was on Rose, his bay mare, coming around the corner of the barn toward the lot gate. He let himself through the gate and shut it again without dismounting, and started up the rise toward me. He was eighty that summer; his walking cane hung by its crook from his right forearm. He had the mare in a brisk running walk. From where I watched, except for the cane, you would have thought him no older than my father. Afoot, he was clearly an old man; on horseback he recovered something of the force and grace of his younger days, and you could see what he had been. He rode as a man rides who has forgotten he is on a horse.

  As we drew near to each other, I slowed to a walk and then changed to a trot, which I thought my best gait, wanting him to be pleased. But his countenance, set and stern as it often was, did not change. He reined the mare in only a little.

  “Baby, go yonder to the house. Your daddy wants you.”

  “Why?” I knew he wouldn’t tell me, but I asked anyhow.

  “Ne’ mind! He wants to talk to you.”

  He put his heel to the mare and went by and on up toward the ridgetop. He rode looking straight ahead. The wind carried the mare’s tail out a little to the side and snatched puffs of dust from her footfalls. I watched until first the mare and then he went out of sight over the ridge.

  I did not enjoy transactions that began “Your daddy wants to talk to you.” I did not cherish the solemn precincts of the grown-up world in which such transactions took place. But I had no choice now, having heard, and I went on to the house. In my guilt I supposed my father had somehow learned of my trip to the pond.

  There was nobody in the kitchen; it was quiet; a cloth was spread over the dishes on the table; the afternoon sunlight came into the room through the open pantry door. I went through the back hall to the front of the house. When I came into the living room I was surprised to see Cousin Thelma there, dressed up. She was Grandma’s sister’s child, about my father’s age, forty-five or so. She and my father were sitting in rocking chairs, talking quietly. I do not know where my grandmother was.

  When I opened the door my father and Cousin Thelma quit talking. Cousin Thelma smiled at me and said, “Hello, Andy, my sweet.”

  My father smiled at me too, but he did not say anything. He stood, held out his hand to me, and I took it. He led me out into the hall and up the stairs.

  And I remember how terribly I did not want to go. I had come in out of the great free outdoor world of my childhood—­the world in which, in my childish fantasies, I hoped someday to be a man. But my father, even more than my mother with her peach switch, was the messenger of another world, in which, as I unwillingly knew, I was already involved in expectation and obligation, difficulty and sorrow. It was as if I knew this even from my father’s smile, from the very touch of his hand. Later I would understand how surely even then he had begun to lead me to some of the world’s truest pleasures, but I was far from such understanding then.

  We went back to the room over the dining room. My father shut the door soundlessly and sat down on the bed. I stood in front of him. He was still holding my hand, as though it were something he had picked up and forgotten to put down.

  “Andy,” he said, “Uncle Andrew was badly hurt this afternoon. A fellow shot him. I want you to understand. It may be he won’t be able to live.”

  He was looking straight at me, and I saw something in his eyes I never had seen there before: fear—­fear and grief. For what I felt then I had, and have, no name. It was something like embarrassment, as if I had blundered into knowledge that was forbidden to small boys. I knew the disturbance my father had felt in imparting it to me; this made me feel that something was required of me, and I did not know what. That Uncle Andrew was a man who could be shot had not occurred to me before, but I could not say that.

  What I said sounded to me as odd and inane, probably, as anything else I might have said: “Where did he get shot?”

  “Down at Stoneport.”

  “I mean where did he get hit?”

  “Once above the belt and once below.” And my father touched his own belly in the places of Uncle Andrew’s wounds. Now, when I remember, it sometimes seems to me that he touched those places on my own belly—­certainly, in the years to come, I would touch them myself—­and perhaps he did. “Here,” he said, “and here.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “Yes. I’ve been to the hospital, and I saw him.”

  “What did he say?” I was trying, I think, to call him back, not from death, but from strangeness, the terrible distinction of his hurt, into which he was now withdrawn.

  “He said a fellow shot him.”

  And I did then have at least the glimpse of a vision of Uncle Andrew lying on a bed, saying such words to my father who stood beside him.

  What more we said and how we left that room I do not remember.

  Now I know that my father led me away to keep me, in my first knowledge of what had happened, away from Grandma in her first knowledge of it—­as if to reduce grief by dividing it. Also I think he was moved by a hopeless instinct to protect me, to shield me from the very thing he had to tell me, before which he was himself helpless and unprotected.

  Somehow I got out of the house again. As I stepped around the corner of the back porch, Jarrat Coulter and Dick Watson drove up to the barn lot gate in Cousin Jarrat’s scratched and dusty car. They had been to town to get Grandpa’s broken hay rope spliced; there was hay to be put up the next day.

  I ran to greet them. Both of them were my friends, and I was happy to see them. I needed something ordinary to happen.

  They were looking out at me, smiling. Ordinarily Cousin Jarrat would have said, “Andy, how about opening the gate, old bud?”

  But I violated my own wish for the ordinary by stepping up on the running board and announcing, “Uncle Andrew got shot.”

  They had already heard—­I could see that they had—­but in their confusion they pretended that they had not.

  Dick said nothing, and Cousin Jarrat said, “Aw! Is that a fact? Well!”

  And then the day seemed to collapse around me into what it had become. There was no place where what had happened had not happened.

  Later, I remember, I was standing in the little pantry off the kitchen, watching my grandmother at work. In the pantry was the table covered by a broken marble dresser-top where she rolled out the dough for biscuits or pie crusts, and so she must have been making biscuits or a pie, though it is not clear to me why she should have been doing that at such a time. I suppose that, in her trouble, she had needed to put herself to work. Perhaps she thought she was distracting or comforting me. She knew at least how I loved to wat
ch her at work there, especially when she made pies: rolling out the dough for the bottom crust and pressing it into the pan, pouring in the filling, crisscrossing the long strips of dough over the top, and then holding the pan on the fingertips of her left hand while she stroked a knife around the edge, cutting off the overhanging bits of dough.

  The sun, getting low, shone in at the one window of the pantry, and everything it touched gleamed a rich reddish gold. I stood at her elbow, as I had done many times, and watched and we talked, about what I cannot imagine. My father must have been gone for some time. Cousin Thelma, if she was still there, was in the living room. My grandfather had not returned.

  And then my other grandfather, Mat Feltner, rapped at the kitchen door and came in. He had come, he said, to take me home. I remember him and Grandma smiling, speaking pleasantly, looking down at me.

  I followed my grandfather out to his car. We got in and started down toward Hargrave. We had gone maybe two miles when Granddaddy, who had driven so far in silence, laid his hand on my knee, as he would do sometimes, and said, “Hon, your Uncle Andrew is dead. He died about five o’clock.”

  I did not reply, and he said no more. He was a comforting man to be with. Perhaps that was enough.

  The sun was down by the time we got to Hargrave. Granddaddy pulled up in front of our house, and I got out. Where he went then, I do not know.