The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

  Jack said he knew it. He did know it.

  “So we must always be ready,” she said. “Pray without ceasing.”

  “Yes, mam.”

  “Well, God bless Ben Feltner. He was a good man. God rest his soul.”

  Jack stepped ahead of her to help her out the door and down the porch steps.

  “Why, thank you, Jackie,” she said as she set foot at last on the walk.

  He stood and watched her going away, walking, it seemed to him, a tottering edge between eternity and time.

  Toward evening Margaret laid the table, and the family and several of the neighbor women gathered in the kitchen. Only two or three men had come, and they were sitting in the living room by the coffin. The table was spread with the abundance of food that had been brought in. They were just preparing to sit down when the murmur of voices they had been hearing from the road down in front of the stores seemed to converge and to move in their direction. Those in the kitchen stood and listened a moment, and then Mat started for the front of the house. The others followed him through the hall and out onto the porch.

  The sun was down, the light cool and directionless, so that the colors of the foliage and of the houses and storefronts of the town seemed to glow. Chattering swifts circled and swerved above the chimneys. Nothing else moved except the crowd that made its way at an almost formal pace into the yard. The people standing on the porch were as still as everything else, except for Jack Beechum who quietly made his way forward until he stood behind and a little to the left of Mat, who was standing at the top of the steps.

  The crowd moved up near the porch and stopped. There was a moment of hesitation while it murmured and jostled inside itself.

  “Be quiet, boys,” somebody said. “Let Doc do the talking.”

  They became still, and then Doctor Starns, who stood in the front rank, took a step forward.

  “Mat,” he said, “we’re here as your daddy’s friends. We’ve got word that Thad Coulter’s locked up in the jail at Hargrave. We want you to know that we won’t stand for the thing he did.”

  Several voices said, “No!” and “Nosir!”

  “We don’t think we can stand for it, or that we ought to, or that we ought to wait on somebody else’s opinion about it.”

  Somebody said, “That’s right!”

  “We think it’s our business, and we propose to make it so.”

  “That’s right!” said several voices.

  “It’s only up to you to say the word, and we’ll put justice beyond question.”

  And in the now-silent crowd someone held up a coil of rope, a noose already tied.

  The doctor gave a slight bow of his head to Mat and then to Nancy who now stood behind Mat and to his right. And again the crowd murmured and slightly stirred within itself.

  For what seemed to Jack a long time, Mat did not speak or move. The crowd grew quiet again, and again they could hear the swifts chattering in the air. Jack’s right hand ached to reach out to Mat. It seemed to him again that he felt the earth shaking under his feet, as Mat felt it. But though it shook and though they felt it, Mat now stood resolved and calm upon it. Looking at the back of his head, Jack could still see the boy in him, but the head was up. The voice, when it came, was steady:

  “No, gentlemen. I appreciate it. We all do. But I ask you not to do that.”

  And Jack, who had not sat down since morning, stepped back and sat down.

  Nancy, under whose feet the earth was not shaking, if it ever had, stepped up beside her son and took his arm.

  She said to the crowd, “I know you are my husband’s friends. I thank you. I, too, must ask you not to do as you propose. Mat has asked you; I have asked you; if Ben could, he would ask you. Let us make what peace is left for us to make.”

  Mat said, “Come and be with us. We have food, and you all are welcome.”

  He had said, in all, six brief sentences. He was not a forward man. This, I think, was the only public speech of his life.

  “I can see him yet,” my grandmother said, her eyes, full of sudden moisture, again turned to the window. “I wish you could have seen him.”

  And now, after so many years, perhaps I have. I have sought that moment out, or it has sought me, and I see him standing without prop in the deepening twilight, asking his father’s friends to renounce the vengeance that a few hours before he himself had been furious to exact.

  This is the man who will be my grandfather—­the man who will be the man who was my grandfather. The tenses slur and slide under the pressure of collapsed time. For that moment on the porch is not a now that was but a now that is and will be, inhabiting all the history of Port William that followed and will follow. I know that in the days after his father’s death—­and after Thad Coulter, concurring in the verdict of his would-be jurors in Port William, hanged himself in the Hargrave jail and so released Martha Elizabeth from her watch—­my grandfather renewed and carried on his friendship with the Coulters: with Thad’s widow and daughters, with Dave Coulter and his family, and with another first cousin of Thad’s, Marce Catlett, my grandfather on my father’s side. And when my father asked leave of the Feltners to marry their daughter Bess, my mother, he was made welcome.

  Mat Feltner dealt with Ben’s murder by not talking about it and thus keeping it in the past. In his last years, I liked to get him to tell me about the violent old times of the town, the hard drinking and the fighting. And he would oblige me up to a point, enjoying the outrageous stories himself, I think. But always there would come a time in the midst of the telling when he would become silent, shake his head, lift one hand and let it fall; and I would know—­I know better now than I did then—­that he had remembered his father’s death.

  No Feltner or Coulter of the name is left now in Port William. But the Feltner line continues, joined to the Coulter line, in me, and I am here. I am blood kin to both sides of that moment when Ben Feltner turned to face Thad Coulter in the road and Thad pulled the trigger. The two families, sundered in the ruin of a friendship, were united again first in new friendship and then in marriage. My grandfather made a peace here that has joined many who would otherwise have been divided. I am the child of his forgiveness.

  After Mat spoke the second time, inviting them in, the crowd loosened and came apart. Some straggled back down into the town; others, as Mat had asked, came into the house, where their wives already were.

  But Jack did not stay with them. As soon as he knew he was free, his thoughts went to other things. His horse had stood a long time, saddled, without water or feed. The evening chores were not yet done. Ruth would be wondering what had happened. In the morning they would come back together, to be of use if they could. And there would be, for Jack as for the others, the long wearing of grief. But now he could stay no longer.

  As soon as the porch was cleared, he retrieved his hat from the hall tree and walked quietly out across the yard under the maples and the descending night. So as not to be waylaid by talk, he walked rapidly in the middle of the road to where he had tied his horse. Lamps had now been lighted in the stores and the houses. As he approached, his horse nickered to him.

  “I know it,” Jack said.

  As soon as the horse felt his rider’s weight in the stirrup, he started. Soon the lights and noises of the town were behind them, and there were only a few stars, a low red streak in the west, and the horse’s eager footfalls on the road.

  Watch With Me (1916)

  ONE OF the vital organs of Ptolemy Proudfoot’s farm was a small square building called simply “the shop.” Here Tol worked, according to necessity, as a blacksmith, farrier, carpenter, and mender of harness and shoes. The shop contained a forge with a cranking bellows and an anvil resting on an oak block. A workbench, with a stout vise attached, ran along one wall under three small windows. Tools and spare parts and usable scraps lay on the bench or stood propped in corners or hung from nails. On good days when they could be left open, large double doors at the front end admitted
a fine flow of light.

  On days when the weather prevented work outdoors, Tol would go to the shop and putter, or he would go there and sit and think. But he puttered and thought to advantage, for he earned more than he spent and sold more than he bought. He would be in the shop in the fall and winter more than in the spring and summer. In the spring and summer it was a good place to set a hen, and a couple of boxes for that purpose were fastened to the wall at the end of the workbench nearest the front doors.

  Tol and his wife, Miss Minnie, and their neighbors killed hogs as soon as the nights became dependably cold in the fall. They wintered on backbone and spareribs and sausage and souse, with a shoulder or ham now and then. By spring they would begin to be a little tired of pork; fried chicken began to be easy to imagine. That was when Miss Minnie would begin to save eggs and watch for her hens to start setting. She liked to put several hens on eggs, in the henhouse and in the shop, just as soon as the weather began to warm up.

  On the morning when this story begins, the chickens of that year were nearly all hatched. There was only one red hen still hovering sixteen eggs in one of the boxes in the shop. It was a fine morning early in August, dewy and bright; the Katy’s Branch valley was still covered with a shining cloud of fog. It was 1916 and a new kind of world was in the making on the battlefields of France, but you could not have told it, standing on Cotman Ridge with that dazzling cloud lying over Goforth in the valley, and the woods and the ridgetops looking as clear and clean as Resurrection Morning. Birds were singing. And Tol could hear roosters crowing, it seemed to him, all the way to Port William.

  He had just stepped out after breakfast. It was later than usual, because the day had begun crosswise. When he had called his milk cows, they had not come. He had walked in the weak dawn-light down into the woods along the branch, where he found a water gap torn out by a recent freshet. From there he tracked the three cows down the wooded slopes halfway to Goforth before he found them and started them home. He drove them through the rent in the fence, wired it back with his hands well enough to hold until he could return with proper tools and more wire, and went on up the hill to chain them in their places in the barn.

  And then when he was milking the third cow—­a light-colored Jersey by the name of Blanche of whom he was particularly fond—­she solemnly raised her right hind foot, plastered with manure, and set it down again in the half-filled bucket of milk.

  Though he was a large, physically exuberant man who had been a wrestler famous all the way to Hargrave in his younger days, Tol was not a man of violence. But once he got Blanche’s foot out of the bucket, he had to sit there on his stool a good while before he could rid himself of the thought of joyful revenge. On the one hand, he sympathized with the cow. He thought he knew how she felt. It would be exasperating, after finding a hole in the fence and escaping into the wide world, to be driven home again, chained to a stanchion, and required to yield one’s milk into a bucket. On the other hand, Tol’s sense of justice was outraged. He had raised the cow lovingly from a calf; he had sheltered and fed and doctored her; he had loved and petted and pampered her—­and now just look how she had treated him! He leaned his head back into her flank and began to milk again.

  “Blanche,” he said, “I ought to knock you in the head.” He milked on in silence, his anger ebbing away. “But I don’t reckon I will.”

  He stripped her dry, poured the bucket of ruined milk into the hog trough, turned the cows back into the pasture, and went to the house for breakfast, carrying one empty milk bucket and one full one.

  “Did you have trouble with the cows?” Miss Minnie asked. She set Tol’s breakfast before him and started straining the milk.

  Tol told her.

  “Why, the old hussy!” Miss Minnie said. “I’ll bet you wanted to knock her in the head. Did you?”

  “Not this time,” Tol said. And that made him laugh, for he thought he was at the end of the story, but he was not at the end of it yet.

  The day had begun so contrarily that when Tol went by the shop to see about the setting hen on his way to the barn, he was not much surprised to hear her squawking in extreme dismay before he opened the door. When he opened the door he saw what the fuss was about. A big snake had climbed the locust tree next to the shop, crawled out along a limb and under the eave of the building, and was now descending along a crossbrace toward the hen’s nest. The snake was the kind known as a cowsucker, and it was big enough to swallow every egg in the nest. Tol was not particularly afraid of snakes, though he preferred not to walk up on one by surprise, nor did he hate them. He rather liked to have them around to catch mice, and now and then he would capture one to put in his corncrib. All the same, he did not welcome them into his hens’ nests.

  “You got to change your mind, boy,” he said to the snake, who was now looking at him with its head erect, flickering its tongue. “You going to have to take your business elsewhere.”

  Tol thought at first that he would just catch the snake by the end of the tail and buy its goodwill by letting it catch mice a while in the corncrib. But a cowsucker is a grouchy kind of snake, much inclined to stand on its rights, and when Tol reached out for its tail, the snake contracted into loops and threatened to bite Tol’s hand. There is no danger of being poisoned by a cowsucker’s bite, but when one threatens to bite you, you are very much inclined to draw back in a hurry whatever you have stuck out, and you are inclined to take the gesture as an insult.

  Tol was a man slow to anger, but when the snake made as if to strike his hand, his mental state reverted to the moment, by no means long enough ago, when the cow had put her foot in the bucket.

  “Well,” he said to the snake, “if you don’t need killing, then Hell ain’t hot.”

  Tol was thoroughly mad by then, and also anxious for the hen and her nest of eggs. On her account, he wanted to get rid of the snake with the least possible commotion and in the biggest possible hurry.

  So he ran back to the house and put a shell into the chamber of the old ten-gauge shotgun that he had inherited from his father. It was a hard-shooting, single-barreled weapon that Tol’s father had called Old Fetcher, “for it was a sure way to send for fresh meat.”

  When he got back to the shop, Tol flung the door open for light, stood back so as to minimize disturbance to the hen, leveled the long, rusty barrel point-blank at the snake’s head, and fired—­only to see the snake, with maddening dignity and aplomb, slowly depart by way of the hole that Old Fetcher had blasted through the wall.

  Tol fully appreciated how funny that was, but he had no trouble in postponing his laughter. The hen, for one thing, was off the nest now and raising Cain, as if Tol and not the snake were the chief threat to her peace of mind.

  “Get back on that nest and shut up,” Tol said.

  He picked up a stick and ran around to the side of the building, but the snake, after the manner of its kind, was nowhere to be seen. And so Tol patched the hole he had made in the wall, and chinked up the place under the eave where he thought the snake had come in. He shooed the offended hen back into the shop and shut the door.

  “Be quiet, now,” he said. “You’re going to live.”

  He went back to the house, got another shell for the gun, reloaded it, and propped it against the shop door.

  Tol went to the garden then, unhooked his hoe from the fence, sharpened it, and began cleaning out a row of late cabbages.

  Steady work quiets the mind. Tol began to feel that he had got the day off to a straight start at last. He had nearly finished the cabbage row when he saw Sam Hanks’s truck come in and stop in front of the barn.

  Sam got out and came strolling into the garden. He wanted to borrow Tol’s posthole-digging tools so he could set a clothesline post for his mother.

  Sam was Miss Minnie’s favorite nephew, the only son of her only sister and Warren Hanks, a hardworking but somehow luckless tenant farmer. Sam had not followed in his father’s footsteps. “He loves a damned wheel,” his father h
ad said, and Sam earned a modest living for himself and his now-widowed mother by hauling livestock and other things in his truck. He owned plenty of mechanic’s tools, but when he needed something to dig with, he came to Tol.

  For that matter, Sam was apt to show up at Tol’s and Miss Minnie’s pretty often, even when he didn’t want to borrow something. He returned his aunt’s affection, and he liked Tol. Moreover, he enjoyed Tol. When Sam came walking into the garden that morning, Tol looked completely in character. He stood amid the rows of his garden, which he kept with an almost perfect attention to detail. And in the midst of that neatness and order, Tol could have been a scarecrow, albeit an unusually big one. He wore an utterly shapeless old straw hat. And he had now been long enough beyond the reach and influence of Miss Minnie that part of his shirttail was out, one of his cuffs was unbuttoned, and his left shoe was untied. Tol’s clothes always looked as if they were making a strenuous and perhaps hopeless effort just to stay somewhere in his vicinity.

  “Well,” Sam Hanks said to him, “looks like I been elected to put up a clothesline. Don’t reckon I could borrow your diggers and all.”

  “Why, sure,” Tol said. “They’re yonder in the shop. Watch, now, when you go in and don’t get snakebit.”

  Tol then told Sam what had happened. But he just said he had let the snake get away from him; he didn’t tell about shooting the hole in the wall. He wanted to save that for when he could laugh about it. He was a man who had been mistreated by a cow and a snake all in the same morning, and he felt sore and aggrieved.

  But while he was still commenting to Sam on the cowsucker’s extreme ill humor, he saw his neighbor, Thacker Hample, coming over the ridge, and then another trouble returned to his mind.

  Thacker Hample belonged to a large family locally noted for the fact that from one generation to another not a one of them had worked quite right. Their commonest flaw was poor vision. When he could find them or somebody found them for him, Thacker wore glasses with lenses as thick as shoe soles. Walter Cotman said that if Nightlife’s nose had been a quarter of an inch longer, he would have been illiterate—­but that was Walter Cotman. They called Thacker Nightlife on the theory that he could not tell daylight from dark, and therefore was liable to conduct his nightlife in the daytime. The name had a certain sexual glamour that appealed to Thacker Hample himself. When he had occasion to call himself by name, he usually called himself Nightlife—­though he didn’t ordinarily say much of anything to anybody.