The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

  Slowly, so as to make no noise, he straightens himself in the chair, feeling with that movement how tired he is. This is the second night in a row that he has passed with little sleep—­and, he might as well say, no rest. Seeing from the slight paling of the windows that dawn has begun, anxious for the night to be over, he reaches up and turns off the lamp, letting the grey of the sky seep into the room. It is not as light as he thought it might be.

  His awareness of the room fades. All his attention is caught now by the pain in his shoulder. The pain is like a four-inch sliver of hot light burrowing in under his shoulder blade. Or like a bullet; the pain of a wound would be the same as other pain. It could be borne. A man gets used to pain, he thinks. He learns it. It gets to be familiar to him, a part of what his life is and feels like. And what good does it do him? It teaches him to make light of the pains that are less, and to respect those that are greater. It teaches him what he can stand. And what good does that do him? He needs to know what he can stand because the chances are he will have to stand as much as he is able. That is what is ahead of him—­to suffer and to stand it. And so is there virtue in standing it? Maybe. Surely. But there are limits too, and suffering kills. Ernest stood a great deal, and kept quiet, until there came a greatness of it that he could not stand. And that—­what it takes to kill a man, what his limit is—­is his mystery. The mystery of his death that becomes the mystery of his life. In the flow of his strange half-dream, Mat becomes conscious of his own mortality upon him. And he does not care.

  He rouses. The light has grown stronger. The outlines of the room have begun to emerge out of the shadows. Changed to accommodate Ernest’s coffin and the ceremonies of his death, the room has an austerity that seems to Mat not only to stand for the sadness of all else, but to be in itself a cause for sadness. He longs for it to be the way it was.

  In the paling gloom he can make out the figure of Old Jack slumped in another of the uncompromising chairs, still asleep, his hands resting on his knees, the cane propped against the seat between his legs.

  They sat out on the porch until after midnight, listening to the music and the noises of the crowd. After Wheeler had started back to Hargrave, it was decided that the three women would go to bed, leaving Mat and Old Jack to sit through the rest of the night beside the coffin. Old Jack had insisted on staying, over the protests of Bess and Hannah, who thought he ought to rest.

  “All I do is rest, honey,” he said to Hannah.

  He and Mat sat in the living room and talked, Mat sitting at the head of the coffin with his back to it, and Old Jack facing him, as they still sit. Mat, as though to lead his own mind as far from that room and that night as possible, turned the conversation ­toward the past. The old man spoke of the names and landmarks and happenings of a time before Mat’s birth, and Mat listened, his mind drawn back before its own beginning, held and quieted by the vision of another time, and by the sense of the continuance of the land, the place, through all that has happened on it and to it—­its history of little cherishing and much abuse. For as always it was finally the land that they spoke of, fascinated as they have been all their lives by what has happened to it, their own ties to it, the wife of their race, more lovely and bountiful and kind than they have usually deserved, more demanding than they have often been able to bear.

  After the house grew quiet, Old Jack’s interest in the talk began to flag, and soon he quit talking altogether. He yawned and rubbed his eyes, and then nodded, and his head dropped forward. With a kind of anger he shook himself, and roused. Looking up at the lamp by Ernest’s coffin, he scratched his head, and in the midst of scratching dozed off; his hand came slowly down and found a resting place on his thigh. His face, tilted forward, was shadowed, but the lamplight gleamed in his white hair.

  Mat remained wakeful a long time. In the silence then he seemed to have reached the end not just of talk but of thought as well. He felt the pressing in of it—­the silence of Ernest’s death, the ever-waiting silence that surrounds all speech.

  He was still sitting there in that suspension when he heard the approaching clamor of Whacker’s funeral procession. At first it seemed only a fitful last resurgence of the festivity, an indecipherable mingling of shouts and laughter, but as it drew nearer he made out the measured heavy beat of a dead march and, above it, the strained wailing of a dirge.

  Mat’s first impulse was to take the irreverence of it as an affront. And for that reason, though it seemed to him he recognized the voices, he did not get up as the clamor drew near to try to see who was making it. But as the procession drew even with the house, he felt himself irresistibly drawn into the spirit of it. That following the giddy jubilance of its victory celebration the peaceful sleep of the town should be broken, not by any song of victory or thanksgiving, but by voices singing a dirge—­that seemed to him to be fitting. For in his mind, at least, and the minds of the others who had sat in silence on the porch, hadn’t the night been burdened with the knowledge that the dead have lost and are absent from victory?

  But that they went by singing, voices raised in the rhythm of loss and grief with unabashed glee, seemed to Mat to change the night, to start it ­toward something else—­though he was not able to say what.

  He shifts in his chair, needing to be up and stirring now that he is awake. There is no longer a comfortable way to sit. But he does not want to disturb the sleepers, and the silence still presses on him as with a weight.

  He thinks of the women and the baby, still asleep. And then there comes to him not only the thought of Margaret but the sense of her, lying asleep, alone in their bed in the dim room. He longs to go in and lie down beside her and take her in his arms.

  Though he does not go to her now, the longing to do so makes a small cell of happiness in his mind. It has been a long time since his thought has gone so freely ­toward her.

  AMONG THE DEAD

  Lying on his back among the headstones and mounds of the graveyard, Burley wakens, changed by his sleep, his head filled with a throbbing dull ache. He lies still for some time before he opens his eyes.

  He can hear the roosters crowing, close and far, and birds singing. He has got to get up. They have got to get out of there before the whole town is awake and watching. A kind of panic seizes him and he uncrooks his arm from over his face and begins to blink and squint, trying to accustom his eyes to the light. At every blink the light floods into his head, glinting and scratching.

  Finally he becomes able to hold his eyes open, and with a summoning of will pushes himself up. He sits there unsteadily, the ground for a moment threatening to dump him over onto his face. He props himself, and again risks opening his eyes.

  Somehow, as if in a dream, the possibility that the runaway automobile might have done great damage among the brittle slabs overpowered the knowledge that it did none, and now he looks around him in surprise and relief to see that the dead still lie undisturbed. The place is flooded with the weak first sunlight of the morning, and the dead are absent from it.

  As gently as he can he lies down again, easing his head back into the crumpled crown of his Sunday hat. He will be sorry about the hat, he knows, when he gets around to thinking about it. He has the wakened dreamer’s sense of escape from something he might well have done. That eases a little of his anxiety, but not all. He will not escape so easily from what he did do. For now he thinks of the betrayals involved in his participation in the profane clamors of Whacker’s funeral. He feels an urgent need to get up and get the others up and clear out, and at the same time an overpowering wish to lie there with his eyes shut, and never move. He is thirsty. The only good thought in reach is the thought of water. His head throbs.

  “Oh me,” he says.

  “Are you awake, Burley?” Jayber asks.

  “Sort of.”

  “I’m afraid I am too.”

  “Jayber, we’ve got to get up and get out of here.”

  “I know it. We don’t want to get caught here, or be seen leaving ei
ther, if we can help it.”

  “Yeah.”

  But neither of them moves, and they say nothing else for some time.

  And then Big Ellis sits up. He shakes his head and says, “Shoo!” Looking around him he grins. “Resurrection morning, ain’t it?”

  As though to confirm the unsuspected truth of that, Burley points down the slope. “Look!”

  Over the mound of loose dirt they see the broken crown of Whacker’s straw hat slowly rising. His shoulders appear over the mound, and he stands up. And then, as though to sleep in a grave is no more remarkable than to sleep in a bed, he picks up the tongue of his wagon and moves off down the slope ­toward the gate.

  They watch him go, hardly believing that without help he could have drawn his bulk up the sheer six-foot walls of that hole. There is something apocalyptic about it, both ludicrous and sobering. Jayber says:

  Unfazed by the grave,

  He doth awake and walk.

  “He’ll never get a better funeral,” Big Ellis says, “if he lives to be a hundred.”

  And then, with all the force of a crucial realization that comes too late, it dawns on Burley that the possibilities have been out of control from the beginning. Suppose Whacker hadn’t been able to get out by himself. They certainly had no idea how to get him out. Suppose he had got sick down there, or died. Suppose they had forgot him and left him there—­as it surely did look like they were going to—­and they had come bringing Ernest.

  He plunges to his feet.

  “Let’s go! Let’s get out of here!”

  They get up and follow him among the stones to where the car sits, doors and trunk still open, and in the daylight still appearing to labor myopically at the granite inscription. They set the wheels and, heaving mightily at the cost of much pain to their heads, push it back over the embankment into the road.

  “Well,” Big Ellis says, “looks like there’s no place to go now but home.”

  “Get in the middle, Burley,” Jayber says. “You’ll be getting out last.”

  But Burley feels a sudden reluctance to go with them. He wants to part from them now. Wants the night’s doings to be finished now, and done with. Here is a day started, it seems to him, that is going to ask a lot of him, and he wants to get himself set for it.

  “You all go on,” he says. “I’m going to walk. I think it’ll do me good.”

  Jayber gets in, but as the car starts to roll he says: “Wait! Listen!” The car stops and he opens the door and leans out. “Listen,” he says. “I don’t think anybody actually saw who it was making all the racket last night. So if we make it out of here without getting caught, it was all done by Unknown Citizens. You see?”

  They see.

  “Big Ellis,” Burley says, “when you come around to where the drive forks, if you’d back out to the road from there it might look like you’d just pulled in to turn around.”

  Big Ellis nods. The car rolls forward, picking up speed, lurches as Big Ellis throws it into gear, and, as the engine starts, grumbles off ­toward the gate.

  Burley stands there, watching them go. He should be going himself, but he does not move. As soon as he has seen them back out and turn and go out of sight ­toward town, the weight of his guilt comes down on him, too heavy to bear away. At the time when Mat may have needed him, and when he should have been sorrowful himself for the death of Ernest, and when he should have been attentive in some decent way to Tom’s memory and the hope of Nathan’s return—­at that time of all times, that one and only and now past and unchangeable time, where was he?

  Drunk. Bawling and singing and laughing at the funeral of a live drunkard. In the graveyard, insulting the peace of the dead.

  And he lay down and slept among them. Among the dead in their graves he lay down and slept. And what awful quiet came on him then?

  He stands there, his suit and shirt wrinkled and dusty, his good hat battered into early old age, the knot of his tie slipped down to the third button of his shirt and jerked tight, his head full of pain and regret and difficult thoughts. He looks at his long shadow pointing down the gravel track ahead of him, and he knows for certain that he will die. He foreknows the stillness that, whichever way he walks, he is coming to. A tremor shakes him from head to foot.

  Even as he starts ­toward the gate he is strongly tempted to go the other way, to go home across the fences and through the fields. But he rejects that. The day summons him into the clear and that is where he is going to go.

  “No,” he says to himself, “I may have to brazen, but I ain’t going to sneak.”

  He sees his shadow move its long leg, sees its foot separate from his foot, light flowing between. There will be a time when he will come here and not leave, but this is not the time.

  PART FIVE

  Chapter 17

  STRAIGHTENING UP

  Home again, Burley hangs his desecrated coat and hat on the yard fence and goes straight to the barn. He attends to the few chores that need doing there, and then, having put it off as long as he can, he goes outside to the pump. He cups his hand under the spout and pumps and drinks. And having filled himself, his thirst far exceeding his capacity, he douses his face and pumps water over his head. He keeps pumping, breathing in great spluttering gasps. Pumping on his head, the water flowing through his hair, around his ears, down the sides of his face, streaming off his eyebrows and nose and lips and chin, splattering and darkening the dry boards of the well top—­that seems to him the finest quenching of his life. Bent, dizzy under the spout, hanging on to the pump with one hand to keep from falling, pumping with the other, he glimpses his brother approaching around the corner of the barn.

  He does not want to talk to Jarrat this morning and so he keeps pumping, hoping that Jarrat is just on his way someplace and will go on. But Jarrat does not. He stops and leans against the barn wall and watches.

  “That looks like a hell of a hard way to drown.”

  Burley straightens up, shuddering as the cold water runs down the collar of his shirt. Blinded by vertigo, he quickly sits down on the edge of the stock trough and props himself with both hands.

  “Huh?” he says. Though it does not matter, he feels caught, feels guilty and most uncertain of himself and of Jarrat. For the thousandth time, surely, he is the wayward younger brother, confronted by the righteousness of the older. Or is that how it is going to be this time? He risks a quick glance at Jarrat’s face, and discovers to his surprise and relief that Jarrat is grinning at him.

  “I said there ought to be some easier way to drown.”

  “There ought,” Burley says, and he laughs. He looks directly at Jarrat now. “Did you know the war’s over?”

  “I heard the commotion start up out there at town and figured that was what it was. And I came over here then and heard the news on your radio. I didn’t reckon you would mind.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I listened a right smart while, sort of waiting for you to come back.”

  Burley feels a pang of disappointment—­of loss. That was the first time in years, maybe since the death of their mother, that Jarrat had come to the house just to visit—­and him not there. There could have been nothing finer, nothing he would have liked any more, he realizes with grief, than to sit in the old living room with Jarrat late into the night, listening to that good news come in on the radio.

  “Well, I stayed pretty late at Mat’s and then me and Jayber and Big Ellis spent the night with some folks there in town. Just to keep from having to come home so late.”

  He can see—­with relief, actually—­that Jarrat does not believe a word of it. But he appears to be amused. He watches Burley with a skeptical, critical gaze that Burley knows will not neglect or misinterpret anything. But there is amusement in it too. Some change has come over him. Is it, Burley wonders, the war ending? Or what is it?

  “It was hard to sleep, I reckon, in all that racket.”

  “Well,” Burley says, “the folks we spent the night with, they w
as quiet.”

  He wishes Jarrat would go on home now. Or go somewhere.

  “What time is Ernest’s funeral?” Jarrat asks.

  “Two-thirty, I think. Are you going?”

  “I thought I’d go a little beforehand, and speak to Mat and them.”

  “Mat’ll appreciate that.”

  “Well, I’ll be seeing you,” Jarrat says. He shoves himself away from the wall with a little thrust of his shoulder and starts home.

  “Be seeing you,” Burley says. And then he says, “Come again! We’ll listen to the radio!”

  As soon as Jarrat is out of sight Burley eases himself to his feet and, after a careful start, walks to the house.

  He builds a fire in the kitchen, puts on the coffee pot and a kettle of water, and sits down at the table to wait. His encounter with Jarrat has left him with a trying consciousness of his misery. To save trouble he just admits that he is totally corrupt and unsalvageable, and yields to the misery of that too. “Oh, me!” he says.

  The smell of the coffee rouses him. He sits watching the spout steam until it has boiled long enough, and pours himself a cup.

  It seems to him that from the minute he sits back down at the table and leans over the fragrant steam of that cup, he begins—­surely, this time—­to mend. He drinks it hot, sitting by the raised window, watching the wind in the grass down the hillside. The grass is green in the sun, and the wind combs it, laying it down, rippling it like water flowing over it.

  “Eat! Put something in your stomach!”

  Those are his mother’s words, and they return to him in her voice, the weary, determined inflections of her old Sunday-morning efforts to sober him up and set him straight, revealing the strain between her persistent faith that this would be the last time and her suspicion that it would not. They come back familiarly and painfully, his inheritance from her.

  To silence them he gets up and obeys. He poaches two eggs, and toasts some light bread, and pours another cup of coffee. That puts some strength into him. That he will make it through until bedtime begins to seem likely. He begins to welcome the duty of going to Mat’s and being there to do what he can. What there will be for him to do he does not know. Maybe nothing. For a few minutes he wishes, like a boy, that there might be some task of great difficulty that Mat will ask him to do—­something to redeem all the failures, past and to come, of his best intentions.