The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

He thought, “If a fellow was to be dead now, and young, might be he would be missing this a long time.”

  There was a privy in back of the church and he went to it. And then, on his way out of the lane, he stopped at the barn and drank again at the cistern.

  Back among the houses, still dark and silent among their trees, he took the road that led up into the smaller of the two river valleys. There was no light yet from the dawn, but by the little light of the stars he could see well enough. All he needed now was the general shape of the place given by various shadows and loomings.

  “I have hoofed it home from here a many a night,” he thought. “Might be I could do it if I was blind. But I can see.”

  He could see. And he walked along, feeling the joy of a man who sees, a joy that a man tends to forget in sufficient light. The quiet around him seemed wide as the whole country and deep as the sky, and the morning songs of the creatures and his own footsteps occurred distinctly and separately in it, making a kind of geography and a kind of story. As he walked the light slowly strengthened. As he more and more saw where he was, it seemed to him more and more that he was walking in his memory or that he had entered, awake, a dream that he had been dreaming for a long time.

  He was hungry. The candy bar that he had eaten when he woke had hardly interrupted his hunger.

  “My belly thinks my throat has been cut. It is laying right flat against my backbone.”

  It was a joy to him to be so hungry. Hunger had not bothered him much for many weeks, had not mattered, but now it was as vivid to him as a landmark. It was a tree that put its roots into the ground and spread its branches out against the sky.

  The east brightened. The sun lit the edges of a few clouds on the horizon and then rose above them. He was walking full in its light. It had not shone on him long before he had to take off the overcoat, and he folded and rolled it neatly and stuffed it into his bag. By then he had come a long way up the road.

  Now that it was light, he could see the marks of the flood that had recently covered the valley floor. He could see drift logs and mats of cornstalks that the river had left on the low fields. In places where the river ran near the road, he could see the small clumps of leaves and grasses that the currents had affixed to the tree limbs. Out in one of the bottoms he saw two men with a team and wagon clearing the scattered debris from their fields. They had set fire to a large heap of drift logs, from which the pale smoke rose straight up. Above the level of the flood, the sun shone on the small, still-opening leaves of the water maples and on the short new grass of the hillside pastures.

  As he went along, Art began to be troubled in his mind: How would he present himself to the ones at home? He had not shaved. Since before his long ride on the bus he had not bathed. He did not want to come in, after his three-year absence, like a man coming in from work, unshaven and with his clothes mussed and soiled. He must appear to them as what he had been since they saw him last, a soldier. And then he would be at the end of his soldiering. He did not know yet what he would be when he had ceased to be a soldier, but when he had thought so far his confusion left him.

  He came to the mouth of a small tributary valley. Where the stream of that valley passed under the road, he went down the embankment, making his way, first through trees and then through a patch of dead horseweed stalks, to the creek. A little way upstream he came to a place of large flat rocks that had been swept clean by the creek and were now in the sun and dry. Opening the duffel bag, he carefully laid its contents out on the rocks. He took out his razor and brush and soap and a small mirror, and knelt beside the stream and soaped his face and shaved. The water was cold, but he had shaved with cold water before. When he had shaved, he took off his clothes and, standing in flowing water that instantly made his feet ache, he bathed, quaking, breathing between his teeth as he raised the cold water again and again in his cupped hands.

  Standing on the rocks in the sun, he dried himself with the shirt he had been wearing. He put on his clean, too-large clothes, tied his tie, and combed his hair. And then warmth came to him. It came from inside himself and from the sun outside; he felt suddenly radiant in every vein and fiber of his body. He was clean and warm and rested and hungry. He was well.

  He was in his own country now, and he did not see anything around him that he did not know.

  “I have been a stranger and have seen strange things,” he thought. “And now I am where it is not strange, and I am not a stranger.”

  He was sitting on the rocks, resting after his bath. His bag, repacked, lay on the rock beside him and he propped his elbow on it.

  “I am not a stranger, but I am changed. Now I know a mighty power that can pass over the earth and make it strange. There are people, where I have been, that won’t know their places when they get back to them. Them that live to get back won’t be where they were when they left.”

  He became sleepy and he lay down on the rock and slept. He slept more deeply than he had in the night. He dreamed he was where he was, and a great, warm light fell upon that place, and there was light within it and within him.

  When he returned to the road after his bath and his sleep, it was past the middle of the morning. His steps fell into their old rhythm on the blacktop.

  “I know a mighty power,” he thought. “A mighty power of death and fire. An anger beyond the power of any man, made big in machines equal to many men. And a little man who has passed through mighty death and fire and still lived, what is he going to think of himself when he is back again, walking the river road below Port William, that we would have blowed all to flinders as soon as look at it if it had got in our way?”

  He walked, as before, the left side of the road, not meaning to ask for rides. But as on the afternoon before, there was little traffic. He had met two cars going down ­toward Hargrave and had been passed by only one coming up.

  Where the road began to rise ­toward Port William up on the ridge, a lesser road branched off to the left and ran along the floor of the valley. As Art reached this intersection, he heard a truck engine backfiring, coming down the hill, and then the truck came into sight and he recognized it. It was an old green International driven, as he expected and soon saw, by a man wearing a trucker’s cap and smoking a pipe. The truck was loaded with fat hogs, heading for the packing plant at Jefferson. As he went by, the old man waved to Art and Art waved back.

  “Sam Hanks,” he thought. “I have been gone over three years and have traveled a many a thousand miles over land and ocean, and in all that time and all them miles the first man I have seen that I have always known is Sam Hanks.”

  He tried to think what person he had seen last when he was leaving, but he could not remember. He took the lesser road and, after perhaps a mile, turned into a road still narrower, only a pair of graveled wheel tracks. A little later, when the trees were fully leaved, this would be almost a burrow, tunneling along between the creek and the hillside under the trees, but now the leaves were small and the sun cast the shadows of the branches in a close network onto the gravel.

  Soon he was walking below the high-water line. He could see it clearly marked on the slope to his right: a line above which the fallen leaves of the year before were still bright and below which they were darkened by their long steeping in the flood. The slope under the trees was strewn with drift, and here and there a drift log was lodged in the branches high above his head. In the shadow of the flood the spring was late, the buds of the trees just opening, the white flowers of twinleaf and bloodroot just beginning to bloom. It was almost as if he were walking under water, so abrupt and vivid was the difference above and below the line that marked the crest of the flood. But somewhere high in the sunlit branches a redbird sang over and over in a clear, pealing voice, “Even so, even so.”

  And there was nothing around him that Art did not know. He knew the place in all the successions of the year: from the little blooms that came in the earliest spring to the fallen red leaves of October, from the songs of the nesting b
irds to the anxious wintering of the little things that left their tracks in snow, from the first furrow to the last load of the harvest.

  Where the creek turned away from the road the valley suddenly widened and opened. The road still held up on the hillside among the trees, permitting him to see, through the intervening branches, the broad field that lay across the bottom. He could see that plowing had been started; a long strip had been back-furrowed out across the field, from the foot of the slope below the road to the trees that lined the creek bank. And then he saw, going away from him, almost out to the end of the strip, two mule teams with two plowmen walking in the opening furrows. The plowmen’s heads were bent to their work, their hands riding easy on the handles of the plows. Some distance behind the second plowman was a little boy, also walking in the furrow and carrying a tin can; from time to time he bent and picked something up from the freshly turned earth and dropped it into the can. Walking behind the boy was a large hound. The first plowman was Art’s father, the second his brother Mart. The boy was Art’s sister’s son, Roy Lee, who had been two years old when Art left and was now five. The hound was probably Old Bawler, who made it a part of his business to be always at work. Roy Lee was collecting fishing worms, and Art looked at the creek and saw, in an open place at the top of the bank, as he expected, three willow poles stuck into the ground, their lines in the water.

  The first of the teams reached the end of the plowland, and Art heard his father’s voice clear and quiet: “Gee, boys.” And then Mart’s team finished their furrow, and Mart said, “Gee, Sally.” They went across the headland and started back.

  Art stood as if looking out of his absence at them, who did not know he was there, and he had to shake his head. He had to shake his head twice to persuade himself that he did not hear, from somewhere off in the distance, the heavy footsteps of artillery rounds striding ­toward them.

  He pressed down the barbed wire at the side of the road, straddled over it, and went down through the trees, stopping at the foot of the slope. They came ­toward him along the edge of the plowland, cutting it two furrows wider. Soon he could hear the soft footfalls of the mules, the trace ends jingling, the creaking of the doubletrees. Present to himself, still absent to them, he watched them come.

  At the end of the furrow his father called, “Gee!” and leaned his plow over so that it could ride around the headland on the share and right handle. And then he saw Art. “Well now!” he said, as if only to himself. “Whoa!” he said to the mules. And again: “Well now!” He came over to Art and put out his hand and Art gave him his.

  Art saw that there were tears in his father’s eyes, and he grinned and said, “Howdy.”

  Early Rowanberry stepped back and looked at his son and said again, “Well now!”

  Mart came around onto the headland then and stopped his team. He and Art shook hands, grinning at each other.

  “You reckon your foot’ll still fit in a furrow?”

  Art nodded. “I reckon it still will.”

  “Well, here’s somebody you don’t hardly know,” Mart said, gesturing ­toward Roy Lee, “and who don’t know you at all, I’ll bet. Do you know who this fellow is, Roy Lee?”

  Roy Lee probably did not know, though he knew he had an uncle who was a soldier. He knew about soldiers—he knew they fought in a war far away—and here was a great, tall, fine soldier in a soldier suit with shining buttons, and the shoes on his feet were shining. Roy Lee felt something akin to awe and something akin to love and something akin to fear. He shook his head and looked down at his bare right foot.

  Mart laughed. “This here’s your Uncle Art. You know about Uncle Art.” To Art he said, “He’s talked enough about you. He’s been looking out the road to see if you was coming.”

  Art looked up the creek and across it at the house and outbuildings and barn. He looked at the half-plowed field on the valley floor with the wooded hillsides around it and the blinding blue sky over it. He looked again and again at his father and his young nephew and his brother. They stood up in their lives around him now in such a way that he could not imagine their deaths.

  Early Rowanberry looked at his son, now and then reaching out to grasp his shoulder or his arm, as if to feel through the cloth of the uniform the flesh and bone of the man inside. “Well now!” he said again, and again, “Well now!”

  Art reached down and picked up a handful of earth from the furrow nearest him. “You’re plowing it just a little wet, ain’t you?”

  “Well, we’ve had a wet time,” Mart said. “We felt like we had to go ahead. Maybe we’ll get another hard frost. We could yet.”

  Art said, “Well, I reckon we might.”

  And then he heard his father’s voice riding up in his throat as he had never heard it, and he saw that his father had turned to the boy and was speaking to him:

  “Honey, run yonder to the house. Tell your granny to set on another plate. For we have our own that was gone and has come again.”

  Not a Tear (1945)

  DICK WATSON was my grandfather Catlett’s farm hand, and he was my friend. When he died, I did not go to his funeral. I was in school. It occurred to nobody that I should have gone, but I should have. I wish I had.

  My father and Grandpa Catlett did go to the funeral and so I know about it. Maybe other white people were there too, about that I don’t know. But it is important to know that at least two were there. This would have been the fall of 1945, and so everybody there belonged to the old division of the races we came to call “segregation.” They had been born in it, had lived in it, partly at least had been made as they were by it. And yet that formal and legal division, applied after all to people who were neighbors, made within itself exceptions to itself. And so they came together, the white with the black, in duty to Dick Watson, at one in loss and in sorrow.

  “Well, sir, it was perfect, Andy. It was just right,” my father said to comfort me, for he knew I was grieving. “That preacher was splendid.”

  From time to time he recited parts of the sermon to me as he remembered it, for he could not forget, and I have not forgot. I will try to line it out as the preacher sounded it. “It was not a speech,” my father said. “It was a song.”

  Standing above the open coffin in which Dick’s body lay in his Sunday clothes in its stillness and Aunt Sarah Jane who sat in the black dress of her sorrow nearby, the preacher gestured broadly with his opened hands, all the while looking at the people, as if to see if they knew already what he was going to say. He said:

  This ain’t him.

  He ain’t here.

  This ain’t no more our brother,

  our beloved. For he

  ain’t here. Where he is

  all is well.

  All is well with Dick Watson.

  All is well.

  He has come to a door

  to a mansion

  didn’t have to knock

  to get in. He had heard

  that voice.

  He has heard, O Lord,

  thy voice.

  “Brother Watson, come in.

  Well done.

  Well done, thou good

  and faithful servant.

  Well done. Enter

  into the joy of thy Lord.”

  “Something like that,” my father said. “For one man can’t do it by himself. He has got to have help. He has got to have inspiration, and help too from the other people.”

  The sermon took a while. The people took up the preacher’s phrases and sang them back to him. They called out to him to encourage him:

  “Amen!”

  “Yes!”

  “Amen!”

  They shouted to him to go ahead, to preach it, for he had it right.

  At first some of the people were crying, and Grandpa cried with them. And then, as the voice of the preacher called them, a sense of triumph grew among them, and the tone shifted. Heaven and earth drew together. The preacher said:

  Blessèd!

  Blessèd are t
he poor

  in spirit, for theirs

  is the kingdom of heaven.

  Blessèd!

  Blessèd are they that mourn,

  for they shall be comforted.

  Children,

  don’t cry no more.

  Sister Sarah Jane,

  don’t cry no more.

  Our brother,

  where he is,

  he don’t hear no crying.

  For his burden is lifted.

  For freedom

  has come to him

  and rest.

  For where he is

  ain’t no crying there.

  Not a sigh.

  Not a tear.

  The preacher stood then with his hands again opened. A beautiful voice sang back from among the people: “Nooo, not a tear.” The other agreeing voices quieted and fell away. While the preacher regarded the people with his hands still lifted, my father said, an immense quiet came upon them, and the freedom of Dick Watson in that moment was present to them all.

  They sang a hymn, they said a prayer, and then they let him go.

  CHRONOLOGY

  NOTE ON THE TEXTS

  NOTES

  Chronology

  1934

  Born Wendell Erdman Berry on August 5 in Henry County, Kentucky, the first child of John Marshall and Virginia Erdman Perry Berry. Father, born November 8, 1900, near Lacie, Kentucky, earned a bachelor’s degree at Georgetown College in central Kentucky in 1922, and then worked as secretary to Congressman Virgil Chapman while earning a law degree from The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He graduated in 1927 and later that year opened a private legal practice in Henry County. Mother born November 6, 1907, in Port Royal, in Henry County. She attended Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, a Methodist women’s college tied to the all-male Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, graduating with a degree in English in 1930. Both families can trace roots back to early years of Henry County’s history; both families also owned slaves before the Civil War (at time of Berry’s birth, there are many children of both slaves and slaveholders in the community). Parents married on July 14, 1933.