The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

  At that point the light turned green, and the traffic began to pour along on both sides of them, and behind them horns began to blow.

  It seemed to Tol that the world, or anyhow his part of it, had come to an end, for he could see no way out. If he had any conviction still in force, it was that when a calamity has happened to somebody, other people ought to come to a respectful and helpful stop. But there he and Elton and Miss Minnie were, trapped and defeated beyond the power of man to conceive, and nothing stopped. The cars and trucks and streetcars and wagons sped past, horns blew, and people shouted. The high, hot sun glared down into the crevice of the street without the mercy of a single tree.

  He lifted his voice across their conjoined vehicles to the man with the mustache. “Hung like two dogs!” He spoke as sympathetically as he was able at the required volume, as if hoping to ease their predicament by so apt a description of it. He was sweating with heat and with panic. Behind him, in the Trick, Miss Minnie’s eyes were round and watery with unfallen tears, and her lips were shut tight together; her hands in their white gloves lay crossed over her purse in her lap and did not move.

  “You must do something about this,” the man shouted to Tol. “I don’t have all day for this. I’m in a hurry!”

  Tol then saw it through, as far at least as indignation. “Drive on!” he shouted back. “I reckon we can drag as fast as you can haul!”

  Elton, who had been waving his hand for attention for some time, then said, “Mr. Tol, stand right here,” and he pointed to the two stout brackets to which the Trick’s bumper was attached.

  “What?” Tol said.

  “Stand on these!”

  Elton showed him again. Propping himself on the back end of the other car, Tol clambered up onto the brackets, and the Trick bowed down under his weight.

  “Now take hold of that other bumper and lift up,” Elton said.

  When Tol lifted—­which he did, Miss Minnie said, “as with the strength of ten”—­Elton applied himself with all his strength to the left front fender of the Trick, which rolled back and came free. The man in a hurry, without looking again at them, stepped back into his machine and slammed the door.

  Elton got back in behind the steering wheel. Tol, whose conviction held further that all calamities should be followed by conversation, stood in disappointment, watching the other car drive away. And then he got in, too.

  “Well,” Elton said, still grinning, “where does that map say to go now?”

  “Home, son.” Tol Proudfoot laughed a little, as if to himself, and patted Miss Minnie’s crossed hands. “By thunder, it says to go home.”

  “Yes,” Miss Minnie said, “let us go home.”

  That is the story as I heard it many times from Elton Penn—and from Sam Hanks, too, of course, for he had his version of it, though Elton was its principal eyewitness.

  One day, when I happened by to see Miss Minnie, it occurred to me to ask her about that famous trip. She had been long a widow by then, and we neighbors often made a point of happening by. We needed to know that she was all right, but also it was good for us to see her and to have her pleasant greeting.

  “Oh, yes!” she said, when I brought the subject up. “We weren’t able to get all the way to the Fair. We got nearly all the way. I’m sure it was wonderful. But we did succeed in getting all the way home. And wasn’t Mr. Proudfoot happy to be here!”

  Burley Coulter’s Fortunate Fall (1934)

  IT HAS been a long, long time since old Uncle Bub Levers was called on to pray at the Bird’s Branch church for the first and last time in his life, and he stood up and said, “O Lord, bless me and my son Jasper. Amen.”

  The Lord must have thought that was a good idea. For with His help, maybe, Jappy Levers grew up and got himself educated for a lawyer. When he hung out his sign in Hargrave, he wasn’t Jappy Levers any more. He was J. Robert La Vere, Attorney at Law. That might not have been all put-on. Some say that La Veres was what the Leverses were before they turned up around Port William. People in Port William don’t say things they haven’t heard of. They never had heard of La Veres. They had heard of levers.

  With the Lord’s help maybe, maybe not, Mr. La Vere got to be a rich man. Getting rich, you know, does not always meet with everybody’s approval. There was always somebody, or several bodies, in Port William who would tell you confidently that Mr. La Vere got rich by finding out where the money was and helping himself to a good deal more than his share. In fact they didn’t know, and I don’t know. To find out how such things are done, you will have to ask somebody besides me. Maybe you can do like Mr. La Vere, who gaveth the credit to the Lord, at the same time keeping a good deal of it for himself, the Lord maybe not minding, maybe.

  Anyhow, the Lord either did or didn’t bless Mr. La Vere with the money he scraped together by the time he was forty-five or so, when he bought the biggest house in Hargrave with a front porch two stories tall. After Uncle Bub died, Mr. La Vere kept the old Levers home place out on Bird’s Branch, and as the chances came he bought other farms hither and yon.

  So he was right smart of a big deal and on the downward slope when he topped himself off by taking to wife, as Wheeler Catlett put it, the elegant, accomplished, and beautiful Miss Charlotte Riggins. Miss Charlotte was from somewhere off. She could have been rich herself for all I know, maybe, maybe not, but she did come up in the world by changing her name from Riggins to La Vere and setting up housekeeping behind the tallest front porch in Hargrave.

  How Mr. La Vere and Miss Charlotte hit it off as a loving couple is anybody’s guess. I somehow never quite could imagine it myself, so I will leave it to you. But Mr. La Vere lived long enough that by the time he died, Miss Charlotte had taken on all his dignity and become a great lady.

  By the time Mr. La Vere departed, Miss Charlotte’s hair had turned mortally blue, but she wasn’t exactly an old woman yet. If widowhood hadn’t suited her so well, and with all her goods and money, surely somebody would have married her. I reckon I might have married her myself, maybe, if she had ever asked me.

  Mr. La Vere died at about the start of the Depression or a little before, and Wheeler Catlett, who was a wingshot of a young lawyer then, settled the old man’s estate, nearly all of it directly onto Miss Charlotte. At about the same time the tenant on the old Levers place gave it up, and Wheeler traded with Grover Gibbs to be the new tenant. And so Grover and his wife, Beulah, and their children moved into the old Levers house that was the Gibbs house then until Beulah’s mother and daddy had gone from this world and left her the little piece of it where she was raised.

  Grover was one of my old running mates, a little younger than I am, but it seems like I was young a long time. So from then on I was party to the doings of Miss Charlotte and to her, what do you call it? relationship, I guess, with Grover. Grover was probably the ideal man for the place—­Wheeler probably couldn’t have done any better. The Levers place was run down but still a pretty good farm, and Grover was a pretty good farmer, so it was a fit. Being a pretty good farmer was good enough for Grover. Now and again, when he was a ­little down in the mouth, he would make the usual complaints about farming on the halves, but being a tenant farmer suited him really well enough. He had several other things he needed to see to: fishing and hunting, and drinking a little whiskey from time to time for his health, and holding up his end of the conversation out at town. Well, he held up his end along with the ends of several others in case they couldn’t make it.

  And, too, he took a particular pleasure in his relationship with Miss Charlotte. Miss Charlotte, you might say, was an enjoyable lady. I don’t believe she was as enjoyable a lady as Beulah Gibbs, fact is I know she wasn’t, but she was in her own way enjoyable. Wheeler, who was Miss Charlotte’s lawyer for the next thirty or so years, had the gift of enjoying her for her own sake. Which was fortunate for Wheeler, for after she died her relatives decided that her estate was beyond the powers of “a country lawyer.” So Wheeler was paid for in fact a lot o
f bother mostly by a little pleasure. But Grover enjoyed the idea of himself as her tenant, and the idea of her as his landlady.

  While she was still a widow in mourning, Miss Charlotte took over the supervision of the farms, and I don’t believe there has been anything like it in the history of the world before or since. She would come riding in, always unexpectedly, in the back seat of her long green car that was about the same color as folding money. It would be shined so slick, Grover said, that a housefly couldn’t stand up on it. She would be wearing a dress that was like a cloud or like a flower bed in full bloom or like a pool with goldfish—­this is Grover talking. And she would have on white gloves and a hat with a veil, and if the weather was the least bit cool she would have a fox or a mink fur piece around her neck and her hands stuck into a fur muff with every hair standing on end. And she would be sitting straight up like a queen in a picture, in reference strictly to herself.

  Driving her would be Willard Safely, of the black branch of the Hargrave Safelys, wearing a black coat and an official little black chauffeur’s cap, Willard being a whole nuther item of interest himself. When he wasn’t wearing his black coat to be Miss Charlotte’s chauffeur, he would be her butler or table waiter wearing a white coat. His wife, Bernice, was Miss Charlotte’s cook and housemaid, always starched and white and waiting to be told what to do next. Willard’s life was in a way glorious, for who else anywhere around drove such a car? But it was difficult too, and not just when Miss Charlotte joined forces with Bernice in regard to several of his pleasures. I know some of what I know, not just from Grover, but also from Wheeler.

  I don’t mean to give you the idea that Wheeler Catlett went around gossiping about his clients. But when his boy Andy got big enough to be some account at work, he would tell us things. At that age, Andy wasn’t always on the best of terms with his father, but he enjoyed Wheeler’s knowledge and his language. So when we were all together at work and the stories would get started, Andy sometimes had good things to pass along. It’s a mystery how the voices gather. Our talk at row ends or in the barn or stripping room would call up the voices of the absent and the dead. Somebody maybe would wonder what old Uncle Bub would think of Miss Charlotte, and though we never knew him and he never knew her he would say about her what he said about everybody of wonder. “Hell and dammit, boys! She’s a ring-tailed twister!” About everybody knew of Miss Charlotte and took some interest in her. She was surrounded, you might say, with observation. And of course also, as Wheeler said, with her own glitter.

  Grover said he could tell when she was coming because first he would see Willard in his chauffeur’s cap driving around the corner of the rock fence along the driveway and then, well behind him, Miss Charlotte would come into sight in the back seat. They would drive up in front of the feed barn. They would look around. If they didn’t see Grover, Miss Charlotte would tell Willard to blow the horn, and he would give forth a toot. When Grover appeared, if he did, Miss Charlotte would roll her window down.

  Grover, you would think, might have gone over and leaned down to speak to her at a respectful level through the window, but Grover never felt dressed for the occasion. So he stood back at some distance, requiring her to raise her voice to, as he put it, his level to speak to him, and he would holler back to her. She took herself too seriously to notice that he took her unseriously.

  “Grover, are you giving milk regularly to the cats?”

  “Yes mam, Miss Charlotte.”

  “Grover, you aren’t looking well. Are you well?”

  “I was feeling pretty well, Miss Charlotte, but I got over it.”

  “I see you have a nice automobile, Grover,” she said once, pointing to one of Grover’s semi-wrecks that he said would roll down any hill it couldn’t pull up. “What kind is it?”

  “A small Packard, Miss Charlotte.”

  Grover liked that remark so well that every old car he had from then on he always called it a small Packard.

  But maybe more often than she came, Miss Charlotte would send Willard by himself. When she sent Willard it was usually with a message she didn’t want to deliver in person.

  Neither one of them ever said so, but Willard and Grover saw eye to eye on a lot of things. They enjoyed a lot of the same pleasures without ever so much as a look or a wink passing between them.

  Willard’s natural laugh was something to see and hear. He would bend way forward and then rear way back and give out a great bellow that would loosen shingles. But when more was going on than met the eye he had a little pecking laugh, “heh-heh-heh.”

  Miss Charlotte was maybe the president of the widows and old maids of the Hargrave aristocracy, and she made a big thing of giving all her constituents an old ham every Christmas, a big ham to the widows with families and a little ham to the old maids. How she got the little hams was a matter of some embarrassment to Willard, and a matter of artistic pride and satisfaction to Grover.

  Every fall when the nights were getting cold and hog-killing time was getting close, Willard would come driving in by himself. He would say, “Trim them shoulders round, Mistah Grover, heh-heh-heh.”

  Miss Charlotte’s hogs, you see, were the only ones ever known to have hams at both ends. “They had hams coming and going!” Wheeler Catlett said.

  Sure enough, Grover could trim a shoulder so anybody who didn’t know the difference would take it for a ham. And the aristocratic old maids at Hargrave didn’t know the difference.

  When it was coming Christmas there would be Willard again, by himself. He would back the big car up to the smokehouse door, Grover would hand the yearling hams out to Willard, and every time Grover handed him one of the little hams Willard, never looking at Grover, said, “Heh-heh-heh.”

  What made Willard laugh his big true laugh was for instance this.

  One afternoon Willard was driving Miss Charlotte and a lesser widow or two and Miss Agnes Heartsease home from some function, and they were overtaken by a big storm of rain at the same time that Miss Heartsease, full of coffee, was overtaken by an urge to uncork herself that she was powerless to resist—­this is Wheeler talking.

  Miss Heartsease was a schoolteacher and a lady of the strictest religion. Her virtue, Wheeler said, was a mighty fortress that she had successfully defended against every assault, as many maybe as one.

  Anyhow, and this was probably something else new in history, Miss Charlotte made Willard stand out in the rain to hold an umbrella over Miss Heartsease, looking away, while she peed I’m sure a genteel little trickle on the gravel.

  The only one who would have told that was bound to be Willard, so I guess he told it. And of course it got back to Grover. And if it happened to be raining, Grover, who liked to make Willard laugh, would say perfectly serious, “Willard, I hate to ask it of you, but that coffee’s working on me. Have you got your umbrella?”

  When Miss Charlotte came to supervise the farming, she never got out of the car. Her need to supervise was fulfilled just by making the trip, passing a few words with Grover, and looking lovingly across the hollow behind the house at the roof of what she called “Father La Vere’s tobacco barn.”

  “Father La Vere” was what with deep respect and daughterly love she called Uncle Bub. It had been Uncle Bub’s barn, sure enough. And hard telling whose before him. It was old. Part of it was log. It went back maybe to the time of D. Boone. It had been pieced out and added to by later generations until it sprawled all over the hillside. Sometime toward the end of his earthly passage, Mr. La Vere had got a good deal on, it must have been, a barrel or two of blue paint, and he hired some brave fellows to brush it onto the rusty roof of that old barn. So when Miss Charlotte looked at Father La Vere’s barn, what she saw was half an acre of blue roof that made Chicken Little look like a true prophet. You could say, and maybe Mr. La Vere did say, that a barn is no better than its roof. But Miss Charlotte’s philosophy on barns was that if the roof is all right then the barn is all right.

  In fact, under the roof, the barn w
as just a collection of splices and patches. It was tiered off with old fence rails and locust poles, all nailed and wired up every which way. All of us who ever worked in it fell out of it at least once. And there was a big old cedar tree grown up on the downhill side with its limbs bushed out until they touched the wall. The tree had no business there, but way before Grover some tenant had let it get started, and every one since had left it, maybe as a comment on the barn that said more or less “To hell with it!”

  Well, after Grover had been there must have been four or five years, the rust began showing through the blue paint to where it was visible even to Miss Charlotte. And faithful to tradition, she wanted it painted again with blue paint.

  She put the proposition to Grover, but Grover couldn’t do it. He couldn’t work high off the ground. It made the world whirl. It made him so dizzy and sick he couldn’t hardly hold his dinner he was so scared he would fall. This was either true or it wasn’t, but it saved Grover a good deal of trouble along with maybe his neck.

  So Miss Charlotte authorized Grover to see who would take the job, and Grover put the proposition to my brother, Jarrat, who took him up. Out of generosity he took him up on my behalf as well as his own.

  “Hang on!” I said. “I don’t want to paint that damned roof. I can’t spare the time. And high places make me sick like they do Grover.”

  Jarrat, a man of few words, said, “You could use the money.”

  Matter of fact, I could. But like Jarrat I also could have done without it, and unlike Jarrat would have been glad to. But I was in and I knew it.

  Jarrat had traded with Grover for two dollars a day and our dinner, dinner to be furnished by Beulah Gibbs, which was the best part of the deal, for Beulah was a fine cook, paint and brushes and so on to be furnished by Miss Charlotte.

  So as soon as we got our crops laid by we gathered up ladders and ropes and everything we thought we’d need, and we got started. We had a long job of it. That roof must have been half an acre, give or take a tenth or two, and in them days nobody had thought of spraying paint or rolling it on. We rubbed it on with brushes, making sure to cover the nailheads and the rust, doing a thorough good job.