The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

  We walked out that little rise the house and buildings are on, and found Anvil sitting in the back door of the barn. One of the older boys was there with him, and his dogs, and we could see right off that things weren’t much more comforting at the barn than they were at the house. The river was up into the bottom there in back of the barn, and between there and the trees on the river bank was nothing but about three hundred yards of muddy water, with here and there a willow or a few dead horseweeds or a cornstalk sticking up out of it. And you just knew, as soon as you saw how things were, that Anvil had been coming out there to the barn every morning for the last three or four to watch it rain and watch it rise, and know he was doing nothing because there was nothing he could do. We went in the upper doors and walked down the driveway and spoke. I says, “How’s it coming, Anvil?” “Up, by God,” he says. I says, “How’re you coming?” “Drownded out, by God,” he says. “Britchies legs rotted off plumb to the knees.” We sat there with him and the boy until nearly dinnertime and talked, none of us having anything better to do. And we wound up buying the sow and pigs. For more than they was worth. To your daddy’s way of thinking, you don’t what you would call trade with a man who is hurting. I know it has got hard for you to know your daddy, but he has that kind of rightness about him. He’s very straight in his dealings.

  Anvil didn’t figure the river would get into his house, but I expect it surely was in his barn by this morning. They say the Ohio has got into a few of the houses down at Hargrave. And the rain falling right on.

  March 10

  Still raining. Off and on all night, and pretty hard and steady since before day. When the rain lets up you can hear water running anywhere you stand. The mud is a foot deep around the barns here, and the barns are as wet inside as out. We put down a little dry bedding every night, but it gets tramped out of sight in a few minutes.

  Anyhow, it’s raining and I’ve got nothing to do for a while but sit here and write to you. Which I aim to do, because once the weather fairs up it won’t be easy to find the time. I’m writing at the table by the front window in the living room. The rain coming down steady outside, and a good fire going in here. When I look back I don’t see many wet weather mornings in my life when I’ve been sitting inside and doing something quiet. And in a way I wish there had been. I notice that every now and then I do something I wish I’d done more of, that I’ve lost a lot of chances for.

  I’ve quit minding to write as much as I did at first. When you boys was first in the army it give me some trouble. I don’t reckon I’d wrote much more than my name for thirty years, and I did have an awful time trying to keep what I had to say inside of what I could spell. But finally it got so it come tolerably easy. I’ve got the habit of it now, and when I’m working or walking to town and soon, I think of a letter to you that says what’s taking place. It’s company for me.

  The weather is throwing us behind in our work. Every day we lose, the loss gets a little more on our minds. We’ve got plant beds to burn and ground to break and the barns to clean and so on and so on. When the weather does fair up things are going to break loose around here in a mighty hurry. I was thinking about it while I was eating breakfast, and kind of dreading it. You know how your daddy will come untied the first day the sun shines. He’ll be just like a fox. One minute he’ll be laying quiet, and the next minute in a dead run, and you’ll have to look mighty quick to see the difference.

  There hasn’t been many times this morning when you could see from here to the yard fence, but the rain has nearly quit now. A good deal more water in sight today than yesterday, so it must of rose considerably during the night. The bottoms are all under water as far as I can see in both directions. There’s water from the foot of the hills on this side to the foot of the hills on the far side. Looks from here like the water is up to the window sills of the old Traveler house in the big bottom on the far side, and there’s a car sitting in the front yard with just the roof and windows showing.

  Awful as it is, I have to say that a flood can be about as interesting to me as anything ever I run into. As soon as I see the backwater get into the bottoms I want to be out on it in a boat. You remember. And I finally did get around to it yesterday afternoon. I was in the barbershop ­toward the end of the morning, after I got done writing to you, and just happened to mention to Jayber that all morning it had been awfully easy for me to imagine that you could have some luck if you was to go fishing. And for some reason Jayber jumps right up and says “Let’s go”—­which he never did want to do before in his life. He turned around that old paper clock of his that says “Back at 6:30,” and locked up, and we got a pound of cheese and a box of crackers from Milton Burgess, and went over the hill. I had my boat chained up on the porch of the old cabin, and the water was nearly up to the joists, so all we had to do was just roll her over and slide her into the river. About fifty foot from the porch we caught her in a long eddy and went just shooting up through the trees along the bank. We went over the road at the creek bridge, and across the backwater, and right on up into the big woods in the creek bottom. We tied the boat, and sat up there inside the woods and fished in the rain all afternoon. We ate cheese and crackers and smoked and talked and caught fish.

  We carried what we caught back to town and fried them up at Jayber’s little living place over the barbershop. It’s not but a little bit of a room, and he’s got everything he needs fitted into it just perfect. And you never seen the like of books he’s got up there. I’ve known Jayber mighty well for a long time, and I never knew he read books. But he tells me he’s read some of them books as many as several times. Some of the authors was ones I’d heard of. You’ve got to hand it to Jayber for the way he’s held his learning and not let it go to his head. When he seen I was interested, Jayber told me that books has meant a lot to him, and there’s some of them he puts a great deal of stock in.

  I thought about you all along while the good times lasted, and wished you was here. Afterwards, while I was walking home, I was thinking about you, and our old times fishing and keeping batch down on the river. I can remember whole conversations that we had back in those old times. Them was good times, I says to myself, and one of these days we’ll have them again.

  Well, according to what they say I ought not to write you anything but cheerful news, and I see I’ve wrote little enough of that. There ain’t but mighty little to be had around here right now, so it’s hard to write much of it. Unless I lie. And I think I ought to save lying for when we need it worse. And I don’t aim to ever start lying to you. If I lied to you who would I have for company then?

  I think a lot about you, and a lot of you.

  Your uncle,

  Burley

  Chapter 7

  BORN A IDIOT, EDUCATED A FOOL

  In the latter two-thirds of his life Mat Feltner’s cousin Roger Merchant has memorialized his father as a cultivated and enlightened gentleman farmer—­which Mat knows the old man never was, never thought of being, and would have refused to be if he had thought of it.

  The truth about old man Griffith Merchant is that he lived on his land like a blight, troubled only by the slowness with which it could be converted into cash, unable to see or care beyond his line fences. If Armageddon had blazed to those boundaries and stopped, he would have noticed it only to think that he had been rightly spared. But Roger—­“born a idiot,” as his father once took occasion to remark, “and educated a fool”—­has believed otherwise. By luck, defect, or determination, he has thought himself the descendent of gentleman farmers and one himself.

  He has lived by himself for forty years in the slowly collapsing house built by his grandfather, half log and half stone, on a point overlooking a wide creek valley to the south of Port William. The foundation under the log forepart of the house has been caved and splayed by groundhogs tunneling under it, and by dogs digging after the groundhogs. The yard-thick walls of the stone L are buttressed by locust poles wedged at uneven angles against them. The ho
use and outbuildings haven’t been painted in half a century. Bees hive in the cornices. Maple seeds sprout knee-high in the gutters. A rambler rose has completely overgrown the steps and posts of the front porch, live runners threading heavy meshes of dead growth. In the garden, briars grow as high as the fence posts. The wall of an outbuilding near the garden fence has burst, spilling an avalanche of tin cans and bottles down the slope. The barn provides shelter, but no longer confinement, only for an old team of mules, kept to validate Roger’s assertion that he has in his “latter years” restricted himself to “a little light fawming”—­though there is not a complete set of harness for either of them on the place.

  In the last decade Roger has made a slow retreat from the opening cracks and leaks and bucking floors of the front rooms, and now lives entirely in the stone kitchen. That room is large and tall, in summer cool as a cellar and dim from the heavy shade of the maples in the yard. In the back of the room there used to be an enormous fireplace, now walled up and plastered, replaced by a tall, black cooking range. In a corner is an old kitchen cabinet whose doors customarily stand open, showing a supply of store-bought canned goods, mostly soups of various sorts, pork-and-beans and Vienna sausages and sardines, boxes of crackers and cookies. A broad table, at which a numerous family or a crew of field hands might be fed, stands in the center of the room. The room is filled—­all its horizontal surfaces littered and heaped—­with plunder that Roger has salvaged from the front rooms as he has needed it: a walnut fourposter bed of excellent make, an outsize rocking chair, a half-dozen or so split-bottom chairs, a chamber pot, a grindstone, a hand-cranked Victrola, a five-shovel tobacco plow. Hanging from nails around the walls are various articles of clothing, a hat or two, a pair of fairly new half-swinny mule collars, a double-barreled shotgun, and a minnow seine. Against the chimney there is a pile of ear corn for the Dominecker hens that roost on the back porch.

  Surrounding this center, taking in ridge and bluff and creek valley, lie seven hundred acres of land, plundered by old Griffith Merchant in his lifetime, ignored by Roger in his. All the farming done on it now is done by tenants, who vary in number from two to four, and whom Roger may see three or four times a year. His only dealing with any of them is through an old lawyer in Hargrave, who arranges for their coming and going, and collects from them Roger’s half of the proceeds from the sale of their crops. And the tenants, in turn, pester the lawyer in order to secure minimum supplies and to keep their houses and barns standing. Each of them raises a few acres of tobacco and corn, and is allowed to keep a few hogs or cows. Except for their shrinking islands of cropland, the place is overgrown with bushes and trees. Some of it Roger has never seen; much of it he has not seen since his boyhood; most of it, if taken to it, he would not recognize. In all his life he has built nothing, added nothing, repaired nothing. For twelve years Whacker Spradlin has kept him supplied with whiskey, making the seven-mile round-trip from his place to Roger’s in all weather, as faithfully as the prophet’s raven.

  When Roger drinks his aim is prostration. His fits of drunkenness extend to remarkable lengths. He has been known to go for months without getting out of bed except to answer what he calls “the physiological summons.” He has been known to lie dormant through the coming and going of a whole summer.

  His trips to Port William are becoming less and less frequent. When he goes he drives a 1927 Ford, which since 1927 he has driven something less than three thousand miles, mostly back and forth over the same three and a half miles of road. Spangled with sparrow dung and rusted, the car wears as a hood ornament a cow’s bleached skull with a four-foot spread of horns, the anonymous gift of some generation of Port William boys. Roger has never driven the car out of low gear. So far as he knows, that is the only gear it has. When he is asked—­as he has regularly been asked for eighteen years by the boys of Port William—­how he likes his car, Roger replies: “It is slow, sir, but powerful.”

  It’s a taxing kinship that Mat has with Roger Merchant. It has been, if not one of the difficulties, at least one of the perplexities of his life, both obligation and nuisance. With something like regularity, over the years, Roger has presumed both to need Mat and to find him useless. When Roger’s summons goes out to Mat and the old lawyer, they go. Usually Mat gets there first. And usually he waits, stopping his car at the roadside below the house, until the lawyer arrives. And then they walk together up the slope and around the house where Roger will be waiting for them—­on the porch in good weather, in the cluttered kitchen in bad. Roger greets them ceremoniously and solemnly, shakes their hands, offers them chairs, stands until they are seated, and seats himself. The order of business never changes.

  At the beginning Roger defines and analyzes his problem in his prim, deliberate voice, in language so excessively grammatical and discriminating that Mat and the lawyer sometimes leave after two or three hours without any certain idea what is the matter. The problems vary from urgent to trivial without producing any change at all in the length of his deliberation or the tone of his voice. Once he wanted them to ponder “carefully, gentlemen, if you will be so kind, the perfectly alarming proliferation of mice in the corncrib.” Once he was wondering “if the wild honey could not be extracted from the cornices of the house to some profit.”

  After he has stated the problem, Roger asks Mat what he would advise. And Mat, knowing that it can come to nothing, explains what he would do if he were Roger. And then Roger turns to the lawyer and asks him what he would do, and the lawyer invariably agrees with Mat.

  Roger listens to each of them, attentive, nodding, polite. And then he leans back and, touching the tips of his fingers together, delivers a long discourse on what he, himself, Roger Merchant personally, considers to be “good fawming in the present case.” This can go on for the better part of an hour, supported by no practical sense, no knowledge, no experience. At the end of this spiel it is normally discovered that the lawyer has footed quietly across from Mat’s plan to Roger’s. Mat is outvoted; Roger is delighted by the reception of his idea; the old lawyer is pulling his ear and looking at his eyebrows.

  THE FARM IN THE VALLEY

  From Roger’s front porch the view down into the creek valley takes in a tract of his land that is in itself a little farm. The house and its clutch of outbuildings stand on a low shelf of the hill on the far side of the valley. A little down the creek from the house, and a good deal nearer the floor of the valley, stand a large barn and corncrib and stripping room. Even from that distance, the buildings and the fields look better kept than any of the rest of the Merchant land.

  And if you were to step off Roger’s porch and walk down the hill to the front of the tobacco barn where Gideon Crop is standing now, you would see that the apparent good order of the valley farm is no illusion of distance. On closer look you would see that the extent of this orderliness, though it is real, is not large; the hillside that rises behind the buildings was worn out and given up long ago, and now is covered with thicket; the place is poorly fenced where it is fenced at all, and the buildings are old and rundown. You will guess that the place must have declined unimaginably from what it was when Griffith Merchant was a young man.

  But what is left of it has been well cared for. The fields in the bottoms along both sides of the creek show the signs of having been regularly mowed and sensibly cultivated. Here and there on the old buildings a loose board has been nailed back in place with new nails. Hinges and latches are in good shape. In the sheds and outbuildings things are put away neatly on their shelves and hooks. In the barn the farming tools have been properly greased and stored for the winter; the dirt of the floor is swept clean. A sizable area to one side of the driveway has been partitioned off, whitewashed on the inside, and stanchioned for five milk cows. At opposite sides of the upper doorway there are stalls for a team of mules. On up the inclining path along the face of the slope, standing under an enormous white oak, there is a small building that has apparently at some time been rescued from coll
apse, pulled back, straightened, rebraced, and made into a toolshed. There is evidence everywhere—­around the other buildings, the house, the garden—­of the presence of a strong, frugal intelligence, the sort of mind that can make do, not meagerly but skillfully and adequately, with scraps.

  To Gideon Crop, standing in front of the barn in weather that has been wet for days, the clouds so low now that they snag and unravel against the wooded bluffs on each side of the valley, it seems that he is still just barely ahead of his circumstances. He is thirty-seven years old, and in the years of his manhood he has held tight, and come out finally a little ahead of where he was when he began. Not much, but a noticeable little. That is how he is able to see it in his good moods. In the bad weather of his mind it can seem to him just as undeniable that the settled account of these years shows him falling behind. There is the money in the bank, all right, more by some few hundred dollars than there was when his father died. But what about the years? He has seen more good years and days than he will see again. His time of limitless energy and limitless hope is gone, and there is nothing yet to show beyond that hopeful column of figures in the bankbook and in his mind, growing, he is afraid, too slowly. His life seems to him to have become a kind of race to see whether those figures will grow to their power before he has exhausted his own.

  From his father Gideon Crop inherited three things: a little bank account in the name of “John Crop and Son,” an ambition to own the farm they have lived on, and Roger Merchant.

  “Gideon,” John Crop would say, “don’t let anybody tell you it ain’t hell to do good work for another man who don’t care if you do it or not. Who, by God, don’t know if you do it or not.

  “But, boy,” he would go on, “have good ways about you. First thing, don’t leave anything behind you that you wouldn’t claim. Second thing, we don’t want to buy a place we’ve ruint ourselves.”