The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

  The conversation pauses. Old Jack turns away, and Margaret starts to the door to accompany him out. But then, coming to a chair near the foot of the bed, to the surprise of both women Old Jack sits down, turning the chair sideways to the bed, back to Margaret, facing the front window. He comes to rest, hands folded on the crook of the cane.

  “Uncle Jack,” Margaret says, allowing the hint to become broad in the tone of her voice, “I expect Hannah may want to rest now. She has just had a long drive, you know.”

  Ignoring her, Old Jack turns to Hannah.

  “Honey, you go right on to sleep if you want to. It won’t bother me atall.”

  “Well,” Margaret says, trying again, “I expect she’d like to have it quiet.”

  Old Jack nods. “I won’t make a sound.”

  Though she would like just now to be left to herself, Hannah smiles and nods to Margaret: Let him stay. And Margaret goes out, shutting the door.

  Having understood that Hannah needs to sleep, Old Jack is careful not to look at her or make a sound. It was not, anyhow, to make conversation that he came. He has come in Hannah’s honor. But also, since Mat came to tell him that the baby was born, he has thought of the absence of Virgil. And he stays now because of that, sitting in that vacancy, though he knows that he cannot fit or fill it.

  He sits still for a long time, gazing out the window. Glancing up finally ­toward the head of the bed, he sees that Hannah is still awake. She smiles, and so does he, but still without looking directly at her. Digging in the pocket of his coat, he pulls out a sack of candy. It is a variety he particularly favors: coconut inside hard frosting, mixed pastel shades of green and pink and yellow, a penny apiece. When he bought the dime’s worth from Milton Burgess this morning, he had a sort of vision of himself giving the sack to Hannah.

  “I brought you this little bunch of candy, honey,” he would say. “It’s mighty good.”

  And she would say to him: “Why, thank you, Uncle Jack. That’s mighty sweet. They are mighty good.”

  Holding the twisted neck of the sack, he sets it flat on the palm of his extended left hand, and then looking at it—­the neck of it twisted and crooked over, the brown paper wrinkled and mussed from being carried an hour in his pocket—­realizes that it is not right. It is damned exactly wrong. Cursing himself and Milton Burgess for their lack of a pretty box, he fails to be able to offer it to her.

  It is a bad moment. He would give a hundred dollars to have that sack back in his pocket, but the expedient of simply putting it there somehow seems the least plausible of all possibilities. She would surely think that was strange—­that he would pull a sack of something out of his pocket, and sit there with it stuck out in his hand, and then put it back in his pocket. Though he may have to settle for being thought an old fool, he would rather she would not think he is crazy. Meanwhile the sack sits like some kind of bad-smelling pet on the flat of his hand. Looking out the window, he is pretending for the time being that he does not know it is there. But realizing that she is watching him, he reaches out with his right hand, untwists the neck of the sack, takes out one of the candies, and sticks it into his mouth. Only slightly modifying the cramped posture of offering, his eyes fastened on the window as if there is something of absorbing interest going on out there, he eats all ten pieces one after another.

  Hannah watches him helplessly. If she had understood quickly enough, she could have asked to have a piece of the candy, and so made it all right. But as soon as she realized that candy was what it was, he had already begun eating it. Pretending to pay no attention, she watches him.

  Now, as from the extremity of his embarrassment, she grows aware of his caring for her. She understands, with shame at her misapprehension, that he is not there because he is flattered by her small attentions; he has come to offer himself. In all her life she has known nothing like it. She sees how free he leaves her. His love for her requires nothing of her, not even that she find it useful. He has simply made himself present, turning away, as he has now, to allow her to sleep if she wants to. She feels enclosed by this generosity as by a room, ample and light. Turning on her side, she does sleep.

  When Margaret tiptoes to the door half an hour or so later, opens it softly, and looks in, Hannah is still sleeping, and Old Jack is sitting at the foot of the bed, gazing out the window, his hands folded on the cane as before. In the cradle the baby too lies quiet, still asleep, her breathing slightly moving the blanket, one of her hands opened in the air like a leaf, at rest. Margaret stands for several minutes, looking in, moved by the sight of them, they are so quiet.

  By and by, not long after they have begun expecting him, Mat comes in. He goes into the hall, hangs his hat up, and comes on into the kitchen, where he begins running water into the wash pan.

  Margaret watches him, aware of the change in him. She knows that since the morning of the baby’s birth, when like lovers they seemed to meet and gather in the same joy, something has been breaking between them. This morning she felt it in his silence.

  And Mat is aware of it too. He knows that he is in retreat from her. He knows how lonely that must make her, and he pities her—­but as if from a great distance, helplessly. It seems to him simply that their lives have gone out of control, and he is grieved and resigned.

  Leaving the house in the morning, he plunged into his work, abandoning himself to it and to his expenditure of himself in it. And once it was set forward again he began to sense powerfully the movement of it, its using up of time, and he became grimly exultant in it. Nothing that happens can touch him now. He is out of reach, set apart by the certainty of death. The solitude of his knowledge rings in his mind, hard and insistent as a bell.

  Looking at his back bent over the sink, Margaret feels something inside her spring up in pursuit of him. And at the same time she feels herself turning in opposition against him.

  “Your Uncle Jack is here for dinner,” she says.

  He finishes drying his face and turns to her. She meets his eyes, and is defeated by them, her pain revealed to him. He stands there grinning at her, a brittle light in his eyes, daring her to tell him one thing that will be worth telling.

  She is angry, and hurt, near to crying. Mat sees it, and is sorry, but still he exults, as if he would ride his loneliness over her very body.

  Past bearing it, she turns away. Taking hold of herself, making her voice matter-of-fact and easy, she says, “You can go tell him dinner’s ready. Hannah and the baby may still be asleep, so be quiet.”

  He walks through the house, his body feeling lightened and quickened. He feels charged with his own life, compact and resistant, his hands awake at his sides. The strength of his refusal presses out around him against the walls of the house.

  Coming into Hannah’s room, he sees that she has waked up. He nods, smiles, asks how she feels, leans over to look at the baby. And Hannah, too, notices the change in him, and it troubles her.

  Going up behind Old Jack’s chair, Mat touches him on the shoulder and tells him that dinner is ready. When Old Jack looks around, smiling, glad to see him, Mat has already turned his back.

  As they eat, Margaret and Old Jack defend themselves with silence against Mat’s silence, turned watchful against him, wondering at him.

  When the meal is finished, Mat goes out.

  “Making tracks, ain’t he?” Nettie says.

  And getting no reply from Margaret, she too understands that they are on dangerous ground. She thought so.

  HE’S DEAD

  On Sunday afternoon Mat is sitting in the living room, reading the paper. Hannah not long ago finished nursing the baby and carried her in. Now Margaret holds her in the rocking chair, rocking slowly and humming some quiet song almost as tuneless as the back-and-forth creaking of the rockers. Hannah sits on the couch, watching, a faint unconscious smile on her lips. It is restful and peaceful, and it goes on that way a long time, the quiet seemingly deepened by the small sounds that occur in it—­the creaking of the rockers, Ma
rgaret’s breathless humming, the rustling of the paper as Mat turns the pages.

  Finally, suspecting that the baby is still awake, Margaret whispers, “Is she asleep, Hannah?”

  “No,” Hannah says, “her eyes are still wide open.”

  Margaret shifts the baby down onto her lap. She lies there quietly, wide-eyed.

  “Won’t Virgil be proud of her when he comes back!” Margaret says, her voice resonant with the thought.

  And an anger begins in Mat that he seems to have been waiting for, and that he welcomes. “Don’t, Margaret.”

  He speaks quietly, making an effort to do so, but his voice tightens and hardens with his anger. “Don’t talk like that anymore. That’s not doing us any good.”

  The two women look at him.

  It is not until then that he fully realizes what it is he has to say. A kind of panic hits him, a kind of sickness. But his words are empowered by anger as they never could have been by grief.

  “Virgil is dead. He’s not going to come back. He’s dead, Margaret. Hannah, he’s dead. Say so.”

  He gets up, and without looking at them again goes out the back door.

  “So be it,” he tells himself. “It had to be.”

  He knows that remorse over what he has done is held off only by anger, that he will suffer from it. But he also knows that his anger is clearer than his sympathy. And he is glad it is done, relieved that they have come to the worst at last. It is upon them now. They have begun to bear it at last. So be it.

  Feeling his anger begin to leave him, he walks faster, going back through the chicken yard. He feels himself going down into sorrow, his body filling with the pain of it, anger yielding to love—­for Margaret, for Hannah, for Virgil dead and lost.

  “So be it. It had to be.”

  He goes into an old wagon shed at the back of the yard, closing the door behind him. In the dimness streaked with dusty slats of sunlight he sits on the ground against the wall and rests his head on his knees.

  When he leaves the shed, done with his weeping and quieted, he feels that he reenters his life at a new place, farther on. He will not live again in Virgil’s life.

  It is getting late, the light weakening and reddening, the shadows beginning to run together. He opens the corncrib and shells corn for the hens, scattering the grains. The hens gather around him, their feathers white in the glow.

  Chapter 13

  HARD AT IT

  June 7, 1945

  Dear Nathan,

  I’m ashamed to hand you the same poor old excuse every time, but it’s the truth that I haven’t had a chance to write. It’s raining this morning, and in spite of the rush we’re in I have to admit I’m just a little bit grateful for a chance to rest my old bones.

  We’ve been hard at it, trying to get the tobacco set. We’ve got out only about an acre of our crops here at home. And at Mat’s we’re not but a little better than half done. So we’ve got a long pull still ahead of us.

  Also, sort of between times and when we can, we work some down at Gideon’s and Ida’s. Gideon is still unheard from, but we’re keeping the place going. And Ida keeps the slack taken up when we’re not there. When we are there she works right along with us.

  There’s a lot of talk in Port William just now about her and Ernest Finley. Ernest has been working down there all spring, carpentering and painting on those old buildings of Roger Merchant’s—­working there a good deal of the time without another man in a mile of him. So you can see what a fine chance that is for them rattle-mouths there in town. And I don’t reckon you need me to make a list of what is being said. It don’t cost them anything to see the visions they see.

  They don’t know Ida, for one thing. And for another, they don’t know Ernest. You don’t have to be around Ida long to know that she’s as mindful of Gideon as she ever was. If I ever seen a woman whose ways gave the signs of belonging to one man, it’s her. And I’m just about certain that Ernest don’t even know how to make the sort of proposition the talkers are accusing him of.

  Which don’t mean that everything is right. There’s some things I believe I do know that haven’t turned up yet in the talk. I do pretty surely know that Ida cooks dinner for Ernest on the days he works down there, just like she cooks for us when we’re there. And I know for certain that he never eats there when we do—­always fixes it so he won’t be there at dinnertime on those days. Which means, as near as I can figure, that Ernest has Ida on his mind in a way he don’t want us to see. I know Ida’s a woman who can take up a lot of space in a man’s mind, like a big bed in a little room. And all this worries me. There seems a possibility of pain in it.

  I wrote you, I think, that Hannah Feltner’s baby was born down in the hospital at Hargrave three weeks ago. I’ve stopped by to see them three or four times, and Hannah and the baby are doing fine. It’s a girl. They’ve named her Margaret. A couple of times when I’ve been there Mrs. Feltner and Hannah have started wondering who she looks like. They never decide. You can see they want her to look like Virgil, but are afraid to say either she does or she doesn’t. So both times I just out and said, “Well, it looks like to me she favors her daddy a good deal.” I figure I wasn’t really lying. The baby is Virgil’s, and looks like she’s bound to get so she favors him some sooner or later.

  Well, old Nathan, be careful. I’m always thinking about you. And thinking the world of you. Don’t forget it, whatever you do.

  Your uncle,

  Burley

  P.S. I meant to tell you—­the other day we went out to salt the cattle, and we salted them and stood there watching them. And your daddy turned and stood looking out over our ridges ­towards the river. And directly he said, “Well, I reckon it must be night now over yonder where Nathan is, and he must be asleep.” He don’t speak of you often, but I wanted to tell you how plain it was to me, the way he said it, that he keeps you in his mind.

  It’s night now. I’ll have to end sure enough this time.

  A WIDOW ALONE

  Hannah’s pregnancy was like a long lovemaking, a long continuance of Virgil’s body in her own. And then, with the birth, they were divided. Now she feels her body going to waste. Her mourning over Virgil is also a mourning over herself—­is the same. She feels his absence within herself, a vacancy, as though some vital part of her own body was removed in her sleep.

  On the Sunday afternoon two weeks after Mat forced on them the fatal words “Virgil is dead,” finding herself alone in the house, Hannah puts the baby to sleep, and climbs the stairs and goes into the room that was hers and Virgil’s. It is the first time she has been there since the birth of the baby. As she comes into it, the room is familiar, but it is a familiarity from which she is now estranged. She stops just inside the door, the quietness of the house grown big around her.

  Like a swimmer, filling herself with breath and determination, she goes into the room and moves in it, resting her hands from time to time on the furnishings, the dresser, the chairs, the table, the bed. She walks with her arms folded tightly across her breasts, reaching down sometimes to touch one or another of the furnishings. She stops before one of the windows, and stands looking out northward over the tops of the ridges, the opening of the river valley, the ridges going on to the horizon on the far side. The country is in the full green of summer. For several minutes she watches it attentively as if listening to it. In the windless clear sunlight of Sunday afternoon it lies before her, shining. But the room is waiting, and finally she withdraws her mind into it, and turns and watches her steps go back across the rug.

  She goes to the closet and opens the door. Hanging there are clothes that now belong to the past—­her winter dresses from the time before she needed maternity clothes, Virgil’s civilian suits and overcoat and, folded on the shelf overhead, several suits of his work clothes. She kept their clothes there together after Virgil’s departure, one of the rituals of her hope.

  But now she begins slowly to take the suits off their hangers and fold them, mak
ing a neat pile of them on the bed, finality in every move she makes. It is not possible to stop or go back. She seems not even to work by her own will. Beyond any power of hers, Virgil’s death claims all that is his. Handling his clothes, as though her fingers touch through the fabrics their own palpable remembrance of his body, her body becomes vibrant with loss as a struck bell.

  She goes and finds two empty boxes and some string, packs in the suits and the work clothes and all the clothes of his left in the dresser drawers, closes the boxes and knots the string around them, carries them one at a time up into the attic, and sets them down in the musty darkness under the slope of the roof.

  She comes back down, turning off the light at the foot of the attic stairs, and returns to the room. It is only then that it occurs to her that she has nothing more to do. The room is filled with brightness, dazzling after the darkness of the attic. She stands, looking around. And then her widowed dresses hanging alone in the closet declare her misery to her, and she sits down on the bed and cries. After some time, hearing the baby wake, she gets up and wipes her eyes and shuts the closet door and goes down.

  She takes the baby up, changes her diaper, and then wraps a blanket around her and goes out by the back door. Once outside, she feels better. Lately the house has seemed to her the very embodiment of her plight and her grief, filled with innumerable marks and signs declaring Virgil’s absence, her loss, the life she will never have. But now, lying around her in the sunlight, the country seems purified of all deaths, past and to come. No griefs cling to it.

  She goes through the yard and the chicken yard and starts up the rise of the ground behind the barn. She goes at a slow wandering pace that does not take her directly up the slope, but here and there over the face of it, looking around her as she goes, feeling sudden pleasurable intimacies with the sunlight, the curving hill, the clover and grass at her feet.