Remembering

by Wendell Berry

  He listened to a paper on “Suggestible Parameters in the Creation of Agricultural Meaning,” read by a long-haired man with a weary face, who had never been consulted by a government and who read his paper diffidently, with oddly placed fits of haste, as if aware of the audience’s impending boredom or his own; and then another paper on “The Ontology and Epistemology of Agriculture as a Self-Correcting System,” read by a woman whose chief business was to keep anyone from viewing the inside of her mouth.

  It was endless, Andy thought, a place of eternal hopelessness, where people were condemned to talk forever of what they could not feel or see, old farm boys and old farm girls in the spell of an occult science, speaking in the absence of the living and the dead a language forever unintelligible to anyone but themselves.

  And then — it was nearly noon, and a number of the auditors were leaving — he heard himself introduced as “an agricultural journalist who could hardly be said to be complacent about the Future of the American Food System, but whose ideas had attracted some attention — Mr. Andrew Catlett of Fort William, Kentucky.”

  Andy, getting to his feet, said loudly, “Port!”

  The organizer of the conference bent to the microphone again. “I’m sorry. Yes, of course, Mr. Andrew Catlett of Port William, Kentucky.” He smiled, and the audience laughed, with sympathy for the organizer and in discomfort at Andy’s unseemly chauvinism.

  Having made one mistake, and knowing it, Andy proceeded directly to another. Instead of the text of the speech he had prepared, he spread on the rostrum the notes he had made on the speeches preceding his.

  “What we have heard discussed here this morning,” he said, “is an agriculture of the mind. No farmer is here. No farmer has been mentioned. No one who has spoken this morning has worked a day on an actual farm in twenty years, and the reason for that is that none of the speakers wants to work on a farm or to be a farmer. The real interest of this meeting is in the academic careerism and the politics and the business of agriculture, and I daresay that most people here, like the first speaker, are proud to have escaped the life and work of farmers, whom they do not admire.

  “This room,” he said, “it’s an image of the minds of the professional careerists of agriculture — a room without windows, filled with artificial light and artificial air, where everything reducible has been reduced to numbers, and the rest ignored. Nothing that you are talking about, and influencing by your talk, is present here, or can be seen from here.”

  He knew that he was showing his anger, and perhaps the fear under the anger, and perhaps the grief and confusion under the fear. He looked down to steady himself, feeling some blunder, as yet obscure to him, in everything he had said. He looked up at the audience again.

  “I don’t believe it is well understood how influence flows from enclosures like this to the fields and farms and farmers themselves. We’ve been sitting here this morning, hearing about the American food system and the American food producer, the free market, quantimetric models, pre-inputs, inputs, and outputs, about the matrix of coefficients of endogenous variables, about epistemology and parameters — while actual fields and farms and actual human lives are being damaged. The damage has been going on a long time. The fifteen million people who have left the farms since 1950 left because of damage. There was pain in that departure, not shown in any of the figures we have seen. Not felt in this room. And the pain and the damage began a long time before 1950. I want to tell you a story.”

  He told them how, after the death of Dorie Catlett, his father’s mother, he had sorted through all the belongings that she had kept stored in the closets and the dresser drawers of the old house where she had lived as wife and widow for more than sixty years. He went through the old clothes, the quilt pieces, the boxes of buttons, the little coils and balls of saved string. And old papers — he found letters, canceled checks, canceled notes and mortgages, bills and receipts, all neatly tied in bundles with strips of rag. Among these things he found a bill on which the ink had turned brown, stating that in 1906 Marce Catlett’s crop had lacked $3.57 of paying the warehouse commission on its own sale.

  Neither Andy nor his father had ever seen the bill before, but it was nevertheless familiar to them, for it had been one of the motives of Wheeler Catlett’s life, and it would be one of the motives of Andy’s. Wheeler remembered the night his father had brought that bill home. His parents tried to disguise their feelings, and Wheeler and his brother pretended not to notice. But they did notice, and they learned, over a long time, what the bill meant. Marce Catlett had carried his year’s work to the warehouse and had come home owing the warehouse $3.57. And that meant difficulty, it meant discouragement, it meant grief, it meant shame before creditors. And it might have meant ruin. It was a long time before they knew that it did not mean ruin.

  On the back of the bill, in some moment of desperation, Dorie Catlett had written, “Oh, Lord, whatever is to become of us?” And then, beneath, as if to correct what she had written already, she wrote: “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord.”

  “I think that bill came out of a room like this,” Andy said, “where a family’s life and work can be converted to numbers and to somebody else’s profit, but the family cannot be seen and its suffering cannot be felt.”

  He knew then that he had damaged himself. As he had spoken of his grandmother in that room, she had departed from him. He was sweating. His legs had begun to tremble. And yet he still stood at the rostrum, in the harsh light, in his anger, sounding to himself as if he spoke at the bottom of a well.

  “I say damn your systems and your numbers and your ideas. I speak for Dorie Catlett and Marce Catlett. I speak for Mat and Margaret Feltner, for Jack Beechum, for Jarrat and Burley Coulter, for Nathan Coulter and Hannah, for Danny and Lyda Branch, for Martin and Arthur Rowanberry, for Elton and Mary and Jack Penn.”

  As he named them, the dead and the living, they departed from him, leaving him empty, shaking, wet with sweat. The audience, embarrassed, had begun to shift and murmur. He had to get down, away, out of that light and that room.

  “In conclusion,” he said, “I would like to say that what I have had to say is no more, and is probably less, than what I have had to say.”

  He hears himself cry out — “Ah!” — and he is standing in the dark.

  2. An Unknown Room

  He is standing in the dark, the sound of his outcry so present to him as to be almost palpable, as if he might reach out and put it back in his mouth. Slowly the memory of the meeting room drifts away from him, and the remembered panic of yesterday becomes, without changing, the panic of today.

  He cannot see himself. He reaches into the darkness with his left hand, feeling for the lamp. His fingers encounter loudly the shade, and fumble over it and down over the unfamiliar shape of the stem and base, feeling for the switch, and find it. The room, as strange to him as if he had just entered, assembles itself around him: the disheveled bed, the low stands on either side with identical lamps, and over the lamps identical pastel prints of large tulips, identically framed. Against the wall opposite the bed there is a long sideboard with empty drawers, and over it a mirror that reduplicates the duplicate lamps and pictures, the bed, and himself, his right arm stumped off at the wrist, his left hand still on the lamp switch, his hair and underclothes as mussed as the bed.

  He stands, looking at himself in the room in the mirror as though he is his own disembodied soul. When he’d answered, “No mam,” to the young woman waiting to meet him at the airport gate, he had felt the sudden swing and stagger of disembodiment, as though a profound divorce had occurred, casting his body off to do what it would on its own, to be watched as from a distance, without premonition of what it might do. And what of that young woman? He is going to be sorry for his lie to her. He is standing so still that he might be looking at himself, stuffed, behind glass: “Homo Americanus, c. 1976, perhaps from a border state.” And then he sees the image grimace in dismissal of itself or its o
nlooker and turn away.

  He turns away into his singularity in 1976 itself, the twenty-first of June thereof. In the light the room reasserts its smell of stale smoke and perfumed disinfectant. It is a little before three o’clock.

  In Port William now it is a little before six. Daylight, he imagines, is reddening the sky over the wooded slopes of the little valley of Harford Run, which falls away eastward from his house; the treetops are misty in the damp morning air, a few stars and the waning moon still bright in the sky. And he would be going out, if he were there, with the milk bucket on his arm, calling the cows. Flora would be starting breakfast, the children putting on their shoes, half asleep, getting ready to go out to their own chores.

  He is outside that, the air and light of that place filling his absence, the disturbance of his departure subsided. He looks back on it as from somewhere far off in the sky. In the quieted place where yesterday he went out, the children are now going out to do the work that he went out to do, Flora going with them, probably, to help them. He knows that she is being cheerful with them. Even if she does not feel cheerful, she will be cheerful. She will be looking for reasons to be cheerful, showing the children the slender moon high up over the colored clouds of the dawn. She is saying, “Look, Marcie, how the mist is hanging in the trees.”

  He would not have that grace himself. If he were going out into the morning aggrieved, he would be the embodiment of his grievance, and the day could be as bright as it pleased, yet it could not prevail upon him to be cheerful.

  His right hand had been the one with which he reached out to the world and attached himself to it. When he lost his hand he lost his hold. It was as though his hand still clutched all that was dear to him — and was gone. All the world then became to him a steep slope, and he a man descending, staggering and falling, unable to reach out to tree trunk or branch or root to catch and hold on.

  When he did reach out with his clumsy, hesitant, uneducated left hand, he would be maddened by its ineptitude. It went out as if fearful that it would displease him, and it did displease him. As he watched it groping at his buttons or trying to drive a nail or fumbling by itself with one of the two-handed tools that he now hated to use but would not give up, he could have torn it off and beaten it on the ground.

  He remembered with longing the events of his body’s wholeness, grieving over them, as Adam remembered Paradise. He remembered how his body had dressed itself, while his mind thought of something else; how he had shifted burdens from hand to hand; how his right hand had danced with its awkward partner and made it graceful; how his right hand had been as deft and nervous as a bird. He remembered his poise as a two-handed lover, when he reached out to Flora and held and touched her, until the smooths and swells of her ached in his palm and fingers, and his hand knew her as a man knows his homeland. Now the hand that joined him to her had been cast away, and he mourned over it as over a priceless map or manual forever lost.

  One day Flora came to where he was sitting in the barn and he was crying. She put her arm around him. “It’s going to be all right.”

  And he said, “What did they do with my hand?” For it had occurred to him that he did not know what they had done with it. Had they burned it or buried it or just indifferently thrown it away? — when they should have given it back to him to bring home and lay properly to rest.

  “What?” Flora said.

  “What did they do with my hand? The goddamned sons of bitches!”

  Flora took her arm away. “What is the matter with you?”

  “Just leave me alone.”

  Alone was the way she left him. Alone was the way he was, as cast away there in his place as his hand was, wherever it was.

  It is three o’clock. It is a little after three. He thinks of the lighted, night-filled, shadowy streets. He has no purpose at all. There is now simply nothing in the world that he intends. He looks at the opened, rumpled bed. He intends at least not to go back there. He would as soon lie down in his grave as in that bed.

  He goes to the window, parts the heavy curtains, and looks down into the empty street that seems to sleep and dream in the undisturbed fall of its shadows and weak lights. And he could be anybody in the world awake in the night, looking out. “How much longer?” he thinks. “When shall I arise, and the night be gone?”

  They passed the winter alone, he and Flora, alone to each other, he alone to all others. He lay awake to no purpose, as he would have slept to no purpose, angry, sore, and baffled, willing to die if he could have died, tossing to and fro unto the dawning of the day. That he was alone was his own fault, he knew. He was wrong. And yet he could not escape the fault and the wrong. He clutched them to himself as he was clutched by them. He made no difference.

  Nor did he work to any purpose, it seemed to him, except survival and the slow coming of dexterity to his left hand. The hand learned with the slowness of a tree growing, as if it had time and patience that he did not have.

  And he was learning just as slowly to use the mechanical hook that he now wore on the stump of his right forearm, a stiff, frictionless, feeling-less claw that would do some of the things he needed done and would not do others. It fitted his arm clumsily and fitted his work clumsily. The only thing pertaining to it that was fitting was the curse upon it that was shaped and ready in his mouth the moment he put it on.

  He now had a left hand and something less good than a left hand, less good than a shod foot: an awkward primitive claw. And the two, the poor hand and the poor claw, did not cooperate, meeting together in the air, dancing together, as his two hands had done, but for the simplest task required all of his mind, all of his deliberation and will, so that he wearied of them and cursed them. There was the problem of balance. He repeatedly set and braced himself, addressing his right hand to some task, only to discover again that the hand was gone.

  He continued by the help of time alone. He went on, not because he would not have stopped, but because nothing else would stop. Through the winter he tended to his animals and kept the little farm alive. Flora helped him and so did the children, watchful of him, always apprehensive of his anger, but giving him patience and kindness that he knew he had not earned and did not repay. He knew that Flora talked to the children about him. He knew, as well as if he had overheard, what she had said. “Well, now, listen. This is a hard time for your daddy. You’ll have to understand and be patient with him. He’ll be better after a while.” This was what she said to the children, he knew, because it was what she said to herself. And he could see them watching him, Marcie and Betty, as if for confirmation of what she had told them. That he was a trouble to them he knew, and regretted, and the knowledge only deepened his anger at himself and turned him harder against them.

  At the edge of his anger at everything else was always his anger at himself. He was ashamed of himself. He had betrayed his hand. He had put his precious hand into a machine that had obliged him by continuing to do what he had started it doing, as if he had not changed his mind. His hand had been given to him for a helpmeet, to love and to cherish, until he died, and he had been unfaithful to it. He was guilty and he was angry at himself. And yet he turned away. The place of his guilt and shame was like the unknown ocean of the early maps, full of monsters. He knew it was there, but he did not go there.

  He could not yet drive a team. He did not trust himself to try that, and for good reason: His left hand had not yet come up to the job; it was strong enough, but not discriminating enough; it had not yet taken responsibility for being the only hand he had. His son, Marcellus, could drive the team, was good at it for a boy, but Marcie was only twelve years old. He wanted to do more, and undoubtedly was capable of doing more, than Andy would allow him to do. For Andy was afraid. Catastrophe lived at the end of his arm. Whatever Marcie did, Andy could see how he could be hurt or killed, how the world might simply shrug him off, as a big horse would shrug off a fly. And so Marcie did not do the jobs with the team that he would have had to do alone, but only those
at which Andy could be with him, ready to instruct or caution or help.

  “We add up to pretty near a man,” he said to Marcie, and Marcie gave him a look.

  “No,” Andy said. “You’re pretty near a man youself.”

  He was moved by Marcie, who was so able a boy and so willing to help, whatever it cost him, and often it cost him a great deal. The words of Andy’s bitterness were always prepared; he uttered them before he thought them. Marcie did the best he could, and he did well, and yet in moments of stress or difficulty Andy imposed a demand that it seemed to him he did not even will: He wanted the boy to be as answerable to his thought as his right hand had been. He wanted the boy to be his right hand.

  “Come on, Marcie!” he would say. “Come on! Come on!”

  Or he would say, “No, damn it! Hit it there! ”

  Marcie, half crying with indignation, would say, “I’m trying, Dad!”

  And Andy would say, “Try harder.”

  He was wrong, and knew it. He yearned toward the boy. His anger revealed his love, and yet removed him from it. He seemed to himself far away from all that he loved, too far away to help or to be helped. The pain he gave to Marcie, he saw, stood between him and Flora, and was his shame, and could not be helped. There were days when he could not bear the eyes of his daughter Betty, who saw everything, and loved him, and was hurt by him, and could not be helped.

  “Daddy,” she said, “are you all right?” And then, correcting herself, “Are you going to be all right?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  He went as an exile into his own house and barn and fields. His wound had shown him the world and, at the same time, his estrangement from it. It was as though he continued to speak to his hand, which did not answer. And this was a loss of speech that could not be spoken of to anyone still whole and alive.